Zenith (11 page)

They seem to float between sea and sky; strange, wrecked castles of an icy realm.

Their collapsed towers, spires and arches are an uncanny echo of the drowned city’s ruined cathedral and the university tower. The death moan as a whole iceberg topples into the sea is heart-stopping. An end-of-the-world sound. The salty ocean digests the ancient ice with a dyspeptic fizzle and gulp.

There’s no turning back. The boreal wind wraps around the ship and hurls them onward into the Far North.

‘Wasn’t this in your book either?’ says Ruby, sarcasm icing every word.

It was, but Mara had been sure the rising ocean meant that all the Arctic ice had melted – though she remembers the island fishermen would often return from long trips with tales of an iceberg blitz. Small enough to look like the crests of waves from a distance, each iceberg, they said, was big enough below the surface to sink a fishing boat. Mara remembers her mother calling her out of bed one night,
Quick, come quick and see
, when an iceberg passed the island, luminous under the stars. A spectral, unearthly thing, Mara thought a chunk of the moon had fallen into the sea.

‘Turn back,’ orders Ruby.

Rowan’s breath is warm against Mara’s ear.

‘Pinball,’ he murmurs. ‘Remember?’

Of course she does.

On the island they had a game called pinball wizard, named after a twentieth-century treasure Rowan’s dad kept in the cellar among the junk. On long days of winter dim, they’d spend hours playing each other on the pinball-wizard machine. In summer, they recreated the game in the sea. Rowan and Gail and Mara would sneak skiffs out into a small cove along the coast from Longhope Bay. There, they’d practise lethal manoeuvres, pinballing between the rocks and surfing the rolling waves that smashed to the shore. It was a deadly game the adults would have banned outright, if they’d known.

‘Just play it as pinball,’ says Rowan.

‘Your call then,’ says Mara. ‘You’re pinball king.’

Rowan groans, laughs and heads for the control cabin. There’s a glint of fear in his eyes, but Mara pretends not to see.

She follows him into the cabin, bolts the door against Ruby and crosses her freezing fingers. There’s a rescue rope looped on the cabin wall and Mara is suddenly tempted to make a lucky wind-knot, like the fishermen on Wing would do when caught in hard seas. They need all the luck they can get.

She closes down the navigation program and switches the ship to manual steering.

‘Here we go.’ Rowan frowns as he stares at the mass of controls and the radar screen. ‘I thought you said the ice is all melted.’

‘Most of it must be or the world wouldn’t have flooded, would it? The book on Greenland said icebergs are like small mountains and these are just hills. Maybe this is all that’s left of the ice – baby icebergs and ice-soup sea.’

‘Let’s just hope there isn’t a daddy one lurking,’ says Rowan, without a hint of a smile.

‘Remember what you see above the surface is—’

‘–the tip of the iceberg. I’m the son of a fisherman, Mara, I know.’

He’s snapping at her because he’s too weak to take on this fleet of icebergs, and he knows it. Rowan is used to being strong. Mara has an idea and opens her backpack.

She pulls out a bottle of bright-orange liquid.
Irn-Bru, energy drink
, says the label.

She unscrews the cap. Candleriggs gave her the bottle. It’s something the old Treenester kept from before the world’s drowning and Mara promised she would drink to her when they reached the North lands; but they’ll never get there if Rowan can’t outwit the icebergs.

The drink gushes out in an orange froth. Mara puts the bottle to Rowan’s mouth. He looks at it suspiciously but glugs it, splutters, then grins.

‘More.’

The Irn-Bru gives him a spark of his old self back. His cheeks are less grey, his hands steadier. Mara takes the chance to slip back out on deck. She has to push through a noisy crowd. Ruby has gathered followers around her. Mara doesn’t stop to listen, but pops her head back into the control cabin.

‘Lock the door. Trouble’s brewing out here,’ she tells Rowan, before bolting past Ruby’s crowd to the bow of the ship.

Queen Cass’s crown of stars sparkles high in the night sky. Her fallen jewel, the Star of the North, glistens behind a blur of cloud. At the top of the world, the North Star would be directly overhead; that’s what Granny said. So they are on track, but how much further is there to go?
There is no moon but the sprinkle of starlight picks out a dazzling mosaic of ice that is so fragile it shifts with the movement of the sea. And there is something else. A long, silver point is sticking up out of the thin crust of ice.

Mara screws up her eyes. It looks like a
sword
.

The silver sword vanishes then reappears further in front, breaking a path through the icy waves. Another sword rises out of the ocean, surges towards the first and crosses it. Mara gasps as the swords clash then vanish.

Narwhals.

That’s what they are. She only saw them once on Wing. Great, shell-encrusted whales, far out in Longhope Bay. Island folk legend said a speck of ground narwhal tusk a day would make you live a hundred years or more, just as the narwhals do.

A narwhal horn always points to the North Star.

That was another thing the folk legends said. Mara looks, and catches her breath. Amazingly, the narwhals are tracking a route through the icebergs, their spiralling tusks pointing straight to the Star of the North. And the narwhals know what Mara doesn’t: where the hulking mass of icebergs lurk under the waves.

Between the radar, the narwhals and Rowan’s pinball skills, maybe, just maybe, they can make it through.

Mara rushes below deck. The hoard of objects the urchins looted from the netherworld museum is stashed behind a pile of crates in a corner of the hold, watched over by urchins and Scarwell’s model apeman.

‘Telescope,’ says Mara, but the urchins have no intention of letting anyone get their hands on their loot. She mimes the act of putting a telescope to her eyes, pleading, but it’s no use. The urchins are fierce guards. Snarling, they bare teeth, more feral than child-like.

‘The telescope!’ she commands. ‘Wing? Where’s Wing?’

A small, wiry, filthy creature jumps down from a crate, gives her a wide smile and holds out his hand.

‘I don’t have any presents, Wing. Listen, I
need
the telescope.’ She does the telescope mime again. ‘Please?’

There is a wordless, stubborn calculation in his eyes.

‘Oh, you!’

Mara yanks off her backpack and rummages until she finds her own precious loot, a pencil. She scribbles on a crate then rubs out the mark with the rubber. Wing watches, fascinated.

‘Deal?’ says Mara.

Wing grabs the pencil. He pulls out a telescope from the plastic bag that is tied around his waist and replaces it with his new toy.

At last.

Mara trips over a crumple of plastic bags in her rush to get back on deck. There’s a howl of pain.

A head emerges from the plastic bags. It’s Gorbals, huddled in a ball of seasick misery.

Mara kneels down beside him. ‘What are you doing down here on your own? It’s not safe. Come up on deck. The sea is a lot calmer now.’

‘Grooo,’ he grunts.

‘Come on,’ she urges. ‘I’ll show you something amazing.’

He follows her unsteadily and trips over a jumbled heap. Mara helps him up, then sees that the jumble is clothing. She picks up one of the garments. It’s an embroidered coat, tough and weatherproof, with a fur hood and lining. She sniffs the garment and knows the material, though she can’t tell what the fur is. The people of her island made winter boots and jackets from this.

‘Sealskin! Where did these come from?’

‘The ratkins stole it all from the museum.’ Gorbals glares at the urchins. ‘They bite if you try to take any of their stuff.’ He shows her teeth marks on his arm.

Mara turns to the urchins. ‘Wing!’

The child peeks out from behind a crate. Mara rummages in her backpack and takes out the crumpled sheets of blank paper she stole from Fox’s grandfather. She folds them into paper birds as she used to do for her little brother, Corey, with the pages of an old book.

Mara fires the paper planes at the urchins who yelp and scrabble to catch one.

‘Now I’m taking these clothes.’

Wing only grins as he sends a paper bird flying through the air.

Mara pulls an embroidered sealskin coat over her thin New World clothes. There are skin mitts in the pocket too.

Gorbals is pulling a sealskin jacket over his bedraggled tatters. The arms are much too short and his tattered plastic clothes hang out of the sleeves. He only just manages to pull the hood over his head. But he doesn’t care. A skimpy sealskin is warmer than any amount of ragged plastic clothing. ‘The ratkins have rat skins anyway. They don’t need clothes.’

‘Lucky them,’ says Mara. She grabs the heap of skins and takes them up on deck.

‘Treenester clothes are too thin for the wide world,’ says Broomielaw, close to tears as she and Clayslaps snuggle inside a warm heavyweight of animal skin.

‘Favouring your friends?’ snipes Ruby, recoiling as a passing urchin bumps into her. She stares in disgust at the child’s thick-downed, weather-toughened skin.

‘Yup,’ Mara snaps back.

She hands coats to the Treenesters but not to Ruby, and heads for the the control cabin where Rowan is so numb with cold that Mara has to pull the coat over his head.

‘We have guides in the sea,’ Mara tells him. He looks at her with weary blankness. ‘Narwhals.’ She gives him a hug and the sealskin coat crackles. ‘Remember what I said about reading signs in the world? If we follow the narwhals, they’ll help us through.’

She rushes out to the bow of the ship and scans the dark sea with the telescope. At last she picks out the glint of a horn.

‘Look.’ She hands the telescope to Gorbals.

‘
Risings of fire and risings of sea
,’ he chants and lowers the telescope in a shaky fist. ‘A war in the sky, now ghosts and swords in the sea.’

‘You
have
been reading my book.’

Gorbals nods and hands the telescope back to Mara.

‘What are narwhals?’ he whispers.

‘Huge sea creatures, much bigger than a man, with long tusks like swords.’

The glimmering tusks of the narwhals surge northward as Mara tells Gorbals the folk legends of these ancient lords of the sea. If the sword-like horns disappear or veer off in another direction, they’ll alert Rowan. But as long as they can keep the narwhals in sight, keep on their track, they might just stay safe.

There’s so much in the world that’s impossible to trust, that misleads and betrays: people, maps, books, weather, sea and land. But some things hold true. There are the September geese, flocking through hidden corridors in the sky. And the narwhals, navigating the icebergs, horns thrust at the North Star.