Zenith (17 page)

A snake coiled on a stick.

There’s a hot graze on her neck as the rope is pulled,
the flash of a blade, and she is cut free of the others. One of the scutpak pushes her in front of the gathering crowd. He lifts her arms to show her muscles, turns her around to show her straight back.

‘Young, ha? Strong and
stark
, yup?’ he prattles.

There’s a mutter of interest in the crowd. Mara stares at her prospective buyers. A man in a hooded skin tunic that reaches the ground, the hood so deep, his black and silver beard so bush-like, that all she can see of his face is a long nose. A woman draped from head to foot in furs that are fastened and knotted as intricately as Broomielaw’s woven plastic clothes. The woman wrinkles her wind-scoured face, weighing up Mara as if she were a cut of meat.

The scutpaker is rummaging in a bag. With a flourish he pulls something out.

Mara gasps.

Candleriggs’ red shoes!

The scutpaker waves the shoes under the nose of the be-furred woman and pushes Mara towards her with a prattle of sales patter that Mara can’t follow. The woman’s face crinkles into a mean smile and as she moves forward to grab the red shoes, Mara catches sight of the bag in the scutpaker’s hands.

My backpack!

She
did
have it strapped to her when the ship sank. She was sure she did. Now she remembers she had to swim against the weight of the backpack. She almost didn’t make it, risked drowning rather than take it off. She was lying on the rock, choking on seawater, but the backpack was still safe. The wreckers took it when they found her, half drowned and exhausted.

She screams so hard the woman drops the shoes in
fright. Mara grabs a shoe before it hits the ground, just as the scutpaker reaches for the tail of rope round her neck. Before he can yank the rope, Mara slams the small, sharp heel of the shoe into his nose. She drops the shoe, grabs her backpack and runs.

She’s forgotten all about Rowan and Mol and the others. She hasn’t a clue where she’s running to. All she knows is she’s got her backpack with her precious cyberwizz and she
must run
.

The pebble shore shifts under every scrambling step. The stones seem to drag her backward; it takes twice the effort to run, but she
is
running. If she can make it across the shore and through the market stalls to the foot of the mountain, there might be a cave or a rockway she can hide in . . .

Her foot catches on a rock.

Mara crashes face down on to stones, but she’s still got her backpack gripped in one hand. Scutpakers and wreckers crash across the stones, close behind. Something punches her in the back and her chin smashes into the stones. She can’t get up. Someone is trying to rip the backpack from her fingers. She holds on tight, even as they stamp on her hand.

A point of freezing cold metal stings her forehead. There’s drumming in her ears. Mara raises her bleeding chin from the ground and stares into the barrel of a gun.

Just being alive has never felt so good. Tuck stares around him as if he’s seeing the world for the first time.

Everything about Land is a surprise. It’s so much more than he ever imagined. The mountains are vast and beautiful, the thunderwater that pelts down them so loud it shakes his bones. But what entrances him most of all is the fact that Land does not move. Not at all. Tuck’s never known what stillness is because he has never felt it before in his life.

He takes the little silver box from the belt of his windwrap and zooms in on such a violent pelt of waterfall that he recoils with a yell.

‘Tuck, lad! What you goggling at like a gormless gull? You armed and ready? From here on, you be ready for anything.’

Tuck waves his cutlass at Charlie and catches a crescent of first morning light on the curved pirate blade.

‘Well, stop playing with that camera and get down here!’

Tuck looks at the little silver box in his hand.
Camera.
He tries the strange word on his tongue.

‘TUCK!’

A gypsea roar shatters his reverie. The almighty BOOM of the Steer Master’s cannon shocks him into the moment. The armada has entered a gap in the land: a wide, curving channel of ocean that winds between the mountains. Vast arms of rock enclose the fleet on either side while right in front jagged peaks rise out of the fog.

‘Urth!’

‘Eyes of The Man!’

‘Great Skua help us!’

Yells and curses erupt from the steerers and lookouts as they suddenly spot the rocky humps and islets that litter the fjord. There’s a sickening crunch of wood and the moan of metal on rock as the gypsea boats hit the land traps in the sea. The
Waverley
’s lookout boy screams as an island looms out of a fog drift. Tuck hangs on to the rail as the steerer heaves the ship clear, almost smashing into one of the ferries. Behind them, the wrecked hulls of sunken boats circle the whaleback island like shark fins.

Chancing another yell from Charlie, Tuck grabs his camera and zooms the eye on to the mountain at the head of the fjord. At first, all he gets is a blank windowful of fog. He sweeps the mountain, zooms in on a flash of sunlight, and finds himself face to face with a sleepy-eyed child who stands open-mouthed in front of a door on a ledge of rock watching the armada appear out of the fog. The sun bounces off the door again as the child yanks it open and disappears inside. Tuck has a moment’s glimpse of the cave that lies behind the door. He stays fixed on the door, jolted with emotion, once it slams shut for it’s so like the door in his sunken shack on
The Grimby Gray
. A yellow car door, battered and scraped by rocks and
waves. The camera reveals a mass of car doors set into the rock face.

Tuck feels a tug inside.

The pirate roar of the armada is like nothing he has ever heard. An order from the Steer Master’s ship cuts it dead. But the drumbeat rolls on. Tuck stares at the sudden industry that fills every ship, as the oil tanks, catapults and cannons that each ship hoards in case of sudden sea attack are hauled up on to the decks.

For long moments he stands there, shifting from foot to foot as if the deck is on fire. An idea is swirling like fog in his head.

Tuck tightens his windwrap and secures the camera in his belt. He races along the deck to the back of the ship. The gondola he was rescued in lies among a pile of ropes, nets and driftwood. He selects two long sticks of driftwood for oars, wraps the gondola in a wide, thick rope-weave of netting, the kind used to catch dolphins and seals, and lowers the boat until it’s almost touching the surge of the waves. He knots the end of the netting to the
Waverley
’s metal rail then he begins to climb down it like a rope ladder, finding footholds in its wide weave. When he reaches the gondola he makes a slash in the netting with his cutlass and climbs inside.

Now he sits in the gondola and waits.

He waits until he is close enough to Land to see the people on the shore. Then he hacks at the netting that cradles the gondola, just above the sea, and slices the boat free with his blade. The gondola crashes sideways into the waves and Tuck has to struggle with every ounce of his strength to set it upright, turn it around and stop it being churned to pieces in the
Waverley
’s wake.

No one seems to notice he is gone. The pirate storm consumes the armada, head, heart and soul.

Someone yells his name as a fleet of yachts surges past.
Pendicle?
Tuck scans the decks but sea spume blinds him and by the time he’s wiped his eyes the yachts are way in front. He oars frantically through the wake from the angry fleet. All the time he is aware of the enclosing shadow of the unknown Land they are invading. But these are
my
people too, he suddenly knows, and he doesn’t mean the gypsea pirates, but the EarthLanders with their sea-scavenged car doors. Tuck is a motley mix of gypsea, pirate and bridger. But now he senses, deep inside, that there’s something Lander in him too, though he’s never set foot on Earth.

But his Landcestors have and they must have left strong, Earthy footprints on his soul.

His last blood bond with Pomperoy sank with Ma on
The Grimby Gray
and a strange tug inside now pulls him to Land.

darkness

Midnight comes; kings are clay; men are earth.

The Play of Gilgamesh
by Edwin Morgan

Night fled in a panic when dawn revealed what was burrowed in the dark. A drumbeat sneaks behind the march of the ocean. Hidden in fog and helped by the tide, the terror creeps up the winding channel of the great fjord.

The people of Ilira are still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, shocking themselves awake with the icy spray of the waterfalls, grabbing new-laid eggs from the mountain ledges, roping down the rockways to market where the scutpakers sell shipwreck booty and branded slaves.

A faded red skysail punctures the fog.

Ilira is entranced by the playful red dash that billows above the fjord. Sails begin to bloom all across the sky. A motley patchwork of masts bursts from the fog like a tattered army of spears. The Steer Master’s horn bellows and the sneaky drumbeat rouses into a gypsea storm.

If the wall of mountains behind Ilira cracked open to reveal a flaming dragon, the shock would be just as deep.

The armada of boats erupts from the fog with a petrifying roar as Pomperoy turns pirate again.

Mara doesn’t dare stop. She stumbles up a steep, narrow rockway until it forms into rough steps. The stone stairway might have been hacked out of the mountain by aeons of grinding ice or human hands, she can’t tell, but it climbs so high she can’t see where it ends because the rockway disappears into a shelf of fog. Soaked by spray from waterfalls that hiss and thunder from crevices all across the mountain, Mara prays she doesn’t lose her footing on the drenched rock. If she does – she looks behind her to the base of the mountain where the waterfalls smash into fizzling rainbows – she’ll crash all the way back down.

She had one second to escape the gun pointed at her head, a moment when the world around her erupted and the cold metal of the gun barrel trembled then lifted from her forehead. She took her chance and raced across the rocky beach, faster than wind, until she found herself at the bottom of the mountain in a maze of rockways that brought her to the mountain steps.

A hundred more slithering steps take her underneath a massive waterfall that drenches her in icy spray. Here, the rock is so lethal with iced slime she hardly dares move. Then she sees the rope. She’s been so intent on keeping her footing that she hasn’t seen the thick rope stapled as a handrail into the mountainside. Mara grabs it, glancing behind her for the umpteenth time, but still there is no one on her tail.