Zenith (20 page)

‘There’s a face . . . a giant face . . . in the fog.’

Tuck scans the fog and jumps with fright as he finds himself eye to eye with the face. A drift of fog blanks him out. Tuck lowers the camera and looks at Mol’s scared face.

‘It’s only The Man,’ he tells her.

‘What man?’ Tentatively, Mol takes back the camera.

Tuck shrugs again. ‘The Man in the Middle. He watches. He sees.’ Tuck chews his lip as he thinks of his silly plan to steal The Man. ‘He makes things happen, I think.’

A shiver runs from his head to his toes as he realizes that the camera gives him a power to match The Man’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes.

‘Mara has a magic machine too. It takes her to another world,’ says Mol, sweeping the camera eye all across the mountains, ‘but she keeps it to herself.’

Tuck has trouble following the girl’s quick tongue though they both speak the same words; but hers fall from her lips as fast as rain while his have the rhythm of deep-sea sway.

‘The
Arkiel
,’ says Tuck. ‘I heard you say something about the
Arkiel
.’

But Mol is too excited. ‘One moment I’m on a mountainside, there’s a blue door, now I’m down among the
rocks on the shore and – oh.’ She jerks the camera to a halt and the colour drains from her voice. ‘So many people dead. All the boats burned.’ Her mouth is tight. ‘Horrible, horrible, why did they – oh.’ She falls silent. Her knuckles tighten on the camera.

‘Mara?’ she whispers. ‘Is it . . . ? Mara!’

Tuck has to grab Mol’s arm to stop her running out into thin air. The camera has tricked her into thinking she is down on the shore, instead of standing at a cave mouth high in the mountainside. Tuck takes back the camera and zooms on to the cluster of people running along the shore. A bunch of children. Seven, he counts, one of them dragging a creature behind her. And an older girl. All he can see is the swirl of her hair in the wind, hair as dark as night or the inside of Earth. She turns to look at the mountain and he sees her face. And knows he’s seen her before.

It’s the girl who fell on her knees on the
Arkiel
.

Tuck watches from the shadows of the cave as the dark-haired girl is gathered into the firelight among her friends. His heart clenches as tight as his fist because there’s no one, not a soul left in the world, not Pendicle or any of the bridger-people, who would weep over his return like that.

The girl soon slips aside from the others and sits on a rock near Tuck. The light of the fire illuminates her face. Tuck watches as she takes something from her bag. He shifts closer and his narrow eyes widen when he sees the glowing globe in her lap.

The globe opens like an oyster shell. Tuck holds his breath as the girl slips a silvery crescent, like a slice of moon, over her eyes and dips a small silvery stick inside the globe. Her face softens as if she’s falling out of the world into a dream.

‘That’s
her
magic machine,’ Mol whispers in Tuck’s ear.

She hands him a tiny sliver of fire-smoked fish. Possil and Pollock found a chute of violent thunderwater deep inside the mountain, but with no light to see by, their only catch was a single fish that leaped out of the waterfall and landed at Possil’s feet.

‘What does it do?’ Tuck stuffs the fish into his mouth and stares hungrily at the magic globe, his looter’s instinct astir.

‘It takes her into another world,’ says Molendinar, ‘but her body stays in this one.’

Tuck swallows the fish in a gulp. ‘What world?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t really understand . . . Broomielaw said . . .’ Mol hesitates.

‘Said what?’

‘She goes to a place where she can be with someone she lost.’

The faces of Ma, Pa, Grumpa and little Beth, his own lost ones, flash through Tuck’s mind. He feels hollow, as if the wind that haunts the cave has blown a hole right through his heart. He shakes himself like a sail in the wind and tries not to think of Ma, sunk by mountains of sea, tries to rid himself of the panicky feeling of being sunk inside the Earth, Land-locked with strangers.

‘Come by the fire, Tuck, and shake off that chill,’ Ibrox calls over. The grizzled-looking man livens the embers with a stick. ‘Shove along, you lot,’ he tells the urchins then brandishes the hot stick at Scarwell, who has just pinched his fish.

Tuck stares at the creature sitting beside Scarwell, the one he saw her dragging along the shore. The hairy beast has a human look about it. Its eyes gleam in the firelight but it doesn’t move at all. Tuck decides it might be best to befriend it and offers it the fishbone.

Around him, people burst out laughing. Mol knocks on the creatures head.

‘He’s not real.’

Feeling a right dubya, Tuck nibbles on the fishbone.

‘Broomielaw said that Mara told her something else,’
Mol whispers, squeezing in beside him, her breath almost as hot as the fire on his neck. She fiddles with the long tail of her hair.

‘What? What else?’ Tuck wants to know.

‘She said the cyberwizz holds the secrets of the past.’

Tuck looks into Molendinar’s large dark eyes. ‘What secrets?’

Mol shivers. ‘The secret of what happened there.’

‘Where?’

‘In the past.’

Tuck takes that in.

The fire is newly fed with sea grass so it’s nice and hot. He stares into the flames until his brow burns and his eyes sting. His head feels full of hot light.

The girl’s globe holds the past like a hoard of lost treasure? Yet Grumpa always said the past was lost, sunk at the bottom of the sea.

‘The
Arkiel
,’ he ventures, raising his voice. ‘What do you people know about that?’

CLANG!

The noise is so loud the very mountain seems to quake.

CLANG!

Tuck covers his ears with his hands, as the
CLANG
sounds over and over again. When a vast percussion of
BANGS
erupts, Tuck is sure the mountain is about to fall on his head.

‘It’s inside as well as out,’ yells Partick, and it’s true. The bangs and clangs echo all across the mountainsides and inside the caves.

‘The caves burrow into the mountains like rabbit warrens,’ Pollock yells back. ‘The people live in them like rabbits.’

‘Wormholes,’ shouts Possil. ‘Noise runs through them like worms.’

That’s what Merien said on the ship, Mara remembers. That the mountains were like a worm-eaten apple. She tugs Mol’s arm, her throat tight. ‘I found her on the shore. She’s dead.’

‘Broomielaw?
No
.’ Mol breaks into a wail.

‘No, no, I mean Merien.’

Mol quietens and looks blank.

‘Ruby’s friend. She was left behind by the scutpak. She was a good person, Mol, and she knew things, she would have – would’ve kept us
right
somehow—’ Mara breaks off, drowned out by the banging and clanging, unable to put into words her sense that Merien is a real loss. They need someone like her. Mol is only relieved that it’s not Broomielaw Mara found dead.

A hand grabs hers and squeezes it.

‘But
you’re
OK,’ says Rowan.

Mara nods.

‘Still got that telescope?’

Mara nods again and pulls the telescope from the deep pocket of her sealskin coat.

Rowan crouches at the cave mouth and scans the mountains.

‘That’s what I thought,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘It’s not gunfire, it’s the mountain doors banging shut and—’ Rowan bursts out laughing.

‘What?’ Mara crouches beside him and he gives her the telescope. She scans the mountain and sees people rushing up the rockways into the caves and banging the car doors shut.

‘Look right above the big clock,’ Rowan tells her.

Above the clock with no hands, the last rays of the low,
fiery sun have lit up the words of a large, bashed metal sign that’s set into the mountain rock. Mara focuses the telescope on the sign.

TIREDNESS CAN KILL
TAKE A BREAK

She lowers the telescope and laughs too. ‘Tiredness can
kill
?’

Rowan half-yawns, half-groans. ‘Well, I feel half dead with it.’

Mara turns to the Treenesters. ‘It’s only their sundown,’ she smiles.

The sun is falling fast and already the sign above the clock is dimming. The last of the car doors bang shut so that by the time the sun has dropped behind the western peaks and the words on the sign have faded, the people of Ilira have shut themselves tight inside the mountain.

Ghosted in fog, the pirate fleet falls silent, as if stunned by the sudden disappearance of their prey. A horn blasts and a final firebomb fizzles in the wrecked and smoking bay.

‘The Steer Master’s horn says stop.’

Everyone turns to stare at Tuck.

‘The what?’ says Rowan.

‘The Steer Master. He gives the orders.’

‘How do you know?’ asks Mol.

‘I was a gypsea. I just Landed today.’

‘You’re one of
them
? Those
murderers
?’ Mara jerks her head towards the pirate fleet.

Tuck glares at her. Who’s
she
calling a murderer? She was on the
Arkiel
that drowned his Ma.

‘I thought you were one of the mountain people,’ says Gorbals.

Tuck shakes his head. ‘
Was
a gypsea. I’m a Lander now, like all of you.’

Mara stares at the large curved blade in the wire-woven scabbard that hangs from the belt of Tuck’s faded blue wrap. The firelight catches at crystals of sea-salt in his sun-bleached hair. The roll of the ocean is in his words, the whinny of sea winds on his breath.

Tuck shakes his hair out of his gypsea eyes. ‘The fleet’ll rest awhile now the light’s gone then start up again at dawn with the Steer Master’s horn.’

‘What do they want?’ asks Rowan.

‘Loot, booty and boats. Pomperoy’s short of boats.’

‘All they’ll have is a pile of cinders,’ says Mara, ‘if they carry on like that.’

‘Well, there’s two ways to loot,’ says Tuck. ‘Sneak or storm. They were in a stormy mood.’

Pollock and Possil exchange glances. This is the kind of talk they understand.

‘They only fire from the boats,’ says Pollock. ‘All day, they’ve fought from the sea and looted the boats but they’ve not landed. Why?’

‘A gypsea won’t set a foot on Land.’ Tuck stamps on the rock floor and his face cracks into a bleak smile. ‘You have to turn Lander for that, like me. They won’t. They’re raging because—’

‘Sounds like they’re scared,’ Possil interrupts.

Tuck blinks. ‘A gypsea’s not scared. We’ve too much pirate in us.’ But he’s scared, so how much pirate is there in him? ‘But Land’s not safe. Land sinks and drowns. A gypsea’s safest at sea.’

‘So why’ve you turned Lander,’ asks Mara, ‘if it’s not safe?’

Tuck shifts from foot to foot, as if he’s ankle-deep on a waterlogged boat.

‘Urth knows, I just, just—’ His eyes flit around the dark depths of the cave, out to the fog-blanked sea and back, as restless as a wave. ‘I just wanted to
see
.’

Mara locks glances with him. She understands that kind of wanting. It’s what led her deep into the cyber-world of the Weave, then took her from her island to the sky city, to Fox, and brought her on a journey she could never have imagined, that has ended up right here at the top of the world.

‘He saved my life,’ Gorbals reminds them all. ‘He’s not like the others.’

Now Tuck has their attention. ‘You,’ he stares hard at Mara, ‘were on the
Arkiel
.’

Mara wonders why he looks at her like that.

‘It was our ship,’ says Mol.

Tuck weighs that up. He pulls his cutlass out of its scabbard.

‘Your ship. So it wasn’t just her. It was all of you.’

Everyone stares at the curved blade glinting in the light of the fire.

‘Our ship,’ nods Gorbals, looking bewildered at the cutlass blade. ‘It sunk. It was wrecked on the rocks – Tuck, what’s up? Put your sword aw—’

Tuck jabs the cutlass towards the two sneaky-looking ones, Pollock and Possil.

‘
The Grimby Gray
sank,’ he yells
.
‘My Ma sank with it and drowned. It was the
Arkiel
that sank them both – my Ma and my barge home. The
Arkiel
’s why Pomperoy turned pirate, it’s why I’m Landed up here . . .’ Tuck looks
around at the shocked, unfamiliar faces, at the darkness of the cave, and feels more alone than he’s ever been. He falters. Urth knows what he’s doing here.

What’ll he do now? Run them through with his blade and chop them to bits? They deserve it, don’t they? If it wasn’t for them Ma would still be alive, he’d still have his gypsea home.