Zenith (23 page)

‘The mountain people wrecked our ship.’ Mol’s lips tremble. ‘They lost us Broomielaw and Clay and Merien and a lot of others too. They tried to sell us as slaves.’

Mara pushes up the sleeve of her sealskin coat and shows Tuck her charred arm. ‘See? They branded us with this.’

Tuck stares at the mark on Mara’s arm. He knows it. It’s the old sign of power and wealth; the oil-black emblem like a wriggly eel on a fish rod that is embroidered on the Prender family windwraps. Gently, he touches the brand on Mara’s arm. She flinches and pulls her sleeve back down.

‘The mountain people did that. They’re brutal and dangerous,’ she insists and tells him of the stone giant’s sinister sign that welcomed strangers to a place of fearful awe. ‘They had a gun to my head,’ she continues, ‘they’d have killed me if I hadn’t run – if your gypsea fleet hadn’t attacked.’ She stops, confused, realizing that the attack by Tuck’s people probably saved her life. ‘If that’s what the people of Ilira were like
before
the attack, they’d surely
kill strangers outright now.’ The others are nodding in agreement. Mara stares into the darkness at the back of the cave. ‘But the interior. Maybe we can find a safe place there . . .’ She turns to Rowan. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think I’d risk my life for a hot bath,’ says Rowan. ‘I really would.’

‘Oh, me too,’ says Fir. ‘Even if we starve to death at the back of the cave, I’d rather die
warm
.’

Ibrox is already tidying up the tools of his little firebox and stuffing it securely inside his skin tunic. He breaks into sneezes.

‘So we’re agreed?’ asks Rowan. He glances at the faces around the fire. ‘No point hanging about then. Let’s go.’

Mara can’t help grinning at the sudden resurrection of the old, feisty Rowan, brought back to life by the thought of a hot bath.

Stone by fiery stone, Possil’s torch flame picks out a glittering amber trail on the floor of the tunnels that worm deep into the mountain. Mara, Rowan, Tuck, the Treenesters and the urchins follow. Each time Possil rounds a curve and the torch disappears, Tuck swallows a panic that makes him want to yell. Touch has replaced sight. His skin is raw-nerved. The hot scrape of the cave wall, an icy blast of waterfall, the stub of his head or toe on rock: every sensation is magnified in the dark.

Tuck touches his nose, feels the familiar bump, but can’t see his own hand.

The only thing that calms him is counting, and the only things to count are his footsteps or the beats of his heart. His heart is racing too fast so he counts steps. He’s counted nine hundred and three when the person behind grabs his arm.

‘Tuck, where’s your hand? Give me your hand.’

He turns, can’t see anyone. Flails his trembling hand around till Mol finds it.

‘You’re shaking like a leaf and your breath’s fluttering like a moonmoth.’

‘It’s the dark. It’s closing in.’

‘It’s not,’ says Mol. ‘It’s just the cave walls are narrow here.’

‘I can
feel
it.’

‘I can
see
.’ Mol squeezes his hand. ‘My eyes are strong in the dark. I was born into a dark world.’

Tuck puzzles over Mol’s words. Survival, and adjusting to the great rift in his life, has taken up so much of his thoughts and energy he hasn’t questioned what he thought he knew about these people from the
Arkiel
. He assumed they lived on the ship just as he lived on a barge shack in Pomperoy. He wonders what dark world Mol means, to unstrap his mind from the fact that the tunnel is now so narrow that he has to walk sideways.

‘I thought the
Arkiel
was your home.’ His forehead scrapes on a sudden lowering of the cave roof. His heart bangs. This is what he feared most, the mountain caving in. Now he has to walk sideways
and
stooped.

‘Oh no,’ says Mol. ‘My home was a scrap of land in a netherworld at the foot of a sky city. We lived on the Hill of Doves, among the trees.’

Mol’s voice breaks on the last word. Tuck hears it. Driftwood comes from trees, he’s sure, though he doesn’t know what a tree is. Mol seems very keen on them though. He knows Mol and her people call themselves Treenesters but he’s never thought to ask why. It’s just who they are, as he is a gypsea. Or was. What he is now, he doesn’t know. A true Lander wouldn’t have such a terror of Earth.

‘Why did you leave?’ he asks Mol, to keep his mind off his terror.

‘The water kept rising. We had to leave before our Hill of Doves drowned just like Mara’s island in the sea.’

‘Mara’s from the sea?’

‘From the island of Wing in the Atlantic Ocean.’

Tuck imagines an island on the world’s ocean shaped like a Great Skua’s wing.

So Mara has the ocean in her blood too. She lived surrounded by it on an island called Wing. That must be what draws him.
Something gypsea about her
. They have breathed the same salt winds. And she gives Tuck the unnerving sensation he had when he first sighted Land, as if she is a missing piece of something he hadn’t ever known he’d lost.

Mol sniffs the air and tugs his hand. ‘It’s not so cold. The air’s turned soft and damp, like the breath above a mushroom bed.’

‘What’s a mushroom?’

Mol giggles. ‘I suppose you don’t get mushrooms on the sea. They grow in dark Earth places. They’re good to eat.’

Mol’s presence is solid and grounded; she settles him down. But Mara, ah, she’s like an ocean heartwind. Tuck knows the very one. The heartwind that would come at the far end of winter, in the deepest folds of night, and haunt the lagoon and the boat masts with whispers of summer. The one that unsettled him with its secrets and unknown scents and tucked dreams in the pockets of his windwrap. A wind that made him want.

Tuck bangs into the person in front, who has stopped. He looks up ahead. The torch has stopped too, he can just see it, and Possil’s hazy, moon-white face in its flame. The tunnel suddenly opens out and with an intake of breath – as if he’s been underwater and just broken to the surface – Tuck steps into a wide cavern.

The air is warm and thick with vapour clouds.
Everything looks hazy and soft. Tuck stares around, amazed.

The roof is as high as a boat mast and when the torchlight flickers up the walls of the cavern they glow like a fogged moon.

‘What is it?’ he asks Mol. Her hair shivers with the luminous glow.

‘A moon cave!’ She stares up through the steamy haze at the cavern roof. Crusts and fronds of rock hang down. ‘If I half-close my eyes they could almost be the branches of trees in moonlight.’

Tuck looks at up at the dim-glowing fronds of rock.
That’s what trees are like?

There’s a crash of water. An explosion of splashes, shrieks and yells. Mol pushes past him, struggling out of her sealskin coat and the crackly layer of knotted plastic she wears underneath. She jumps into a steamy, bubbling pool that’s tucked into a nook of the cave.

Tuck’s banging heart calms. Each lungful of warm air relaxes him and his Earth terror lifts.

‘Come in, Tuck!’ Mol shouts. ‘It’s lovely.’

Mara is already sitting at the side of the pool, her feet in the water, her eyes closed. Rowan crashes in, soaking her and she laughs. The urchins are splashing up a storm. Tuck throws off his fears and his windwrap and under the strange, steamy moonglow, he plunges into the most blissful warmth he’s ever known.

‘Come on then,’ says Fox.

His tawny eyes and hair glint in the flickering lights of the Weave.

She follows him off the broken bridge, down the ruined boulevards that stretch as far as she can see. Unravelling carcasses of data-worms slither across great heaps of cyberjunk. Fox takes her past the junk mountains into a wide boulevard stacked on each side with tumbledown towerstacks – sparking, crumbling Weavesites crammed with the rotting electronic data of the drowned world.

‘Don’t you remember this place?’

Mara looks around her, at the flickering towerstacks, at the cracked and buzzing street name. After the cold, dark tunnels and the unearthliness of the moon cave, it’s a relief to plunge back into the familiar world of the Weave with Fox.

BOULEVARD OF something, says the flickering ice-blue sign. Mara peers hard and sees that the unlit last word is DRE\AMS. A crack runs right through the word and the blue light has died in that part of the sign, as though the dream is dead.

‘This is the boulevard where I first saw you,’ says Fox.

‘It was?’

Mara remembers the creeping Fox presence that haunted her Weave visits when she would zoom down the boulevards for fun, her realworld self safe in her bedroom in Wing. Now, that not-so-distant past seems like someone else’s life.

Fox has stopped outside one of the Weavesites.

‘In here.’

‘WORLD WIND.’ Mara reads the faded name that flickers on the the towerstack.

‘It’s a wind that blows you all around the world.’ Fox pauses. ‘I found it the other night when you didn’t come. Spent half the night just wandering the Weave. Most of this boulevard’s rotted or dead, but this site’s ace. You ready? Here we go
. . .
’

The Weavesite crackles and Mara gasps as she’s sucked into the whirl of a cyberstream. In the second it takes to yell Fox’s name, she has whooshed right through the cyberstream and shoots out into calm black space. She draws a breath, swallows, blinks.

Looming up before her is a vast glowing gem.

‘Planet Earth,’ says a voice in her ear.

They are floating in black space. Mara wants to grab Fox’s hand then remembers she can’t. She stares up at the amazing vision.

‘This is Earth?’

She can hardly breathe as she takes in the beauty of the glowing, gem-like planet: the stunning blue of the oceans, the brown and green of its lands and ice-crusted mountains and white ice caps, all wrapped in swirls of cloud. It’s hard to believe that in realworld she is sitting in a cave deep in the mountains in the dark of winter at the tip of such a vivid world.

Fox is watching her, not the planet. The glow of the Earth reflects in his cyber-eyes. But she can feel his real self looking at her. Can he feel her too?

‘But – but how is this possible?’ she whispers. ‘To see the Earth
. . .
?’

‘Satellite images,’ says Fox. ‘Remember, the old satellites all round the Earth that hold the Weave? This is an image of the Earth taken from the moon, long ago. Look, there’s the date.’ Above them, a label hangs in the ether. ‘The Earth photographed from the moon, 20 July 1969.’

Mara laughs. ‘People went to the moon? And I suppose it was made of cheese?’

‘Cheese?’ Fox looks at her askance.

‘When I was small,’ Mara explains, ‘my mum used to tell me the moon was made of cheese. People thought it was, once.’

‘Once upon a time,’ says Fox. ‘In a time out of mind.’

They float in space, the bright Earth-gem in front of
them, the words tingling between them.