Zenith (33 page)

The globe is a dead and useless thing. It has no power to get him out of here.

Tuck wriggles inside the tent he’s made of his windwrap as something trickles down his neck. A fragment of the rockfall that traps him, or an insect, he can’t tell.

An insect.

Tuck has been trapped long enough to latch on to the slightest slither of thought. He gave up counting heartbeats once he reached twelve thousand and after that there was nothing else to count. He doesn’t know much about insects. There were few in Pomperoy. Lots of woodworm though.

Worms
. They live in the Earth as well as in wood. Maybe it’s a worm that’s gone down his neck.

He waits, feels nothing except the pain in his trapped foot, but a thought slides out of a corner of his mind.

Worms and insects. Dead insects. Dead, black insect words.

The book.

Tuck rummages in the pockets of his windwrap, willing the book not to be lost. In one of his pockets he finds a trickle of small, smooth stones. They run through his fingers and Tuck remembers with a shock what they are: the seven pearls that Pendicle gave him on the day Ma died. He’d forgotten all about them. Tuck’s heart beats faster. It feels like a sign. But a sign of what?

Great Skua, this is not the day
he
’s going to die.

What about Pendicle? Is he loose on the ocean or safe back at the rig? Or is he lost at sea just as Tuck is lost at Land? And the bridgers? What about the rusted barges and ferries and the leaky old
Waverley
? Did they all survive the harsh oceans of the Far North?

What folly to rush headlong after the
Arkiel
like that. Pomperoy acted on pirate impulse with no thought to what might happen or how to get back if it all went wrong. Just as he rushed headlong to Land.

Don’t build a bridge into thin air, Tuck
.

An old bridger saying that Da used to quote. Before, it was just words but now Tuck understands.

He’s found the book in a pocket and grips on to it, visualizing the tatty cover in his hands, its words like thick black oil. He fixed those words in his head.

NATURAL ENGINEERING by C. D. STONE

There were worms and insects in the words and pictures of the book.

Tuck
is
trying to build a bridge out of thin air – to every dead insect word and every picture from the dark days and nights when Gorbals read to him by skull light. He knows there are three hundred and thirty-seven pages and forty-two pictures, but remembering what’s in them is hard. Tuck tries to turn each page in his mind, pages upon
pages on the dam-building of beavers, the web-weaving of spiders, tower-building of termites, nest-knitting of birds, the industry of ants – and the tunnelling of worms.

The tunnelling of worms.

The sun takes another golden footstep into the sky, climbing higher each day as they make their way through the vast glacier gorge. The wheel of the year is turning, winter slowly rolling towards spring. But the journey through the gorge is so gruelling that Mara wonders why she brought everyone to such a place.

Why didn’t she stay in the caves? Why didn’t she stay with Fox? Why didn’t she stay on the island and drown? Drowning in her own comfortable bed on Wing often seems preferable to this: a moment-by-moment struggle, fighting brutal winds along the perilous wrinkles of rock that the glacier has scraped into the mountain face. The baby grows heavier by the day, sapping her energy, making a back-aching agony of every blistered step.

Sometimes she wishes she was Tuck, crushed to death in an instant in the caves.

They have climbed right down into the pit of the glacier gorge. It’s a place so deep and gloomy the light of the low sun never reaches its ancient ice. Now they have to climb up the other side of the gorge and hope against hope that they find a break in the rock face there, that
there are cave tunnels or a mountain pass that will lead them through the mountain to the interior. Mara can’t let herself wonder what it will be like there, whether it will be a place they can survive or not.

All she can do is survive here and now, one breath, one step, at a time.

A shrieking wind roams the glacier gorge. It’s so harsh that Mara wonders if this is the very source of the North Wind. It fades to bitter whispers as they climb. They take a break in the shelter of a cave where they eat slivers of seal meat, washed down with thin, bitter soup made with lichen scraped from the rocks and boiled up with seal fat in chunks of ice.

Mara’s exhausted mind is spooked by the whispering winds in the gorge. She dozes and dreams that the North Wind has hurled the lost secrets of the drowned world into the glacier gorge and imprisoned them in its icy home.

‘Another tree!’

Fir is on her feet, pointing at the roof of the small cave, at a tree root entombed there in the stone.

‘Long dead,’ says Tron.

‘But it’s a
tree
.’ Fir turns to Mol. ‘A stone-telling.’

Mara closes her eyes. She’s had enough of stonetellings and signs.

And yet, when she falls back into her doze, her dreams are now crowded with trees. Candleriggs’ great nest in the oak tree on the Treenesters’ Hill of Doves. The Athapaskans in their boreal forests, around the curve of the Earth, near the top of the world. In the dream she’s back on Wing, digging up slabs of peat for the fire. The peat is packed with ancient tree roots that made the soil so rich. The dream turns into nightmare as she’s whisked off
the island by a screaming wind. Pain grips her as she’s ripped from the ground, from her roots.

She wakes up. She can still feel the hot pain in her back and all down her legs.

Rowan is crouched over her, his blue eyes full of worry. ‘OK? You cried out in your sleep.’

‘Bad dream.’

She doesn’t tell him about the pain. It’s almost gone now, anyway. She’s thinking about her dream and how, like the green wind, trees are the key to the future. She’s not sure how but she feels it in her bones.

Rowan stirs up the fire embers and warms her a ladleful of the lichen soup.

‘What were you dreaming about?’ he asks.

‘Trees.’ She sips the bitter soup.

‘Trees?’

‘Yup. We need trees.’

‘You’ve got one right here.’

Mara looks up at the petrified tree root in the stone roof of the cave.

‘We need live ones.’

‘That’s me.’

She looks at him, puzzled, then laughs. Rowan, of course.

‘I forgot you were a tree. A rowan tree.’

She sees how he has shed the last of his boyhood. His shaved hair has grown back a much darker blond than it used to be. Always tall and lean, his face and limbs are sharpened by months of hunger and trauma, as her own must be. The ice wind has blazed colour on his cheeks, as the sea wind once did, and his carefree blue eyes are now sharp as flint. Though he’s changed, he looks more like
Rowan from the island again than the wasted wreck he was on the
Arkiel
.

Mara sees what the change is. He looks like one of the island men.

‘Protector against bad things.’ Rowan makes a rueful face. ‘Huh. Lots of people on Wing used to have a rowan tree outside their house, did you know that?’

Mara didn’t. There were no trees at all on the island in their lifetimes.

‘They cut them all down before we were born. My mum called me Rowan after the tree outside her bedroom window when she was small. She cried the day they chopped it down. She said its red berries cheered up the winter and when I was born I was as red as a rowan berry.’

Mara laughs again. Then groans as a sudden deep pain grinds into her back and grips her inside.

Blue eyes meet hers. He is trying hard to look like a protector from bad things but she knows he is just as scared as she is. Mara puts her head down on her backpack as the pain recedes and tries to ignore the baby’s kicks and punches, tries not to think about the pain coming back or the journey through the mountain pass that lies ahead.

The fever strikes as sudden as a winter storm, though Fox has been off-colour and achy all day. He’s in the thick of the bookstacks, reading about the creation of nations by flickering mothlight, when the headache strikes and his body is gripped by invisible chains of fire and ice. His skin is shot with hot needles, his stomach spasms with pain and he can’t seem to find his way back through the maze of adjoining book rooms to Candleriggs and the part of the tower they’ve made their home.

Was it something he ate? What did he eat?

Dizzy, Fox grips the edge of a bookshelf. He tries to hold on to the dream kingdom he’s been building inside his head. A dream of a cybercity, a place that doesn’t exist in realworld, created only of ether and ideals. A gathering of energy in cyberspace, strong enough to cause vibrations of change in the real world. Fox loses his grasp of the dream as the real world seems to tremble, now, as his body tries to burn the sickness out.

He lies between the bookstacks, too ill to move, on a bed of wrecked books. Under the shelves by his head is a pebble-like object covered in dust so thick it looks like fur.
Fox reaches out and grabs it. Wipes off the dust with his thumb. It’s sleek and black and flicks open easily. There’s a small screen and a keypad inside. What is it? Some old world computer or communicator? Fox presses all the keypad buttons but it’s out of power, just like him.

He stares at the glossy screen and all he sees is his own gaze reflected back. Fox can’t believe the haunted eyes that peer from a mess of matted hair belong to him.

He feels so ill and disorientated he’s frightened. He calls out for help but no one comes. His can’t remember where his godgem is. If he had it, he’d send an SOS to his grandfather in the Noos because something awful is happening, he’s dying, he’s sure.

When he’s home in New Mungo and all better he’ll demand an airship to go North and find Mara and bring her back. After all, his grandfather is the Grand Father of All the New World, he can do anything. Surely he’ll do that for the grandson he loves.

A beautiful child with green eyes, the colour of his godgem, flits into his vision and his head fills with a hiss of white noise. He can’t quite remember who she is. The lantern of glowing moonmoths is by his head and as he falls deeper into fever Fox thinks it’s his legion of peekaboo moons. They’ve homed back to him here, among the tower bookstacks.

They’re answering his call.

Day breaks like a spell, the air as sharp and clear as glass. All around them, as they climb, is the crack of icicles breaking off the frozen waterfalls.

‘Just as well we got out of that gorge when we did,’ mutters Ibrox. ‘Wouldn’t want to be down there when these waterfalls burst into full pelt.’

They scramble through a chaos of rock. For the first time, the sun almost manages to heave itself over the mountain peaks but gives in at the last gasp. Mara does no better. She can’t go any further. Not until the pain that is slicing through her subsides. She leans against a rock, willing the pain to pass.