Zenith (34 page)

There’s a shout from up ahead, then a volley of excited cries.

‘Just a few steps further, Mara,’ Mol pleads.

What have they found?
Mara forces one foot in front of the other until she makes it into the mountain pass, a gully between two high peaks.

At the far end of the gully she sees what looks like a church steeple. Mara’s heart jumps. Bewildered, she rubs
the sweat out of her eyes and looks again. No, it’s a spiralling narwhal horn, pointing straight up into the blue ocean of sky.

‘That rock – it’s like a dead giant’s finger,’ murmurs Fir. ‘Are there giants in this land?’ She grabs Mara’s arm in fear.

It’s not a church steeple or a narwhal horn or the finger of a dead giant, but a spire of rock as tall as the steeple of Fox’s netherworld tower.

‘Water!’ Voices ricochet off the gully rocks. ‘Water, like a great
sea
. . .’

‘Hear that, Mara?’ Mol urges, pulling her on. ‘We’re nearly there.’

Mara hears through a surge of pain. The stomach cramps have been growing stronger and stronger. Now the pain is suddenly red-hot and ripping, as if the baby has grown talons and is clawing her insides.

‘Stop it,’ she mutters through clenched teeth. Amazingly, the baby obeys and the pain subsides.

The others are at the far end of the gully, running towards the rock spire just beyond. She can see little Wing’s bright blue snow suit, bouncing through the gully like a ball.

The baby starts up another agony of talon-clawing her until–

‘Ow, w-water!’

‘Nearly there, slow-slug.’ Mol laughs, then she sees Mara’s face and stops dead.

‘Something’s happening, Mol, something’s wrong . . .’

‘Oh, Mara.’ Mol looks at the hot gush on the ground at Mara’s feet and sees what’s wrong. ‘
That
water. It’s all right. It’s what happens.’ But Mara hears the crack of fear in Mol’s voice, sees the paling of her face as she yells at the
top of her voice to the others. ‘Come back! Quick, everyone, help!’

‘
What
happens?’ Mara gasps, but she is remembering the island women’s birth talk.

‘
This
happens when the baby’s ready to come.’

Mara nods. Of course it does. She just didn’t expect it to happen to her, right now.

‘We should have talked about it.’ Mol’s face furrows with anxiety as she takes Mara over to a sheltered shelf in the rock face. ‘I thought we had more time.’

‘We have – it’s too soon – I’m sure it’s not time yet –
oh
.’

In a lull between peaks of pain, Mara tries to count months on her fingers then stops as the pain surges back. She has no idea, anyhow, what month this is.

‘The baby doesn’t think it’s too soon,’ says Mol briskly. ‘All this climbing might have brought on the birth.’

Mara grips on to a rock as shards of pain break inside her.

‘Stop gawping, you lot,’ Mol shouts. ‘
Do
something.’

‘What?’ says Gorbals. They all look blank with panic.

‘Oh, just go away,’ Mol sighs. ‘Useless bunch of dubyas. I’ll deal with it.’

Gratefully, the others disappear – all except Ibrox, who makes up a fire in silence, and Fir, who twitters nervously as she breaks icicles from rocks and puts them in a pot to boil. And Rowan, who crouches by Mara’s side.

‘Go away,’ Mara whimpers. ‘I want my mum.’

‘So do I,’ sighs Rowan. He ignores her and stays.

‘Hold her hand,’ instructs Mol.

And in the undulations of pain and fear that follow, Rowan’s hand is the one and only thing that roots Mara to herself.

Great Skua, he’s through!

Bashed and smashed and scraped and bruised, yet he’s wormed out of the Earth just like he used to wriggle out of a Salter’s grip. He was lucky too. His little nook was near the edge of the landslide and after an age of tunnelling he made his escape.

Now he’s stuck in the blind dark. Tuck tries not to panic and feels in the pockets of his windwrap for the little silver firebox he looted from Ibrox. His trembling fingers fumble uselessly on the switch, again and again, until finally the miracle of a tiny flame burns a bright hole in the dark.

Tuck whimpers with relief. He limps around the cave, hurting his crushed foot, but it doesn’t matter, he’s free! Well, nearly. He scrambles across rubble, kicking up dust, searching for an exit tunnel, and begging The Man, though he’s an ocean away by now, to help him find a way out. And he does! Tuck’s tiny flame shivers on the upside-down grin of a skull. Tuck grabs it and lights the small chunk of driftwood inside.

Now he can see the way through the dust and rubble
into the tunnel. All he has to do is follow the trail of bone crosses back to the hot spring. Beyond that, the way is marked with amber fire stones.

Tuck can hardly believe it. Soon he’ll be outside under the sky with the ocean wind in his face, not trapped here deep inside the Earth.

He’ll be out in the world again, free at last!

Fox wakens in a slice of sun as it breaks over the city wall. He feels the fuzz on his chin and the fur on his tongue and wonders if he’s been asleep for a day or a week. Slowly, he remembers the burning fever, the terrible sickness and the pain gouging his stomach but it all feels distant as if it happened in a bad dream. What was it? A bad egg or some disease from the filthy netherworld sea?

Or the urchin child. She is real. She isn’t a fevered dream. She eats rats and birds. Has she given him some disease?

Where is she? Where’s Candleriggs? Fox looks around him. Where is
he
?

This is not the usual tower room. He’s lying in a sick-crusted bed of paper below a wrecked bookstack labelled
History
.

Gingerly, Fox sits up. He peels off a layer of loose pages that are stuck to his back. He is so fuzzy-headed it takes him some time to find his way through the mess and maze of wrecked bookstacks to the tower room he’s made his home with Candleriggs. So weak is his voice that when he tries to shout only a crackle comes out.

‘Candleriggs?’

She’s not here, only the urchin child, hiding inside a small cave she’s built out of books.

Fox kneels down by the child.
Pandora.
The name crawls out of his memory, as if he’s been gone a hundred years.

‘Where’s Candleriggs?’

Blood and a crust of sickness are spattered all down the creases of the knotted tunic Candleriggs made for the child out of the litter of plastic bags. Pandora must have been ill too, but what’s the blood? She looks pale and her gem-green eyes are shadowed and scared. Fox sees the dead mouse on the ground that she’s been eating. He swallows a surge of nausea.

‘Candleriggs!’

He’s panicking now. Something’s wrong. Candleriggs wouldn’t leave Pandora alone eating dead mice.

Pandora points at a mound of books she has made under the tower window at the other side of the room. Fox stares at the gnarled foot that pokes out.

He digs away books, hurling them all over the room until Candleriggs’s face is clear.

The only other time Fox has seen death was the shot urchin in the water. That was brutal; this is not. The deep lines on Candleriggs’s face have softened as if she is deeply at rest, but death is not something that can be mistaken for sleep. There’s no life, no breath, just stillness in a golden lozenge of sun.

She’s not there.

Candleriggs is gone.

She left him a note, scribbled in the margins of a book with a bit of charred wood from the dead fire.

Go back to your people. This is all wrong. Maybe it was
enough that Mara found you and I lived long enough to know you, and you could know the truth of the abandoned world. There’s nothing you can do from here, I see that now. You’ve lost too much and there is so much more to lose. Take the child and go back home. Change your world from the inside. Tell Caledon

And there it stops. What she wanted to tell his grandfather has been lost to death or the impossibility of finding the right words.

There’s a charred circle around some words in the book.

We shall be as a city on a hill
, Fox reads
. The eyes of all people are upon us.

They are the long-ago words of an Englishman, John Winthrop. He wrote them, the book says, on board a ship called the
Arbella
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He was one of the Founding Fathers of a new world in another age.

Fox stares at the words. Walks over to the window. He looks up at the gleaming towers that dwarf the old world tower he stands in and hears the misery that carries on the wind from the boat camp all around the city walls.

He doesn’t really know what the words mean or why Candleriggs wanted him to have them. Maybe, though, they weren’t for him. Maybe they’re for his grandfather in his city high above. And Candleriggs is right. Though he hardly knows his own parents Fox knows they’ll be broken-hearted, as his grandfather will.

Maybe he wants them to be.

Just what
is
he doing here? Getting back at his parents for not being around? Kidding himself that one person in a tower can change a whole world?

We shall be as a city on a hill.

Fox finds the bucket of rainwater. He splashes his face and gulps handfuls of the cold water until his head clears.

He remembers his fever-dream of going back to the sky city, demanding an airship to find Mara at the top of the world. In the throes of deep fever Fox was certain his grandfather, so thankful to have him back safe and sound, would do that for him.

Fox looks over at the dead body of the woman his grandfather once loved yet abandoned in the drowned world. All because she stood against him and challenged the cruelty of his world. Fox knows his fever-dream was fantasy. When the world he created is threatened his grandfather is ruthless, even to those he loves. The evidence is here, right before his eyes.

The only way Caledon would have him back is if Fox denies the truth of the world outside.

How can he? Mara is living the truth he’d have to deny.

We shall be as a city on a hill
.

The long-ago words keep haunting his thoughts, recalling his idea of a cybercity, a place with no state in realworld. A place that only exists in the ether because its citizens will it to be.

And what would it be, this secret city, entered through the portal of a peekaboo moon? A place that would open its doors to the truth of the past and the present – to Candleriggs’s and Mara’s existence, and the life of his baby to come, and to all the lost people of the drowned world.

But though Fox popped a legion of moons into the Noos, no one has answered his call.

It’s no use. He can’t create a city on his own. And if he did? He reads Candleriggs’s message once again. What more there is to lose? Candleriggs kept trying to make him
think about the consequences of his plans.
Once you’ve shocked them with the truth about the outside world
, she’d ask,
what then?
Now, with her dead beside him, Fox feels bound to ask himself the questions he always avoided before.

What would revolution really mean? His heart quickens as scenarios tumble through his mind. For the first time Fox sees that it might not be such a grand and glorious task.

He looks at his torn, grubby fingernails and the netherworld grime ingrained in his skin. It might be vicious, dirty work. Wrecking the old order means destruction.

Fox looks at the towers above him. How much wreckage and destruction justifies the creation of a better world? Could he be sure it would be better? What if the new order were just as corrupt and hooked to power as the old? What if they became so?