Zenith (35 page)

There is one question he cannot avoid any more.

What if people died?

Could he live with that?

Mara has to live with guilt of the deaths of people she loved dearly. But they were a mistake. Wouldn’t any deaths caused by his revolution be the same? A horrible but necessary consequence of his attempt to rescue the future?

But would Mara ever have left Wing and sailed to New Mungo if she knew it would mean those deaths?
Never
. And yet he is contemplating something with consequences that are just as unknown, involving countless lives.

What if he begins something he cannot control?

What if he does nothing when he could be the catalyst for a new world?

The eyes of all people are upon us.

How many deaths, Fox asks himself, would justify the creation of that world? Many or none? Well, Candleriggs, he thinks, I’ve faced the hard questions but haven’t found answers. The final question, Fox knows, is the darkest of all.

What if that’s the only way?

And it sometimes happens that the stone breaks into flower in your hand.

George Mackay Brown

She is born in a sunbeam, in a flame of agony, just before the sun sinks.

From the moment Mara first sets eyes on her daughter’s face, on the soft mouth that opens and closes like a little fish, on the waxy eyelids that flicker like moth wings in the weak candle of spring and on the fox-tawny down of hair, she knows the baby is not the hostile presence she had begun to fear, especially in the tearing hot pain of her birth.

She is the most perfect and beautiful thing Mara has ever seen on this Earth.

Stunned by sun, Tuck catapults back into the cave.

He thought the darkness was thinning, but after a season spent in deep night the last thing he expected when he turned the fifty-sixth tunnel bend was a dart of such eye-stinging sun.

Tuck rubs his shocked eyes. A galaxy of sunspots flashes in his head. Shading his face with one hand, the other gripping on to one of the rock spears sticking up from the cave floor, he peers round the very last bend.

Reels of copper light lie like metal rods across the waves in the fjord. The salt wind is in his face and Tuck’s spirit soars as he stares at the sunlit sea.

His jaw drops. His heart beats hard. Tuck scrubs the wind-tears from his eyes and looks again, but the light has shifted and the vision, or whatever it was, has already passed.

Yet for a moment there, he saw the most astonishing thing.

The rods of sun, with the waves running through them, seemed to forge into a network. Tuck rubs his eyes again.
He knows it was only a trick of his salt-stung, sun-stunned eyes but for an instant he’d swear, by the eyes of The Man he would, that what he just saw was the glint and weave of bridges.

Bridges, all across the water!

A hundred bridges! Linking the islets of the fjord.

That would beat his Da’s seventy-three. Tuck imagines the trademark Culpy crescent branded on every one.

What was that gypsea saying Ma would always nag at him?

Take your father’s windwrap and step out into the wind.

Now he sees that Ma was only telling him to loot the best of what his Da had given him and make it his own. If she’d nagged a bit less maybe he’d have listened to what she was trying to say. Well, now he understands.

Breathing heavy and hard, Tuck counts each of the looted and gifted treasures in the various pockets of his windwrap. The vision of the bridges is so strong in him, it’s shaken him to his roots. Counting always calms him down.

He’d counted twelve thousand heartbeats trapped in the earthfall. There in the dark, Tuck suddenly knew why he has always counted out the world. It gives him a grip of things his weak eyes don’t always reach – and a grip of the world when it feels beyond him.

Maybe now it’s within his grasp. Maybe the
Arkiel
’s sinking of
The Grimby Gray
opened up a gateway to the world he would never have had if he was still there with Ma.

Tuck fingers the pages of the book on natural engineering, the cold metal of the camera and the firebox, and the seven tiny moons that are Pendicle’s pearls. There’s the tiniest tingle in his fingertips when he touches the egg-smooth
surface of Mara’s globe, with all the secrets of the past nesting inside. And he has his cutlass in its wire-woven scabbard, hanging from his belt.

He misses the smooth glass of Grumpa’s three-cornered mirror. It fitted snug and sharp into the crease of his palm. That’s gone with Mara, along with a broken piece of his heart. He’s got her globe so they’re quits, he supposes, though Urth knows he didn’t mean to loot it, he was always going to give it back. But he can’t now there are mountains between them and a landslide of fallen rocks.

The pirate in him was snuffed out somewhere deep inside Earth. There wasn’t too much to snuff out. He’s not enough of a pirate to beat the things that make him quake. Things like ice tunnels and unsalty air and the inside of Earth.

He can’t be a gypsea now either because he’s Landed.

So who am I? What am I now?

The beautiful vision of the bridges glistens in his mind’s keep-pocket, beside his memory of the gem that is the Earth. Tuck limps out of the cave mouth and climbs down on to the rocky shore. He lets the salt wind gust through him, overcome with a sharp joy just to be on the outside of Earth once again.

A huge sky billows above the ocean, stacked high with night clouds. The sun has died behind the mountains of Ilira but it’ll be back – Tuck is almost certain it will – at the other side of night.

He tugs his windwrap around the warm clothes he took from the caves. The salty gusts blow the dust of the Earth from its folds. He remembered who the windwrap once belonged to when he was tunnelling through the earthfall in the mountain, with an instinct that he never knew he
had. It’s the windwrap of one of the best bridge-builders Pomperoy has ever known.

In the faded blue windwrap that was his father’s, with pockets full of treasure, Tuck limps into the wind and heads for Ilira.

The place of fearful awe.

Iceberg ships and castles sail the interior sea under a vivid sundown sky.

So vast is the water that the mountains on the furthest shores can’t be seen. If it wasn’t for the air, sharp as glass without a tang of salt, Mara would believe that the rolling waves belong to the ocean, not a lake cupped in the middle of a land.

‘Trees,’ whispers Mol. ‘I can smell them on the wind. I’m sure I do. Can’t we go to the trees?’

Ibrox has already sparked a meagre fire in a shelter of rocks and Mara hardly has the energy to move. Mol has taken Wing’s telescope to scan the shores of the lake.

‘There!’ She thrusts the telescope at the others. ‘Look over there!’

The trees of a young forest hunch together in a valley that leads down to the interior sea. Thick, dark, arrow-shaped trees bend in the wind over a scattering of bare silvery ones. The mountains on either side lean over them like austere parents.

‘Where there are trees, there are birds and animals,’ says Possil.

‘Food,’ says Pollock, in case anyone misunderstands.

‘It’ll be more sheltered there,’ says Fir. She pulls Tron’s arm around her. ‘I want to be
warm
again. I miss the hot spring.’

‘The fire,’ shouts Ibrox. ‘I need something to burn. First things first.’

‘This
is
the first thing,’ snaps Mol. She’s grey with tiredness and her eyes keep blurring with tears, Mara sees, and knows it’s because they’ve made it here but Tuck has not. But still, Mol won’t let up on the trees.

‘Who are we if we’re not Treenesters any more? Who are we now?’ she demands.

‘This must be the land I dreamed of on the ship, only I never imagined a place so . . . so . . .’ Gorbals stares out at the darkening lake. For once, he doesn’t have words for what he sees. ‘This is the land of Mara.’

‘So we’re Marans now,’ says young Clyde. ‘Not Treenesters.’

Mara has to laugh.

‘We sound like aliens. I think I’ll stay a Longhoper.’

‘It
looks
like another planet,’ says Rowan. ‘Or the moon.’

Ice has sculpted the mountains into infinite strangeness: chaotic cathedrals of stone. A frenzy of spires and turrets, worm-eaten lattices of rock, snow-packed crevasses and vicious, staccato peaks. The great spire of rock that looms high above them points to the Star of the North, just as the narwhal horns did in the ocean. The lake, full of fallen starfire, is like the crumpled silver litter the urchins hoarded in the caves. A silver moon peeks over a crag of mountain and blows the North Wind across the waves.

‘Can you walk, Mara? Could you make it down there?’

Mara nods. She’s more exhausted and sore than she ever thought possible but she’s as anxious as everyone else to find shelter from the bitter wind. And though there were none on her island and she was only a Treenester for a short time in the netherworld, the green patch of trees make her feel she is home, at last.

More than anything, she wants a home for her baby.

The baby snuggles against her skin and a beam of happiness surges through her, as pure as a shot of sun; but the flash of joy is spiked by grief so sharp that Mara has to push the pain deep inside, where she has put the grief for those other losses that are too painful to bear.