Pathfinder (8 page)

Mara turns to her mother in surprise. “You believe in the New World?”

“I believe in
you
,” says her mother.

Tain grasps Rosemary's hand.

“I think that swayed it,” he murmurs, keenly scanning the faces in the hushed church. “We'll take a vote now.”

It is decided. In two days they will set out for the New World while the summer seas are calm and steady, before another storm or sea surge hits. But there's no way of forecasting the weather, no way of knowing if a storm will strike on the voyage, and no guarantee that they will find New Mungo or reach it safely.

People wonder fearfully if the island's fishermen have the skills to navigate the perils of a great ocean when they have only ever fished the seas close to Wing. The journey might take as long as a week, they reckon, but will there be enough room in the crammed fishing boats for all the water and food and provisions they will need? The talk is all about the sea journey but not about what lies beyond it, because no one can imagine what life in a New World city, high above the ocean, could possibly be like.

The last day on the island feels like a dream. Tomorrow they will set out on a perilous journey into the future, yet today everyone still tends to the animals and farm holdings as always—they stack the peat and prepare meals just as they always have. They don't know what else to do, thinks Mara, and neither does she, so she meets up with Gail and Rowan and they climb up to the standing stones to sit upon the ancient rock and look at the endless sea and
sky. It's what they've always done on midsummer nights when their northern sky stays light all night long; a strange, forget-me-not sky that is the same intense blue as the scattered wildflowers that once grew in the drowned field of windmills.

But now, the sight of all that empty ocean is too hard to bear.

As they walk home, Gail is talking up a huge, ridiculous fairy tale for their future but Mara and Rowan are quiet, looking all around, saying impossible good-byes to every rock, every stone, every weed and wildflower that remains.

“What are you taking?” asks Gail. “I've lost almost everything—all the beautiful clothes I made over the winter. Mara, can you give me something decent to wear in the New World?”

Rowan shakes his head, a comical look of disgust on his face. But Mara laughs, glad to have a bit of Gail's feather-brained chatter to lift the desperate mood. Only Gail could think about clothes at a time like this.

“Hmm,” Mara frowns. “Something that travels well and won't crease too much in the crush of thirty people in a fishing boat.”

“It's important!” Gail declares. “What if we land up in some great new city looking like gawky peasants?”

Suddenly Gail is in tears, choking on loud sobs. Mara hugs her friend tight, knowing Gail is not really a feather-brain at all. The frantic chatter is just her way of blocking out a nightmare.

“Let's go,” Rowan says heavily and he puts an arm around his twin. “See you tomorrow, Mara.”

“Yes,” says Mara, but she can't imagine tomorrow. She
watches her two friends head toward their makeshift shelter in the church, then turns for home.

When she gets home her mother is weeding and watering their small vegetable field, clinging to every last scrap of her life here on the island for as long as she can.

“Find us some music, Mara!” Rosemary calls out, so Mara runs upstairs and powers up her cyberwizz to zoom into the Weave. Quickly, she locates the flickering tower-stack that's packed to the brim with all kinds of music, selects a soaring waltz from its electronic catalog, and zips back into realworld where she connects the sound-site up to an ancient speaker in her bedroom. She opens her window and lets the rousing music float out over Wing and the surrounding sea.

Downstairs, Mara grabs Corey by the hands and leads him around and around the garden in a dance until he is full of giggles. Rosemary sings along in her clear voice, smiling at the two of them—then, all of a sudden, her face crumples and she goes inside. Mara follows her into the kitchen and watches her mother plant herb cuttings in a tiny pot. The room is full of the green, mind-clearing aroma of her namesake, rosemary. She has tied it in bunches to dry over the fire. Mara knows why. Her grandmother seeded that plant on the day Mara's mother was born. Rosemary won't leave without taking it with her to their new life. Mara plucks a small bunch of dried rosemary and tucks it in the pocket of her jeans as she looks out of the kitchen window at her father, who is setting the sheep and the goats and their two horses running free on the hillside.

Later that evening, Mara downloads a movie she once found in the Weave—an adventure story of heroes and strange lands, with a comfortingly safe and happy ending.

She puts the glowing halo on her little brother and lets him enjoy the story as he lies snug in his bed.

At sundown, despite the heat, the islanders light their fires. No one is sure why, but they do, and so, on the last evening, the people of Wing fill the air with the earthy peat smoke that has filled its winter nights, time before memories, time out of mind.

Mara knows she will remember this day, every detail of it, as long as she lives.

“Go now, Mara,” says Tain. “Go. Find a new future.”

He pushes her toward the boats: every fishing boat and ferry, every seaworthy vessel the island owns. They knock together, rocking on strong wave surges.

Mara's family begins to board a boat that looks too full to take anyone else.

“Come on, Mara!” her father shouts urgently, but she stands stubbornly beside Tain. The rest of the old folk stand on the hill beside the sea, dead-eyed but dignified.

“I won't go until Tain does!” she shouts back. “There
must
be room for everyone. We'll have to
make
room.” All around her and in the boats people lower their gaze from her furious, accusing look. All except for her mother. Precariously, she stands up in her place in the boat and tries to push back through the crush of people on deck to get to Mara.

There are to be no old ones on the boats. It has all been decided, but Mara can't believe it. She
won't
believe it. They cannot leave the old ones on the drowning island.

“We've had all the time in the world to prepare for this and we never made sure we had enough boats? We might at least have done that.” Mara clutches at Tain's sleeve as she did when she was his little helper. But she can't help Tain now. She feels useless.

Gail's father, Alex, the skipper of the last boat, is shamefaced and desperate. “There's no room, Mara. Look for yourself. You tell me who to leave—the old ones or the children? The brown-eyed or the blue?” Alex lowers his voice. “Listen to me. This is going to be a long and perilous journey. Those old ones won't make it. And what about once we get there? How would somebody like Tain manage in one of those cities? But they say they don't want to come anyway—they want to stay here.”

Mara glares at Alex with blazing eyes. Tain is furiously ordering her to go, right this second. Gail is pleading with Mara to jump on board with her family. Her mother is raging at Mara, raging at the crush of people around her who block her way.

“Tain is the last person who should be left!” cries Mara. “He warned us all about this. He told us to prepare. We never listened and now he's been proved right, we're leaving him here to drown? It's not right! The ones who wouldn't listen, who said we didn't need to do anything, that this would never happen—they should be left behind before Tain!”

Mara hears a scream. Her mother's. She spins around and is drenched by sea spray. A large wave has hit the boats and they rock wildly, crashing against each other. Some have already pulled away, a small exodus scattering the ocean. Mara can still hear her mother's cries and frantically she scans the few boats still at the edge of the waves.

No!

Her family's boat has pulled out on the wave surge. There is suddenly an expanse of sea between them—too far to jump. Already the boat is fogged in clouds of peat-smoke from the boat funnels.

“No, wait!” Mara cries. “Please wait!”

She didn't mean this to happen. Mara tries to focus on her mother's face. She can't see her father or Corey at all, but she can hear her little brother's agonized wail.

“I'll see you in the city!” she sobs but the chug of the boats muffles her cry. In moments they are out of earshot, beyond reach.

The boat fades amid sea spray and smoke. Sobbing with shock, Mara turns to Tain, who looks stricken, blaming himself. Frail though he is, he lifts her bodily onto the last boat where Gail and her mother grab her and pull her on board beside them. Mara can't seem to let go of Tain's hand. In the moment before the boat pulls away she pushes her face into the sleeve of his oilskin jacket and breathes in the scents of the sea, the cheeses, and the peat that are so much a part of him, of her, of the island.

“I was born here and I'll die here,” says Tain gently, firmly. “This is where I want to be.”

He juts out his craggy chin. And now Mara sees that Tain is speaking the truth. He doesn't want to come to the New World. The fear and hope that shine in his dark eyes are for Mara and all the others in the boats, not for himself.

The journey south will be treacherous. Maybe no one will survive it. Maybe they won't find the New World—the island's fishermen have tried to map out navigation charts using compasses and the pattern of the sun and the stars and Mara's screen map of New Mungo, but they can only hope that their calculations are accurate. And even if they do get there, who really knows what kind of life lies out there beyond the horizon? What kind of life could an eighty-year-old man make in a strange New World?

Tain will stay on the island he's never left, not once, since the day he was born. All his memories and stories
and knowledge, all that he is, will disappear with the island when it is swallowed by the ocean.

The old ones begin to climb the hillside to the church that will now be their home, as the refugee boats struggle against an incoming tide, abandoning their island and the last of its people to the sea.

Many times, in the long days and nights of the journey south, Mara is sure they will never make it. The ocean is a ferocious, swallowing beast. Somehow, Alex steers them up over huge, rolling walls of waves, across moving mountains of sea. Mara dreads each new wave; dreads the horrendous death-ride into a deep, dark valley, then the huge surge upward into a white cliff face of ocean. The wooden boat cracks and groans loudly, its timbers strained to their limit under the massive force of the waves. Mara grips the cold ship's rail until her fingers grow numb, her stomach churning with fear and seasickness. She keeps her face turned to the seething black well of the ocean. Spray stings her face, crusts her eyes with salt, but she keeps looking out and cannot turn away. There's been no sign of the other boats in days. Mara's terror is so great she can hardly contain it. She knows that Jamie, the skipper of her family's boat, is much less experienced than Alex. The lives of her family lie in the hands of a novice skipper.

She longs to put her head down and sleep and not wake up until they find the New World—but that's impossible in a heaving boat, amid the crush of so many bodies. It becomes hard to believe that the journey will ever end, that the wails of the children will ever quiet, that the
awful seasickness will ever stop, that she will feel solid ground beneath her feet ever again.

The crush on board means that there wasn't room enough for sufficient provisions of food and water. They finished the last scraps of food yesterday and there are hardly any water rations left—just enough for the babies and the very youngest children. Everyone is praying that they reach the city today. They must. Months of meager food rations during the storm months on the island have weakened them all more than they realized. No one has much strength left. And no one has ever experienced terrifying seas like these.

Trembling and muddleheaded Mara begins to drift in a hazy trance. Gail is crammed beside her, their bodies so close and intertwined that the other girl's spasms of sickness, her listless fear, even her aching, restless limbs, feel like an extension of Mara's own. Rowan, who began the journey full of tales and stories to pass the time, is crushed up next to his twin, his blue eyes glazed, his mouth too dry and sore to let him talk anymore.

At dawn next morning Mara is suddenly shaken out of her daze.

“Look up ahead!” Alex shouts. He stares shock-eyed across the ocean.

All around her people are waking up and crying out in fright. Weakly, Mara struggles upright and looks out, but all she can see is ocean.

“There!” Gail cries in a parched voice. Trembling, she clutches Mara's arm and points.

The most colossal structure rises out of the ocean, swathed in mist.