Zenith (26 page)

Mara rushes onward, following the flashes of Toronto, Montreal and Quebec along a trail of waterways that lead her North, tracking the line of the coast. As the wind-shuttle takes her over the huge water bowl of Hudson Bay, she remembers something and glances back West. But there are too many lakes, scattered like shattered glass across the rugged terrain of the North. Somewhere among those lakes and forested highlands lived the Athapaskans whose story first inspired her to find a homeland in the Far North. She hopes the Athapaskans survived.

Now all her hopes and wishes fly North, like a spur of boreal wind because there it is at last, like a great white whale at the top of the world.

Greenland, the biggest island on Earth.

A patch of island, a cuttlefish beside Greenland’s giant
whale, comes as a shock because it’s due North, surely, of where Wing, her home island, must lie. Mara peers out of the wind-shuttle window.

The name flashes up.

Iceland.

She remembers tales of an ice land full of molten fire. The oldest island folk swore the tales were true. Mara digs into her memory. Wasn’t there a mention in her Greenland book of a volcanic island in the northern Atlantic? The old people’s stories were of a violent land, so hot it melted the soles of your feet and guarded by a people so fiery they could burn a stranger’s eyes to blackened sockets with a glance. Not a soul on Wing suggested they go there, not even when the sea reached their doorsteps.

Mara pauses the wind-shuttle. Now that she’s here, she knows it’s been in the back of her mind to do this all along.

Just to see.

She descends to a speckle of islands that lie south of Iceland and North of the British Isles. She’s using up too much of her precious power but she doesn’t care. She circles the speckle of islands. It’s the largest, most southerly one.

Mara stares at the island. Her vision blurs and her throat tightens.

In realworld she scrubs tears from her eyes. In the cyber-world she swoops low over the old satellite image of Wing, her island, her lost home.

How long ago did some satellite orbiting the Earth capture this image of what no longer exists? Was it when Mum and Dad were young? Before they were born? A century ago, before the seas rose, when Granny Mary and Tain were young? Mara zooms deeper into the satellite image, as close as the World Wind allows, until she is no higher from the ground than a sky city tower. That grey clutter near the sea
must be the rooftops of the old village – before the sea forced the villagers further inshore. There’s a scattering of farms on the hillside that didn’t exist in her lifetime. It was the field of windmills. Mara’s heart beats painfully as she follows the coastline of her island until she finds the horseshoe shape of Longhope Bay.

There it is. She can hardly believe her eyes. Far below is the grey rooftop of a farm cottage. Her own home. And there, further up the hillside, is Tain’s cottage roof.

Mara can hardly breathe as she gazes down at this lost world, her world, from a time long before she was born, before the Earth drowned.

Two specks are outside Tain’s cottage. They could be rocks. Or they could be people.

They might be Granny Mary and Tain.

She can’t take any more.

Mara revs the wind-shuttle and zooms away as fast as she can from the ghosts of the past.

Mara takes the wind-shuttle up the eastern side of Greenland, across endless fjords. In realworld, their mountain could be in any one of the fjords that fritter the edges of the great white island like frosted ferns.

She zooms over the ridge of the mountains that enclose the mass of ice and snow in the interior. The snow is melted now so the mountains must surely cup a lake so vast it would seem like a sea.

Mara thinks of the dead tree root in the cave roof and wonders. She remembers the Athapaskans who lived among the boreal high lands and lakes. Anything is possible, she reminds herself. It’s a thought she hasn’t had in a while.

She is about to pull the wind-shuttle back from the Earth to find its parking bay in electronic space when she pauses. Thinks hard. Then scribbles on her screenpad and hits the message flag button on the control panel. Maybe no one will ever see it but Wing, her island, deserves a flag of its own.

Now she revs up the wind-shuttle, ready to exit Earth.
She’s seen what she needs to know, and far more. Of one thing she is sure.

They need to go through the mountains. They need to find a way through to the interior sea.

Tonight, at long last, he found Mara on the Bridge to Nowhere. Fox replays the precious moments in his head. She seemed so lost and upset. When he asked her what was wrong, she hardly made sense. Before she left, she asked him such an odd thing.

Have you ever seen the sign of a snake coiled around a stick?

She described a symbol she’d found among the carvings on a cave wall. The same sign, she murmured, was burned on to her arm.

Burned? By who?
Fox demanded, appalled. Not now, she muttered, she’d tell him another time.

He has only seen her for a few snatched moments since her sudden, strange exit from the World Wind. Now he’s too worried to focus on his own task. Who could have done such a thing to her? The gypsea? Yet Fox remembers, all too clearly, how fondly she speaks of him.

Finding out about the snake sign is the only thing he can think of to do, so Fox searches the tower bookstacks, trying to calm his spiralling fear. The image is niggling at the back of his head. It’s only when he turns over a book
on serpents and spots a tiny snake coiled on a stick on the corner of the back cover, that he realizes what it is.

Of course! It’s all over New Mungo and the Noos.

It’s a dollar sign. The trading symbol of the New World.

Fox grips the book. The sign of a
dollar
is branded on her arm?

‘What’s branded on whose arm?’

Candleriggs is frowning at him.

Fox could kick himself. He must have spoken the words out loud.

The gnarled hand on his arm is like a claw.

‘What’s happening?’ demands Candleriggs. ‘You told me they’d found land, that they’re safe and settled for the winter in caves by the sea.’

He said exactly that. Fox has been very careful about what he has and has not said. Mara was adamant about that.

‘What’s happening?’ Candleriggs repeats. ‘Is someone sick? Broomielaw and the baby, are they—’

‘They’re fine,’ he says, too quickly.

‘What’s
happened
, boy?’

Fox shakes his head. With Candleriggs’s owl eyes fixed on him so fiercely, he can’t lie any more.

When he tells all he knows she doesn’t break down. She hunches deeper into her earthen cloak, says nothing at all, just walks away.

Night has fallen when he hears her wail somewhere deep in the book rooms. Her cry mingles with the moans of misery Fox is sure he hears, carried on the wind, from the boat camp on the other side of the city walls.

He couldn’t tell Candleriggs what else Mara said.

If my power dies, don’t give up on me. If something happens, if we lose contact, don’t ever give up.

What’s wrong? he kept asking. What happened that night you disappeared?

I’m running low on power, she said. I’m – I – I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. Just don’t give up on me, promise?

He promised, of course he did. There was nothing else he could do.

Now he has found the snake sign but when will he find Mara again? Fox is filled with a terrible foreboding. All he can do is wait on the Bridge to Nowhere and hope that she comes.

There are skeletons in the nooks and crannies of the deep caves, and the scattered belongings of the people they once were. Broken watches, jewellery, unfathomable gadgets from the past, all kinds of useless stuff. Useful things too. Clothes and shoes and blankets, pots and plates, empty cans, knives and spoons, plastic bottles and bags.

The urchins have found a collection of small metal and coloured plastic boxes, some of which still magic up a flame when a switch is flicked. Ibrox sniffs the unfamiliar oil that fuels them, impressed at these ingenious fireboxes of the old world.

Mara shudders at the thought that the skeletons were once the same people who carved the story of the world’s drowning on to the cave wall, though she overcomes her qualms and gratefully pulls on their warm clothes. Did they die here waiting for winter to pass? Their remains can’t be buried. The ground is solid rock. So the urchins play with the skulls and bones, turning them into bats and balls, guns and swords, and sticks to batter out a drum bash on the rocks.

The urchins make treasure hoards of the bright litter
they find scrunched on the ground. They dress up in motley assortments of clothes, drape themselves in jewellery and broken watches and take apart the gadgets to see what’s inside.

Scarwell has moved into a cave of her own, a low cavern along one of the tunnels that branch off from the moon cave. She has filled it with precarious bone-heaps, gruesome things that scare the other urchins off her treasure hoard, each one topped by a skull with a gleaming pair of firestone eyes. In the middle of them sits her constant companion, the plastic apeman from the drowned museum, who is almost as big as herself. He looks strangely at home in his cavern, hunched over Scarwell’s treasure, surrounded by human bones.

It was Scarwell who made the skull lanterns, by turning skulls upside down and burning small chunks of driftwood soaked in fish oil inside. Everyone was horrified, but the darkness of the mountain and the outside world had crept into the moon cave. It seemed to sap the thunder of the waterfalls and the soft moon glow that lives in the cavern rock. Now Scarwell’s skull lanterns are a welcome, if grotesque, source of light.

Ibrox, whose fire-making tricks have been dwindling fast, hoards all the fireboxes that still have dregs of fuel. Every so often, he uses one of the fireboxes to spark the embers of the fire. It’s the signal for everyone to gather in semblance of the Treenesters’ old sunup and sundown ritual. No one can be bothered to shout out their names any more but they gather together and Gorbal reads from
A Tale of Two Cities
or a snippet from Tuck’s book, or he unwraps a poem or story from his own head and warms it by the fire. The ache of their empty stomachs fades a little as they fly on the wings of the words, escaping their
entombment in the caves. They fall asleep with the story infused in their dreams.