“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.
Fox is not here to see the miracle they’ve made. She is the lucky one. Mara looks down at her little miracle, tucked tight and safe against her, and the love that sweeps through her is as intense and frightening as the pain of her baby’s birth.
“I never saw Broomielaw or Clayslaps in my dream like I said I did.” Gorbals looks as if it’s a secret he can no longer bear to keep to himself. “I lied. They were never meant to be here, were they, or they would have been in my dream.”
Mara glances at his face as he helps her over a spur of rock. She remembers the moment of hesitation when he first told of the dream and squeezes his hand. It doesn’t make her own pain any easier but she’s not the only one who has lost the person they love.
It’s hard to look at Mol and see her pain because then she has to think of Tuck, who wouldn’t be dead and neither would his mother, if Mara hadn’t crashed into their lives. But even that can’t ease her devastation, her disbelieving fury, at his theft of the globe.
*
Life has fastened itself into the most unlikely nooks and crannies all over the Earth. Mara looks at a shrub that seems to be growing out of a cleft in sheer rock. She thinks of the lichen they found in the bleak glacier gorge and remembers the netherworld ruins, alive with insects and creatures and herbs and weeds. She thinks of Fox in his tower there and wills him her love on the wings of the wind.
In this small nook of forest, Mara vows, they will root themselves to the Earth and make a life at the top of the world.
In the shelter of the trees, they fall asleep around a crackling fire, hardly able to believe they are here. When light trickles through the trees a bird flies out of the branches above them, singing a song of impossible joy.
The baby rouses with sharp, hungry cries.
“What will you call her?” Fir asks, stroking the baby’s cheek as she feeds from Mara. “She’s as soft as a new leaf.”
“Or a flower.” Mara winces at the force of her baby’s hunger but she can’t stop breaking into a smile every time she looks down at the perfection of the tiny face. “I’m calling her Lily. For Candleriggs.”
“Lily Longhope.” Gorbals smiles. “It’s a good name.”
“You’re not Longhope, you’re Mara Bell,” says Rowan.
“Longhope’s my placename,” Mara explains.
“The name of your farm on Wing.” Rowan still looks puzzled.
“It’s a Treenester thing,” says Mara, but she takes his point. “She can be Lily Bell Longhope then.”
“Better,” says Rowan. “But what about …?”
Mara’s face tells him not to mention Fox.
“She has his looks so she can have my name,” Mara says in a voice that’s brusque to stop her brimming into tears.
Rowan hesitates, as if he’s searching for just the right words. He touches the baby’s hand and her fingers open like a star. Then she closes her hand tight around his thumb. “She can have all of my love and care. Always.” His voice trembles.
And that does it. Mara’s tears brim and fall on the baby’s fox-tawny head and onto the earthy roots of the trees.
Mara rocks her baby asleep to a rhythm her body seems always to have known. She can’t stop gazing at the tiny face. As long as she has Lily she will never be alone in the world. The future seems ever more precarious now that this precious mite depends on her for survival, and yet Mara feels a fluttering joy as she thinks of all the things they will do together in the years ahead. And there is so much she must tell Lily, one day.
In the shelter of a tree Rowan is busy with a pile of fallen branches. Mara walks across the carpet of needles cast by the trees and looks over his shoulder. He is weaving a large basket. After a while, he sets it down and tests it on the ground. He throws a quick smile at Mara and now she sees what it is: a rocking nest for Lily.
“Bit wobbly,” he decides and begins to weave some more.
As she watches his hands working the wood, Mara thinks of old Tain and his driftwood carvings that were famed all over Wing. She pictures her father mending his fishing boat with scraps of driftwood alongside the other island men on the shore. And she remembers her mother rocking her to sleep just as she rocks Lily, with the slow sway of a summer sea.
What she and Rowan are becoming, Mara is not sure. His familiar presence anchors her where Fox was like an electric storm. He ripped through her life and is scorched into her soul as surely as the snake is branded on her arm. And he is burned into her future through Lily.
Mara remembers how she and Rowan grew up as close as two saplings in this forest of young trees. They sprang from the same patch of Earth; their roots are entwined. And Rowan is still here, alive, in her world. Sunbeams flicker through the branches and land upon the cradle-nest in his hands. The wind ruffles his hair, the same deep, burnished blond as her father’s and so many of her island people. He glances up, sensing her gaze, and the look in his blue eyes stirs up a sensation that takes her by surprise, as if a hot spring has burst through the hard grief inside. Mara holds on to his gaze, and the feeling. And she wonders.
Might she and Rowan salvage a future, together, out of the wreckage of their past?
Anything is possible, she reminds herself. It was something she once believed.
MOONSCAPE
Mara is not here. It was only a trick of hope on the back of his fever-dream.
The emptiness of the Bridge to Nowhere leaches all his hopes. His plans are a waste of time. He has lost Mara for nothing. A one-man revolution is just a joke and he’s not sure he could stomach what a revolution really means. Candleriggs was right. He should take Pandora and go home. He will risk the wrath of his grandfather and the rooks and try to change his world from the inside.
He’ll leave behind a fox-phantom, a dream of himself, to guard the broken bridge. A fox that will bay each night at midnight, its cry echoing all down the boulevards of the Weave. But he can’t keep coming back here, night after night, to a bridge that leads nowhere at all. He will exit this ghost existence and find his real life again.
But he’s not giving up on Mara. He can never do that. The fox is the guardian of his last flint-spark of hope and he’ll leave it here on the bridge. If she does come, the fox will alert his godgem, wherever he is, however far from now.
The ether is full of nervy static, as if he has infected the Weave with his mood.
A light flashes high over the bridge. Fox scans the network for flying cyberdogs or one of the other venomous creatures that mutate out of Weave-rot. But there’s nothing he can see. He’s about to exit the Weave when there’s another flash of light. He looks up.
A moon falls into the boulevards.
A silver glow illuminates the ruins, too strong for a solitary moon.
Another moon shoots over the bridge.
The peekaboo moons!
Fox watches two more moons zip out of the empty ocean of cyberhaze that lies between the defunct Weave and the sizzling cyberuniverse of the Noos. He watches them land in exactly the right place. How many have come? How many moons have answered his call?
Time to act or time to go? Now, Fox doesn’t know.
But he leaves the phantom fox on the broken bridge and zooms through the junk heaps and the towerstacks, heading for the place he first spotted Mara when they were bot
h just kids who knew nothing of the world and played among the rot and ruin of the Weave.
Fox zips across the ether onto his boulevard of broken dreams.
Just to see.
IMAQA
maybe
The Earth turns five thousand times and more.
Sunups and sundowns rise and fall.
In the long polar nights of the Far North many suns
never rise or set at all.
Days pile on days and lives are lived.
THE EARTH SPEAKS
In Candlewood, the tree lamps wink and shiver. Winds burrow through the forest, as fleet as Arctic hares. Above the Lake of Longhope, a cutlass moon sharpens its blade on the eastern mountains, its watery twin broken into pieces on the waves. The stars are so fierce their reflections fizzle on the lake.
Deep in the mountains, winter still grips. But on the shores of the lake at the top of the world, the sun is winning the battle against the longest night, unfastening the fingers of winter, one by one.
There’s a rip in the texture of the night. A shift and crack that is nothing to do with the rupturing sky lights of the magnetic Pole. A roar and bellow like a dying iceberg, but this is a voice that is deeper, older still.
The voice of the Earth.
CLAY
In the moon-windy rockways of Ilira, no one hears the Earth speak.
No one hears in the umiaks, the fleet of long walrus-skin boats moving fast as darts up the snaky channel of the fjord. The sea and the banshee wind are too loud.
The tide is with the umiaks and the waves rush them home. The rowers are grateful. Their arms ache after a long shift salvaging bridge metal from the sunken wrecks around the jutting sharks of land where the fjord becomes open sea. As they turn the last bend, the rowers pass under the network of bridges that connect the inner islets of the fjord.
Moonlight makes a glistening weave of the bridges. To Clay, in the umiak at the tail end of the fleet, it looks as if a spider’s web has been cast over the wide bay.
A lamplit procession is moving along the unfinished Culpy Bridge. The Pontifix has promised it will be the greatest of all the bridges, an astonishing wonder of metal-weave suspended right across the fjord before it widens out into the bay. The coiling pillars at each end and the graceful weave and sweep of the bridge make Clay think of the sea melodies the wind-pipers play in the market caverns, frozen in midair.
Clay pulls on his oar, his eyes following the moving procession of lamps.
“Eyes on your oars!” roars the scut at the head of the umiak. He snaps his whip and his cutlass winks at the moon, while the moon winks on the metal crescents that brand the Culpy Bridge. Clay lowers his head but chances a sly glance upward just before his boat passes under the bridge. The whip tail cracks on his head but Clay doesn’t care. What he just saw was worth twenty whips.
The Pontifix was standing on the Culpy Bridge. Clay knew it was him by his wind-straggled hair, the color of a winter sun, and his bright blue windwrap emblazoned with silver crescents and the crossed wings of a Great Skua on its back. He was examining the bridge’s wirework with his silver eyebox. As the umiak fleet passed underneath him, the Pontifix leaned over the bridge to watch. Clay could swear the silver eyebox looked right down at him.
The Pontifix, Bridge Master of Ilira and Keeper of the Globe, looked through his eyebox into Clay’s upturned face.
That’s something to tell his mother. It might bring a smile to her weary face.
Up in the mountains the Earth is roaring and shifting but Clay is racing home to harbor, the world’s wind is in his ears, and he doesn’t hear a thing.
PANDORA AND THE GODGEM
Fox is fast asleep at last.
Pandora kneels on the floor beside the bed of shredded books, heaped with ancient clothes from the museum. She pulls on one of the long, grubby dresses, the first that comes to hand, strokes the tawny hair that’s strewn with fine threads of gray like cobwebs on autumn leaves, and steals a kiss from his dreams.
He’s exhausted from a long night’s work in cyberspace, outrunning the rooks that are forever on their track. Since Caledon died, New Mungo has lost its dominance of the New World. New forces are rising, says Fox, things are shifting. Insurrection and dissaffection vibrate in the ether. Finally, he says, after all these years, our time has come.
Pandora lifts the lid of the jeweled casket they found years ago among the museum’s armor and swords. It’s where he keeps the godgem with its headgem that is the same green as her eyes. He’s always telling her it’s not a toy, but she knows that well enough. The game they play is a deadly serious one.
Pandora creeps out of the tower room and runs down the narrow winding stairs. When at last the stairs end, she bursts out through a small door and only stops to rub a stitch in her side. Now she’s running through the great halls of the museum, barefoot, long dress rustling, the night air of the netherworld seeping through the smashed window panes and coating her unwieldy tangle of hair with beads of dank mist.
She finds the hall with the huge stuffed elephant and crawls underneath, resting against the thick trunk of its back leg. It’s her favorite place and he never finds her here.
Her presence disturbs an owl perched on the elephant’s head. It flies off with an indignant who you! to join the ghostly hosts of owls hooting and hunting all across the netherworld. Pandora puts on the godgem. The green gem on her forehead looks like a third eye. She gives a happy sigh as she takes a cyberleap to join a night hunt in another ruined world.
Now she’s zipping through the ruined boulevards, no longer Pandora but a green cybersnake, hyperspeeding far faster than she can ever run through the museum’s halls. Behind her is the broken bridge where a forlorn fox bays night after night for a mate that never comes. Pandora doesn’t bother about him. She is too busy snaking through the flickering towerstacks to play her own furtive part in events that will shake the very foundations of the New World.
And there they all are, waiting for her in a puddle of moonbeams, in the wrecked boulevard where dreams are forged.
CANDLEWOOD SPIRE
In Candlewood, no one hears the Earth roar.
Not those gathering for supper around sundown fires, nor Lily, racing through the trees in the face of the wind. Her hair streams behind her, glinting in the lights of the tree lamps like the tawny tail of a fox.
Beyond the trees, on the edge of the Lake of Long-hope, Wing is perched halfway up Candlewood Spire. The huge rugged spire of rock points straight to the Star of the North. Wing is studying the night with his telescope, a grounded star sailor on a stone mast. When the Earth trembles, the thick down of hair on his skin bristles. His hackles rise as he hears the faraway crack and roar.
He has heard that voice before. Once, when he was small, on the journey through the glacier gorge when the mountain swallowed Tuck. It’s the voice of the Earth.
Wing sweeps the telescope over the rock faces of the mountains, but there’s nothing to see. The tremor came through the rocky pass behind him, carrying ice echoes from the glacier gorge that cuts through the mountains in the world beyond the lake. Often, the land slips and slides and deadly spring tides of snow rumble down from the peaks. But what he just heard is something much darker and deeper than that.
When Lily comes, he’ll tell her. Once the stars wheel around the North Star, their anchor, and the great lake throws morning up into the sky, he and Lily might sneak off into the mountains to track the voice of the Earth.
He knows Lily. She’ll want to go.
Just to see.
The great waterfall has crashed into sudden meltdown. The huge force of it tears at a weakness in the rock. The land cracks and breaks and a vast slice of the mountain hurtles into the glacier gorge.
The Earth roars as an old ice wound reopens.
A green wind blows over the mountains, fresh from the trees around the lake. It rushes into the opening and snakes through the dark salty air of the tunnels that worm deep into the mounta
in and lead to Ilira, and the world beyond.
Author Bio
JULIE BERTAGNA started her career as a teacher and freelance feature writer for major Scottish newspapers and has established a reputation as an author of powerful and original fiction for young readers. Pathfinder was inspired by a newspaper article about global warming and is now published in several languages around the world. Julie lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband and daughter. Visit her website at www.juliebertagna.com.
Also by Julie Bertagna
The Raging Earth series
Pathfinder
Firespark
Copyright © 2007 by Julie Bertagna
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Young Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Limited
Published in the United States of America in 2009 as Zenith
by Walker Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Revised e-book edition published in August 2013
www.bloomsbury.com