Firespark (17 page)

Just being alive has never felt so good. Tuck stands on the
Waverley
's deck, staring around him as if he's seeing the world for the first time.

Everything about Land is a surprise. It's so much more than he ever imagined. The mountains are vast and beautiful, the thunderwater that pelts down them so loud it shakes his bones. But what entrances him most of all is the fact that Land does not move. Not at all. Tuck's never known what stillness is because he has never felt it before in his life.

He takes the little silver box from the belt of his wind-wrap and zooms in on such a violent cascade of waterfall that he recoils with a yell.

“Tuck, lad! What you goggling at like a gormless gull? You armed and ready? From here on, you be ready for anything.”

Tuck waves his cutlass at Charlie and catches a crescent of first morning light on the curved pirate blade.

“Well, stop playing with that camera and get down here!”

Tuck looks at the little silver box in his hand. “Camera.” He tries the strange word on his tongue.

“TUCK!”

A gypsea roar shatters his reverie. The almighty
boom
of the Steer Master's cannon shocks him into the moment. The armada has entered a gap in the land: a wide, curving channel of ocean that winds between the mountains. Vast arms of rock enclose the fleet on either side while right in front jagged peaks rise out of the fog.

“Urth!”

“Eyes of The Man!”

“Great Skua help us!”

Yells and curses erupt from the steerers and lookouts as they suddenly spot the rocky humps and islets that litter the fjord. There's a sickening crunch of wood and the moan of metal on rock as the gypsea boats hit the land traps in the sea. The
Waverley
's lookout boy screams as an island looms out of a fog drift. Tuck hangs on to the rail as the steerer heaves the ship clear, almost smashing into one of the ferries. Behind them, the wrecked hulls of sunken boats circle the whaleback island like shark fins.

Chancing another yell from Charlie, Tuck grabs his camera and zooms the eye onto the mountain at the head of the fjord. At first, all he gets is a blank windowful of fog. He sweeps the mountain, zooms in on a flash of sunlight, and finds himself face-to-face with a sleepy-eyed child who stands open-mouthed in front of a door on a ledge of rock watching the armada appear out of the fog. The sun bounces off the door again as the child yanks it open and disappears inside. Tuck has a moment's glimpse of the cave that lies behind the door. He stays fixed on the door, jolted with emotion once it slams shut, for it's so like the door in his sunken shack on
The Grimby Gray
: a yellow car door, battered and scraped by rocks and
waves. The camera reveals a mass of car doors set into the rock face.

Tuck feels a tug inside.

The pirate roar of the armada is like nothing he has ever heard. An order from the Steer Master's ship cuts it dead. But the drumbeat rolls on. Tuck stares at the sudden industry that fills every ship, as the oil tanks, catapults, and cannons that each ship hoards in case of sudden sea attack are hauled upon to the decks.

For long moments he stands there, shifting from foot to foot as if the deck is on fire. An idea is swirling like fog in his head.

Tuck tightens his windwrap and secures the camera in his belt. He races along the deck to the back of the ship. The gondola he was rescued in lies among a pile of ropes, nets, and driftwood. He selects two long sticks of driftwood for oars, wraps the gondola in a wide, thick rope-weave of netting, the kind used to catch dolphins and seals, and lowers the boat until it's almost touching the surge of the waves. He knots the end of the netting to the
Waverley
's metal rail then he begins to climb down it like a rope ladder, finding footholds in its wide weave. When he reaches the gondola he makes a slash in the netting with his cutlass and climbs inside.

Now he sits in the gondola and waits.

He waits until he is close enough to Land to see the people on the shore. Then he hacks at the netting that cradles the gondola, just above the sea, and slices the boat free with his blade. The gondola crashes sideways into the waves and Tuck has to struggle with every ounce of his strength to set it upright, turn it around, and stop it being churned to pieces in the
Waverley
's wake.

No one seems to notice he is gone. The pirate storm consumes the armada, head, heart, and soul.

Someone yells his name as a fleet of yachts surges past.
Pendicle
? Tuck scans the decks but sea spume blinds him, and by the time he's wiped his eyes the yachts are way in front. He oars frantically through the wake from the angry fleet. All the time he is aware of the enclosing shadow of the unknown Land they are invading. But these are
my
people too, he suddenly knows, and he doesn't mean the gypsea pirates, but the EarthLanders with their sea-scavenged car doors. Tuck is a motley mix of gypsea, pirate, and bridger. But now he senses, deep inside, that there's something Lander in him too, though he's never set foot on Earth.

But his Landcestors have and they must have left strong, Earthy footprints on his soul.

His last blood bond with Pomperoy sank with Ma on
The Grimby Gray
, and a strange tug inside now pulls him to Land.

Midnight comes; kings are clay; men are earth
.

The Play of Gilgamesh
, Edwin Morgan

Night fled in a panic when dawn revealed what was burrowed in the dark. A drumbeat sneaks behind the march of the ocean. Hidden in fog and helped by the tide, the terror creeps up the winding channel of the great fjord.

The people of Ilira are still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, shocking themselves awake with the icy spray of the waterfalls, grabbing new-laid eggs from the mountain ledges, roping down the rockways to the market where scutpakers sell shipwreck booty and branded slaves.

A faded red skysail punctures the fog.

Ilira is entranced by the playful red dash that billows above the fjord. Sails begin to bloom all across the sky. A motley patchwork of masts bursts from the fog like a tattered army of spears. The Steer Master's horn bellows and the sneaky drumbeat rouses into a gypsea storm.

If the wall of mountains behind Ilira cracked open to reveal a flaming dragon, the shock would be just as deep.

The armada of boats erupts from the fog with a petrifying roar as Pomperoy turns pirate again.

Mara doesn't dare stop. She stumbles up a steep, narrow rockway until it turns into rough steps. The stone stairway might have been hacked out of the mountain by eons of grinding ice or human hands, she can't tell, but it climbs so high she can't see where it ends because the rockway disappears into a shelf of fog. Soaked by spray from waterfalls that hiss and thunder from crevices all across the mountain, Mara prays she doesn't lose her footing on the drenched rock. If she does—she looks behind her to the base of the mountain where the waterfalls smash into fizzling rainbows—she'll crash all the way back down.

She had one second to escape the gun pointed at her head, a moment when the world around her erupted and the cold metal of the gun barrel trembled then lifted from her forehead. She took her chance and raced across the rocky beach, faster than wind, until she found herself at the bottom of the mountain in a maze of rockways that brought her to the mountain steps.

A hundred more slithering steps take her underneath a massive waterfall that drenches her in icy spray. Here, the rock is so lethal with iced slime she hardly dares move. Then she sees the rope. She's been so intent on keeping her footing that she hasn't seen the thick rope stapled as a handrail into the mountainside. Mara grabs it, glancing behind her for the umpteenth time, but still there is no one on her tail.

Up through yet another waterfall, the stepped rockway splits. She can either climb up into the fog clouds or take the descending way. Upward is cold and terrifyingly blank, so she takes the way down, though these steps are so steep and twisting her head spins and the world reels. Mara grips the mountain rope so tightly her freezing hands burn.

The steps wind down around a knuckle of mountain and Mara finds herself on a wide ledge in the middle of a crowd. A shrieking woman yanks on ropes knotted like harnesses around the squat, fur-wrapped bundles of two small children. Mara stares at the doors set haphazardly across the cave-pitted face of the mountain.
Car doors
. There was such excitement on those rare occasions when one washed up on Wing. Mara remembers the scramble to claim such scarce scrap metal.

The car doors are bashed and ill-fitting for the uneven cave mouths. The scraped, motley colors couldn't look more out of place. Yet somehow they give the bleak mountain face the homely look of a village. As the shrieking mother drags her children inside, Mara glimpses a cavernous darkness made snug with candles, furs, and skins, and feels a jolt of wanting. She wipes a stream of water from her drenched face and tries to catch her
breath. The crowd of weathered-looking people stare out to the ocean.

Mara sees the stricken faces. She follows their eyes.

A vast tide of boats fills the fjord.

What she thought was the roar of the mountain waterfalls was only partly that; the rest is the battle roar of an invading fleet.

All the way up the mountain, escape was Mara's only thought. She grabbed the chance to save her backpack, and her life. Only now, as she watches the horror erupting in the bay below, does she remember what she's left behind: her friends, abandoned on the shore.

Slamming erupts all around her. The mountain vibrates with the metallic percussion of car doors. People armed with guns and spears are racing out of the caves and hurling themselves down the rockways, harnessed to ropes. Others drag their children inside.

Which way? Which way
? Should she escape farther up the mountain to who knows where, stay here, or join the people rushing down to the battle on the shore?

The snake burned into her arm throbs, reminding her that this race of people had her bound and branded as a slave. Escape is the only sensible thing to do. But her friends are down there on the shore.

A firebomb catapults from a ship and explodes in one of the boats on the bay, scattering blazing debris onto the shore. Gripping the rope rail, Mara begins to run down the mountain steps, as fast as the slippery rock allows. She reaches a lower ledge crowded with stone igloos. Mara uses the wall of an igloo to brace herself against the icechipped hurl of the wind. She looks down the mountain, trying to figure out what's happening, trying to see which way to go.

Ma-ra-ra-ra
…

She scans the mountain. Are her ears playing tricks? Is it the shriek of the wind in the rockways or is someone really calling her name? It's hard to tell amid the uproar in the bay. A stone cracks against the mighty slab of granite that forms the ledge and bounces close to her foot. Mara picks it up. She peers at the ground below.

A mass of people are rushing onto the firebombed shore. Smoke and flames now fill the fjord. Mountain people have taken cover behind rocks to return fire at their attackers, but the invading fleet is out of reach of short-range guns and spears. Firebombs are devastating the anchored boats in the bay while the counterfire of the mountain people lands in the sea.

Ma-ra-ra-ra
…

Her name, again, she's sure. Another stone cracks against the rocky ledge. Mara scans the mountain slopes and the shore below her. Where are they? Where? Far below, a cluster of people are out on the open shore. Mara thinks she sees Rowan's dark blond head, Mol's stream of hair whipped up in the wind, the ragged scarecrow that is Gorbals. The wind clears a gap in the smoke and now she's sure it's them—there's Pollock, wiry and dark-headed, his arm raised to throw another stone. Mara waves frantically, then screams as she sees what they can't because they're looking up at her: a firebomb flying across the bay toward them.