Firespark (20 page)

Tuck swallows the fish in a gulp. “What world?”

“I don't know. I don't really understand … Broomielaw said …” Mol hesitates.

“Said what?”

“She goes to a place where she can be with someone she lost.”

The faces of Ma, Pa, Grumpa, and little Beth, his own lost ones, flash through Tuck's mind. He feels hollow, as if the wind that haunts the cave has blown a hole right through his heart. He shakes himself like a sail in the wind and tries not to think of Ma, sunk by mountains of sea, tries to rid himself of the panicky feeling of being sunk inside the Earth, Landlocked with strangers.

“Come by the fire, Tuck, and shake off that chill,” Ibrox calls over. The grizzled-looking man livens the embers with a stick. “Shove along, you lot,” he tells the urchins, then brandishes the hot stick at Scarwell, who has just pinched his fish.

Tuck stares at the creature sitting beside Scarwell, the one he saw her dragging along the shore. The hairy beast has a human look about it. Its eyes gleam in the firelight but it doesn't move at all. Tuck decides it might be best to befriend it and offers it the fishbone.

Around him, people burst out laughing. Mol knocks on the creature's head.

“He's not real.”

Feeling a right dubya, Tuck nibbles on the fishbone.

“Broomielaw said that Mara told her something else,”
Mol whispers, squeezing in beside him, her breath almost as hot as the fire on his neck. She fiddles with the long tail of her hair.

“What? What else?” Tuck wants to know.

“She said the cyberwizz holds the secrets of the past.”

Tuck looks into Molendinar's large dark eyes. “What secrets?”

Mol shivers. “The secret of what happened there.”

“Where?”

“In the past.”

Tuck takes that in.

The fire is newly fed with sea grass so it's nice and hot. He stares into the flames until his brow burns and his eyes sting. His head feels full of hot light.

The girl's globe holds the past like a hoard of lost treasure? Yet Grumpa always said the past was lost, sunk at the bottom of the sea.

“The
Arkiel
,” he ventures, raising his voice. “What do you people know about that?”

Clang!

The noise is so loud the very mountain seems to quake.

Clang!

Tuck covers his ears with his hands, as the
clang
sounds over and over again. When a vast percussion of
bang
s erupts, Tuck is sure the mountain is about to fall on his head.

“It's inside as well as out,” yells Partick, and it's true. The
bang
s and
clang
s echo all across the mountainsides and inside the caves.

“The caves burrow into the mountains like rabbit warrens,” Pollock yells back. “The people live in them like rabbits.”

“Wormholes,” shouts Possil. “Noise runs through them like worms.”

That's what Merien said on the ship, Mara remembers. That the mountains were like a worm-eaten apple. She tugs Mol's arm, her throat tight. “I found her on the shore. She's dead.”

“Broomielaw?
No
.” Mol breaks into a wail.

“No, no, I mean Merien.”

Mol becomes quiet and looks blank.

“Ruby's friend. She was left behind by the scutpak. She was a good person, Mol, and she knew things, she would have—would've kept us
right
somehow—” Mara breaks off, drowned out by the banging and clanging, unable to put into words her sense that Merien is a real loss. They need someone like her. Mol is only relieved that it's not Broomielaw Mara found dead.

A hand grabs hers and squeezes it.

“But
you're
okay,” says Rowan.

Mara nods.

“Still got that telescope?”

Mara nods again and pulls the telescope from the deep pocket of her sealskin coat.

Rowan crouches at the cave mouth and scans the mountains.

“That's what I thought,” he calls over his shoulder. “It's not gunfire, it's the mountain doors banging shut and—” Rowan bursts out laughing.

“What?” Mara crouches beside him and he gives her the telescope. She scans the mountain and sees people rushing up the rockways into the caves and banging the car doors shut.

“Look right above the big clock,” Rowan tells her.

Above the clock with no hands, the last rays of the low,
fiery sun have lit up the words of a large, bashed metal sign that's set into the mountain rock. Mara focuses the telescope on the sign.

TIREDNESS CAN KILL
TAKE A BREAK

She lowers the telescope and laughs too. “Tiredness can
kill
?”

Rowan half-yawns, half-groans. “Well, I feel half-dead with it.”

Mara turns to the Treenesters. “It's only their sundown.” She smiles.

The sun is falling fast and already the sign above the clock is dimming. The last of the car doors bang shut so that by the time the sun has dropped behind the western peaks and the words on the sign have faded, the people of Ilira have shut themselves tight inside the mountain.

Ghosted in fog, the pirate fleet falls silent, as if stunned by the sudden disappearance of their prey. A horn blasts and a final firebomb fizzles in the wrecked and smoking bay.

“The Steer Master's horn says stop.”

Everyone turns to stare at Tuck.

“The what?” says Rowan.

“The Steer Master. He gives the orders.”

“How do you know?” asks Mol.

“I was a gypsea. I just Landed today.”

“You're one of
them
? Those
murderers
?” Mara jerks her head toward the pirate fleet.

Tuck glares at her. Who's
she
calling a murderer? She was on the
Arkiel
that drowned his ma.

“I thought you were one of the mountain people,” says Gorbals.

Tuck shakes his head. “
Was
a gypsea. I'm a Lander now, like all of you.”

Mara stares at the large curved blade in the wire-woven scabbard that hangs from the belt of Tuck's faded blue wrap. The firelight catches at crystals of sea salt in his sun-bleached hair. The roll of the ocean is in his words, the whinny of sea winds on his breath.

Tuck shakes his hair out of his gypsea eyes. “The fleet'll rest awhile now the light's gone, then start up again at dawn with the Steer Master's horn.”

“What do they want?” asks Rowan.

“Loot, booty, and boats. Pomperoy's short of boats.”

“All they'll have is a pile of cinders,” says Mara, “if they carry on like that.”

“Well, there's two ways to loot,” says Tuck. “Sneak or storm. They were in a stormy mood.”

Pollock and Possil exchange glances. This is the kind of talk they understand.

“They only fire from the boats,” says Pollock. “All day, they've fought from the sea and looted the boats but they've not landed. Why?”

“A gypsea won't set a foot on Land.” Tuck stamps on the rock floor and his face cracks into a bleak smile. “You have to turn Lander for that, like me. They won't. They're raging because—”

“Sounds like they're scared,” Possil interrupts.

Tuck blinks. “A gypsea's not scared. We've too much pirate in us.” But he's scared, so how much pirate is there in him? “But Land's not safe. Land sinks and drowns. A gypsea's safest at sea.”

“So why've you turned Lander,” asks Mara, “if it's not safe?”

Tuck shifts from foot to foot, as if he's ankle-deep on a waterlogged boat.

“Urth knows, I just, just—” His eyes flit around the dark depths of the cave, out to the fog-blanked sea and back, as restless as a wave. “I just wanted to
see
.”

Mara locks eyes with him. She understands that kind of wanting. It's what led her deep into the cyberworld of the Weave, then took her from her island to the sky city, to Fox, and brought her on a journey she could never have imagined, that has ended up right here at the top of the world.

“He saved my life,” Gorbals reminds them all. “He's not like the others.”

Now Tuck has their attention. “You,” he stares hard at Mara, “were on the
Arkiel
.”

Mara wonders why he looks at her like that.

“It was our ship,” says Mol.

Tuck weighs that up. He pulls his cutlass out of its scabbard.

“Your ship. So it wasn't just her. It was all of you.”

Everyone stares at the curved blade glinting in the light of the fire.

“Our ship.” Gorbals nods, looking bewildered at the cutlass blade. “It sunk. It was wrecked on the rocks—Tuck, what's up? Put your sword aw—”

Tuck jabs the cutlass toward the two sneaky-looking ones, Pollock and Possil.

“
The Grimby Gray
sank,” he yells. “My ma sank with it and drowned. It was the
Arkiel
that sank them both—my ma and my barge home. The
Arkiel
's why Pomperoy turned pirate, it's why I'm Landed up here …” Tuck looks
around at the shocked, unfamiliar faces, at the darkness of the cave, and feels more alone than he's ever been. He falters. Urth knows what he's doing here.

What'll he do now? Run them through with his blade and chop them to bits? They deserve it, don't they? If it wasn't for them Ma would still be alive, he'd still have his gypsea home.

He'd still be stuck in a broken-down shack on a wrecked barge with his moaning ma, wishing she was dead and that he was free.

Hot, sweaty guilt rushes up his legs and all through him, churning his insides. Tuck can't bear it. He clangs the cutlass against one of the rock spears sticking up from the cave floor and an urchin falls off his feet in fright. The impact runs up Tuck's arm, jangling all his nerves. Sparks fly from the blade and he feels the power of a cutlass in his hand.

And for the first time in his life Tuck feels a pirate beat in his blood.

“It's not their fault, it's mine.”

Mara, the girl he saw on the
Arkiel
, faces him. Her mouth trembles but her eyes are not scared. Just in case his own fear is showing, Tuck swishes the long curve of the blade close to her face, so close he lops off a strand of her hair. Mol screams but Mara's dark eyes only glitter at him. She doesn't flinch.

“I never knew there were boat cities out on the ocean. I never knew your barge was there. I tried to stop the ship as soon as I saw but I couldn't. I'm sorry.”

Tuck remembers her desperation. He saw it, when he glimpsed her on the ship. He hears her voice break over the word “sorry” and knows she means it. But he's not going to let her off that easy. She killed his ma.

“Sorry's no good,” he tells her, “not to my drowned ma. And there's only one gypsea city, that's Pomperoy.”

Though he doesn't know for sure if that's true.

Her eyes drop and she twists her hands together.

“What can I do?” she mutters.

“Well …” Tuck pretends to think, but he knows what he wants.

When she looks back up at him, Tuck's heart turns over and the fledgling pirate in him fades. The girl's sorry and scared, white as moonlight. Something about her catches at his heart. The looter instinct in him is alive and strong though.

“If you're sorry, prove it.”

“How?”

“Give me something to make up for the death of my ma.”

Mara looks aghast. “What'll make up for that?”

Tuck knows nothing will. He's bluffing. His breath turns greedy. “You have to lose something that's precious to you. Like that globe thing—your whatsitwizz—your magic machine.”

Mara's eyes have the dark gleam of an ocean night. Now they turn stormy.

“
No
.”

Tuck flashes his cutlass in her face again. He's not really angry anymore, but there's something about this Mara girl that dares him to impress her. The cutlass-flashing is just for show.

Mara sways.

Urth
, he's scared her. She looks like she's going to—

Tuck drops the cutlass and catches her as she falls.

She can't believe it. She almost passed out. And now she's thrown up—all over herself and the pirate boy.

He'll probably kill her now. Except his pirate blade is on the ground and he's leaning over her, shaking vomit off the tail of his blue wrap.

Mara takes a deep breath to quell her queasiness. The cave spins, but she has to make sure her backpack and her cyberwizz are safe. She turns her head, sees the bag through someone's feet, and lunges for it. She can't reach
and the effort makes her sick again, right over Tuck's old cracked boots.

Tuck makes a disgusted noise and grabs the backpack. Mara kicks him as hard as she can, but he hands the bag calmly to her.

Amazed, Mara grabs it and wraps her arms around it.

“Wasn't really going to chop you.” Tuck gives her an apologetic smile. “I was just all stormed up about my ma—aah!”