Firespark (21 page)

The blue windwrap becomes a noose around his neck. The cutlass glints above his head. Tuck chokes and struggles.

“Pollock, no!” Mol yells. “He said he wasn't going to hurt her. He's just upset. We killed his
mother
, Pollock! We sank his home. Let him be!”

Mol throws herself at Pollock and sinks her teeth into his fingers until he yells and loosens his grip on the noose he's made of Tuck's windwrap. Tuck breaks free, choking for breath.

“Foghead!” Mol rages, glaring at Pollock until, reluctantly, he lowers the cutlass. Rowan, with a rock in his fist, lowers his arm too but keeps up a threatening glare.

Mol crouches beside Tuck, now on his knees. “Water, someone. He's choking, water!”

Tuck unhooks a small wooden flask from his belt. “Here's water,” he gasps, but hands the bottle to Mara, first.

Mara takes in the look on Mol's face as she sips Tuck's water.

“Oh, yes, of course, you were sick,” mutters Mol, her cheeks flushed.

“I'm fine now,” says Mara.

“Maybe it was the fish,” says Gorbals.

“Huh!” Pollock jabs the point of the curved blade at Gorbals's behind. “The fish was fine. No one else is sick, are they?”

“Give me that.” Ibrox takes the cutlass from Pollock. “Now, I will melt this blade in the fire,” he declares, “if there's any more trouble from any of you. Our lives are precarious enough. We need to save our energy for keeping alive, not killing each other. Yes?”

He lays the cutlass beside the fire and glares around him.

“
Yes
?”

Everyone nods.

Mara sits up and leans her head against the cave wall. She hands the water bottle back to Tuck.

“I'd probably have killed me if I was you,” she admits.

Once again, the horrible memory flashes up of her own kill back in the sky city.

Tuck gives her a wobbly grin. “Lucky I'm me, then.”

Mara returns a thin, wary grin before pulling up the furred hood of her sealskin coat. She lies down on the rock floor, hugging her backpack tight to her chest.

“I'm truly sorry about your ma,” she whispers. “I lost mine too, so I know. I lost all my family.”

Tuck leans across the cave floor and grabs his cutlass. He cleans the blade in the ash and embers of the fire and scrapes off the sick on his boot with the tip of it.

“Me too,” he murmurs.

He doesn't need to raise his head to know that Pollock, Possil, and Rowan, and the firekeeper, Ibrox, are watching his every move. Gorbals is pretending he is not. Mol, the one with the hair as long as herself, never stops watching him. Tuck puts the cutlass back in exactly the spot Ibrox placed it, on the stones by the fire. He finds a place to
sleep that's not too far from the heat and winds himself tight in his windwrap.

If he decides to stay with them, he'll have to win their trust.

And if he doesn't, well, they don't have the all-seeing eyes of The Man in the Middle. They can't see his thoughts and watch his every move, all night, every night, to see what he will do.

Half asleep, Mara thinks the silver crescent cutting through the mist is the moon. She sits up, heart thumping, when she sees it's Tuck's curved cutlass. They've been here long enough to see the thin crescent moon grow fat, yet there's something about Tuck that she still doesn't trust. But he's only cutting down the few strands that remain of the tough sea grass that overhangs the side of the cave, to stoke up the fire Ibrox struggles, night and day, to keep alive.

The fog is like a live creature. It creeps around the bends of their doorless cave to the inner caverns they have made their home and curls icy fingers around them as they sleep. Each morning they wake up fog-blind and coughing.

The siege in the bay ended when winter arrived in a shock of cold so deep even the sun seemed to lose the courage to face the day. The pirate fleet panicked as night swallowed day and the sea began to creak. Ice threatened to trap the invaders in the fjord where they would become the prey of the mountain people. They made a clumsy retreat through the hardening waves, grabbing a loot of
boats and booty, along with a harvest of bridge-building metal from the wrecked ships at the neck of the fjord.

And left a bay full of ruin behind.

Mara has seen bodies broken and burned, tangled in seaweed on the rocks where the tide has cast them.

The one good thing the battle brought is a fjord full of driftwood from all the bombed boats. But even Ibrox's fire-keeping skills can't quell the cold. In the gloomy light of the dimming days Possil and Pollock and Partick sneak out of the cave to gather whatever eggs and seaweed and driftwood there are to be found among the rocks near the cave mouth. Tuck shows how to dry, weave, and knot seaweed into nets and sleeping mats and throws. The urchins are both pests and helpers, but Mol is his most ardent pupil, hanging on the salt-scraped ocean-roll of his voice and the sea-glitter of his eyes in the firelight.

They keep their presence hidden from the people of Ilira. A reminder of their brutality is branded on so many arms. But as winter deepens and hunger grips, Mara has to fight the urge each day to grab more than her fair share of food and fire. She begins to see how survival in such a harsh place might have made the mountain people as brutal as their land.

At the end of each day, when the setting sun illuminates the
TIREDNESS CAN KILL
sign, the mountain shudders with the noise of the curfew bell and all the cave doors bang shut in a grand slam. Then, the refugees claim the bay and take to the shore with driftwood spears and seaweed nets and fish by starlight or fog-clouded moon. Each day the curfew comes earlier and earlier. The days shorten as the sun's power fades and it cannot seem to find the energy to climb into the sky.

One day, the sun doesn't rise at all.

The mountain is still and silent. The people of Ilira are landlocked inside now that day has become one long winter's night. The North Wind whines across the ocean and up the fjord. It whirls through the mountain rockways, kicks on the shut doors, and rampages into the open caves where it hurls around the spears and pillars of rock, spitting ice and shrieking like a demented banshee.

Mara aches to the marrow of her being. Her turns at the fireside fill her ice-bitten limbs with scorching pain. Hunger is a raking agony. She has been sick again and brought up the sliver of fish and sip of seaweed broth she had only just gulped down.

Tuck carries the cut sea grass over to the fire and feeds a bundle to the flames. But it only fizzles, too full of frost to be much use.

Ibrox sighs. “We'll be lucky if it lasts till morning. Stupid to let the fuel get so low.”

He's angry with himself for falling ill with a bad cold. No one else has Ibrox's nose for driftwood. He goes to the cave mouth and sneezes as he looks out at the stars banked thick and high above the ocean. “If I could steal some of
that
fire.”

One of the young Treenesters yawns. He ruffles his hair out of his eyes and groans. “I'll go,” mutters Tron, “and find some.”

“No,” yelps Fir, from underneath the heap of sea grass and seaweed that is their bed. She tries to pull him back down beside her. “You're not going alone. It's too dark.”

“The stars are like moonmoths tonight.” Tron shakes her off. “I'll be fine.”

“No, Tron,” growls Ibrox. “Fir's right. No one goes out alone. That's how we lost Partick.” He falters and the others fall into a stricken silence. Partick went out alone to
gather driftwood from the rocks at the other end of the bay one night when a sudden fog descended. They have searched and searched but there's been no sign of him since. “Oh, you can curse me as an old fire fool,” cries Ibrox, “but we can't afford to lose any more of you strong young ones. And you can't bear to lose one another. You can't tell black ice from rock in the dark.”

Tron gives Fir a nudge. “You come with me then.”

“Me? In the cold? In the black dark?”

“Someone has to,” snaps Tron.

“I'll go with you.” Ibrox sneezes and hunches down beside his dying fire. “Just let me warm up first.”

“Such a crowdy sky,” says Gorbals. He spends much of the endless night mapping the patterns of the stars on the cave walls with charcoal embers from the fire. “Forests of stars. We never saw all this in the netherworld. The lights of the New World were too bright.”

“Where's Pollock and Possil?” Ibrox ignores Gorbals's star rapture and peers into the dark nooks of the cave.

“Gone worming,” says Tron. He frowns at Fir, who has wrapped her arms around him and wrestled him back into their sea-grass bed. “She didn't want me to do that either.”

“Worming?” asks Gorbals.

“Cave-worming,” says Fir. She prods Tron in the chest. “And they've been gone an age. We might never see them again.”

“Possil and Pollock could track their way out of anywhere.” Young Clyde glares at her. “They'll be back.”

Tuck rummages in the pockets of his windwrap. He brings out the book he stole from a shelf in Pendicle's boat in what feels like another life, and hands it to Ibrox.

“It's not much, but it's got three hundred and thirty-seven pages so if we tear it and feed it slow, it might keep
the fire awake till morning. I've been saving it till the last. Take it.”

Ibrox stares at the book and jumps backward, as if Tuck's tried to hand him a firebomb.

Gorbals, on the other hand, leaps forward. “A book! Look, Mara.”

But Mara has fallen fast asleep, curled up beside Rowan, and looks so wan and exhausted that Gorbals can't bring himself to waken her, not even for a book.

“We can't burn this.” He takes hold of Tuck's book. “It's not like our netherworld where the sea was full of book pulp,” he reminds the others, “and their pages blew about us in the wind. We burned books like litter then, but we can't do that now. I lost my only book when the ship went down. All we have left is
A Tale of Two Cities
. No, Tuck, this book of yours is more precious than fire.”

Gorbals turns the book over in his hands. The cover is stained and tatty but the title is big and bold and clear.

“
Natural Engineering
by C. D. Stone,” he reads, settling down beside the weak ember fire and beginning to flick through pages blurred with water stains.

“
Urth
.”

Tuck curses under his breath. He's been working hard to win back the trust he broke with his cutlass. The pretended sacrifice of something that he doesn't even want was meant to seal that trust, but the only one he's impressed is Gorbals, who trusts him with his life anyway, just because he saved it once.

Gorbals is flicking through the book. “Is this where you learned all your weaving and knotting, Tuck?”

Tuck nods, though he has hardly glanced at the thing.

“Listen,” Gorbals is muttering. “It says here that animals are the best builders in the world. Look, termite
tunnels and towers, how a beaver builds a bridge, ants, spiders … the technology of birds, of a worm … ha! Wait till Pollock sees this.”

Tuck stares at the book in astonishment. “It tells you all this?”

Gorbals reads him a passage about the drill-like action of a worm in earth.

“And these—these dead insects tell you this?” Tuck stabs a finger at the black words on the page.

Gorbals laughs. “Yes, that's it. These dead insects are words. When you read them they tell you all sorts of things.”

“How do you know what they say?”

“My mother taught me,” says Gorbals. “I'm the only Treenester who reads. The others, well, they were brought up to be scared of books. You saw Ibrox just there.”

Tuck nods.

“But Mara has a book.”

“Oh, yes,” agrees Gorbals. “But she's not one of us.”

“She's not?”

Puzzled, Tuck glances at Mara, deep in sleep.
What is she then
? He remembers a snatch of conversation he overheard between Mara and Rowan as he dozed by the fire. They were talking about a place called Wing. An image of a Great Skua's wing pops into Tuck's mind and his skin prickles. He always wondered where the flocks of Great Skua go. Could it be a place called Wing? Does Mara come from the place that the Great Skua fly to? Is that what draws him to her like the moon draws the tide?

Yet she treats him warily, like a stranger, and always sits with her Treenester friends and the other one, Rowan, who must be one of her people because he also knows Wing.

Gorbals has thrust another page of the book in his face and Tuck casts aside his thoughts as he looks at a sketch of small creatures who seem to be building a driftwood bridge across a river.

“My da was a bridger,” he tells Gorbals. “One of the best. He built a hundred bridges.”

So Ma said, though Tuck only ever counted seventy-three that were branded with his da's trademark, the Culpy crescent, the shape of a fishhook moon or a cutlass blade.