Firespark (33 page)

They have climbed right down into the pit of the glacier gorge. It's a place so deep and gloomy the light of the low sun never reaches its ancient ice. Now they have to climb up the other side of the gorge and hope against hope that they find a break in the rock face there, that
there are cave tunnels or a mountain pass that will lead them through the mountain to the interior. Mara can't let herself wonder what it will be like there, whether it will be a place they can survive or not.

All she can do is survive here and now, one breath, one step at a time.

A shrieking wind roams the glacier gorge. It's so harsh that Mara wonders if this is the very source of the North Wind. It fades to bitter whispers as they climb. They take a break in the shelter of a cave where they eat slivers of seal meat, washed down with thin, bitter soup made with lichen scraped from the rocks and boiled up with seal fat in chunks of ice.

Mara's exhausted mind is spooked by the whispering winds in the gorge. She dozes and dreams that the North Wind has hurled the lost secrets of the drowned world into the glacier gorge and imprisoned them in its icy home.

“Another tree!”

Fir is on her feet, pointing at the roof of the small cave, at a tree root entombed there in the stone.

“Long dead,” says Tron.

“But it's a
tree
.” Fir turns to Mol. “A stone-telling.”

Mara closes her eyes. She's had enough of stone-tellings and signs.

And yet, when she falls back into her doze, her dreams are now crowded with trees. Candleriggs's great nest in the oak tree on the Treenesters' Hill of Doves. The Athapaskans in their boreal forests, around the curve of the Earth, near the top of the world. In the dream she's back on Wing, digging up slabs of peat for the fire. The peat is packed with ancient tree roots that made the soil so rich. The dream turns into a nightmare as she's whisked
off the island by a screaming wind. Pain grips her as she's ripped from the ground, from her roots.

She wakes up. She can still feel the hot pain in her back and all down her legs.

Rowan is crouched over her, his blue eyes full of worry. “Okay? You cried out in your sleep.”

“Bad dream.”

She doesn't tell him about the pain. It's almost gone now, anyway. She's thinking about her dream and how, like the green wind, trees are the key to the future. She's not sure how but she feels it in her bones.

Rowan stirs up the fire embers and warms her a ladleful of the lichen soup.

“What were you dreaming about?” he asks.

“Trees.” She sips the bitter soup.

“Trees?”

“Yup. We need trees.”

“You've got one right here.”

Mara looks up at the petrified tree root in the stone roof of the cave.

“We need live ones.”

“That's me.”

She looks at him, puzzled, then laughs. Rowan, of course.

“I forgot you were a tree. A rowan tree.”

She sees how he has shed the last of his boyhood. His shaved hair has grown back a much darker blond than it used to be. Always tall and lean, his face and limbs are sharpened by months of hunger and trauma, as her own must be. The ice wind has blazed color on his cheeks, as the sea wind once did, and his carefree blue eyes are now sharp as flint. Though he's changed, he looks more like
Rowan from the island again than the wasted wreck he was on the
Arkiel
.

Mara sees what the change is. He looks like one of the island men.

“Protector against bad things.” Rowan makes a rueful face. “Huh. Lots of people on Wing used to have a rowan tree outside their house, did you know that?”

Mara didn't. There were no trees at all on the island in their lifetimes.

“They cut them all down before we were born. My mom called me Rowan after the tree outside her bedroom window when she was small. She cried the day they chopped it down. She said its red berries cheered up the winter and when I was born I was as red as a rowan berry.”

Mara laughs again. Then groans as a sudden deep pain grinds into her back and grips her inside.

Blue eyes meet hers. He is trying hard to look like a protector from bad things but she knows he is just as scared as she is. Mara puts her head down on her backpack as the pain recedes and tries to ignore the baby's kicks and punches, tries not to think about the pain coming back or the journey through the mountain pass that lies ahead.

The fever strikes as suddenly as a winter storm, though Fox has been off-color and achy all day. He's in the thick of the bookstacks, reading about the creation of nations by flickering mothlight, when the headache strikes and his body is gripped by invisible chains of fire and ice. His skin is shot with hot needles, his stomach spasms with pain, and he can't seem to find his way back through the maze of adjoining book rooms to Candleriggs and the part of the tower they've made their home.

Was it something he ate? What did he eat?

Dizzy, Fox grips the edge of a bookshelf. He tries to hold on to the dream kingdom he's been building inside his head. A dream of a cybercity, a place that doesn't exist in realworld, created only of ether and ideals. A gathering of energy in cyberspace, strong enough to cause vibrations of change in realworld. Fox loses his grasp of the dream as realworld seems to tremble, now, as his body tries to burn the sickness out.

He lies between the bookstacks, too ill to move, on a bed of wrecked books. Under the shelves by his head is a pebblelike object covered in dust so thick it looks like fur.
Fox reaches out and grabs it. Wipes off the dust with his thumb. It's sleek and black and flicks open easily. There's a small screen and a keypad inside. What is it? Some old-world computer or communicator? Fox presses all the keypad buttons but it's out of power, just like him.

He stares at the glossy screen and all he sees is his own gaze reflected back. Fox can't believe the haunted eyes that peer from a mess of matted hair belong to him.

He feels so ill and disoriented he's frightened. He calls out for help but no one comes. His can't remember where his godgem is. If he had it, he'd send an SOS to his grandfather in the Noos because something awful is happening; he's dying, he's sure.

When he's home in New Mungo and all better he'll demand an airship to go North and find Mara and bring her back. After all, his grandfather is the Grand Father of All the New World, he can do anything. Surely he'll do that for the grandson he loves.

A beautiful child with green eyes, the color of his godgem, flits into his vision and his head fills with a hiss of white noise. He can't quite remember who she is. The lantern of glowing moonmoths is by his head, and as he falls deeper into fever Fox thinks it's his legion of peekaboo moons. They've homed back to him here, among the tower bookstacks.

They're answering his call.

Day breaks like a spell, the air as sharp and clear as glass. All around them, as they climb, is the crack of icicles breaking off the frozen waterfalls.

“Just as well we got out of that gorge when we did,” mutters Ibrox. “Wouldn't want to be down there when these waterfalls burst into full pelt.”

They scramble through a chaos of rock. For the first time, the sun almost manages to heave itself over the mountain peaks but gives in at the last gasp. Mara does no better. She can't go any farther. Not until the pain that is slicing through her subsides. She leans against a rock, willing the pain to pass.

There's a shout from up ahead, then a volley of excited cries.

“Just a few steps farther, Mara,” Mol pleads.

What have they found
? Mara forces one foot in front of the other until she makes it into the mountain pass, a gully between two high peaks.

At the far end of the gully she sees what looks like a church steeple. Mara's heart jumps. Bewildered, she rubs
the sweat out of her eyes and looks again. No, it's a spiraling narwhal horn, pointing straight up into the blue ocean of sky.

“That rock—it's like a dead giant's finger,” murmurs Fir. “Are there giants in this land?” She grabs Mara's arm in fear.

It's not a church steeple or a narwhal horn or the finger of a dead giant, but a spire of rock as tall as the steeple of Fox's netherworld tower.

“Water!” Voices ricochet off the gully rocks. “Water, like a great
sea
…”

“Hear that, Mara?” Mol urges, pulling her on. “We're nearly there.”

Mara hears through a surge of pain. The stomach cramps have been growing stronger and stronger. Now the pain is suddenly red-hot and ripping, as if the baby has grown talons and is clawing her insides.

“Stop it,” she mutters through clenched teeth. Amazingly, the baby obeys and the pain subsides.

The others are at the far end of the gully, running toward the rock spire just beyond. She can see little Wing's bright blue snowsuit, bouncing through the gully like a ball.

The baby starts up another agony of talon-clawing her until—

“Ow, w-water!”

“Nearly there, slow-slug.” Mol laughs, then she sees Mara's face and stops dead.

“Something's happening, Mol, something's wrong …”

“Oh, Mara.” Mol looks at the hot gush on the ground at Mara's feet and sees what's wrong. “
That
water. It's all right. It's what happens.” But Mara hears the crack of fear in Mol's voice, sees the paling of her face as she yells
at the top of her voice to the others. “Come back! Quick, everyone, help!”

“
What
happens?” Mara gasps, but she is remembering the island women's birth talk.

“
This
happens when the baby's ready to come.”

Mara nods. Of course it does. She just didn't expect it to happen to her, right now.

“We should have talked about it.” Mol's face furrows with anxiety as she takes Mara over to a sheltered shelf in the rock face. “I thought we had more time.”

“We have—it's too soon—I'm sure it's not time yet—
oh
.”

In a lull between peaks of pain, Mara tries to count months on her fingers, then stops as the pain surges back. She has no idea, anyhow, what month this is.

“The baby doesn't think it's too soon,” says Mol briskly. “All this climbing might have brought on the birth.”

Mara grips on to a rock as shards of pain break inside her.

“Stop gawking, you lot,” Mol shouts. “
Do
something.”

“What?” says Gorbals. They all look blank with panic.

“Oh, just go away.” Mol sighs. “Useless bunch of dubyas. I'll deal with it.”

Gratefully, the others disappear—all except Ibrox, who makes up a fire in silence, and Fir, who twitters nervously as she breaks icicles from rocks and puts them in a pot to boil. And Rowan, who crouches by Mara's side.

“Go away,” Mara whimpers. “I want my mom.”

“So do I.” Rowan sighs. He ignores her and stays.

“Hold her hand,” instructs Mol.

And in the undulations of pain and fear that follow, Rowan's hand is the one and only thing that roots Mara to herself.