Aurora (12 page)

Clay is unable to look at the girl. The Scutmaster’s rare praise means not a thing. Does he want to be the best scavenger in Ilira? Is this what he’s meant to be? He looks at the girls tragic face and knows it is not.

‘Wing, where are you?’ she mutters, staring at the mountains that line the fjord. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

Clay can’t bear to add to her misery. He saw what happened to the wolfman.

Where’s your father?’ he asks the girl, wondering why any father would leave such a soft-faced daughter at the mercy of the world. Then Clay remembers the Sea Lord who owns him and bosses Kronk. What a brutal father he is to his daughter.

The Scut is jumping on the back of his deer, arguing loudly with one of the marketeers. He’ll be back any moment. There isn’t much time.

The girl flicks him a wretched glance. ‘My father’s across the ocean, in a city as tall as the sky.’

Clay’s eyes widen. A vision of towers fills his head; a vision he remembers from the stories told to him as a child by his mother.

‘Market’s closed,’ the Scut shouts in disgust. ‘One man gets married and the whole world’s got to stop.
Urth
,’ he curses. ‘Lock her up in storage for today, dirt-boy.’

‘The name’s
Clay
, crab-face,’ Clay mutters under his breath. Kronk’s good mood didn’t last long. But he knows better than to be heard; a Scut will cut off a slave’s hand for less. At least he’s got more time to find out about the scavenged girl.

Clay hauls his terrified prisoner along the harbour, across the rocky shore to the warren of sea caves at the foot of the mountain where goods and scavenges are stored. He pulls back the bolts on a rusted door and pushes the girl into a dank darkness – then checks that no one is looking and follows her into the cave.

THE GIRL AND THE PONTIFIX

‘Clay?’ whispers the girl.

‘That’s my name,’ he replies, as he takes the long end of the rope that binds her arms and knots it around a rock. ‘What’s yours?’

Her name is Lily Longhope, she says. He studies the trembling girl in the dim light that filters through gaps in the battered door. The plea in her amber-brown eyes tugs at his heart.

Look away
, Clay tells himself.
Tomorrow she’ll be someone’s kitchen slave and you’ll never see her again.

‘The wolfman,’ he begins, because if he doesn’t tell her she’ll never know what happened. He can give her that, at least. ‘He – he was killed. The ocean currents took him.’

Lily blinks. The milky skin of her face grows paler still. She shakes her head slowly.

‘Wing’s not
dead
,’ she scorns, as if that’s something he would never do. ‘I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t drown.’

Clay makes himself tell her. ‘He got hit in the head with an arrow.’

She sits in disbelieving silence, shaking from head to toe. Clay takes a step closer and reaches out a hand to stroke her hair but she lunges at him, sinking her teeth into his hand. Clay raises his other hand to retaliate, but his mother’s horrified face flashes up in his mind and he stops.

Grunting with pain, he retrieves his bitten hand when she opens her mouth to let out a wail.

He must leave yet there’s so much he wants to know about this wretched, feisty girl with the temper of a wildcat and the soft eyes of a doe.

‘Your father –’ he begins, then remembers the other scavenge, one he hid from Kronk – a mysterious object he snatched from the girl’s pocket after he netted her on the rocks. Clay pulls the carved wooden box from the pocket of his hide jacket. Opening the box, he stares at the strange silver crescent inside. When he takes it out, it begins to glow in his hand like a thin young moon.

The girl’s heartbroken sobbing instantly stops.

‘What’s this?’ he asks, mystified.

‘Give it back!’ Lily gasps tears scattering from her face. ‘I
need
it.’

‘Why?’ Clay holds up the crescent and its gentle glow falls upon the piles of crates and sacking that fill the dank cave. ‘What’s it for?’

‘You’ve never seen one before?’ Lily asks, suddenly curious. ‘Don’t you have these in your world?’

Clay shrugs. ‘I see most things. I’m a good scavenger, the best. I’ve found all kinds of sea treasure from the drowned world,’ he boasts, wanting her to know he is not just an ordinary slave. ‘But I’ve never seen this.’

He looks up to find Lily’s eyes fixed on his own so intently that something flips in his stomach, as if he has swallowed a tiny, excitable fish.

‘Did you never,’ she asks urgently, ‘find a globe?’

Clay shakes his head. ‘The Pontifix has a globe. But I’ve never seen it.’

‘Ponty-fix?’ Lily stumbles over the strange word.

‘The man who rules Ilira. He’s Bridge-Master, Overlord of the Sea Lords, Ocean Commander, Keeper of the Globe. Tuck Culpy’s just about everything round here.’

‘Tuck!’ Lily’s tear-streamed mouth falls open. ‘
Our
Tuck?’

Clay stares. ‘There’s only one Tuck Culpy.’

‘But he’s supposed to be dead,’ says Lily wonderingly. ‘My people made his name a curse.’

‘My people have made him a god.’

Clay is unnerved. The Pontifix’s magic globe is a subject he usually avoids – especially in front of his mother. It’s guaranteed to get her weepy about the past.

‘If it
is
him, if – if somehow he didn’t die in the landslide,’ Lily is muttering to herself, ‘then – then the globe
must
be . . . I must see this Tuck!’ she declares.

Clay bursts out laughing. ‘I don’t think so. The Pontifix is too busy to meet scavenged slaves today. He’s getting married. To my almost-sister,’ he adds, with a sigh.

He moves towards the cave door, avoiding the girl’s scared, bewildered eyes.

‘I’m no slave. Don’t leave me here,’ she cries. ‘Please let me go.’

Clay lights a small oil lamp so she won’t be left in darkness. He takes his own leather water pouch and a sliver of smoke-blackened seal meat from his pocket and chucks them in her lap. On an impulse he also tosses her the carved wooden box, now empty, telling himself she hardly deserves his kindness after that vicious bite to his still-throbbing hand.

‘Help me!’ she shouts as he leaves. ‘I
must
see Tuck Culpy. I need the halo and the globe to find my father!’

Clay’s heart is heavy as he bolts the cave door against her desperate cries. He stuffs the crescent deep in his pocket and runs to hitch a ride on the back of the little cable train that
click-clacks
up the mountainside. His mind is buzzing. What does it all mean?

Nothing
, he tells himself. She’s just a scared girl trying to talk herself free.

Gripping on to the back rail of the train, Clay sticks his free hand in his parka pocket and fingers the crescent. A halo, she called it. A thought strikes him. The Pontifix is mad for strange treasures like these. If this halo is something to do with the globe then he, Clay, holds a powerful gift in his hand.

It’s only after he has jumped off the cable train and is clambering up to the mountain cave where his mother is in the thick of wedding preparations that something jars in his mind. He stops, balanced precariously on a thin ledge of rock.

Clayslaps
. Was that what the girl called him as he was running away from the cave? She couldn’t have. Only his mother ever calls him that.

He looks down the steep mountainside to the harbour where Lily Longhope is locked in the cave, then stares across the ruffled waters of the fjord where the Pontifix’s glass palace is raincloud dull in the dreary light.

How could a scavenged girl from beyond the mountains know that was his proper name? And how could she have anything to do with a man as powerful as the Pontifix?

THE BRIDGE BRIDE

‘And once the babies arrive,’ says Broom, wiping the tears from the blotchy face of her young mistress, ‘that will make everything better. Having Clayslaps made all my hardships easier to bear – and you too, Candle, once I had you to look after. The Pontifix is a great man and you should be proud he chose you out of all the young women in Ilira.’

‘But why? I’m not pretty. I’m nothing, not to him.’ Tears spout once again from the girl’s small dark eyes, splashing down the sides of her snub nose. ‘You know why he’s marrying me, Broom – because my father has ships and trade links. And he has enticed the Pontifix with all your ideas about sun- and waterpower. What would the Pontifix do if he found out my father steals
your
dreams and pretends they’re all his own?’

‘Even the dreams of a slave belong to her master,’ Broom says drily, though she has told Candle often enough how her inventions began among the ruins of a netherworld, far across the ocean, long before she was an Iliran slave. ‘The Pontifix won’t care – as long as he gets what he wants. And don’t you tell him, Candle. The young bride of such a powerful man must tread carefully.’

‘I’m not a bride,’ says the girl sullenly. She wipes her eyes and nose on the fur-trimmed sleeve of her wedding dress. ‘I am a bridge between two men. My father and the Pontifix are marrying their businesses. It’s their wedding, not mine.’

‘You’ll find your own power one day,’ Broom tells her, patting the arrangement of shining coils she has styled out of Candle’s heavy, straight hair. ‘Just you wait.’

The girl’s downcast face brightens at a scampering sound beyond the roughly hewn window in the mountain cave.

‘There are worse things than this, believe me,’ Broom tells the girl. ‘You are not losing all the people you love. I’ll still be with you, and Clay won’t be far. You must make the best you can from the life you’re landed with, Candle. It’s the same for all of us. And no,’ Broom casts a withering glance at her son who has just clambered in through the window, ‘that doesn’t mean
you
can go to sea. Slaves do not go to sea.’

Clay and Candle exchange grins as Broom takes a snow-goose feather and dips it into a scallop shell full of powdered pearls then dusts the girl’s tear-stained face.

‘But we’re not slaves, Mother,’ mocks Clay. ‘
We
are Treenesters – people of the wide world who ended up here by mistake.’ He snatches the feather brush from his mother’s hand and tickles her nose. ‘Treenesters
do
go to sea – you did.’

Broom sneezes and grabs back the feather. ‘And look how that ended up! Stop wasting the pearl-dust, Clay. It costs the Earth. Go and do something useful, you pest.’

‘I just did.’ Clay’s teasing stops. ‘I scavenged a girl.’

‘A girl?’ Candle’s dark eyes narrow to slits. ‘Where?’

‘Out on the rocks. And a wolfman, almost, but he’s dead.’

‘Was there a wreck?’ asks Candle excitedly. Ship and boat wrecks mean all kind of goodies. Not that she gets many, but she likes to hear about all the strange sea junk from Clay.

Footsteps echo through the winding mountain corridors and they fall silent, recognizing the heavy
clop
of metal-soled boots.

‘Rodenglaw!’ Broom hisses at her son.

Rodenglaw must not find a scavenger slave in his daughter’s bedroom on the morning of her wedding. It doesn’t take much for him to erupt. Clay may be like a brother to Candle, but to Rodenglaw he’s just another slave.