Pathfinder (19 page)

“
City Songs
by James MacFarlan,” whispers Gorbals, eyeing the fine gold lettering on the book cover with awe. “A gift for me? Thank you, Mara.” But he doesn't take the book.

“Why are you all scared of books?” Mara flings herself and the book on the grass under the trees, tired and downcast after a long and fruitless search.

“They're full of poisonous necrotty,” Broomielaw reminds her, looking worriedly from the book to baby Clayslaps, who is crawling on a patch of grass nearby. “Candleriggs says so.”

“This isn't—it hasn't been near the water. I found it in a room high up in the great black steeple.”

“Broomielaw told us you went there,” whispers Gorbals. “Don't let Candleriggs find out.”

“But I will,” Mara insists, “because I want to know why she fears that building and its books. Gorbals …” she sits up now, her face alight, “you must come with me tomorrow. It's an amazing place full of so many books and things of the old world you won't believe it. Please, Gorbals. I need someone to help me—it's important. If you want a future you
must
come.” Mara picks up the book
again and holds it out toward him, insistently. “This could have been written for you—read it!” she urges him.

Tentatively, Gorbals takes the book. He holds it in his hands as if it's a bomb. “My mother loved words,” he murmurs. “She taught me to read from pages she saved from the water—like you do. She wouldn't listen to Candleriggs either.”

Gorbals gingerly turns the pages, and Mara takes her place for sundown beside the others as the Bash begins. Ibrox the firekeeper has scattered the flames with soothing lavender and the scent calms her body and mind, even amid the racket of the Bash.

Gorbals cries out in sudden amazement, his eyes drinking in the words of the book.

“Mara, you are right! Treenesters, listen to this. “
Again upon my senses beat the city's wavelike din
,” he reads. “This poet has written about the Bash and he hates it too.”

Mara wrinkles her brow. “It was published over two hundred years ago. There wasn't a Bash then.”

“There must have been,” says Gorbals. “How else could he write that? Listen, his words are like treasure: he speaks of
Brave hearts
,
like jewels
. And what does this mean?

But does no lingering tome survive

To prove their presence more than dreams?

“What's a ‘tome'? Is it like a tomb? A necrotten place?”

“A tome is a very large book,” says Candleriggs quietly. She is frowning fiercely at the book in Gorbals's hands. Now she turns to Mara; but Mara has steeled herself for the old woman's displeasure. “You were in the library of the university? What were you doing there?”

“Universe city?” asks Gorbals, wonderingly.

“University,” snaps Candleriggs. “The old place of learning.”

“So that's what it is,” Mara murmurs.

“Then why have you always warned us never to go near it, Candleriggs?” cries Gorbals. “You've always told us that it's a necrotten place, a place that brings sorrow and heartache. That its books are full of poison. Why?”

“Because it's true,” says the old woman. “You will not go back there, Mara.”

“I have to,” says Mara. “Because I think it might hold the answer to the future—yours and mine. Isn't that what you want?”

Old Candleriggs stares at her furiously, then her owl eyes mist with sadness.

“But where's the heartache in learning, Candleriggs? There's no sorrow in that,” says Molendinar. “If there's learning in those books they might help me with my cures and medicines. There's so much I don't know, so much we need to know.”

Candleriggs shakes her head miserably.

“Mara says that the books of the university might be part of the stone-telling because the statue of Thenew has a book on her knee,” ventures Broomielaw. “It's true, she does.”

The old woman stands trembling and points up to the sky city. “
That
is the sorrow and heartache that learning ends in. A place that lives only for itself in its own world of dreams and forgets the rest of the world. Now don't ask me any more. It's a story I can't bear to tell.” Candleriggs composes herself. “But if Mara feels that it's a necessary part of the stone-telling then I must put my faith in her, whether I like it or not.”

Candleriggs sits down again weakly. Broomielaw and
Molendinar try to comfort her but the old woman shrugs them off.

Gorbals clears his throat. “This James MacFarlan has written about our world. His poems are far better than any of mine. So if—if Candleriggs will allow it I'll use his words, not my own, for tonight's sundown.”

Candleriggs mutters as she stares into the sundown fire but she doesn't object.

Pollock sniggers. “No words of your own left, Gorbals? Got to steal someone else's?”

“I don't steal,” Gorbals says coldly. “I have what I need and I don't steal what doesn't belong to me.”

The two young men match each other sneer for sneer.

“Stop this,” says Broomielaw breathlessly. “I hate it. Why is everyone unhappy tonight?”

“The sun is almost gone and you two are bickering yet again,” growls Candleriggs. “Well, read this poet from long ago, Gorbals. Let's hear if his words are treasure—or poison.”

As the sun drops and light dies in the sky, the din of the Bash recedes. Gorbals flicks through the pages, stops suddenly, and peers close at the book.

“
The Ruined City
,” he announces. “I'll read from this.”

The Treenesters fall still and quiet and settle themselves within the ember glow of the fire. Gorbals begins to read.

“
And still this city of the dead

Gives echo to no human tread
.”

Mara is covered in goosebumps as the words form pictures.

“
And when the sun is red and low
,

And glaring in the molten skies
,

A shadow huge these columns throw
,

That like some dark, colossal hand.
…”

How could he know? wonders Mara. What uncanny future dream did that poet have so long ago?

“
Day rises with an angry glance
,

As if to blight the stagnant air
,

And hurls his fierce and fiery lance
,

On that doomed city's forehead bare
.

The sunset's wild and wandering hair

Streams backward like a comet's mane
,

And from the deep and sullen glare

The shuddering columns crouch in vain
,

While through the wreck of wrathful years

The grim hyena stalks and sneers
.”

“He knows our city,” nods Broomielaw in the silence that follows. “But what's a hyena?”

“It's a creature that makes a horrible noise like screaming laughter,” says Candleriggs.

“Well, we know them, don't we?” Ibrox says to Mara. “We hear the grim hyena screaming every time the door in the wall opens and the white ships come through. They're the orange sky people that invade our world and take away the ratbashers.”

The sea police, thinks Mara, with their orange uniforms and hyenalike sirens. “They take the urchins away? Where to?”

“Up to the city in the sky,” says Gorbals.

“What for?” asks Mara.

“They use them for work because the ratbashers can swim in the deep water. And they can climb fast and high like rats,” says Possil. “Pollock and I sometimes see them when we go on our travels to the dangerous parts of the
islands on the other side of the water, near the sky towers or the door in the great wall.”

“But they're pests, those ratbashers,” adds Pollock, curling his lip. “It's good that the sky people take them away and make some use of them. I might have to start culling them myself if they didn't.”

Mara is outraged at Pollock's brutality but she controls her anger because she needs to know more.

“What work are they used for?”

Possil and Pollock look at each other vaguely.

“Tunnels,” yawns Pollock.

“Bridges,” shrugs Possil.

Mara thinks back to the Pickings in the boat camp and feels sick. If the people in the sky city use urchins like Wing as slave labor then is that also why they pick out the young and strong from the boat camp? To be slaves? Mara remembers the spine-chilling feeling she had when the Pickers came around the boat camp and feels sure she is right.

Above them, the city gleams. A maze of starlight glistens far beyond. Stars like diamonds.

“
And souls flash out, like stars of God
,” murmurs Gorbals.

“
From the midnight of the mire
.

No palace is theirs, no castle great
,

No princely, pillared hall
.”

Mara thinks of the wealth of dreams that lie abandoned among the pillared halls of the university. If the New World uses the refugees of the lost, drowned world as slaves to build its empire, then it's a vile and necrotten place and she wants no part of it, ever. She wants to rip that city out of the sky.

Tomorrow she will search again for information on the mountainous lands of the Arctic where the Athapaskans live. She will search and search until she finds the answer
she needs. She is struck by an image of Rowan huddled inside his blanket in the boat camp and hopes harder than ever that he's still alive.

She'd better find that answer fast.

Mara watches Broomielaw feed her baby from her own body. The girl looks blissful, in a state of grace that Mara doesn't understand, yet envies. Now Broomielaw puts the baby down to sleep and smiles at Mara.

“Clayslaps will see his two hundredth sunup tomorrow,” she announces proudly as she rocks his swinging nest to the sway of the wild and windy music some of the others are playing on the weird instruments they fashion out of twigs, bones, and feathers, bits of metal, and plastic and glass.

“We'll celebrate him,” announces Candleriggs. The old woman has recovered from her earlier upset. She holds up the round object she is molding out of intricately woven grasses. “See, Broomielaw, I'm making him a soft play ball.”

Broomielaw smiles and lifts up a clay cup that Mara has watched her shape and dry and stain red with berry juice. “I've made him his first cup.” She turns to Mara. “How many sunups have you seen, Mara? Maybe a thousand less than me, I think.”

“How many since I came here?” Mara looks blank.

“No, I mean how many have you lived?” smiles Broomielaw.

“How could I know that?” laughs Mara.

“You don't know?” says Broomielaw. “I've seen six thousand six hundred and thirty-four sunups.”

“I've seen six thousand two hundred and seventy-eight,” says Gorbals. “Candleriggs has seen over
thirty thousand
.”

“Where I come from we count in years,” says Mara. “I'm fifteen years old.”

“Years?” says Gorbals frowning. “My mother told me about years when I was little—a year is something to do with the sun.”

“A year is from one winter to the next,” says Mara, trying to remember whether Earth circled the sun, or if it was the other way around. The more books she reads, the more frustrated she is about how little she knows of the world.

Gorbals shakes his head. “A year is too long to hold in mind but you can hold a day easily enough.”

“But it's too hard to remember days,” says Mara.

“It's easy,” says Gorbals. “You just add one on after another. And at the end of each day you can look at how you lived it. You could never do that with a year, it's too big.”

“The Earth works in years. So do we,” Mara explains.

“People live by sunups and sundowns,” insists Gorbals. “Now, a hedgehog or a squirrel might count its life in years because they sleep in winter and wake in summer but we sleep at sundown and wake at sunup. So we are part of the story of days.”

Pollock is stretched on the ground tearing into a roasted rabbit. He gives Broomielaw a dismissive wave with a rabbit leg. There is something in those eyes of his, huge eyes as lazy as stagnant water, that Mara dislikes. She can't understand why Broomielaw has anything to do with him. Though Clayslaps is his baby too, and he'll swing his little nest from time to time, jingling his wind chime, all care of the baby is done by Broomielaw. He prefers to go on night hunts with Possil, the nervy, fidgety one, then sleep all day. Mara's not sure if she likes Possil either, but she will need their hunting skills if the plan that's taking shape in her mind is to work.

“I wanted to ask Pollock something,” says Mara.

“Pollock?” says Gorbals, sending him a filthy look. “He's good for nothing unless it's bad.”

Pollock hurls his ravished rabbit leg in return for the look, and it bounces off Gorbals' head, to Pollock's loud delight. Gorbals grabs a branch and looks ready to thwack Pollock with it until Ibrox intervenes and threatens to roast them both on the fire if they don't behave.

“What's between Gorbals and Pollock?” Mara whispers to Broomielaw. “They seem to hate each other.”

Broomielaw's gentle face stiffens. She leans over to prod the fire. “Me,” she answers, indistinctly. “I'm between them.”

“You?” says Mara, astonished. “But how?”

Broomielaw leans closer to Mara so that their conversation is private.

“Once Gorbals loved me but I turned his love to ash,” Broomielaw says sadly. “There's nothing I can do now. He hates Pollock, though he's kind enough to me and Clayslaps, I suppose. I can't blame him.”

“What happened?”

Broomielaw glances nervously at Gorbals and Pollock but they are both now safely occupied.