Exodus (24 page)

Deep in the still center of the night, when even the bats and owls fall quiet, Mara shakes Broomielaw awake in her nest.

“What is it?” Broomielaw panics.

“Come with me to the cathedral,” Mara pleads urgently.

“Now? In the dark? Be calm now, Mara, it's nest time.”

“It's important, Broomielaw. I have to.”

Broomielaw sighs but she rises and climbs down from her nest. “Wait,” she says. “I must get Molendinar to nest with Clayslaps till I come back.”

While she does so, Mara takes a moth lantern from under its bat-proof covering in the nook of a tree trunk. Then they take a raft and set off across the water to the cathedral island.

“What are we doing?” asks Broomielaw.

“There's something I need to do if I'm to get Gorbals and Wing back,” Mara replies.

“Oh, Mara,” wails Broomielaw, and she bursts out crying again. “We'll never get Gorbals back, or Wing. No one ever returns once they are taken. They're lost forever. Forever!”

Mara hushes her. Then, to calm Broomielaw, she begins to tell her how the crack in Thenew's stone face
matches her own scar and is also uncannily repeated in the crack in her grandmother's mirror, which reflects as a scar upon her face. All three scars occur on the same side, the left cheek.

“It's strange, Broomielaw. It's a small thing but it's so odd,” she finishes. “I really don't know what to think. I can't believe I'm the Face in the Stone because I'm just me—Mara. Yet I'm determined to find a way to save us all. It's got nothing to do with the signs in the stone, though, it's just what I feel I must do. It's the only way I can live with myself. And part of what I must do is try to find Gorbals and Wing, because I owe it to them. There are other things I'll explain later, to all of you.”

Broomielaw jumps off the raft to bring them into shore.

“The scars are to do with the stone-telling,” she says simply. “I'm sure of it. And you think there's something in the cathedral that will help you?”

“Yes,” says Mara.

They enter the dark, empty cathedral. The mothlight shows the dark shadow of blood spilled in many places among the ash on the stone floor.

“What should we look for?” asks Broomielaw nervously.

“A girl,” says Mara. “One of the sky people. She's been left behind. The other sea police can't have seen her—she's behind one of the tombs.”

Broomielaw looks terrified.

“She's dead,” Mara reassures her. “It's her clothes I need.”

They step carefully around the small, crumpled bodies that lie among the vast stone pillars. Broomielaw lets out a hard, dry sob, and Mara watches her bend over a tiny urchin and close the child's eyes.

“You're right, Mara. They're only children, and what's
been done to them is a horror beyond words.” Broomielaw turns away, stricken. Then she stoops to pick up something from the ground. She holds up the mothlight to let Mara see. “Look! Isn't this Wing's?”

Mara cries out in surprise. It's the bone-handled dagger that Wing looted from the museum halls of the university. Gratefully, she takes the weapon. The ancient bone handle feels sound and sure in her grip. Its stone blade is cold and crude. Yet it could still, after thousands of years, rupture human flesh. It could still kill.

“This way,” says Mara, moving carefully through the bodies to the back of the cathedral.

“It's a sign,” says Broomielaw, “a good sign, finding that.”

“I hope so,” whispers Mara. But there's no sign of Wing. Yet somehow, with his dagger in her hand, she feels stronger, more certain of what she is about to do.

“She's here,” says Mara quietly, reaching the body of the girl who has fallen so awkwardly behind a tomb.

“She's been shot?” puzzles Broomielaw. The mothlight reveals a small, dark bullet hole in the girl's forehead. A pool of blood makes an angry red halo around her head.

“They shot one of their own by mistake,” Mara nods, but she can't take any pleasure from that fact.

“You want her clothes?” says Broomielaw.

Mara nods again and together, gently and silently, they undress the body from its waterproof orange uniform, taking the soft, sleek clothing beneath that and the light, tough shoes. When they've finished, Mara covers the young woman in a moss quilt she has brought with her.

“We must bury her,” says Broomielaw. “We must bury all of them. But we can't do it ourselves. We'll come back with the others and do it at first light.”

Mara turns away from the girl's body, overcome by the sweet, thick smell of death all around her. She feels sick to her soul, wants out of this awful place, needs fresh air,
now
. Mara grabs the policewoman's bundle of clothes and runs for the door—but in her hurry to escape, she trips over the leg of a dead urchin. Horrified, she steadies herself against the thick trunk of a pillar. The cold stone calms and soothes her body. She leans her hot cheek against it for a second. And finds herself face-to-face with the word REMEMBER, cut thick and deep into the stone.

Behind her, Broomielaw's moth lantern flutters just enough light to illuminate the rest of the inscription on the pillar.

Read the story of the past

Ponder its lessons—

And think not to leave

Without lifting up your heart
.

Though Mara does not believe in signs set in stone, she can't help but shiver at the uncanny aptness of ancient words that seem to know what she has already decided to do.

Mara is packing her world into her small backpack.

The book on Greenland and
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens, Wing's bone-handled dagger, the tiny black meteorite, and the young policewoman's wallet, inside which she found several small, shimmering, wafer-thin disks, all go into her bag.

In the bathtub up in the ruins at the top of the Hill of Doves, she has scrubbed herself clean of netherworld grime, brushed her teeth with applemint leaves, smoothed the tangles from her hair with a brittle twig brush until it gleams like dark water. Now, back down among the trees,
she checks her reflection in the cracked mirror of Tain's little carved box before putting that back in her bag. She can't help staring at the crack in the glass that runs parallel to the fading scar across her face.

Last of all, she checks out her cyberwizz.

The Treenesters whisper nervously and huddle together when they see it. Pollock has told the others all about the magic machine that he spied in Mara's bag. Mara takes out the globe, the silver halo, and her tiny cyberwand. She holds the globe snug in her palm and feels it come alive at her touch. The Treenesters gasp as colors swirl and shadow across the globe's surface, and Mara feels a rush of emotion for that old, safe existence when the most difficult thing she had to face was a close shave with a Weave demon.

She has recharged the cyberwizz with whatever rays of netherworld sun she could catch, but she'd better double check. A sudden, wicked idea strikes her. She bends her head over the globe to hide her grin and scribbles a quick cyberspell upon its electronic pad. Then she slips the silver halo over Pollock's eyes.

“Hunt that,” she tells him.

He looks at Mara in puzzled wonder for a moment, then his eyes focus on some vision that only he can see and his expression changes to horror. He screams, loud and long, rips off the halo, and hurls it at Mara.

“Monsters!” he yells and runs off into the bushes.

“Monsters?” Gingerly, Broomielaw puts on the silver halo and immediately yelps with terror and turns to run for safety. Mara catches her and pulls off the halo.

“M-monsters,” the girl repeats dazedly.

“Not real ones,” says Mara apologetically. “It's a kind of picture story.”

Pollock's eyes stare out in horror from the bushes. The other Treenesters have all backed off.

“A m-monster nearly ate me,” they can hear him sob.

“It's gone now, Pollock,” Mara tells him bluntly. “Broomielaw scared it away.”

She picks up the young policewoman's clothes and shoes and goes behind a tree to change. Broomielaw has meticulously scrubbed the blood from the orange uniform where the girl's head wound stained it. Mara pulls off her own clothes and her leaky, sodden terrainers. The uniform fits well but the girl's shoes are too tight. Still, they'll have to do. Her old terrainers would give her away instantly. But her nylon backpack, well-scrubbed, should pass. Its material is not dissimilar to the policewoman's uniform.

“Candleriggs wants to know what you are doing, Mara,” says Molendinar, from the other side of the tree.

“What I have to do,” Mara replies.

“No, Mara, no,” Broomielaw cries. “This is not the stone-telling.”

“How do you know?” says Mara as she emerges, all neat and clean, dressed in the luminous orange uniform of New Mungo's sea police. The Treenesters stare.

“You look so strange,” Broomielaw shakes her head ominously, her huge eyes brimming with dread. “Not our Mara. Like one of
them
.”

“Good,” says Mara. “That's exactly how I need to look because I'm going up to the New World.” The Treenesters erupt in horror. Mara holds up her hand to quiet them.

“I've made up my mind. Listen! I'm going to try to get Gorbals and Wing back. And we need ships. Remember I told you about the Athapaskans—well, just before he was taken Gorbals found a book in the university that convinced
me there
is
land in the north, in a place called Greenland—a huge land that was covered in ice until the meltdown that flooded the oceans. It has lots of high land, and it must be free from ice now. It's the kind of place we could build a new life, but to get there we need a ship—more than one, because we must rescue the people from the boat camp outside the walls. So I need to go up to the sky city to find a way to get access to those ships. We can't do it from down here.”

“It's too dangerous!” Broomielaw protests.

“And look,” pleads Molendinar, “we've put wish gifts all over your nest tree so that Gorbals and Wing will come back safe and sound. So you don't need to go up after them. And a new little bird has come—I think it might be the ratkin's, so you must stay and look after it for him.”

Mara looks up at the branches of her beech tree that are strewn with bright rags and plastic ribbons and food and scraps of paper scribbled with wishes. Glass wind chimes make a gentle, happy music to put the tree in a wish-granting mood.

“Thank you,” she says. “You've been real friends to me. Wish
me
luck now because I
must
go.” Mara gives in to the huge wave of emotion that is rising in her and grabs Broomielaw in a tearful hug, then Molendinar, then all of the Treenesters, even Pollock and Possil. “You want Gorbals back, don't you, and I want Wing back too. This is the only way. Broomielaw, cuddle little Clayslaps every day for me. And look after the sparrow, just in case it's Wing's.”

Broomielaw nods, unable to speak.

“Take this,” says Molendinar. She hands Mara a sprig of dried herb. “Thyme. For courage.”

Mara breathes in its scent and remembers something. She unseals a small inner compartment of her backpack, takes out her mother's sprig of rosemary, and binds it with the thyme.

“Clear head and courage,” she tells Molendinar.

Broomielaw grips Mara's hand. Tears stand in her large green eyes. “You were wrong when you told us Mara means bitterness. I think Mara must mean a strong, long hope that doesn't give up.”

“Longhope.” Mara finds herself smiling in surprise as that was the name of their farm hamlet on Wing. She clasps Broomielaw's hand. “I'll find him, Broomielaw. I won't come back till I do.”

Broomielaw nods tearfully. “I've believed in you from the first day. But wait now.” She springs up into her nest and returns with a bundle of water-warped pages, covered in clumsy writing, that have been sewn along one edge with tough grasses to make a book. “Take these with you. They're Gorbals's poems.”

“I can't take them,” Mara protests. “He meant you to have them.”

But Broomielaw pushes the lumpy pages into her hands. “Gorbals always says a poem belongs to whoever wants it or needs it. Don't you want it? You might need it …” she nods fearfully, “up there.”

Mara bites her lip and takes Gorbals's handmade book of poems. Carefully, she seals it away in an inside pocket of her backpack.

“Be ready,” Ibrox warns her. “For whatever is to happen.”

And now she really must leave or she'll break down and won't be able to go. But there is still Candleriggs to say good-bye to. Mara walks over to the oak tree. The ancient owl eyes peer down from the greatnest.

“You might lose your life, Mara Bell,” Candleriggs says quietly.

Mara gazes up at her. “I know. But, Candleriggs, I wanted to die in the boat camp after I lost my family and my best friend, just like you did when you were thrown out of the New World. I tried to die but somehow I couldn't—though if Wing hadn't got me out of the boat camp I could well be dead by now. It's my fault Gorbals was taken, so I have to try to get him back. Also, it's a risk I have to take if we want to find a safe home in the world. But Candleriggs, it's more than that. See, I've found something to live for again. Strangely enough, it's worth risking my life to have that. And most of all …”

Mara pauses and swallows hard. “I need to do it for my family—so that their lives weren't lost for nothing.”

Candleriggs nods slowly.

“Well, all I can say is what I know,” says Candleriggs. “It's this—you can betray someone with a word or an action. You can betray them with silence or inaction too. And in betraying that one person you can betray a whole world. I've seen almost thirty thousand sunups—that's more than eighty years in old time—and that's the most important thing I've learned. Except that the opposite might also be true. So yes, I think it's worth risking everything to save another person's life. And I know this too: the future will not depend upon the human mind; it
belongs
to the human heart. But Mara—don't you believe any of this is part of the stone-telling?”