Firespark (16 page)

She has made it to the top of the world and it doesn't seem to matter.

Broomielaw and baby Clay are lost. They might be lying at the bottom of the sea. She has lost her cyberwizz and she's lost Fox.

It feels like the end of the world.

The Steer Master's horn sounds a long, ominous bellow.

Tuck shivers and knots his windwrap tighter. Another boat lost to an iceberg. Since the berg blitz hit, it has been every boat for itself, but the seafaring skills of the steerers are blunt and rusty; Pomperoy was anchored to the rig for so long. Now the sea is clearing and it's more perilous to go back than to go on. They'd better find the
Arkiel
soon, Tuck reckons. He can smell gypsea temper in the air.

Sunlight swords the fog and Tuck is dazzled by a mad sparkle of sea and ice floes. He feels dizzy and breathless as if he's been leaping bridges and boats, but he's still huddled in the lifeboat on the upper deck as the
Waverley
hurtles across the ocean with fists of wind in its sails.

Land rises out of the ocean like a giant, petrified wave. Tuck lowers the silver box from his eyes and presses the button that retracts the long zoom nose. He no longer needs it. The Land is close enough now.

The Steer Master's horn bellows across the Pomperoy fleet once again. This time it's a continuous blast. Tuck points the eye of his silver box at the Steer Master's ship and almost drops the box with fright as he finds himself
eye to eye with The Man. Now he looks with his own eyes and sees that The Man has been hung high on
The Discovery
's middle mast. He's still The Man in the Middle then and still spying on Tuck.

The bridgers are arming themselves, though there's still no sign of the
Arkiel
. But the Steer Master's ship has a long eyescope on its deck that, it's said, can see the faces of the stars so maybe it can see the great white ship.

“Ah, there you are, Tuck, lad. Grab yourself a cutlass, you'll be needing one.”

On the deck below, Charlie beckons him. Tuck clambers out of the lifeboat and jumps down. Charlie hands him a curved sword that's as wide as his arm and almost as long. Tuck swallows, throat tight, as he takes the cutlass. He has never felt less ready for a fight. There's an ache in the pit of his stomach, as if he's eaten bad fish, but it's not that. He can't stop thinking about his family. He wanted them so badly in that strange, lonely moment when he looked for the first time at the world of his Landcestors, at the miracle of Land.

There's another signal from the Steer Master, a melodic horn blast that Tuck doesn't know. But the bridgers next to him do. Their gypsea eyes narrow and glint, just like the curved cutlass blades in their belts. There's a sudden brash swagger about these men that should make him laugh, but makes him wary instead. The women, some of them, have it too. Others disappear below deck with the children, looking grim, as the ragged fleet of boats maneuvers, with the instinct of a flock of birds or a shoal of fish, into the shape of an arrowhead. Tuck watches, wondering what's happening. Then he hears the Land's thunder, a noise like the warrior roar of an enemy fleet. And as they draw close, his eyebox shows
him what the Steer Master's powerful eyescope must have seen when the warning horn bellowed: the giant stone men that guard the Land.

The day wanes and the sun falls behind the thundering mountains. The vast arrowhead of boats still follows the jagged line of land, every vessel spiked with swords and spears.

Armada
.

That's the word Tuck hears, shouted from boat to boat. The Steer Master's ship sets up a soft, predatory drumbeat that spreads from boat to boat like a footstep. Soon the whole fleet is athrob with the march. Pomperoy is no longer a city, it's a dense arrowhead, an armada on attack, heading for the great wall in the ocean that is Land.

Up against a wall, you can hurtle onward or retreat. Pomperoy does both. It hurtles forward and turns back into what it once was.

Tuck remembers the words Grumpa would growl whenever his temper was roused.

Time to turn pirate again
.

The female wrecker is yelling into a black box that crackles with white noise. A man's voice shouts out of the crackling. The woman puts it to her ear as she scans the shoreline, screwing up eyes that are so deep-set they almost disappear among the folds of her weathered face.

“Tok-tok.” She nods, and clicks a switch that kills the noise of the box. She glances at the captives and frowns, shoves them into tidier lines, and surveys them with a satisfied smile.

The other wreckers stop picking through the litter the sea has junked on the shore. To focus her mind beyond the horror of what seems to be happening, Mara scans the litter. Plastic bags and bottles, tins and cans, a small metal disc full of rainbow lights, a scatter of bones, a bashed thing that must once have been a wheel, and the eyeless head of a doll. Her heart turns over when she sees a green rain boot and a branch of bare, bent spokes that was once an umbrella. When she was little Mum used to let her stand in the rain in too-big green boots with an old daisy-covered umbrella, as long as the wind wasn't too high.

Faraway hooves clatter on the rocky shore. In the
distance, four deer gallop toward them, the riders dressed in a ferocious drama of feathers, wings, bird heads, and fur tails, beaks, claws, and strings of teeth. The riders look more unnervingly animal than the deer.

“Scutpak!” the wreckers announce, a warning in their eyes.

Sand and pebbles scatter as the deer clatter to a halt. One of the gang the wreckers call
scutpak
jumps down from his saddle. His entire tunic is covered in teeth and claws. He scans the crowd of captives with a quick, keen eye.

“Ah, yaaaa,” he drawls. “Yup, yup, yup.” He begins to select some of the men. “Nup, nup, nup, ah, yup.”

Mara turns her head and catches Rowan's eye.

“Like the Pickings,” she whispers and he nods, his gaunt face grim and scared. He was “picked” before in the boat camp outside New Mungo and ended up a New World slave.

The picked men are cut free, Pollock and Possil among them, but there's no chance of escape; a noose is immediately looped around their necks. If they try to run, they'll yank the noose tight.

The scutpak leader is making his way along the lines of captives. “Yup-yup. Pffff! Nup, old bones.”

The chosen are cut from their bonds, noosed, and led across the shore. The tooth-and-claw man reaches Gorbals and Rowan, and frowns. “Dud. Skinny-scrawny, see!” He pinches their arms, peers at their eyes. “Young, huh … mibbe, mibbe.” His frown lifts and he claps his hands. “Okay!” His frown returns at the sight of the tiny, scrawny urchins. “Nup, nup.” He waves them away, then changes his mind. “Yup, yup. Un, doo, tree. Tree for un. No sale then junk 'em all.”

He makes a cutthroat sign.

Now he's yupping at Molendinar, Mara, Ruby too. As they are noosed and led away, Ruby gives a cry.

“Merien!”

Mara looks back. Merien has been left behind on the shore, her hands and feet still bound.

But there's nothing to do except go where the noose pulls. In front of her, there's an outburst of screams. Now Molendinar screams, right in front. The noose is yanked hard around Mara's neck, and someone rips the clothes off her shoulder. Mara screams too as a metal pole jabs her arm and red-hot pain flashes through her.

The top of her arm sizzles. The skin is black and burned. The smell of her own cooked flesh makes her sick and faint. She can't believe what is happening. They are being branded like cattle.

The noose is yanked hard again. Mara chokes, goes where she's led. She is hauled with the others into the middle of the market, and stands confused, in a daze of pain, among the busy stalls. A crowd gathers and the scutpak gang begins to sell their noosed captives.

The clock with no hands and the crashed plane on the mountain, the sky, and the noisy crowd reel around her. Mara feels unreal, as if she's been shocked out of her own self. “
Mara
.” She murmurs her own name because for a petrifying moment she can't remember who she is. She has lost herself in the herd. “
Mara
,” she repeats, and concentrates on the pain of her arm. The pain is the only thing that feels real. Mara eases the clothes from her shoulder to let the icy air cool her burned skin, and sees the symbol that's been branded on her arm.

A snake coiled on a stick.

There's a hot graze on her neck as the rope is pulled,
the flash of a blade, and she is cut free of the others. One of the scutpak pushes her in front of the gathering crowd. He lifts her arms to show her muscles, turns her around to show her straight back.

“Young, ha? Strong and
stark
, yup?” he prattles.

There's a mutter of interest in the crowd. Mara stares at her prospective buyers. A man in a hooded skin tunic that reaches the ground, the hood so deep, his black and silver beard so bushlike, that all she can see of his face is a long nose. A woman draped from head to foot in furs that are fastened and knotted as intricately as Broomielaw's woven plastic clothes. The woman wrinkles her wind-scoured face, sizing up Mara as if she were a cut of meat.

The scutpaker is rummaging in a bag. With a flourish he pulls something out.

Mara gasps.

Candleriggs's red shoes!

The scutpaker waves the shoes under the nose of the befurred woman and pushes Mara toward her with a prattle of sales patter that Mara can't follow. The woman's face crinkles into a mean smile and as she moves forward to grab the red shoes, Mara catches sight of the bag in the scutpaker's hands.

My backpack
!

She
did
have it strapped to her when the ship sank. She was sure she did. Now she remembers she had to swim against the weight of the backpack. She almost didn't make it, risked drowning rather than take it off. She was lying on the rock, choking on seawater, but the backpack was still safe. The wreckers took it when they found her, half drowned and exhausted.

She screams so hard the woman drops the shoes in
fright. Mara grabs a shoe before it hits the ground, just as the scutpaker reaches for the tail of rope around her neck. Before he can yank the rope, Mara slams the small, sharp heel of the shoe into his nose. She drops the shoe, grabs her backpack, and runs.

She's forgotten all about Rowan and Mol and the others. She hasn't a clue where she's running to. All she knows is she's got her backpack with her precious cyberwizz and she
must run
.

The pebble shore shifts under every scrambling step. The stones seem to drag her backward; it takes twice the effort to run, but she
is
running. If she can make it across the shore and through the market stalls to the foot of the mountain, there might be a cave or a rockway she can hide in …

Her foot catches on a rock.

Mara crashes facedown onto stones, but she's still got her backpack gripped in one hand. Scutpakers and wreckers crash across the stones, close behind. Something punches her in the back and her chin smashes into the stones. She can't get up. Someone is trying to rip the backpack from her fingers. She holds on tight, even as they stamp on her hand.

A point of freezing cold metal stings her forehead. There's drumming in her ears. Mara raises her bleeding chin from the ground and stares into the barrel of a gun.