Exodus (15 page)

Mara frowns. “Wing isn't a rat-whatever, he's just a child with no one to look after him. And I won't let him die—I'm going to look after him. I know they're strange children but you're
all
strange to me. You're not like my own people.”

“They're horrible little things,” Broomielaw insists. “But please tell us about your people,” she says eagerly, as she chops the vegetables roughly with a slate knife.
“We've got things to do now but please tell us your story at sundown.”

“There might be no sundown tonight if there's a bad storm coming,” warns Gorbals, sniffing the air and peering tentatively through New Mungo to the distant sky. “It might be straight to nest.”

“Then I
must
find Wing,” cries Mara. “If there's a bad storm coming I want to know he's safe.” A thought suddenly strikes her. “Broomielaw, if the Face in the Stone asks the Treenesters to give shelter to the child who brought me here to you, you would do that, surely?”

Broomielaw lowers her eyes. Still, she hesitates. “Of course,” she says at last. “Oh, but be careful!” she warns as Mara races down the Hill of Doves to the rafts.

The world turns electric. The sky flashes and booms. The ferocity of it makes New Mungo shudder. And now the thought of the ancient stone face that mirrors her own no longer makes Mara shiver; now the idea of it sends a wild-powered current surging through her.

It's just the storm in me
, she tells herself, then has a fleeting moment of wonder.
What if it were all true and I really am what they say?

Whatever it is, for the first time since leaving the island, she feels alive again.

In the gloomy daylight of the netherworld the cathedral is full of dim color and shadows. Mara peers through the tints cast by the shattered stained glass windows that reach up to the vast, vaulted ceiling. A million sparkling motes of dust drift like minuscule floating lanterns. Even amid the noisy games and quarrels of the urchins there's a sense of peace, pure and deep, distilled by centuries of stone.

Now she sees Wing. He's perched close to the feet of one of the statues that shelter in alcoves all around the cathedral. The man's gentle stone face smiles down at him from under a crown of thorns, beatifically oblivious to the pain of the thorns and to the rabble of hundreds of naked, dirt-caked urchins. Wing has strewn gifts of colored glass chips all around the feet of the statue and smiles up as if he believes the stone man is real.

Mara thinks back to the stories that belonged to the old religion on Wing. This man, with his crown of thorns, was supposed to be the son of God, yet somehow he could not, or did not, save himself from a torturous death on a cross. Mara could never understand that story—why would anyone who was able to save themselves choose not to?

“Wing!” she calls over to the mesmerized urchin. “Are you okay? I'm so sorry I left you. See, I met some people here, they live in the trees on another island…”

Mara stops. What's the use? He can't understand a word. She looks around the cathedral, at the mess of junk and debris the urchins have littered everywhere.

“Are you hungry? Have you eaten?” She gestures to her mouth and rubs her stomach to show what she means.

Wing holds out a dead pigeon that he has torn apart. In disgust, Mara sees the tiny head the child grasps in his other hand, the blood and juices that run down his chin and chest. He's eating the bird raw. But an even worse horror is her own hunger, so strong and vicious it overpowers her revulsion at Wing's barbarity. Mara turns away before she rips the bird from his hands and begins to tear into its raw flesh herself.

Screams erupt behind her and Mara spins around to see a girl of about ten attacking a younger child, trying to pull a green plastic bottle out of her hands. Bright litter is the urchins's playstuff; it's gathered in little piles all over the cathedral, sorted into colors. Groups of children play and fight and squabble over it. But this girl's attack is ferocious.

“Hey!” yells Mara.

She pulls the girl off the younger child and now finds herself fending off an assault of bites, punches, kicks, and vicious, tearing fingernails. Mara's own temper gets the better of her and she fights back, inflicting her own stinging wounds. A crowd of urchins gathers to watch, Wing among them, curious and excited but unperturbed at what is happening to Mara. And it's the shock of his carelessness, along with the sudden fear of the savagery of these wild children, that chills Mara's fury and sends her
running to the door of the cathedral. She wrenches it open and bursts out into the storm, then races down to the water's edge to find Gorbals waiting for her. He is holding a flickering lantern high so that she will see him in the gathering gloom.

Mara runs up to him, shocked and shaken. Gorbals takes her hand and helps her onto the raft. His sullen mood is gone and he eyes her with deep concern.

“What happened?”

Mara's mouth trembles in her effort not to cry. She can't answer.

“I came to row you back because the storm is making the water wild,” he says, then sighs. “Mara, those ratbashers are wild and dangerous!”

Mara nods, shaking. He is tactful and doesn't ask about the ragged, burning wound the wild girl has torn across her face. But he picks a large dock leaf from the grass and gently places its healing coolness on her bleeding cheek. Mara murmurs her thanks. Shock has replaced the bright surge of hope and energy she felt such a little while ago; now the netherworld feels dark and alien once more.

“I hate that place. It's full of necrotty,” Gorbals mutters darkly as he places the lantern on Mara's knees and begins to steer the raft out from the gravestones and the cathedral, back through storm-chopped waters. He steers it expertly through a succession of poles that stick up out of the water. The flickering lantern light just picks out the shapes of a fish, bird, bell, and tree attached to each pole. “You should stay away from there. So should I,” he adds.

“What do you mean? What's necrotty?” says Mara, staring at the strange twig-woven lantern that Gorbals has set upon her lap. It's full of huge moths. They glow like moonbeams and cast a gentle, fluttery light.

“Dead stuff is necrotty—all the drowned, rotten things. The cathedral hill and the waters are full of it—look, you can see it at night.”

Mara looks down into the water and once again sees the luminous glow of the drowned city.

“That's the Foss.”

“Foss?” says Mara wonderingly.

“It's the ghost light that comes from all the necrotten things. Never touch it,” Gorbals warns her. “It's full of death.”

A high-pitched, blood-chilling noise pierces the air behind her. A fat black creature swoops down and flaps in her face. Mara screams and tries to beat it off, then sees the vicious little face, with such nasty, tiny, ravenous teeth, trying to poke through the gaps in the twig lantern to get at the moths.

“Get off, you rodent!” Gorbals whacks the creature with his paddle and it surges high into the air. Mara hears a satisfying plop in the gloom as it hits the water.

“Bats,” says Gorbals crossly. “They're always after the moonmoths.”

“That was a bat? I've never seen a bat so huge and so vicious,” gasps Mara. There were bats on Wing but they were tiny, harmless creatures that lived quietly in the church and the farm buildings. That one was as big as a winged cat.

Gorbals is frowning at the storm-fretted trees as they approach the Hill of Doves. “No sundown tonight. The storm will kill our fire—but we'll still have stories. You must tell us yours. We're always hungry for stories.”

“My story?” says Mara as they disembark. She doesn't think she can bear to tell her story.

She helps Gorbals drag the raft out of the water's reach.
Three sheep are running nervously through the stunted apple trees on the hillside. Large wet drops splatter her face and Mara looks up in surprise at the sudden clangor above her head: the percussion of the rain on the sky city.

Gorbals grunts as he hauls rocks onto the raft as an anchor against the wind.

“You must have stories,” says Gorbals. “Stories are the world's heartbeat. That's what keeps us all alive. But Mara, about the ratbashers—Broomielaw is right. They live like animals. They have short, wild lives and they breed too fast, too young. They have no language and yet they move together as one, in flocks like animals. They're not human like us.”

“But they're more like us than not. And they
are
human beings, children—wild children, maybe—but they've been abandoned by the world and they deserve kindness, not hate.”

Gorbals looks at her thoughtfully. “I never thought of it like that. But …” in the glow of the moonmoths she sees him smile, “do you really feel kindness for the savage creature who ripped your face like that?”

Mara smiles back ruefully. “Not right at this minute.”

She follows the glow of his flickering moth lantern up the Hill of Doves into the thicket of trees. There's no sign of the Treenesters. The clearing is empty.

“Where have they all gone?” Mara wonders, as a single metallic beat rings out somewhere in the netherworld. That strange, lonely sound amid the gusts of wind makes her uneasy.

“They're already nesting,” says Gorbals. He nudges past a goat and springs up a ladder that hangs down the side of a chestnut tree, then disappears inside one of the human-sized nests that Mara spotted earlier. A host of owl eyes
stare down at her from the storm-tossed branches of surrounding trees. The Treenesters are all snug inside their enormous nests, each one dimly lit by the fluttery glow of a moth lantern.

“Come on up,” Gorbals calls down softly. “There's room in here.”

There's a smothered burst of laughter from the other nests. “I'm fine down here,” says Mara, awkwardly. She huddles into the wrinkled base of the chestnut tree. Two roots stretch out on either side of her like an armchair. A couple of chickens nestle in a nook of the tree next to her.

“She doesn't want to share a nest with
you
,” she hears Candleriggs rebuke Gorbals. “Mara!” the old woman calls down through the rising moan of the wind. “Please come up here and share the greatnest with me.”

So Mara climbs a ladder made of tough grasses that hangs down the side of the huge oak and pulls herself up into Candleriggs's roomy nest. By mothlight she can see that it's woven securely into the branches and thickly lined with moss. Overhead, twigs and branches are meshed into a roof.

Candleriggs hands her something warm wrapped in a leaf package. Mara sniffs it then ravenously unwraps the leaves and bites into a thick potato pancake filled with herby vegetable stew. It tastes like the most delicious food in the world. When she's full, she lays her head down and ever so gently a moss quilt is tucked around her. She curls up in bliss. Then jolts back into guilty wakefulness. The wind has increased to a ghoulish howl that echoes through the netherworld. A huge gust hits the trees and Mara thinks of Rowan and all the others, starved, sick, and dying in the misery of the boat camp, in such a wind. She tries to block out a mind-picture of the storm smashing the boats up
against the great wall. The image shifts to another: that of a single mountainous wave about to swallow up a small fishing boat. The wave looms over the helpless boat, then crashes down with the weight of a falling cliff. All that remains is the heaving blackness of the ocean.

Mara cries out for her lost family. The wind takes her cry and hurls it across the netherworld.

The eager rustlings of the Treenesters, anxious to hear her story, stop. Candleriggs leans over to grasp Mara's hand and, tucking the quilt around her, insists that her story will keep, that she should sleep now.

Yet exhausted though she is, Mara fights off sleep, afraid that the nightmare of what has happened to her family will come back to haunt her dreams. To keep herself awake, more than anything, she begins to tell the story of her island home swallowed by the ocean. She tells them all about Tain, her lost friends, and of the nightmare of the boat camp that clings to the other side of the great wall. She tells them how she got into their world and how she could never have done it without Wing, the wild urchin.

She doesn't tell them what happened to her parents; she can't, not yet. And she senses the gentle Treenesters will hear what she doesn't say and know why.

When Mara finishes, all she can hear is the storm. The Treenesters say nothing, and she wonders if they have fallen asleep during her long story—or perhaps they couldn't hear her through the noise of the wind. Beside her, old Candleriggs has her eyes shut tight, her mouth set in a grim line. Then Mara looks out of the greatnest and sees all the eyes gleaming among the mothlit branches of the trees, brimful of the unspeakable hurt the Treenesters feel for her.