Pathfinder (12 page)

Amazingly, the urchin's little bird friend has kept with them during their precarious spin through the city gate and now it hops nervously about the raft. With a shock Mara realizes that the child lies in a heap beside her, unconscious. What happened? She leans over him, struggling to see in the dark. A shadow stains his face. Mara touches it—blood. Now she sees the nasty gash on the side of his head. Don't let it be a bullet wound, she panics. Maybe some bit of junk was churned up in the waves and hit him—or perhaps he lost his balance and dashed his head on the metal raft. She feels for a pulse in the child's thin wrist. It's weak and shaky, but thankfully he's alive.

As she rips up a T-shirt from her backpack to stem the rush of blood from the child's head, Mara wonders what on Earth she is going to do now, in this dark and alien place. The one thing she knows she can't do is abandon a small child who risked his life to get her through the city wall.

Desolate, Mara paddles through the dark waters of the netherworld that lies under New Mungo. She tries to think what to do. She never thought beyond her sudden impulse to get through the wall with the urchin, and now that she is here she is badly in need of a plan of action. Should she head for the great towers and attempt to make it up into New Mungo as soon as the urchin recovers? Mara remembers her filthy clothes and hair, feels the thick layer of grime on her skin. Looking like this, she wouldn't stand a chance.

Once again, she feels the urchin's pulse. He hasn't moved, but the pulse is stronger, she's sure. Mara reaches down and tickles his toes. The child's eyes snap open in surprise, though he still lies in a daze in his metal shell.

“You're alive then,” says Mara gently. “Welcome back to the world.”

The urchin looks at her with limpid eyes. He touches his head and whimpers.

“It'll get better.” Mara pulls a strand of his long, matted hair from his face. Warily, wordlessly, he watches her every movement. Then, shakily, he sits up.

“What's your name? Say something,” Mara urges. “You look about Corey's age. What age are you? Five? Six?”

He doesn't answer, just chirrups weakly to his sparrow. Mara peels off the blood-soaked T-shirt to have a look at his head but it's almost impossible to see in the dark. His injury can't be too serious or he wouldn't be sitting up, surely? Now the urchin grunts.

“Speak to me,” she pleads. “Don't just grunt. Can't you speak at all?”

Has he had no one to teach him to speak? No one to look after him? How has he survived?

Now he chirrups, urgently, and stares out in front as if he sees something. Mara looks ahead but sees nothing. Yet as they move deeper and deeper into the netherworld her eyes adjust to the dark and she is able to pick out strange, unfathomable shapes.

“What's that?” she gasps. A huge black arm rises high out of the water. As they pass beneath she realizes it's a broken bridge that ends in midair—a bridge to nowhere. Mara catches her breath. It must be a ruin of the old, drowned world that lies beneath New Mungo. Could there be more? She leans over the side of the raft to peer into the black water and jumps back in terror.

Ghosts! There are ghosts under the water!

Mara steadies herself.
Now don't be silly, there are no such things. Keep calm and look again
.

Gingerly, she peers once more over the side of the raft. But they are still there—luminescent, ghostly things moving under the water. She takes a deep breath and forces herself to keep looking, her eyes straining to see in the dark, because there's more, much more. Beneath the silver darting things are all sorts of ghostly shapes and lines of luminescence that glow eerily beneath the waves. Something shifts in Mara's perception and all of a sudden she knows what she is seeing—rooftops and towers and crumbling
walls. Right below her is an old, drowned city. It glimmers like a ghostly presence in the sea. And the darting ghosts are only fish, lit by that same, strange luminous light.

“
Who?
” demands a sudden loud voice. Mara screams in fright. “
Who you? Who!
”

It's right behind her. Mara cowers in the raft, gripping the urchin, pulsating with fear. Again, she forces herself to look, searching the dark for the source of the voice.

“
Who!
”

The voice is directly overhead now but still she cannot see anyone or anything. Then all of a sudden she does—it seems to swoop out of nowhere—a white, spectral face with wide, piercing eyes. It moves swiftly and silently through the darkness above her.

“
Who!
”

“Mara! I'm Mara!” she cries in terror. “Please—what—who are
you
?”

But there's no answer. The spectral creature vanishes as silently as it came, its ghoulish cry fading into ghostly echoes. Trembling, Mara stares out into the dark. What was it? Some strange creature that belongs to this world within the wall? Or was it—her heart stops at the thought—some phantom of the drowned city?

They paddle on for ages, passing all sorts of shadowy shapes that Mara can't identify. Suddenly the urchin bursts into excited chirps. Mara peers fearfully into the darkness but there's no sign of any more shrieking phantoms. The raft clangs against a pole that sticks out of the water and, as Mara steers away from it, she sees another shadow looming above the water right in front. She blinks, her eyes strained to their limit by the depth of the darkness, her imagination overwrought. What is it? Her heart thumps loudly—then, as before, her perception shifts and she sees
that the shadow is nothing to fear. It's just a great hump of land, a solid mass of earth. An island in the drowned city? Does the urchin know something about this place? But he can't tell her, even if he does.

When the raft knocks against the land mass they climb out. Mara reaches down and touches grass. A large building sits on the island's hilltop. She can just make out a soft, flickering glow—this one as warm as the undersea glow was cold—that lights it from within. The urchin has erupted in another burst of delighted, wordless babble.

“It's a church,” Mara tells him as they climb up the hill and she recognizes the solid, familiar outline. But as they draw closer she sees the size of the building and knows it is no ordinary church.

The child is tense, listening to something. Now Mara can hear it too. He twitters and yelps, pulling Mara toward the building's huge wooden doors. But she stops for a moment to read the name carved there:

Glasgow Cathedral

Wondering about the name, Mara follows the urchin through the heavy doors. Once inside, she gazes around at the huge stone interior. Its size reminds her of the Weave towerstacks—all those vast, abandoned halls littered with rotting mountains of electronic junk. But she has never known such a place in realworld. Now, as she stands in the great stone hall amid tall pillars and smashed stained glass windows and alcoves full of statues, Mara sees that a cathedral is a massive church. And Glasgow must be the name of the drowned city.

The cathedral is alight with small bonfires. Swarms of dirt-caked, naked urchins perch upon high window ledges,
scramble across tombstones, and scamper among tall pillars. A cathedral full of sea urchins! Mara is laughing, yet her eyes fill with tears as she takes in the sight of all these lost little ones who have made a chaotic home here.

Her own urchin looks up and gives a sudden bright smile. Mara scrubs her eyes clear of tears and lifts a lock of his long, mud-packed hair to look at the head wound in the firelight.

“You'll live,” she tells him.

The light reveals that underneath the mud and slime his skin is tough for such a young child, his whole body covered with sleek hair—thick, seaworthy skin like a water rat or a seal. Mara shudders and takes a step back as, full of curiosity now, the child reaches up to touch her face. She is both drawn and repulsed by this strange little creature.

Don't be silly. He's just a child
.

An abandoned little one in a drowned world. And somehow the urchin and his friends are surviving—somehow they've found enough food and this shelter and even learned to make fire.

“I'm Mara,” she tells him. “My name is Mara.”

Now the urchin touches his own face and looks at Mara intently.

“You've no name? Never mind, I'll give you a name.” Mara wonders what she can call this strange little urchin. The name that springs to her mind is not a child's name but somehow it suits him with his quick, birdlike movements, chirping voice, and spindly legs.

“Wing,” she announces. “That's what I'll call you.”

Wing chirrups and runs off into the noisy mass of wild, vagabond children. A sudden loud “
who!
” makes Mara freeze. She looks up at the vast, vaulted ceiling toward the source of the cry and sees what the white phantom is.

An owl. That's all. There are lots of them, perched high in nooks and ledges in the ancient stone—quite different in color and marking to the barn owls on Wing. And quite different in voice too, with their loud and eerie hooting. Mara remembers the hissing shrieks of the owls that lived in her barn as they flew on silent wings past her window at night in search of prey.

She sighs with relief and tries to shake off her ghost-terrors. Now she leaves the noisy cathedral to walk across the grassy hill outside, finds a moss-furred slab of stone, and sits down to rest and think. All around her the black sea glimmers and flickers with the ghost-light of the drowned city below and the dark reflections of New Mungo looming high above. Beyond the colossal geometry of the new city glows a forget-me-not sky. But Mara falls into an exhausted sleep with her mind upon what might still exist down here, in the drowned ruins.

When day breaks she is still out on the cathedral hilltop, fast asleep upon the thickly mossed stone. The scents and sounds of this strange netherworld under the sky city flow into her exhausted body and gently, unconsciously, she absorbs them. Her eyes are opened at last by a sharp shot of sun that breaks over the top of the city wall. For a while, as the sun climbs above the wall and before it is netted by the thick weave of the sky tunnels, the drowned city is filled with light.

Mara blinks, awake in a moment, and sees the massive trunks of New Mungo emerge from the steamy waters—then she sits up in amazement as the rest of the world within the wall unwraps itself from the early morning mist.

It's huge—even larger than she guessed in the dark. And Mara's heart leaps as she realizes that it's not all sea.
Five, six, seven, eight islands are emerging! They lie scattered across the great walled circle of netherworld sea, around the vast trunk of New Mungo, as unguarded and forgotten as old secrets.

Some of the islands are tiny, just a few leaps across, but one or two are about the size of Wing's small village. Some are topped with ruins and—Mara gasps in delight—tall clumps of greenery surround the ruins. Trees! She has seen pictures of them in books but she has never seen a real tree before.

And now a mass of tall, dark shapes, like spiky wizard hats, materialize from the mist and float upon the sparkling waters.

Mara rubs her eyes. Then sees the wizard hats for what they really are—the steeples of drowned churches. She laughs and leans back to stretch upon the mossy slab. The bright green moss is soft against her face, the sun warm upon it. There is bee song in the air, or the lazy hum of a small wind.
Nice
, thinks Mara, stroking the soft moss. Beneath the moss there are grooves in the stone. She fingers them and recognizes the pattern of letters—and her heart jumps in horror.
No! Not a gravestone!
But it is. Now she can see the ranks of ancient slabs and tombstones, camouflaged with green moss, all down the grassy hillside.

I've been asleep in a graveyard!

But gnawing hunger and a desperate thirst override her fear. What's so scary about a peaceful graveyard anyway? The living world is far more terrifying. Mara recalls the silly things she used to worry about in her old, ordinary life; all the thrills of the Weave she used to enjoy scaring herself with. She stretches out her exhausted limbs and looks around, wondering where she might find water and food.

Suddenly a shadow falls. Mara turns her head and sees that New Mungo has eclipsed the rising sun. The graveyard takes on an unnerving aspect as gloom robs color from the netherworld.

Now Mara hears something rush toward her, and she can do nothing as it lands upon her with the force of a charging bull.