Pathfinder (39 page)

And now she begins to cry as she has never cried before.

Rowan clasps her to him, his bony frame shaking with exhaustion and emotion. He holds her until she is calm enough to try to speak again.

“What about your parents?” whispers Mara. “What about Ruth and Quinn and all the others from the island?”

“Gail's death …” he sighs, struggling for words. “That killed all hope in my parents, then a wave of sickness spread through the camp—diseased drinking water this time—and they had no strength left to fight it. Once they were dead, I didn't care what happened to me. The Pickers took me up into the city to work on the sea bridge. But I saw Ruth and Quinn and some of the others before I was taken—they were so kind, they tried to help us when we fell ill. They were devastated when Mom and Dad died. I don't know what happened to them. Ruth had her baby just before I was taken. I hope they all survived.”

“They might have escaped. They might be on another ship,” says Mara, desperate to believe that they are.

“Maybe,” says Rowan, but he's full of grief, and changes the subject.

“I can't believe I'm here. Mara, what happened to you? Where did you go? How did you do all this?”

“Rowan, when I tell you, you'll never believe me. What happened is like one of those legends in the books you used to read on the island. I'll tell you everything once you've had food and rest, because it's such a long, strange tale. I'm going to tell everyone so that one day, when we find land, the story will live on in the world and the people who come after us will know how they came to be free. And maybe, somehow, our story will help them to be strong in their lives,” she says, knowing how the stories of Granny Mary and Thenew and Candleriggs helped her.

Mara's eyes burn with tears as she thinks of Fox but she blinks them back and tries to smile at her friends.

“Here you are, Treenesters—out in the world for the first time ever!” she cries. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“I'm so happy I can't think,” Gorbals bursts out. “I'm just
being
in the world. I can't believe all this has really happened. It's the end of the Treenesters' story but the beginning of a new one.”

He steps forward to lean on the railing and look out at the world—and trips over the ship's anchor.

Bad as she feels, Mara can't help laughing. Some things don't change. The whole world might end and Gorbals would still trip over his feet.

“Look!” Broomielaw exclaims. “Mara, look! It's the fish with the ring.”

She points at the anchor that Gorbals has just tripped over. The metal is molded into the shape of a fish with a split tail at the end. The large ring in its mouth holds the anchor rope.

“So it is.” Mara stares in surprise. “But the rest didn't
happen. The stone-telling didn't come together, after all. What was your rhyme?”

“
The fish with the ring
The bell and the bird and the tree.
When these all come together
Then the stone-telling shall be
.”

The Treenesters chant it for her. Wing, with his little sparrow friend back upon his shoulder, sits among a cluster of urchins nearby. They all cock their heads, like birds, to listen. Mara looks back at New Mungo and hopes with all her heart that Fox is safe and alive in the netherworld, that Candleriggs will find him. The sky city is no more than a faint gleam in the night sky, the furious clangor of its alarms just the gentlest peal on the sea wind.

Free at last!

Something clicks in Mara's mind, like a key turning gently in its lock. She looks at the Treenesters, enclosed within the fluttery glow of their moth lanterns, then at little birdlike Wing and his friends as they play upon the huge fish anchor. And with a huge shock she sees that maybe it
has
all come together—the fish with the ring, the bird, the tree. And she is Mara Bell.

Has the stone-telling really happened, after all?

Dizzied by the thought, Mara leans against the ship's rail. She doesn't know what to think, doesn't know if she ever will. And now she wonders if it matters, in the end. What
does
matter is that the future has been unlocked. She and Fox each hold a key to the future in their hands. But all this—the death of her family, losing Fox, and everything else—will have been worthless if she doesn't
try as hard as she can to hold on to a sure sense of what is fair and right. Mara relives that terrible moment outside the city walls when her own fear and panic, her overriding instinct to save herself, showed her how Caledon and the New World ended up as they did.

She turns toward the future. The Pole Star blazes in front. The bow of the ship cuts a clean white line through the dark ocean, guided by the star's torch. The ship's speed is exciting; the cold sea spray invigorating. Mara feels truly alive, full of hope and loss, pain and exhilaration. She thinks of the legend of Thenew and imagines that wretched young girl, banished from her homeland and set adrift upon the ocean in a ramshackle raft, all alone, with a child growing inside her. Yet she chanced upon land and Thenew's child, Mungo, grew up to found a whole new city—the ruins of which now lie drowned under New Mungo, the sky city that still bears his name.

Well, I'm not all alone and adrift in a ramshackle raft. I'm on a solid ship and I know where I'm going. I've got the Treenesters and Rowan and the urchins. All we need to do is find a bit of high land. It's there in the North, in the green land of the people. I'm sure it is
.

And she still has Fox, in a way. Tonight she'll wait, way out on the edges of the Weave, on the Bridge to Nowhere, and hope, with all the energy she owns, that he'll be there too.

Gorbals comes to stand beside her. Mara smiles at her friend.

“I'm afraid I gave your poems away to someone who needed them,” she confesses.

“That's just what they're for,” Gorbals smiles back. He follows her intent gaze out into the darkness.

The world's wind touches her face. The night is empty
and enormous. There's no ship or land in sight, nothing at all but ocean and the huge hush of the stars.

“What are you looking for, Mara?” Gorbals asks curiously.

“Miracles,” she says.

JULIE BERTAGNA
started her career as a teacher and freelance feature writer for major Scottish newspapers and has established a reputation as an author of powerful and original fiction for young readers.
Pathfinder
was inspired by a newspaper article about global warming and is now published in several languages around the world. Julie lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband and daughter. Visit her website at
www.juliebertagna.com
.

The Raging Earth series

Pathfinder
Firespark

An author's note

In 1999, a snippet of news that should have stopped the world in its tracks caught my eye. Two South Pacific islands had disappeared under the sea. Many more were at risk. For decades, the islanders had been trying to alert the world to the rising ocean. Now they were faced with moving entire villages inland, hut by hut. Mass evacuation loomed. But where to? Stuck in a corner of a newspaper, the islanders' plea to the world hit a wall of disinterest.

Back then, the scenario of a drowning world seemed a farfetched fantasy. I did some research on global warming and what I found out made my heart stop. The stories that spark my imagination are about individuals on the edge, on the cusp of change, and the plight of these islanders began to haunt my imagination. Sometimes you don't choose the stories; they choose you. And so I came to write
Pathfinder
and its sequel,
Firespark,
the future story of a drowned Earth. Now global warming is on every front page. By 2100, the year of my future story, global warming is forecast to destroy the lives of over 100 million people and create the greatest refugee crisis the world has ever known. It's all too much, too terrible to take in. Especially if you're young and your life lies ahead. It's your future at stake. Best just plug in the iPod, have a laugh on YouTube, and hope the grown-ups sort it out in time. And yet . . . the response from young readers to
Pathfinder
and book two,
Firespark,
has been astonishing.

As a teenager I devoured fiction that asked big, hard questions about the world. Back then, there was little fiction written specially for young adults, so I leaped from Alan Garner's and Ursula Le Guin's fantasies to science fiction like Le Guin's
The Left Hand of Darkness
and John Wyndham's (the melting ice caps in
The Kraken Wakes
now seem eerily prescient). Books like these forged my imagination. They were prisms through which you could explore the issues and apocalyptic terrors of the time. Humanity has a rendezvous with destiny. As former president Jacques Chirac said, our house is burning down. Our future depends on us turning a new page in the human epic and imagining a whole new way of being in the world. Science is key, but fiction can offer a map, flashlight, and compass through terrors and dreams.

Traveling into an imagined future is both thrilling and terrifying. Returning to the here and now, the world seems to have shifted on its axis. Things don't feel quite the same. And now, I'm setting off again to continue this epic story. Imagining what
may be
doesn't mean it
will be.
But asking questions about the future is a powerful thing to do. The future is not set in stone. In realworld, the day ticks by at its normal pace. Time traveling, I feel as if some mischievous time lord reset the clocks. Each morning I zip away, a hundred years into the future, then crash-land back in the here and now, thinking an hour has passed—and wonder why I feel dizzy, my coffee is cold, I'm starving, and my body's gone numb. I've been writing so intensely that the day has flown past. It's deep into the afternoon. On the evening news, the freak weather on the screen seems to belong to the Century of Storm that I imagined in
Pathfinder.
On the radio, I hear politicians squandering precious time, arguing over global warming, debating what they should, could, might, and probably won't do. Almost ten years on, the plight of those South Pacific islanders is now even more desperate. Evacuation plans are tied up in red tape. No one wants the world's first climate change refugees. Often these days, as I surface from writing, I feel I'm caught within a fragile membrane that separates what is from what may be. The future seems to have arrived a lot sooner than expected. These are the last words of the prologue in
Pathfinder:

Stand at the fragile moment before the devastation
begins, and wonder: is this where we stand now,
right here on the brink?

1. How does the concept of home play a role in the book? Why has Candleriggs named all the Treenesters after places from the drowned world? How does Mara feel when she gives the urchins names from Wing? Do you think the people struggling to survive in the seas below the sky cities would prefer the New World to the places they left behind? Why or why not?

2. Why are the people of Wing afraid to face their future? What do they risk and lose by ignoring Tain's warnings? Why do you think they eventually listen to Mara when she publicly agrees with Tain?

3. When Mara voices surprise that the Treenesters have done nothing to save themselves from drowning, Gorbals replies, “‘
We live our lives and watch for the signs of whatever will happen. It's all we can do
'”. How does this attitude mirror the islanders' unwillingness to leave Wing? Is the fear to leave home universal? What about the reluctance to face change? Why is Mara able to overcome these fears?

4. What role does faith play in
Pathfinder?
At the beginning of the book, Tain tells Mara that “‘
there's no great miracle going to save us
'”. How does this sentiment relate to the Treenesters' belief that Mara is the Face in the Stone? Is it Mara's fate to help those the New World left behind?

5. Fox tells Mara that, in the New World, “‘
The past is banished. It's been deleted. All anyone ever thinks of is here and now.
There is only the power of now
'”. Why don't the Grand Fathers of All want their people to study history? What is the value of learning about the past?

6. When so many of Wing's inhabitants die on the way to New Mungo, Mara feels a huge sense of guilt. Are these losses Mara s fault? How does she cope with her feelings? When Fox tells Mara that, because he knows the truth it is his duty to share it, he says, “‘
If I don't stand against it, then I'm part of it. . . . Caledon s cruelty becomes mine. From this point on, for the rest of my life, I'll be guilty too'”
. How do Mara s and Fox s feelings of responsibility impact their actions?

7. At the end of the book, the supply ship is almost capsized by other refugees anxious to escape the horrors of the floating city outside New Mungo. Mara feels an impulse to save herself and her friends, rather than risk their safety and help the others. How does this experience help Mara understand the strict rules of the New World? How far will people go to protect themselves?

8. There are three distinct places described in
Pathfinder:
the New World, realworld, and the Weave. When Mara first speaks to Fox in the Weave, she asks how to find the sky cities in “
realworld
”. After Mara finally reaches New Mungo, does she still consider the New World “real”? In what ways are citizens of the New World unaware of realworld? Why is it important that Mara and Fox are the only two characters in the book who have experienced all three locations? What do they learn in each space?