The People of Sparks (16 page)

Caspar laughed. Maddy lumbered to her feet and came beside Lina. She put an arm around her. “You’re shaking,” she said. “Well, never mind. You don’t have to be by the fire if you don’t want to.”

From a box on the truck, she took what they called “travelers’ cakes”—lumps a little smaller than a fist, made of Lina knew not what—and she and Caspar stuck them on the end of long sticks and roasted them over the flames. “You have to get fond of these if you’re a roamer,” Caspar said. “They keep well, that’s their best quality. You need them for those long stretches where there’s no other food to be found.”

They were dry and tasteless, but Lina was hungry, so she didn’t mind much. She ate hers standing up, and she licked her fingers when she was through.

She wondered where they were going to sleep. There was no room on the truck, so she supposed they’d have to lie on the ground. It was quite dark now. A breeze had come up. From somewhere far away, she heard an animal noise:
yip-yip-yip,
then a long wail, then an eerie chorus of wails. “What’s that?” she asked Maddy.

“Wolves,” Maddy said. “Out hunting. They’re not very close, don’t worry.”

Lina shivered. The darkness here was so enormous, and so full of terrible things. In Ember, except when there was a blackout, people were almost always safe in their beds when darkness came. Lina wasn’t used to being outside at night. She thought about Mrs. Murdo, who would be getting into bed in the doctor’s attic room right now. Mrs. Murdo would be worried about her. Poppy would be saying, “Where Wyna?” No one would imagine that she was out in this great emptiness, with nothing between her and the sky.

Maddy took some rolled-up blankets from the truck and spread them on the ground. She put two of them close to the fire. The third she offered to Lina. “Put this wherever you want to sleep,” she said.

Lina walked over to take the blanket, and as she did, Caspar tossed a big branch onto the fire. Sparks sprayed up. Some flew sideways, caught by the wind. Lina jumped away, but a few sparks landed on her sock. She stamped her foot frantically, but this only made the sparks burn brighter. The threads of her sock glowed. On her ankle she felt a pain like a fierce bite. “No!” she cried. “Get it off me!” She shook her leg and clawed at her sock with her hand. Panic rose up in her, and she would have taken off running if Maddy had not blocked her path and grabbed her in strong arms. Once she’d stopped her, she bent down and put a hand over the burning place in Lina’s sock, and when she took her hand away the glow was out.

But the pain was still there. Maddy took off Lina’s shoe and sock and poured cold water on the burn, but it didn’t help much. All night, Lina huddled on the ground under the thin blanket, gritting her teeth against the pain on her leg and wishing she had never come on this awful journey.

CHAPTER 16

                    
The Starving Roamer

The next morning, after a breakfast of plums and coarse bread, they set out again. Maddy made Lina a place to sit at the back of the truck, between two of the crates. She took the blankets they’d slept on and spread them on the rough floor of the truck. Lina could sit on the blankets, lean against the nearest crate, and dangle her legs over the truck’s back edge. The burn still hurt this morning; it was a reddish, angry-looking blister. After a while, as the sun came up and sweet grassy smells arose from the earth, Lina began to enjoy herself again. She watched the countryside fall away behind the truck, stretches of brown-gold grass as big as the sky, trees like hairy spikes, rocky slopes.

And this is how it was for four more days. At night they would find a place by a stream to sleep, if they could find a stream. They passed other ox-pulled cars and trucks on their way, both going their direction and coming back. They would stop and talk with these roamers and sometimes trade with them for food. Caspar always asked if they’d been to the city. Very few of them had. The ones that had been there just shook their heads when Caspar asked if they’d found anything interesting. “It’s a waste of time to go there,” they said. “Don’t bother.” Most of the roamers they met had been scavenging in what they called the suburbs, which Lina understood to mean towns that lay around the city.

Caspar and Maddy hardly spoke to her at all during the day. Around noon they would stop the truck and get something to eat from the chest of provisions they had brought. At first there was dried fruit, but they soon used that up. After that it was travelers’ cakes, morning, noon, and night.

Caspar always went to sleep right after he’d filled his belly. He lay back on the ground and snored. Then Maddy would beckon to Lina with a tilt of her head, and they would walk away from Caspar and find a place to sit, often beneath a tree, one of those trees that spread their branches out like the top of a big mushroom. They would sit in the soft grass and look up at the sky through the tree’s branches. Sometimes a breeze swept across the land and brought them the scent of dusty earth and dry weeds.

After lunch on their second day of traveling, Lina asked Maddy where she came from.

“A horrible place,” was all she said.

“Horrible in what way?”

“Small, cold, and poor. Houses made of old boards. Bad soil for growing things, never enough food. A place that was withering.”

“What does that mean, withering?” Lina asked.

“It means shrinking and dying. Things were getting worse there. There was too much sickness, too much hunger, too much unhappiness. People were always quarreling, and a lot of them were leaving. It was ending, the place where I came from. I wanted to be somewhere that was beginning.”

“Our city was ending, too,” said Lina. She looked up at the blue sky and thought about the sky in Ember: utter blackness, not a speck of light. No lights shone anywhere in Ember now. “There’s no one left in our city,” she said.

“Sparks is a place that’s beginning,” said Maddy. “If it can get past the hard spots.”

“Hard spots?”

“Yes, like suddenly having to take in four hundred people.”

“Oh,” said Lina, remembering the conflicts in the village and all the reasons she’d wanted to get away from there. Her heart sank. “Maybe by the time we get back, that will all be over, all that trouble,” she said.

“Maybe,” said Maddy. “I hope so. Sparks is a whole lot better than where I came from.”

“I can understand why you wanted to leave that place,” said Lina.

“Pretty badly,” said Maddy. “Bad enough to take up with a fool.”

“Fool?”

Maddy just tipped her head toward the sleeping Caspar.

“You came with him just to get away?” Lina whispered.

Maddy nodded. “Roamers hardly ever came to our little settlement,” she said, “mainly because we had nothing to trade. Caspar was only the second one I’d ever seen. I thought I might never see another, so I grabbed the chance.”

“Why couldn’t you just leave by yourself?”

“I thought of it,” Maddy said. “But I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know the roads, or where the settlements were. I didn’t know how I’d get food. I guess I wasn’t quite bold enough to go alone.”

“When you got to Sparks, you could have stayed there,” Lina said. “You didn’t have to keep traveling with him.”

“I would have stayed,” said Maddy, “if I hadn’t promised to help him on this quest of his. I try to honor my promises, if I possibly can.”

That afternoon, as they traveled on across the rolling hills, Lina thought about places that were ending and places that were beginning. She knew about endings. Now she wanted to be part of a beginning. Maybe the people of Ember could begin again in the city. If not . . . well, she wouldn’t think about that until she had to.

On the second night, they pulled up beside the ruins of a town. Not much was left of it, but you could see that once there had been hundreds of houses. The concrete foundations, overgrown with weeds, lined up along curved streets. Here and there a wall or a chimney was still standing. Caspar stopped the truck just beyond the outer row of ruins, and Maddy went around to the back and opened the trunk that held their dwindling supply of food. They had stopped beside a ditch where a trickle of water ran. It was green, scummy water, but Lina drank it anyway. It was all there was.

Caspar seemed especially grouchy. His pink face was splotched and damp, and his eyes looked inflamed. He had forgotten to twist his mustache into points, and it hung down at the corners of his mouth. He dug a crumbling travelers’ cake from the trunk and glowered at Maddy. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he said. “You haven’t been very chatty lately.”

“I’m never chatty,” said Maddy calmly.

Caspar took a savage bite of his cake. “It’s like traveling with a tree stump,” he said. “I thought you were going to be a pleasant and helpful companion.”

Maddy did not reply to this. She chewed serenely, gazing out over the acres of fallen houses. Lina realized there was a certain beauty in Maddy that she hadn’t seen before. Her back was straight, she held her head high, and there was something unswayable in her. The bones of her face were strong, and her gaze was firm. There was nothing fluttery about her. You could see that Caspar was finding out that she was not what he’d taken her for at first. She was more than he’d bargained for.

On the third day, near evening, they saw a truck coming toward them from a great distance away. They were on a long, straight road with few trees or buildings to block their view, just the dry brown grass and a few ancient fences leaning over and flocks of birds rising, swooping through the air, and fluttering down again. Up ahead came this dark dot, toiling forward. In twenty minutes or so, the two trucks drew near.

Lina stood behind Caspar and Maddy, looking forward. This roamer looked poor. He had only one ox, a shaggy, swaybacked animal, and on his truck there were only two crates, not four as on Caspar’s. The man himself was almost as shaggy as his ox. His hair was long and his beard lay like a hairy brown bib against his chest. As he came closer, he stood up on his truck and shaded his eyes with his hand, peering at them.

“Watch out for this one,” Caspar said. “Could be a bandit. Looks bad and mean and dangerous.”

When the other truck was twenty or thirty feet away, its driver suddenly hauled on the traces. His ox veered, and the truck turned sideways so that it blocked the road. Lina couldn’t tell if he’d done this on purpose. His movements were jerky, as if something was wrong with him. He climbed down from his truck and stood in front of it, his neck tucked down and his shoulders hunched as high as his ears. His eyes glittered in his hairy face. He stood there like that, saying nothing, waiting for them.

Caspar stopped the truck. He stood up and leaned forward. “Out of my way, you ragged wretch! Move that flea-bitten rig!”

The roamer came a few paces closer. His mouth opened—a hole in the tangle of beard—but no words came out.

Lina could see the back of Caspar’s neck flush deep red. “I said,
Out of my way!
” He snatched up his whip and sent the long lash curling out toward the man and snapped it a few feet from his face. The roamer let out a howl. He lurched toward them.

All this happened in only a minute or so. Lina’s heart was beating wildly.
Was
this a bandit? Was he going to attack them? She ducked down behind a crate and peered between the slats.

Caspar raised the whip again. “Come any closer and I’ll cut you to shreds!” he shouted.

But before he could lash out, Maddy grabbed his arm. “Wait,” she said. Caspar tried to shake her off, but she yanked at him so hard he lost his balance and sat down again. “Why not find out what the man wants before you attack him?” she said.

Caspar struggled against her, but she was strong. She managed to wrench the whip out of his hand. Then she jumped down and confronted the other roamer, who had halted just in front of the truck.

“What do you want from us?” she said to him, standing squarely in his path, her hands on her wide hips. “Why have you stopped us like this?”

The roamer backed up a step. He looked at her with his mouth hanging open. He was grubby, Lina saw. His hands and his bare feet were nearly black with dirt. He mumbled something.

Maddy bent closer to him. “What?”

He mumbled again.

She turned to Caspar, who had climbed down from the truck and was approaching with his fists clenched. “He says he’s out of cakes.” She turned back to the man. “How long since you’ve eaten?”

The man stared at his hands. He had long, filthy fingernails. His fingers twitched. “Three days,” he croaked. “Just crumbs . . . three days.”

“Well,” said Caspar, “if you think we’re going to supply you with food, you’re very mistaken.”

“Surely we can spare a couple of cakes,” Maddy said.

Caspar’s face was dark red. “We can
not,
” he said. “We are on a special mission, extremely important. We need that food for ourselves—
all
of it.”

Lina thought this was unreasonable. “He can have one of mine,” she said.

Caspar whirled around. “No!” he said. “You’re going to need your strength.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” said Maddy, but Caspar reached out and pushed her. “Back in the truck,” he said. “And you”—turning back to the roamer —“get your rattletrap out of my way, if you want to stay alive.”

From the roamer came a sound Lina had never heard before from a human being—a hoarse hissing sound, as if he were spitting a stream of fire straight at Caspar’s face. He did this twice, and then he turned away and scuttled back to his truck. He pulled on the ox’s traces and it moved a few feet along, just far enough for Caspar to drive his truck past it. Caspar yelled at him one more time as he passed: “You shouldn’t
be
a roamer if you can’t feed yourself!” He cracked his whip at the man and drove on.

Lina climbed into a crate and sat with her head on her knees for a while after this. She was horrified by the starving, filthy roamer. How did he come to be in such a state? Was it his own fault? Was he a madman? But Caspar could have given him
something,
couldn’t he? Or were they so low on food that losing any of it really would harm them? Her stomach lurched; she felt queasy. But she didn’t know if it was hunger or horror at what she’d just seen.