The People of Sparks (8 page)

“From here? Oh, I don’t think so,” said Martha. “You don’t look a bit like us. You’re so much—well, smaller, if you’ll pardon my saying so. And paler.”

“True,” said Clary, “but I suppose that’s because of living in a dark place for so long. Everything is bigger and brighter here.”

“But why do you think you came from here?” Martha asked.

“Because of a notebook we found,” Doon said. “It was written by someone from this world who went to live in Ember right at the beginning. All the people of Ember came from this world.”

“Is that so,” said Martha, eyeing Doon skeptically. “Well, I must say, it’s the strangest thing
I’ve
ever heard.”

Doon’s father changed the subject. “You have such a fine, solid house,” he said. “What is it made of?”

“Earth,” said Martha.

“Pounded,” said Ordney. “Strong as stone.”

“Thick walls,” said Martha. “They make it cool in hot weather and warm in cold.” She reached for another pickled carrot. “I suppose you lived in—what? Some sort of burrows?”

“Stone houses,” said Edward Pocket, suddenly joining the conversation because his plate was empty. “Two stories. Extremely sturdy. Never too warm.”

There was a silence.

“Such a lovely lunch,” said Miss Thorn in a small voice.

“Perfectly delicious,” Mrs. Polster declared. The others chimed in, and Martha beamed.

They all rose from the table. Martha scurried into the kitchen and came out with a basket full of cloth-wrapped parcels. She handed one to each of her guests. “Your supper,” she said, “and breakfast.”

“Thank you,” said Doon’s father. “You’re very generous.”

They filed out the front door. Doon was the last to leave. Just as he stepped outside, he felt a light tap on his shoulder. He turned to see Kensington standing behind him, his eyes wide.

“Aren’t you the one who found the way out?” he whispered.

Doon nodded.

“I thought so,” the boy said. He made a curious gesture—stuck out his hand with the fingers curled and the thumb straight up. Doon didn’t understand it, but he thought it must mean something good, because a shy smile went with it. “Call me Kenny,” the boy said, and he darted back through the door.

Doon followed his father and the others down the street. He’s heard of me, he thought. He felt a pleasant sort of glow. Of course, Kenny was just a little boy; it was natural for a young boy to admire an older one.

All afternoon, they worked on the toilet holes. Doon was ready to drop by the end of the day. When the work leaders let them go, he walked down the long slope of ground in front of the Pioneer Hotel to the river. Large stones bordered the water at this point; he found one that was flat on top and sank onto it, tired to his bones. The sun was setting; the western sky glowed pink. The trees on the other side of the river cast long, thin shadows across the ground. He sat for ten minutes or so, just gazing, his thoughts swirling slowly.

It was going to take the people of Ember—all four hundred of them—several days just to build their outhouses. And already they were exhausted. How long before they got used to doing this kind of work? Doon couldn’t imagine feeling so tired day after day. He had blisters on his hands, his wrists and shoulders ached, and the back of his neck felt hot and sore, as if it had been burned. And he was strong and young! What about the older people and the younger children? Of course they’d all have to work if they expected to be fed, but—

His thoughts were interrupted by footsteps crunching behind him.

He turned. There was Tick Hassler, walking toward him across the field. Doon’s pulse quickened a little. Tick moved through the grass with a long stride, and when he came to the rocks alongside the river, he stepped from one to the next easily, never slipping or losing his balance. He raised a hand in greeting, and Doon waved back.

“Thinking deep thoughts?” Tick said, coming up beside Doon and smiling down at him.

“Not really,” said Doon. “Just watching things.”

“Ah,” said Tick. He put his hands on his hips and gazed out across the river. The setting sun shone on his face, making it glow, and draped his long shadow over the rocks. Doon wished he would sit down and talk. After a while, Tick said, “I’ll tell you something.”

Doon glanced up quickly. Tick’s eyes were a blue so light it was almost startling.

“This is a very fine place you’ve brought us to,” Tick said.

“Yes,” said Doon, pleased at being given the credit.

“You deserve a lot of respect,” Tick said. “You may be just a kid, but you took action when things got desperate. You were brave.”

Ordinarily, Doon didn’t pay much attention to what other people thought about him, but there was something about Tick that made it pleasing to have his good opinion. Somehow, he didn’t even feel insulted at being called “just a kid.” “Thank you,” he said. He thought surely Tick would sit down on the rock next to him now, and they would talk, but instead he stepped onto another rock, closer to the water, so that he had his back to Doon.

They both gazed for a while at the reddening sky. Then Tick turned around and said, “Really a wonderful place. Just look at all this!” He swept his arm in a wide arc, taking in the groves of trees, the fields, the river, and the glowing red ball of the sun.

“Yes,” said Doon. “It
is
wonderful.”

“We just need to get ourselves a little more comfortable,” Tick said. “I have ideas already. We could fix up this old building, first of all. Get people organized and working together. Get new glass for the windows, maybe. Pipe some water in from the river. What do you think?”

“Sure,” said Doon.

“Chet Noam wants to work with me,” Tick said. “Lizzie Bisco, too, and Allie Bright. How about you?”

“Sure,” said Doon again, a little disappointed that Tick had talked to all these other people before him.

“You’ll be great on the pipe project,” Tick said, “because of your experience.”

Doon nodded. Actually, there were lots of things he’d rather do than work with pipes again, as he had in the Ember Pipeworks. But it might actually be fun to work on a plumbing project with Tick. Energy blazed from Tick’s keen blue eyes.

“There’s so much we can do . . . ,” said Tick, and Doon waited to hear the end of his sentence, to hear what else he thought they could do, but Tick didn’t say any more. He just bent down, plucked a stone from between the bigger rocks, turned back to face the river again, and threw the stone with all his might. It sailed high up, a black dot against the scarlet sky, and came down with a splash in the shallow water on the far side of the river.

Then he twisted around and smiled at Doon, an exuberant, radiant smile. “See you,” he said, and he stepped across the rocks, climbed up the riverbank, and went back toward the hotel.

When he was gone, Doon picked up a stone and flung it as hard as he could. It plunked down in the middle of the river—not a bad throw, but not as good as Tick’s.

CHAPTER 8

                    
The Roamer and the Bike

Several days passed. Poppy would get a little better and then a little worse, and Lina and Mrs. Murdo stayed with her nearly all the time, putting cool rags on her forehead and trying to get her to drink the medicine the doctor gave her. When Mrs. Murdo wasn’t caring for Poppy, she was prowling around the medicine room, inspecting the doctor’s jumbled collection of herbs and potions and powders, making notes in a tiny notebook, and rearranging things, trying to create some order.

Dr. Hester was often gone, seeing patients in the village, and when she was in the house she was doing ten things at once, or trying to, and being interrupted by patients who came to the door at all hours. It seemed to Lina that the people of Sparks were constantly cutting themselves, spraining their muscles, getting rashes, and falling ill. The doctor would give them medicine or bandage their wounds, and a few days later the patients would bring something in return—a basket of eggs, a jar of pickles, a bag of clean rags.

Lina had never seen anyone so disorganized as the doctor. She peeked into the medicine room once when the doctor was out and was amazed at the clutter in there—shelves and cupboards and tables piled with stuff in bottles and stuff in boxes and stuff in jars, all higgledy-piggledy. How Dr. Hester found anything she couldn’t imagine.

It took the doctor a couple of days even to get organized enough to figure out how Lina could help her. But when she did, she began giving her one chore after another, and sometimes several all at once, often forgetting that Lina didn’t know how to do them.

“Could you go and water the asparagus?” she’d say. Then before Lina could ask what asparagus was, and where to find it, and what to put the water in, she’d say, “And then can you rip some of those rags in the kitchen basket into strips for bandages? And when you’ve done that, maybe you could wipe the floor in the medicine room—I spilled something the other day, I think over by the window. And the chickens, the chickens—they need to be fed.” And then she’d be out the door, leaving Lina to remember the string of tasks and figure out how to do them.

Everything here seemed extremely
inconvenient
to Lina. To get water, you had to go outside the gate to a pump and work a stiff handle up and down. To go to the bathroom, you had to go out in back of the house to a little smelly shed. There was no light at night except for candles, and at first she’d thought there was no stove to cook on. “Oh, yes,” said the doctor, “that’s the stove there”—she pointed to the thing like a black iron barrel in the corner of the kitchen—“but I hardly ever use it in the summer. Too much trouble to keep the fire going, and it’s too hot anyway. We mainly eat cold food in summer.”

When she did want to cook something—boil a pot of water to cook an egg, for instance, or make tea—the doctor had to squat down, stuff some dry grass and twigs into the stove’s belly, and set them alight. Sometimes she used a match; sometimes she hit what looked like two rocks together until they made a spark and the grass caught fire. Then she had to feed in bigger and bigger twigs until the fire was finally hot enough. This fire seemed fairly safe to Lina, though she didn’t like to get too close to it; at least it was contained in its iron box. It wasn’t free to leap out at her like the fire in the fireplace. Fortunately, the doctor didn’t make another fire in the fireplace after that first night. As the days grew hotter and hotter, the nights were no longer cool. Extra warmth was the last thing they needed.

One day—a week or so after Lina first came to the doctor’s house—a patient came with news to tell as well as a wound to bind. She was a scrawny young woman with brownish teeth. She had a bad scratch on her wrist where she’d scraped it against some rusty wire. “There’s a roamer in the village,” she said. “Just arrived this morning.”

“What’s a roamer?” Lina asked.

The doctor, tying a rag around her patient’s wrist, said, “Roamers go out into the Empty Lands and bring things back.”

“From the old places,” added the patient. “The ruined places.”

“My brother Caspar is a roamer!” said Torren. “And when I’m old enough, I’m going to be a roamer, too, and we’re going to be partners.”

This was the first time Lina had sensed real happiness in Torren. His little eyes shone with hope.

“That will be exciting,” Lina said. “Is it dangerous to be a roamer?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes you run into other roamers trying to get the same things you want. Sometimes you’re attacked by bandits. You have to fight them off. Caspar has a whip.”

“A whip?”

“A great long cord! As long as this room, almost. If people get in his way, he lashes them.” He lifted his arm overhead and brought it down as if he were lashing something. “Whhhhtt! Whhhhtt!” he said.

“Now, stop that,” said the doctor absently, tying the final knot in the rag. The patient left, and Lina and the doctor and Torren, along with Mrs. Murdo, carrying Poppy, went down to the market plaza to see the roamer.

A crowd had assembled in the plaza. Lina looked for Doon, but she didn’t see him. She saw only a few Emberites, in fact; most of them must have been working in other places. But a great many villagers were there, clustered around a big truck. The truck was loaded with barrels and crates, and on it stood a brown-skinned woman with wiry muscles in her arms and legs. “I have been in the far north,” she cried out in a shrill, strong voice, “out in remote corners of the Empty Lands. I have traveled roads where I saw no human being for weeks on end. And in these distant regions, I came across houses and farms that had never before been searched. I have treasures for you today.” She beckoned with a long brown arm. “Step up and look.”

The crowd pressed forward. Apparently this roamer was known to the villagers. Some people called out greetings and questions.

“Did you bring us any writing paper this time, Mackie?”

“What about seeds?”

“What about tools?”

“And matches?”

“And clothes? I’m so tired of wearing homemade patchwork!”

“I have all that and more!” the woman called. “Come close. Special things first.” She bent over an open crate and rummaged around for a moment. When she stood up again, she was holding a blackened iron cooking pot, so big she had to use both hands to lift it. “What am I offered?” she cried.

“Half a bushel of dried apricots!”

“A bushel of peas!”

“Barrel of cornmeal!”

The woman listened, cocking her head, her eyebrows raised. She waited until the offers stopped, and then she pointed at a tall young woman with shiny black hair who had offered five loaves of apricot cornbread. “Done!” she said, and she lowered the pot into the young woman’s hands.

For the next special thing, the roamer reached into a big cardboard box. She brought out a smaller box colored blue and held it high. “Soap flakes!” she cried. “Twenty-four boxes of them!”

Dozens of people bid for these. They were all gone in minutes. Then came more cooking pans, two thick jackets of shiny material, rolls of rope, garden tools, books, a pair of scissors, some doorknobs, some nails. There were a few odd, useless things, too. For half a dozen carrots, one woman bought a pair of faucets, one with an H and one with a C. “What will you do with them?” asked Lina. People here got their water from long-handled pumps that stood at certain spots in the village. No one had indoor running water. “I’ll turn them upside down,” said the woman. “They’ll make good candle holders.”