Aurora Page 11

  OLD ZENITH

  All day the sun beat down like a hammer. The sky tunnels hummed in the bludgeoning heat.

  Even now, as the red gong of the sun falls behind the city wall, the heat-hum hangs! the steamy dusk. Fox leans out of the window of the old steepled tower, desperate for a breath of air, but there’s none. The whooping coils that farm the winds high up on the sky towers are as stunned and still as the swamp dragons on the mudbanks below.

  Fox slumps down on the cool stone floor and turns a dial on the old Zenith radio. A sudden whine and crackle fill the room, as if a star just zipped through the window. Pandora sits bolt upright in a rattle of jewels. Fox fiddles with the dials, searching the soundwaves, ear pressed to the carved mahogany box as if listening for the click that will unlock a safe full of gold. All he hears is a fuzz of white noise.

  Old Zenith changed everything.

  Fox almost smashed it up for firewood when he found it in a corner of the museum. But something stalled his axe. He scraped off layers of dirt then scrubbed with his sleeve until a patch of dark wood appeared, shiny as a new nut.

  Beneath a century of grime Fox found a beautifully carved cabinet with the legend ZENITH RADIO set like a spiky jag of lightning on the front.

  Next to old Zenith, a bronze plaque on the museum wall listed all kinds of Revolutionary Inventions: telephones, cars, bicycles, photography, flushing toilets, electric light, steam-powered ships and trains, sewing machines, ice cream and Jelly Babies and many more mysteries – including radio.

  Fox didn’t know what any of it was. He’d lived the first seventeen years of his life in the sky empire where the outside world was hidden behind a great wall and history was locked in the past. He’d only ever snatched bewildering glimpses of life before the floods in the virtual news sites of the abandoned network of the Weave.

  After finding old Zenith, he ransacked the university bookstacks. There, among the mouldy pages, Fox solved the mystery of the radio. He read about the era of discovery that changed human life on the planet forever and underpinned everything that happened afterwards – from the industries that revolutionized millions of lives to the towering New World sky cities built to withstand the floods that devastated the polluted planet.

  Fox couldn’t believe he’d grown up swamped in the techno-wizardry of the sky cities yet knew nothing about the soundwaves that once connected people all across the Earth – a whole century before the old computer network of the Weave and two hundred years before the vast cyber-universe of the Noos.

  Radio waves.

  Invisible and forgotten.

  Tides of electromagnetic currents surging around the planet.

  The soundwaves cross gulfs of storm and silence to the survivors of the world’s floods, and buzz once again with the voices of the planet’s forgotten people. All of it unheard by the sky empire in its towers. The resurgence of radio has enabled Fox to reach out to the abandoned flood refugees of the Earth. He has stoked them up with stones that set alight their hopes and dreams, fired up a revolution to rescue them from wretched existences and amassed a global battle to win them new futures upon the remaining lands of the world – the precious high lands the sky empire wants to claim for itself.

  Savaged by storms on a devastated Earth, the survivors of the great floods once had no way of knowing what land or who else might be left in the world – the global soundwave connection has changed all that.

  Fox never forgot what Mara told him about her island in the Atlantic. We thought we were alone in the world, she said. All the old communication systems were dead. We didn’t know what existed on the rest of the Earth. I couldn’t believe it when I found you and you told me about the sky cities . . .

  Fox was just as amazed. He’d grown up in New Mungo believing there was no land left in the world. That lie has been amended now that young empire builders are needed for the conquest of the Northlands and other fertile high lands in the east and the south of the world. But still the Guardians maintain the greatest lie of all:

  We are the only ones. There is no one else in the world outside. All there is in the world belongs to us.

  But as the sky fleets head North and the young empire builders see otherwise, that lie will surely unravel too. Or will they, as the Guardians of the empire must believe, be so consumed with the ambitions of their masters that the reality of the world will not matter to them?

  If he had never discovered Mara, what would he, Fox wonders, be now? One of those empire builders headed North?

  The lost girl from the drowned island touched his heart and became part of him, part of the man he is now – because everything changed for him, everything he was and everything he thought he knew, when he heard her desperate story and he discovered the brutal truth about the flooded world and its refugees. His home would still be a sky city and the bright, questing spirit of his youth would have dulled and hardened over the years until he was no longer Fox, but David Stone, doubtless in league now with Mungo, his father, carrying on the work of Caledon’s dynasty; a vital cog in the machine of the empire, blocking his mind to the lies about the world . . .

  If he’d never known Mara, is that what he would have become?

  Is she still alive? Over fifteen years have passed since their connection died, yet Fox still hoards the hope that somehow, somewhere, in the home of the North Wind, she survived and gave birth to their child. A child who would be the same age now as Mara was when he knew her. Even if he survived the coming war and got himself there, how could he ever find them in that vast land mass of the North?

  Too much time has passed anyway. She never came back to the Weave so either she is dead or she has broken with the past to make a new life. No, the best he can do for Mara and his child, if they are alive in the North, is fight to keep that land free from the empire’s grasp. And if he must lose his life to keep theirs safe and free, so be it.

  The radio crackles. A voice rises above the hissing soundwaves. Fox grabs the earphones and turns the dial but the voice drowns in an ocean of white noise.

  It’s the heat. Messages zip across the planet on cool nights. Heat makes them sluggish and weak.

  A drop of sweat plops on to the radio’s polished wood. Fox wipes his face. The timing couldn’t be worse. Clogged-up communications is the last thing he needs at this crucial moment of the Surge. The solar winds of the night should clear the way for radio waves – but they also stir up the aurora storms. The vivid cascades of charged energy that stun the Northern skies at this time of year can wreck the radio signals too.

  Fox snuffs out the image of a young woman with hair the colour of winter’s midnight under a skyscape of brilliant aurora lights.

  ‘Time!’ Pandora jumps up from the bed of shredded books and grubby dresses that spills across the tower room and pins the tiny godbox to his collar, kisses his brow before she affixes his mindgem there, then pushes her lucky jade frog into his palm. ‘For good luck.’ Her voice thrills in his ear. ‘For our future.’

  The golden hands of the huge Chinese clock in the corner, a salvaged treasure from the museum, are about to entwine at the point of midnight. The radio waves are clearing at last. Now for the Noos. Fox connects up his godgem, gives a final tuning to the Zenith radio dials and grabs a thick pile of paper, the pages covered in his own handwriting.

  Operate in depth, said Lawrence of Arabia rather than traditional battle lines.

  So now he’s ready to do just that, in his last ever task in the netherworld before the Surge breaks into the sky cities of the world.

  THE END BEGINS

  Midnight is Fox time.

  Time for him to do the impossible and exist in three dimensions at once: the netherworld, the Noos and the radio waves of the world.

  Fox’s voice travels the night, bounding across the Earth’s soundwaves. A few scattered listeners soon became many as the fame of the Midnight Storyteller spread like a virus around the globe. Hundreds became thousands. Now millions listen in each night, hu
ddled beside radios in boat camps and in the ruins of drowned cities, in gypsea pirate fleets and precarious mountain hamlets, in the floating caravans of nomads who fish the sea-logged plains of the Earth – and in the sky cities too. For Fox has become a phenomenon in an empire where books and stories belong to the distant past, broadcasting from secret, ever-changing hubs deep in the cyberjungles of the rebel Noos weavers

  Strive above all, urged Lawrence of Arabia, to win hearts and minds.

  And he does.

  When he and Mara broke out of New Mungo and escaped to their separate destinies, Fox discovered that it wasn’t enough to cast people into crisis if you wanted to change their world. You had to ignite their spirits and give them dreams to reach for. His youthful attempt to stir up rebellion was extinguished almost as soon as it began, but this time the wildfire revolution he has sparked burns so deep and far it will not be stamped out.

  To this end, Fox tells the forgotten stories that are preserved in the old books of the netherworld, as fossils are in rock. Once upon a time, says the Midnight Storyteller, this is who we were. These were our battles and breakthroughs, our best and worst of times. These were our passions and terrors. This is how we loved and fought and laughed and wept, all on the same Earth, under the same sun, moon and star. This is who we are.

  Fox’s listeners in the flooded world cling to the tales that crackle from their radios as if to lifebelts in a storm, but his genius in the Noos has been to make Midnight an exotic harbour where frenzied Nooworlders come to anchor in one of the great stories of the lost world.

  Fox has bound them together in a spell of imagineering, a wondering about the world that was, but has he also roused the sky people’s curiosity about what might exist, now, beyond their towers and walls? Has the fear and apathy about the outside world, so carefully nurtured by their Guardians, finally been shattered by the Midnight Storyteller’s husky Once upon a time?

  As the sky empire descends into crisis and panic steams in the Noos, will its citizens – the ones who must hear this story – still dare to gather amid the storm to hear Fox’s final tale?

  They will come, Fox believes, because that’s what people have done for time out of mind. From the distant ages when the first humans shivered in caves with wind and wolves howling outside to the boat refugees on the wild oceans beyond the wall, people have gathered for a story to fire up their spirits in a stormy world.

  The story Fox will read now has never been told before. It is Mara’s story, the tragedy of the Earth’s sea-broken people. The most powerful part of this story, Fox will tell his army of listeners, is the ending. It has no ending, not yet. The end is still to be.

  You, he will tell the people of the world, are the storytellers now. You must decide what happens to the sea-broken people. How the story ends all depends on you.

  CANDLE, ALONE

  ‘Broom!’ Candle hugs her beloved slave as she enters the room. ‘You’ll never believe—’

  Broom shakes her head and puts her finger to her lips. Candle hears the footsteps that have followed Broom’s and falls silent.

  ‘The Pontifix wants to see you right away,’ says Broom.

  Candle lets out a wail. ‘He treats me like a slave, sending me away, fetching me . . .’

  ‘Something’s happened to upset him. Be careful,’ Broom warns, as she pushes her out of the door.

  Candle stomps through the palace after the guard. All day long she has waited to talk to Broom, who has been busy in the palace kitchen. Endless empty hours alone in her room have passed with only meals to punctuate the wretched boredom that is now Candle’s life. And now, just as Broom arrives and Candle is itching to find out what Broom meant earlier about escaping, bursting to tell her that Tuck knows about Mara, she must run to her strange, cold husband.

  Her father’s constant seafaring gave Candle precious freedom when he was away; she cannot bear this shut-in life. She will escape.

  But she must hide her feelings and calm herself now, as she enters his room.

  Tuck stands by the wide slab of rock he uses as a desk.

  ‘Bad news,’ he says gruffly, before she even has a chance to sit down. ‘It’s your father.’

  Candle stares at her husband, wondering what her father has done. It might be anything. His temper is as unpredictable as the moods of the sea goddess herself.

  ‘Rodenglaw’s boat didn’t return to Ilira,’ says Tuck.

  He pauses and Candle hears the wind moan around the palace.

  She shrugs, puzzled. Her father is always off somewhere or other – but where would he go in a wedding gondola?

  Tuck hesitates. ‘He is drowned,’ he says, quick and tense.

  Candle hears the words but they seem to bounce off her senselessly. She turns her head and looks through the layers of glass to the oceanic darkness outside.

  ‘But – but the sea was calm.’

  What is Tuck saying? He must be mistaken. How could a seafarer like her father, who has sailed on the ocean since he was a boy and knows the waters around Ilira better than his own face, drown in a calm fjord?

  ‘The gondola hit wreckage, I’m told.’ Tuck’s glance flickers.

  ‘A sea trap?’ Candle bursts out before she can stop herself. The Pontifix’s traps are meant to sink intruders and it was his own gondolier who took her father back down the fjord, so how could that be? The gondoliers know where the traps lie.

  Tuck frowns and mutters something about rival Sea Lords.

  ‘Another Sea Lord had him drowned?’ Candle thinks of all the rivals her father has fought and feuded with over the years.

  ‘The palace lookout found the wreckage of the boat on our shore,’ says Tuck, ignoring her question. ‘My guards have searched the waters and shores of the fjord. I’ll have them search again.’

  The reality of her father’s death is sinking in. Candle begins to tremble with shock. What could have hapened? Was it an accident? Or was it by another’s hand? Did some rival have him drowned?

  I didn’t hate him, she realizes. I didn’t want him dead. I only wanted him to love me and be kind.

  She remembers his final, unexpected wave and a sadness wells up in her that is beyond tears. Now she is all alone in the world, at the mercy of this strange man.

  The steamy gurgle of the geyser in the alcove sounds like a drowning man Candle covers her ears with her hands.

  ‘I want to go my room,’ she pleads.

  ‘This is your home,’ says Tuck, his voice suddenly gentle and lilting as a calm sea. ‘You are free to do as you please. The guards and slaves are here to look after you.’

  Free? thinks Candle, bitterly.

  He moves towards her but she has already turned away so an awkward kiss lands cold upon her ear.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But he was a cruel father,’ he adds unexpectedly. ‘I could tell.’

  It’s a relief to escape. In the corridor Candle waves the guard away, wanting to be alone. Only the hiss and gurgle of the geysers break the stillness of the palace. The ocean booms on the rocks outside. Last night, it was full of dark whispers, a hushed sea. Not a sea to drown in.

  A sudden thought filters through Candle’s shock.

  What if it wasn’t a rival Sea Lord but Tuck who made sure her father never made it back to Ilira? With Rodenglaw dead, it’s Tuck who will inherit all his ships and trade and wealth. Did her new husband have her father killed on her wedding day?

  INTRUDER AT THE PALACE

  Candle stops, lost. Wandering aimlessly, she has come to a dead end in the maze of glass

  ‘I will!’ a voice hisses.

  Candle jumps with fright. The voice came from the ground at her feet. She looks down and sees she has almost hurtled into a dark hole where the rocky floor gives way to a flight of steps. The steps lead to an underground cavern. Deep in the cavern is a brightness. Candle crouches and peers down into the cavern and sees a long table lit by an oil lamp. The glow of the lamp reflects dully on the metal table as the
moon does on a fogged sea.

  A girl’s face leans close to the lamp, towards two figures who sit with their backs to Candle.

  ‘You can’t stop me!’ the girl bursts out.

  ‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ says a familiar voice. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Broom!’ Candle cries. She clambers down the rocky steps.

  ‘Candle! What are you doing here?’ Broom turns around and rushes over. ‘It’s lucky the kitchen workers are all in bed. What would the Pontifix’s people think of you coming down here?’

  ‘But – my father – Broom, haven’t you heard?’

  Broom takes in her stricken face. She leads Candle to the table and sits her down.

  ‘What’s he done now?’ says one of the others at the table.

  Candle’s eyes have blurred with tears so it’s only when she hears the voice that she knows who it is.

  ‘Clay!’ Candle clings on to him as he grabs her in a hug. ‘You’re here?’

  She glances at the young kitchen girl at the table. ‘Send her away, Broom. I must talk.’

  ‘She’s a friend. She can be trusted,’ Broom assures her. ‘What’s happened, Candle? The guards know something but they wouldn’t tell.’

  Candle blurts out the story of Rodenglaw’s drowning and her suspicions about Tuck.

  ‘You can see why he’d do it,’ Clay agrees. ‘Now he gets everything, doesn’t he? Rodenglaw’s share in the cable trains, his ships, all his wealth and power in Ilira. And control over the new waterfall and sun energy industries. Rodenglaw promised him the plans, Mum.’

  ‘My plans,’ says Broom, ‘and he won’t be getting them now. But to do this so brazenly, on the very day he married Candle . . . ?’

  ‘A very convenient accident,’ says Clay. ‘But that’s what Tuck Culpy does. His fleets wreck trade boats and ships all the time. Why d’you think there’s so much work for scavengers? Piracy’s what made the Pontifix so powerful. Bridges are just his hobby, Mum. Piracy’s his real work. It’s what keeps other pirates away from Ilira There are old seafarers who swear he was a gypsea pirate before he was the Pontifix.’