Aurora (15 page)

Clay draws out his dagger; Broom slaps his hand down.

‘I’ll sort this,’ she says.

‘He carries a
gun
!’ Clay hisses at her, but his mother is already at the cave door.

He and Lily hold their breaths as Broom stalls the Scut.

‘Listen to her!’ Clay makes a retching sound. ‘He stinks like a festering fish and she’s—’

‘Shh!’ Lily puts her hand over his mouth.

‘I’ll take the girl as a kitchen slave for the palace – Clay knew I was looking for one – and the Pontifix won’t forget your kindness,’ Broom is saying, in a voice like warmed oil. ‘I will see to that.’

‘This wedding’s already cost me a day’s trade,’ growls the Scut, but there’s a sly smile in his voice.

‘Well worth it,’ coaxes Broom, ‘if you end up on good terms with a man like Tuck Culpy.’

The cave door gives a rusty squeal. There’s a rough laugh and some scuffling. Clay reaches for his dagger again but before he can act Broom bursts back through the door, looking flustered.

‘Quick,’ she gasps.

‘What’re we doing, Mum? Huh? Did you
kiss
fish-breath out there?’Clay makes the vomiting noise again.

‘Never mind that,’ snaps Broom. ‘Just do as you’re told.’

THE LIGHT OF ILIRA

Candle’s wedding day spins around her in a dazzle.

The Pontifix’s guards escorted her down the mountain under the new spring sun as the whirling songs of the windpipers rang out from the cavernous market halls of the mountain. The steep rockways were crammed with cheering citizens, their faces lit with smiles as she passed by. And lit up by
her
, Candle saw, as the necklace caught the weak sunbeams and burned them into fiery sparkles that made the eyes of other girls narrow with envy as her wedding procession swept past.

Now Candle steps into the steam gondola that waits in the harbour. The boat is decorated with bright billowing silks from distant Siberian ports. She takes her place in the cushioned seat across from her father who sits bolt upright, looking pained. He is furious, Candle notes with pleasure, that such a fuss is being made over her.

She bursts out laughing. The gondola’s small funnel is behind Rodenglaw and it seems as though he’s hissing steam from the top of his head. Her father glares at her as a long ribbon of silk slaps across his face. Candle giggles again. After all, what can he do to her now?

The crowd falls quiet. Candle stifles her laughter and looks around to see why, wondering at all the faces suddenly turned towards the sky. Steam from the gondola clouds her view but she senses the ripple of panic in the crowds. Her father frowns, glancing upward, and orders the gondolier to set off.

Candle forgets the strange panic as the wedding gondola
puff-puffs
towards the glass palace on the rocky islet deep in the great fjord. Her old, ordinary self has been left behind in her father’s caves. The wedding has magicked her into someone new.

Light of Ilira!
the people shout from the bridges, waving at the colourful spectacle of the gondola and its bride. Candle’s brilliant necklace surrounds her with an aura of longed-for sunlight after the long darkness of winter. In that moment the girl has a fleeting sense of what Ilira wants from her as the Pontifix’s bride, what she could
be
in her new life . . . some bright lodestar for her people that might bring Candle her own power in the world.

The gondola rounds an islet so cragged its rocks look as if they’ve been uprooted violently from an unwilling Earth. The graceful masts of the
Great Skua
, the Pontifix’s ship, loom in front. Panic fills Candle as the gondola slides into the roughest of harbours and she sees the tall figure of the Pontifix with the vivid silks of his windwrap gusting around him – the man who rules Ilira and who will now rule her young life.

THE MAGIC GLOBE

The ceremony is a short, cold shock of words that fly over Candle’s head.

She stands on the landing rock of the harbour, clutching her polar-bear cloak around her, swallowing angry tears. She had expected a grand wedding in the palace in front of the important families of Ilira. Why be dressed up in furs and gems for a trade deal between two men on a wind-blasted rock?

Her send-off from Ilira was only a spectacle for the people. Even the painted shaman – whose body charms of bones, walrus teeth and seashells make him rattle in the wind – chants the marriage spell as fast as he can then blows a blessing of air, ash, seawater, rain and earth over them, looking mightily bored.

Now Rodenglaw pushes her towards the tall man with sunlit hair. The light is behind him and Candle can’t see his face. He leans forward and gives her a cold kiss on the cheek. Candle feels numb. Is that it? Is it done? Is she married now?

The shaman is already striding up the rocky steps to the palace. She must be.

‘There was a fleet in the sky, Pontifix – did you see?’ blurts her father. As soon as he has spoken Rodenglaw looks as if he’d like to bite off his own tongue. The Pontifix is said to be proud and unpredictable. Drawing attention to the weakness of his eyes is rash. ‘I – I mean, your lookouts, did they spy them? Maybe you saw through your eyebox . . .’

Rodenglaw glances nervously at the slim silver box that hangs on a chain from the Pontifix’s belt and helps him see the world. The old seafarers say people once captured pictures of the world in such boxes, though Candle can’t imagine how.

‘Not the first fleets we’ve seen,’ her new husband cuts in, his voice as cold as his kiss.

‘Ah,’ nods Rodenglaw. ‘But these planes – where do they go?’

‘Ships,’ the Pontifix corrects him. ‘Sky ships. Planes have wings, like birds. These look like whales in the sky. They fly northward from the South.’

His demeanour is calm but Candle senses he is deeply rattled, as is Rodenglaw, by these alien presences in then skies.

She looks towards the chink of open sea. Beyond the last bend of the fjord are the armed ships that guard Ilira. Unarmed boats from other ports are given safe passage once they’ve been searched by the Pontifix’s guards. Armed ships are made to surrender or are wrecked by lethal rocks and man-made traps in the sea. The Pontifix is revered for his power to keep their fjord safe from the pirates the city so greatly fears but even he, thinks Candle, cannot rule Ilira’s skies as he does its seas.

Rodenglaw gives a gruff goodbye, anxious to leave now that he’s traded his daughter, insulted the Pontifix’s one weakness and shown his ignorance over sky ships. A father should surely embrace his newly married daughter at such a moment, thinks Candle, but Rodenglaw is already in the gondola. Yet as it puffs away he glances over his shoulder and the strange, shamed expression Candle saw after his earlier brutality flits across his weathered face. She raises a hand, expecting nothing in return for her bare little wave. But slowly her father lifts his own hand and dips his head in the slightest of bows. Candle could not have been more amazed if he’d blown her a kiss.

Rodenglaw’s gondola disappears behind a ridge of rock, leaving a ghostly drift of steam.

The tall man beside her speaks and she jumps.
What did he say
? The wind has snatched his words away.

Her stomach feels like a basketful of needles as she follows her new husband up the rocky pathway to his palace. Candle panics as she realizes she can’t see the city from here. The fat rump of Bear Mountain blocks it out. The doorway of her new home faces away from Ilira, towards the open sea.

The glass palace seems to sizzle. Steam rises from its domed roof. Sunlight sparkles on curving, mottled walls made of cemented fragments of bottle glass. It’s said that a million broken bottles were scavenged from seabed and shore to build the Pontifix’s dream. Candle shades her eyes against the glare to snatch glances at her new husband.

His long hair is the colour of a winter moon and his beard barely frosts his face. The crinkles around his eyes are not caused by age, Candle realizes with huge relief, because he’s not old at all. It’s because he peers at the world with piercing eyes that don’t, she thinks, look weak to her.

Until now, Tuck Culpy has been a godlike presence on a bridge or sailing the fjord in a gondola his hair and bright windwrap streaming in the wind. No ordinary man could create wonders like a palace made of glass and such majestic bridges, or could scare away the marauding pirates that ransack the rest of the North.

Candle feels dazed. Is it really possible that she is married to this man?

The silks of his windwrap ripple around him as he walks, the colours as vivid as the aurora storm Candle watched cascade across the sky last night, too nervous to sleep. She limps to keep up, feet blistered by the red shoes, as he leads her into the palace through a whalebone arch. Once inside, the Pontifix stumbles slightly, his movements suddenly uncertain as if his natural element is under the wide sky riven by the wind.

A guard leads the way through a maze of corridors. Now Candle sees why the palace seems to sizzle. Hot geysers hiss within alcoves of rock. Like steamy fireplaces, they warm the air. The mottled walls fill the palace with a dappled, watery light. Mysterious objects – sea scavenges, she guesses – are shelved in the glass.

When they reach what must be the heart of the palace, the Pontifix gestures for her to enter a curtained doorway. Through the sealskin curtain is a large, round room with a wide stone table in the centre. More sea junk clutters the rocks that are scattered like small tables across the fur-carpeted floor. A geyser gurgles lazily at the far end of the room. A rack of cutlasses hang on the wall, the curving blades like the talons of a grant bird.

‘Tartoq.’

She jumps. Only her father calls her Tartoq, if he calls her anything at all.

‘Don’t be scared,’ says the Pontifix. ‘Sit down.’

Candle looks around and sees she must sit beside him on a huge bed of furs. He blinks as she moves and her necklace catches the light. How much can he see? His eyes seem to follow the bright glitter of the necklace. Maybe that’s why she was to wear it, so that he knows where she is.

‘You have your own room and your slave,’ he says in the kindly voice of an adult to a child ‘Everything you need. It
is
Tartoq, eh?’

He’s not even sure of her name. Candle hesitates. Broom has urged her to be careful, but also to begin as a human being.

‘My
own
name is Candle,’ she says. ‘I have a wedding gift for you.’

She takes the crescent-shaped halo from the goose-feather bag. The Pontifix frowns as she places it in his hand.

‘My eye,’ he mutters, lifting the small silver box that hangs from his belt. A snout shoots out as the Pontifix puts the box to his eyes. He seems to use the silver snout to see, like an eye on a stalk, pointing it at the gift as he peers through the box.

‘
Urth
,’ he exclaims. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘I – I found it.’

She hopes he can’t hear the lie in her voice. Slaves are not supposed to keep scavenges so she can’t risk saying it was Clay.

‘You
found
it? Where?’

Candle casts around for an answer she should have prepared. Gulls shriek and she sees a flock of fluttering shadows in the spangled dome above her head.

‘A bird,’ she lies again. ‘An eagle! It flew into my cave and dropped it.’