The People of Sparks (10 page)

“Sure,” said Doon.

“Right now?” said Kenny.

“Okay,” said Doon.

Kenny led him through the streets of the village, going first toward the river and then away from it, along a street that led out away from the houses and into a grove of oak trees.

“There,” said Kenny, pointing ahead.

At first Doon saw only the long line of a roof above the trees. Then the street opened out into a big empty space that, he could see, had once been covered with pavement. Now the pavement was cracked and weeds grew up through it. To the left of this span of pavement stood a huge building—a rectangular structure so tremendous it could have held both the Ember school and the Gathering Hall. At the end facing them were two massive wooden doors, which Kenny walked toward. “In the ancient days,” Kenny said, “you didn’t have to open these. They were made of glass, and they had eyes and opened as soon as they saw you.”

“That can’t be,” said Doon.

“It was, though,” Kenny said.

Above the doors was a sign missing most of its letters. It was a long sign, so you could tell whatever it used to say was a long word, but now all it said was UPE ARK.

“What does that mean?” Doon asked, pointing to the sign.

“I don’t know,” Kenny said. “We just call it the Ark. It’s our storehouse. We’re going around to the back.”

He led the way around the side of the building to a small door in the back wall, which he opened. He had to push hard, because something was behind the door that had to be shoved out of the way.

Doon peered into the darkness. At first he couldn’t make out what he was seeing. Lumpy mountains appeared to fill the room to the ceiling and spread from wall to wall. He took a step forward, but his foot jammed against something hard on the floor.

“There’s answers to everything in here,” said Kenny.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Doon saw that the room was full of—was it boxes? No, they almost looked like books. They lay in toppling stacks, giant heaps, sliding mounds, as if they had been dumped in from an enormous bucket. Some of them lay open, with their pages crumpled. Some were so warped that their covers curved. A smell of ancient dust and mold arose from them. He reached down and picked one up. Its cover was furred with dust. He opened it and saw pages of tiny neat printing. It
was
a book, yes. Not like the books of Ember—these were much bigger and sturdier, and had much more writing. He riffled the pages—more dust flew up—but he couldn’t tell what the book was about. One page said, “Chapter XV. The Thermodynamics of Aluminum.” He had no idea what that meant.

“This is amazing,” said Doon. “Can I take some back to the hotel?”

“I guess so,” said Kenny. “No one will notice.”

Doon set down the book about thermodynamics. He brushed his smudged fingers against his pants. He felt like a hungry person who had been led to an immense banquet, far more food than he could eat in his whole life. He was starving, all of a sudden, for the knowledge hidden in these books. He reached out and chose three of them blindly, not even looking at the titles.

“Don’t you want some?” he said to Kenny.

“No,” said Kenny. “I already read four books in school. That was enough. We learned about history. Pre and post.”

“Pre and post?”

“Pre-Disaster and post-Disaster.”

“Oh,” said Doon. “What do you like to do, then?” he asked.

“Just poke around,” said Kenny. “I poke around in the woods. You could come with me sometime,” he said, looking up at Doon with hopeful eyes. “If you want.”

“Maybe I will,” Doon said, though he was thinking probably he wouldn’t. He had so many other things in mind to do. Besides, Kenny was a little young to be his friend.

During the first week after the Emberites arrived, Martha Parton had showed off her cooking skills at lunch every day. She made mashed potato pie, fresh peas with chives, walnut croquettes, mushroom gravy, cheese popovers, red-onion-and-bean dumplings, scrambled eggs with tomato jam, apricot pudding, and apple butter cookies. Every time she brought in a new dish, she said, “I don’t imagine you had these where you came from,” or “This will be new to you,” and the Ember guests would say, “You’re right, we’ve never had this! We’ve never tasted anything so delicious! It’s wonderful!” and Martha’s mouth would crimp into a small, pleased smile.

As time went on, however, the food at lunchtime became plainer. Martha got tired of making something new every day to impress her guests. What they found in their dinner and breakfast parcels became less interesting, too—usually it was some chunks of cornbread, ten or twelve carrot sticks, and a few slimy bits of goat cheese. If they were lucky, there might be a hard-boiled egg. Martha took to mentioning, as if it were a little joke, that even though the Partons were given extra food from the storehouse because of the extra people, it
seemed
as if they had less! Wasn’t that odd!

Doon started to feel hungry a fair amount of the time, and he knew others did, too. His father never spoke of it, but Edward Pocket griped about the food every evening. “I know I’m old and small,” he’d say, polishing off the last crumbs of both his dinner and his breakfast, “but that doesn’t mean I can live on air.”

One day Ordney made a disturbing announcement. The cabbage crop, he said, was going to be smaller than expected. Worms had got into it. They’d have only about two-thirds of the cabbage they had last year.

After this, not only was the food at lunchtime plainer, but there was less of it. One week, they had string beans, last year’s pickled cabbage, and goat’s milk pudding for lunch four days in a row, and when they opened their baskets at dinnertime, they found only a bottle of cold potato soup to serve as both dinner and breakfast.

Clary had started a garden just a few days after the Emberites arrived at the Pioneer Hotel. She cleared a patch of ground about forty feet square not far from the riverbank and planted seeds that she had brought from Ember. Children who were too little to go to work in the village helped her pull weeds and fetch buckets of water from the river. Old people sat in the shade giving her advice. After a while, green shoots appeared in rows on the patch of dirt, and Clary was out there every morning and every evening, tending them. In several weeks, there would be a little extra food for the people of Ember out in their own front yard.

But it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Some people were already grumbling about their skimpy dinner parcels. One night, when Doon was in room 215 eating with his father and the others, he heard voices in the hall and went out to see a cluster of people a few doors down. Lizzie was there—Doon spotted the red cloud of her hair. Tick was there, too. His voice carried above the rest. “Well, I got three carrots, a plum, and a chunk of sour cheese,” he said. “Lucky me. That ought to keep me going for a while.”

A few people laughed drily at this. Doon heard Lizzie giggle.

“It’ll keep you going for maybe half an hour,” someone said. “I don’t know how they think we can work, with nothing but scraps to eat.”

Along the hall, other doors opened, and other voices joined in.

“All I got was some limp green beans and a few clumps of porridge!”

“I’ve had carrot soup three days in a row!”

Some people counseled patience. “We shouldn’t complain,” someone said. “It’s hard for them to give us food. We should be grateful for—”

“I’m tired of being grateful!” someone else broke in. “They promised to feed us, but they’re starving us instead!”

“It seems to me,” said Tick, “that we should do something about this. I think maybe I’ll mention the problem at lunch tomorrow. Maybe we
all
should. Maybe we should tell them it’s very hard to work when you’re hungry.”

“I’ll tell them!” cried Lizzie’s high voice, and other voices rose in agreement. An excited, angry babble filled the hallway, drowning out those who spoke for patience. “I’ll speak up!” “We have to protest!” “Tick is so right!”

“Tick for mayor!” someone shouted, laughing.

For a second Tick looked surprised. Then his eyes glowed with pleasure. He raised a fist in the air. “We’ll stand up for ourselves!” he said, and the people around him roared and raised their fists, too.

Doon turned to his father and Edward and Sadge, who had all come to the door to see what was going on. “We should tell the Partons,” he said. “If we’re working, we need enough to eat. It’s only fair.”

“Of course, they don’t
have
to give us
anything,
” said Doon’s father. “They’re giving what they think they can spare.” He looked sadly at the dry chunk of cornbread in his hand. “But I suppose it can’t hurt to mention it,” he said, “without being rude, of course. I imagine they’re doing the best they can.”

Mrs. Polster agreed to be the one to bring the matter up. She did so at lunch the next day. They were having cold spinach soup.

“I have a request,” she said firmly. She set down her soup spoon.

Everyone looked toward her. Doon felt a jitter in his stomach.

“We have noticed,” said Mrs. Polster, “that the food parcels you so generously give us have become considerably
smaller
lately. We find that when we have eaten what is within, we are still, to be frank,
hungry.
This is a difficulty for us.”

There was silence. Everyone stared at Mrs. Polster, who sat very calmly with her hands in her lap, waiting for an answer.

“What?” said Martha Parton at last. “Did I hear right?”

“I believe so,” said Mrs. Polster, “unless you have ear trouble. I said we are not getting quite enough to eat.”

Martha laughed a one-note laugh, a laugh of disbelief. Kenny stopped chewing and looked frightened. Ordney drew himself up and cleared his throat. “I am surprised,” he said. “I had thought you people understood the situation.”

“We do, indeed,” said Doon’s father hastily. “We’re very grateful for what you’ve done for us. It’s just that . . .”

“We’re working quite hard,” said Clary.

“It’s a very small amount . . . ,” said Miss Thorn timidly.

“For both dinner and breakfast,” added Edward Pocket.

“Last night,” said Doon, “I had a boiled egg and three carrots for dinner. And nothing for breakfast this morning.”

There was a silence again, a terrible, vibrating silence.

Then Ordney leaned forward, gripping the edge of the table with his fingertips. “Now, listen here,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can with what has been asked of us. And I must say, a great deal has been asked. Suddenly we’re supposed to feed twice as many people as before! More than twice as many!” He glared at the Emberites, shifting his eyes to each one in turn. “And yet we do not have twice as much food as we did before. It’s true that each family is being given a little extra from the storehouse for this emergency. But not much.
Sparks village just does not have enough for four hundred extra people.
Are we supposed to feed you instead of our own families? Why should we? Who
are
you, anyway, you strangers from some city no one’s ever heard of?”

By the end of this speech, Ordney’s face was a deep red and his voice was shaking with rage.

Doon felt frozen. All he could think was,
He’s right. Of course he’s right. But we’re right, too.

Everyone else must have been thinking the same thing. They finished their soup in silence. At the end of the meal, Martha dumped the food parcels on the table instead of handing them out. They each took one, but Doon’s father was the only person who said thank you. Later, when Doon opened his parcel, he found a wedge of cabbage leaves turning yellow at the edges and a hunk of some sort of bean cake. His stomach clenched. They’re tired of helping us, he thought. What are we going to do?

CHAPTER 10

                    
Restless Weeks

Poppy was now almost well. She still slept more than usual, but when she wasn’t sleeping she tromped around the doctor’s house pulling spoons off the table and spilling cups of water and crumpling pages of books. That is, she was almost her old self. So Lina often asked Mrs. Murdo if it wasn’t time for them to go and live with the others at the Pioneer Hotel. Mrs. Murdo always said she wasn’t quite ready. They’d wait until the brother came, she said. Lina had a feeling the real reason was that she liked helping the doctor. She was always poring over the doctor’s big medicine books, and helping her pick her herbs and mix her remedies. So they stayed on.

And Lina worked for the doctor. It wasn’t that she didn’t like working. But in Ember, she’d had an adventurous job, an important job. She’d run with her messages all over the city—running the way she loved to run, so fast she almost flew. It was hard for her to stay in one place all day. She felt restless and bored.

She did a huge amount of cooking—well, not cooking exactly, since the doctor rarely wanted to bother making a fire in the stove, but chopping and peeling and slicing and mixing. She wiped up spilled medicines and herbal solutions from the counters, she swept dirt from the floor, she pulled down cobwebs from the ceiling. There were always rags to be torn into bandages. There were always herbs to be pounded into powder and bottles to be labeled and plants to be watered. While everyone else was out in the village, doing new, interesting things and meeting new people, Lina was stuck doing
housework.

One day she asked the doctor if there was any extra paper she could use for drawing. There wasn’t, the doctor said, but if she could find blank pages at the backs of books, she could use those. So Lina tore out eight blank pages, the doctor gave her a pencil, and she began drawing whenever she had a few minutes of free time.

Out of habit, she drew the city she had always drawn—she hardly knew how to draw anything else. But she thought that since she was here in the real world, she should be able to imagine the city much better than before. She remembered the first drawing she’d done with her colored pencils, back in Ember, when she’d made the sky blue instead of its normal black. She had thought it was just an imaginary thing, a little crazy, to draw a blue sky. But now look! The sky really was blue! She must have known it somehow, in some secret place in her mind. Something in her was a little bit magic, maybe—she could see beyond what was right in front of her eyes to things that used to be, or things that could be in the future.