The People of Sparks (18 page)

“I guess so,” Kenny said. He lowered his eyes, then looked up again. “Probably they mean to send food with you,” he said. “To get you through the winter. That must be it.” He gave a small, hopeful smile. “That must be it,” he said again, and he darted away toward the front door and went into the house.

Doon followed. His vision of the future, already shadowed by anxiety, had just grown several shades darker.

One morning a week or so later, as Doon came out the door of room 215, he nearly bumped into Tick Hassler, who was running at full speed down the hall. “Something’s happened!” Tick called to him.

“What?” said Doon, breaking into a run himself to keep up with Tick.

“I don’t know,” Tick said. “But I heard people out in front, shouting.”

Tick must have jumped out of bed and not taken time to do anything but throw on his clothes, Doon thought. He hadn’t combed his hair, he hadn’t tied his shoes, he hadn’t even washed his face—there were gray smudges on his neck and below his ear. In the usually well-groomed Tick, these were signs of serious alarm. Doon’s heart beat faster. He took the stairs three at a time, crossed the lobby, and, still following Tick, pushed through the front door.

Outside, a crowd stood in the field, staring up at the hotel. Doon ran out to join them and turned around to see what they were seeing.

Someone had scrawled words on the walls of the Pioneer—tremendous black letters, rough and scratchy, as if written with burnt wood. “GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE,” said the message, over and over. “GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE. GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE.” The few ground-floor windows that hadn’t already been broken were broken now.

Doon stood staring for a minute, feeling sick, and then anger rose in him. This was the work of whoever had slopped that mud message onto the plaza—another ugly message, bolder this time. Around him the others were rushing forward, shouting, staring at the scrawled words. Some of them stood silent and glum, with arms folded or hands in pockets. Others shook their fists in the air and vowed revenge. Tick was more furious than anyone, but he didn’t yell. Doon watched him weaving through the crowd, seizing one person after another by the arm, talking in a voice as sharp as a blade but low and steady. His light blue eyes glinted like steel.

“It’s what I thought,” Tick said. “This shows it. They’ve pretended to be kind, but their kindness isn’t real. Here’s what we can know from now on: they hate us.” He narrowed his eyes, lowered his voice almost to a hiss, and said it again. “
They hate us.
They want to get rid of us. Well, I’ll tell you what.” People all around turned toward him. “They want us to leave, but I’m not leaving. Are you?” He scanned the crowd.

“No,” said someone.

Doon thought about what Kenny had told him: winter, cold, rain. Maybe Tick is right, he thought. They
do
hate us.

“Do you
like
being called cavepeople?” Tick cried. “Do you
like
being told to crawl back into a cave?”

And angry voices, twenty, fifty, a hundred of them, cried, “No, no!”

Doon went up close to the wall of the hotel and examined the words scratched there. He pictured the people who had done it, clutching their burnt chunks of wood, writing with big, angry strokes in the dark of the night. Yes, Tick was right. Hatred seethed in those jagged letters. He felt almost as if their strokes had scraped open his skin.

                    
The Second Town Meeting

The three town leaders called a meeting after these unpleasant incidents—the tomato-throwing, and the graffiti on the plaza and on the hotel wall. They met in the tower room of the town hall to talk.

“This is unfortunate,” Mary said. “I’m afraid these spiteful deeds will cause bad feelings to get worse on both sides.”

Wilmer nodded. “Feelings are already bad,” he said.

“These cavepeople,” said Ben, “are not as civilized as we are. People who will destroy two whole crates of tomatoes might do anything.”

“We don’t know for sure that one of them did it,” Mary said.

“Come now, Mary,” said Ben. “I think it’s safe to assume.”

“And what about the people who wrote ‘Go Back to Your Cave’ on the hotel walls?” said Mary.

“The problem is,” said Ben, “we don’t know who did that. But I must say that I think they were expressing an understandable frustration. These cavepeople have adversely impacted our way of life. The food we give them comes out of the mouths of our own people.”

“We do have a bit of a surplus in the storehouse,” said Mary.

“But why should we use it for
them
? It’s our protection against hard times.” Ben smoothed his beard and went on. “I have a rule to suggest,” he said. “I think it would be best if the cavepeople didn’t eat in the homes of families anymore. I think it’s too hard on our families to have strangers eating with them every day. It would be better if the families simply hand them their food parcels when they arrive. They can eat somewhere else.”

“Where?” asked Mary.

Ben waved a hand in the direction of the river. “On the riverbank,” he said. “Or at the edge of a field. Or on the road. I really don’t care where they eat,” he said, “as long as they don’t intrude on our households.”

“Quite a few people have complained of the inconvenience,” said Wilmer. “The Parton family seems the most unhappy.”

“That’s because they have that evil boy,” said Ben. “The one who threw the tomatoes.”

“We don’t know that he’s the one who threw them,” said Mary.

“We are as sure as we need to be,” said Ben.

So they voted: should they make that rule?

Mary voted no.

Ben voted yes.

Wilmer hesitated for several seconds, his eyes darting between Mary and Ben. Finally he voted yes.

“I suppose this will make things better,” said Wilmer.

“I’m sure it will,” said Ben. “We need to make it clear that this town belongs to us. This is
our
place, and these people are only here because of our generosity.”

“I think we
have
made it clear,” said Mary. “We went to all that trouble to make a flag and put it up on the town hall.”

“No doubt that will help,” said Ben. “Still, we must constantly reinforce the message: if they don’t behave themselves, they can’t expect to stay here even as long as six months.”

“They’ve just begun to get used to things,” said Mary. “They’re not ready to leave.”

“That,” said Ben, “is not our problem.”

CHAPTER 18

                    
Caspar’s Quest

On the last night of their journey to the city, the travelers stayed in a real house. It was roofless, but most of its walls still stood, providing shelter from the wind that blew strongly off the water. There was no furniture in the house, of course. They sat on the bare floor.

Caspar was excited that night. He talked so much that he almost forgot to eat—his third travelers’ cake sat on his knee getting cold. At one point, he turned to face Lina. “Now, listen,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, so you’ll understand the importance of what we’re doing.” He paused. Then he spoke in a low, vibrating voice. “I happen to know,” he said, “that there is a treasure in the city.”

“There is?” said Lina. “How do you know?”

“Old rhymes and songs speak of it,” said Caspar.

“The trouble is,” said Maddy, “those old rhymes and songs don’t make sense anymore. If they ever did.”

“They make sense to me,” Caspar said. “But that’s because I’ve studied them carefully and have found out their deeper meaning.”

“What do the old rhymes say?” Lina asked.

“Various things,” said Caspar, “depending on what version you hear. But they’re always about a treasure in an ancient city.” He looked into the air and sang tunelessly: “‘There’s buried treasure in the ancient city. Remember, remember from times of old. . . .’ One of them starts like that.”

“Why hasn’t anyone searched for the treasure before?” asked Lina.

“I’m sure many people have,” Caspar said. “But no one has found it.”

“How do you know?” Lina asked.

“Because obviously, if someone had, we would have heard about it.”

Lina thought about this. She saw some holes in Caspar’s logic. Someone could have found the treasure, taken it away, and never said a word.

“Another problem,” said Maddy, “is that these rumors never say what city the treasure is in. It could be some city a thousand miles away.”

Caspar gave an exasperated sigh and set down his cup of water. He raised two fingers and pointed them at Maddy. “Listen,” he said. “Be logical. It’s
here
that the rumors are passed around. I’ve never heard them in the far north, where I was last year. I’ve never heard them in the far east, either. This talk of treasure in a city—I hear it
here,
and within a hundred or so miles of here.”

“Still,” Maddy said. “There are at least three ancient cities within a hundred miles of here.”

“But only one
great
ancient city,” said Caspar. “That’s the one we’re going to.”

“A city is big,” Lina said, remembering the myriad streets and buildings of Ember. “How will you know where in the city to look for the treasure?”

A crafty look came over Caspar’s face. He smiled, with his lips pressed together and his eyes narrowed. “That’s where my careful study comes in,” he said. “Many, many hours of study. I’ve written down every version of the rhyme I’ve heard—which is a great many, forty-seven to be exact. I’ve compared them, word for word, letter for letter.
Then
—” Caspar paused. He looked at them in a way Lina recognized—it was the same way Torren looked when he was about to make a big impression. “
Then
I applied my skill with numbers.”

“Numbers?” said Lina.

“That’s right. What you do is, you count the letters in the words. You count in all different ways, until you start to see a pattern. The pattern is the key to the code, and the code tells you the secret of the message.” He sat back, looking highly pleased with himself.

“And the secret of the message . . . ,” Lina said, confused.

“Is the location of the treasure, of course!” Caspar slapped a hand on his big thigh. “It’s obvious, once you’ve figured it out. Street numbers, building numbers—it’s all there.”

“Well, then,” said Maddy, “what is the location of the treasure?”

Caspar jerked his head back. “You think I’d tell you?” he said.

“I thought I was your partner in this,” said Maddy.

“You’ll know when it’s time,” said Caspar. “Until then, the information stays strictly with me.”

Lina glanced at Maddy in time to see her rolling her eyes toward the sky.

That night, Lina couldn’t sleep. Animal sounds kept her awake—scrambling and snuffling just beyond the walls, and a strange hooting in the distance. Dark thoughts troubled her, too. Caspar’s search sounded all wrong somehow. She didn’t want to help him. The thought of it filled her with dread. She lay on the hard floor of the house, staring at the black sky, feeling worse and worse, until finally she decided she must try to think about something else. So she said to herself, over and over for a long time, “Tomorrow I’ll see the city, tomorrow I’ll see the city.”

They traveled the next day, mile after mile, along a road that was nearly straight, though they had to trace a winding path around the places where the pavement was pitted or thrust up or crumbled away. On their right was the vast green sheet of water, bordered by waving grasses where great white birds stood knee-deep in pools and rose like floating paper, and flocks of black birds flew up trilling into the air, their shoulders red as blood. On the left was a forest of trees so thick they hid all but the briefest glimpses of the ruined buildings among them.

Lina’s excitement was rising. She rode standing up now. She’d climbed back into the crate and stuck her feet between the third and fourth slats of the side, which put her at the right height for holding on to the top edge and looking forward. She could see over Caspar’s and Maddy’s heads to the rear ends of the oxen, their sharp hip bones sticking up, left-right, left-right, their tasseled tails switching back and forth. The sun sank lower in the sky until it was directly ahead, blazing straight into Lina’s eyes. “We’ll be there before night,” Caspar said.

The road began to slope upward. Hills rose on either side, and soon Lina could no longer see the water, just the brown humps of the hills, spotted with clumps of trees and scarred here and there by the remains of old roads and buildings. The air was cooler. They rounded a curve—and all at once the city lay before them.

CHAPTER 19

                    
Unfairness, and
What to Do About It

In the days after the hateful words had been scrawled on the wall, Doon went to work grudgingly. He didn’t want to work with people who did such awful things. He had to remind himself that they weren’t
all
ignorant brutes, and that they
were
still giving the Emberites shelter and food—even though they were no longer allowing them to eat with their lunchtime families, and even though they were planning to send them out to fend for themselves in the winter. But the people who had written those words—no one was trying to find out who they were, no one was punishing them. Who was the one getting the evil looks and being called bad names?
He
was, he who had done nothing! He couldn’t stand the
wrongness
of it. He felt it physically, as if he were wearing clothes that were too tight, a shirt that pinched him under the arms, pants that were too short and too snug. Unfair, unfair, he kept thinking. He couldn’t
bear
unfairness.

One day he was assigned to clean the fountain in the center of the plaza. Chugger handed him his tools for the job: a bucket, a long stick with a metal scraper on one end, and a pile of rags.

Chugger lifted up one of the bricks in the pavement near the fountain. Under it was a round handle. “You turn this off first,” he said. “It shuts off the water coming in from the river.” He gave it several turns, and the spouting water in the middle of the fountain dipped and vanished. “Now the water in the basin will drain through the outflow pipe,” Chugger said. “It goes back into the river. When the basin is empty, you climb in there and scrub. I want this thing clean as a drinking glass when you’re through.”