The People of Sparks (4 page)

A path led to a wooden gate, which the doctor opened. They came into a shadowy, leaf-littered courtyard paved with uneven bricks. On three sides were the three wings of the house, like a square-cornered U. The eaves of the roof sloped down to form a walkway all around. In the failing light, Lina could just see that the courtyard was crowded with plants, some growing in the ground and some in pots of all sizes. Vines wound up the columns of the walkway and crawled along the edge of the roof.

“Come inside,” the doctor said. She led the way to a door in the central part of the house. She and the boy went in. Lina stopped just inside the doorway, and Mrs. Murdo came up behind her, Poppy in her arms. They stood peering into the gloom. There was an odd pungent smell—like mushrooms or leaf mold, only sharper.

The doctor disappeared for a moment, and when she came back she held a lit candle. She moved around the room lighting more—two candles, three candles, four, until a wavery light filled the central part of the room. The corners remained in darkness.

“Come in, come in,” the doctor said impatiently.

Lina moved forward. She felt grit beneath the soles of her shoes, and the tickle of dust in her nose. She was in a long, low room with clutter everywhere—clothes draped over the backs of armchairs, a shoe on a saggy couch, a plate with some bits of food on it sitting on the windowsill. At one end of the room were two doors, both of them closed. At the back, a stairway rose into a dark square hole in the ceiling. At the other end of the room, in the corner, was an open doorway—leading, Lina guessed, to the kitchen. Beside this doorway was a kind of hollow in the wall, framed by stones and containing some sticks and scraps of paper.

The doctor stooped down before this hollow place and held her candle to the sticks and paper there. In a moment, a flame leapt up. It was a bigger flame than Lina had ever seen, like a terrible orange hand, reaching up and out. Lina’s heart knocked hard against her ribs. She stepped backward, bumping into Mrs. Murdo. They stood staring, Mrs. Murdo with a hand clutching Lina’s shoulder.

The doctor turned around and saw them. “What’s the matter?” she said.

Lina couldn’t speak. Her eyes were fixed on the flames, which leapt higher and crackled.

Mrs. Murdo tried to answer. “It’s, ah, it’s—” She inclined her head toward the end of the room, where the first flame had become a dozen flames, licking upward, sending out flashes of orange light.

“Oh!” said the doctor. “The fire? You’re not used to fire?”

Mrs. Murdo managed to smile apologetically. Lina just stared.

“It stays in the fireplace,” the doctor said. “Not at all dangerous.”

In Ember, there was never fire unless there was danger—someone’s electric wiring had frayed and ignited, or a pot holder had fallen on a stove’s electric burner. The only fire Lina had seen that wasn’t dangerous was the tiny flame of a candle. This fire scared her.

In the window glass, reflections glimmered. The windows were set so deeply into the walls that there was a ledge at the bottom, wide enough to sit on. The boy, Torren, hiked himself up on one of these ledges and sat there, kicking his feet against the cabinet set in the wall below it. “Afraid of fire,” he said in a low, scornful voice.

“Come in,” the doctor said. “You can sit over there, if you like.” She pointed to some chairs at the other end of the room, far from the fire, so that was where Lina and Mrs. Murdo sat. Poppy woke up enough to give a weak wail, and then she slumped into Mrs. Murdo’s lap. “This will likely be the last fire of the season, anyway,” said the doctor. “Nights will be getting warmer soon. We won’t need one.”

A creak sounded from outside, and then rapid footsteps. Someone pounded on the door. Lina clutched Mrs. Murdo’s hand.

But the doctor only sighed and moved to answer the knock. “Oh, it’s you, William,” she said. “What do you need?”

“Some of that ointment,” said a man’s voice. “I need it right now. My wife cut her hand. It’s bleeding all over.”

“Come in, come in, I’ll get it,” the doctor said, and she went into another room and rummaged around while the man stood shyly just inside the door, looking out of the corners of his eyes at Lina and Mrs. Murdo.

The doctor brought him his jar of ointment, and he went away. No more than ten minutes later, another knock came, this time from a young woman who wanted some willow bark medicine for her sister, who had a pounding headache. Again the doctor rattled around in the other room. She came out with a small bottle, and the woman hurried off with it.

“Are you the only doctor here?” Mrs. Murdo inquired.

“Yes,” said Dr. Hester. “It’s a never-ending job.” She suddenly looked worried. “Did I give William the right jar? Yes, yes, the one on the third shelf, I’m sure I did.” She gave a frazzled sigh. “Now let’s tend to your little girl. Put her down here.” She patted the couch that stood against the wall. “And wrap her in this.” She retrieved a knitted blanket that had fallen on the floor, gave it a shake, and handed it to Mrs. Murdo. “I’ll give her a swallow of medicine.”

Poppy accepted two spoonfuls of medicine—it was something reddish that Dr. Hester poured from a jar—and spit out the third, whimpering. Lina’s heart ached to see Poppy so sick. Most of the time, Poppy was a ball of energy, so quick and curious you never knew what she’d do next. She might chew up a valuable document, for instance, or trot off on an exploration of her own at exactly the wrong moment. Now she was limp and pale, like a little sprout that hadn’t been watered.

Mrs. Murdo laid her on the bed. Lina sat by her and stroked her hair, and quite soon she went to sleep. The doctor disappeared into the kitchen, and Torren climbed the stairs and vanished into the room above.

All at once Lina was overcome with tiredness. The disorderly house, the unfriendly boy, the fire . . . all of it was strange and disturbing. And Poppy was terribly sick, which worried Lina so much that she felt a little sick herself. She sat down by Mrs. Murdo and laid her head on Mrs. Murdo’s lap. She was vaguely aware of clattering and chopping noises coming from the kitchen, and then she dozed off into a confusing dream of lights and shadows. . . .

“Dinner!” shouted Torren. Lina bolted upright, and he laughed. “Have you heard of food?” he said. “Have you heard of eating?”

They sat at the table, all of them but Poppy, and the doctor ladled out something from a big bowl. Lina wasn’t sure what it was. Cold potatoes, she thought, and something else. She ate it because she was hungry. But when she had eaten she suddenly became so tired again that she could hardly move.

“Quite tasty,” said Mrs. Murdo. “Thank you.”

“Well,” said the doctor. “Certainly. You’re welcome.” She started to stand up, then sat down again, looking flustered. “Maybe you’d like to read? Or . . . walk around? Or . . .”

“We’re a bit tired,” said Mrs. Murdo. “Perhaps we could go to bed.”

Dr. Hester’s face brightened. “Bed, yes,” she said, standing up. “Of course, why didn’t I . . . Let’s see. Where will we put you?” She looked around, as if an extra bed might be hidden in the mess. “The loft, I suppose.”

“No!” cried Torren. “That’s my room!”

“It’s the only place with two beds,” said Dr. Hester. Picking up a candle, she made her way through the clutter to the stairway.

“They’ll touch my things! And Caspar’s things!” cried Torren.

“Don’t be silly,” said Dr. Hester, starting up the stairs.

“But where will I sleep?” Torren wailed.

“In the medicine room,” said Dr. Hester. Tears had appeared in Torren’s eyes, but the doctor didn’t notice. She disappeared into the loft, and for a few minutes Lina heard thumps and scrapes from above.

“Come on up,” the doctor called.

Lina climbed the stairs, and Mrs. Murdo came after, carrying Poppy. By the light of the doctor’s candle, Lina saw two beds under a sloping ceiling. There was a chest at the foot of each bed. Some clothes hung from hooks, and some boxes were neatly lined up on the sill of the one window.

“Two beds, but three of you,” said the doctor, frowning. “We could . . . hmm. We could put the baby . . .”

“It’s all right,” Lina said. “She’ll sleep with me.”

And a few minutes later, she was in bed, Poppy in the crook of her arm, covers drawn over them. “Good night,” Mrs. Murdo said from the other bed, and the candle was blown out, and the room went dark—but not as dark as the rooms in Ember at night. Lina could still see a faint gray rectangle where the window was, because of the lights in the sky, the silver circle and the bright pinpoints. What are they called? she wondered. And who is Caspar? And how can the doctor stand to have that huge, awful fire right there on the floor of her house?

Everything here was the opposite of Ember. Ember was dark and cold; this place was bright and hot. Ember was orderly; this place was disorderly. In Ember, everything was familiar to her. Here everything was strange. Will I learn to like it here? she wondered. Will I ever feel at home? She held Poppy tight against her and listened to her snuffly breathing for a long time before she fell asleep.

                    
The First Town Meeting

While Lina slept, the three town leaders were holding a meeting. They sat at a table in the tower room of the town hall, which looked out over the plaza. Mary’s hands were clasped tightly in front of her. Ben scowled, his gray eyebrows bunched together, deepening the two lines between them. Wilmer pulled nervously on one ear and looked from Mary to Ben and back to Mary.

“They can’t stay here,” said Mary. “There are too many of them. Where would we put them? How would we feed them?”

“Yes,” said Wilmer. “But where can they go?”

No one spoke. They had no answer for that question. Outside the settlement of Sparks, the Empty Lands stretched for miles in all directions.

“They could go up to Pine Gap,” said Wilmer. “Maybe.”

Mary snorted and shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “That’s at least two weeks’ walk away. How could these feeble people travel that far? How could they carry enough food with them? Where would they
get
enough food, unless we emptied our storehouse and gave them everything?”

Wilmer nodded, knowing she was right. The people of Sparks knew of only three other settlements, and they’d heard from the roamers that those places were smaller and poorer than Sparks. Their inhabitants wouldn’t want extra mouths to feed, either.

The three of them gazed out the window and down at the moonlit plaza, filled with strange sleeping people from a city under the earth. Four hundred of them, with no food, no possessions to speak of, and nowhere to go.

“What I fail to understand,” said Ben, “is why this particular misfortune has happened to us.” He paused, looked into the air to his left, and frowned. This was a habit of his; he seemed to need a pause and a frown every now and then to put together his thoughts. Wilmer and Mary had gotten used to waiting through these pauses. “I don’t see that we deserve it,” Ben went on after a few seconds, “having labored as diligently as we have. And just when we are starting to prosper at last, after so many years of . . . well, adversity is a mild word for it.”

The others nodded, thinking of the hard years. There’d been winters when people shivered in tents and ate chopped-up roots and shriveled nuts. There had been years of drought and plagues of tomato worms and devastating crop failures that meant people had nothing to eat for months but cabbage and potatoes. There had been times when people had to work so hard to stay alive that they sometimes died just from being too tired to go on. No one wanted to go back to those times.

“So what do we do,” said Mary, “if they can’t stay and they can’t go? What is the right thing to do?”

The others sat silent.

“Well, there’s the Pioneer,” said Wilmer. “As a temporary solution.”

“True,” said Ben.

“A good thought,” said Mary, and Wilmer beamed. “So what about this,” Mary went on. “We’ll let them stay in the Pioneer. We’ll give them water and food—we do have some extra in the storehouse. In exchange, they work—they help in the fields, they help with building, they do whatever there is to do. We’d have to teach them how. As far as I can see, they know nothing. After a while, when they’re stronger, and when they know better how to get along, they can move on. They can set up their own village somewhere else.”

“We’ll have to watch them carefully if we let them stay,” said Ben. “They’re strange. We don’t know what they might do.”

“They seem fairly ordinary to me,” said Mary. “Except for the business about living in a cave.”

“You believed that?” said Ben.

Mary shrugged. “The question is, shall we let them stay?”

“How long would we have to keep them,” asked Wilmer, “before they were ready to go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe six months? Let’s see. It’s near the end of Flowering now.” Mary counted out the months on her fingers. “Shining, Burning, Browning, Cooling, Falling, Chilling. They could stay through the summer and fall seasons and leave at the end of Chilling.”

“That would mean they’d be on their own for the winter,” Wilmer pointed out.

“That’s right,” said Ben. “Are you suggesting we should keep them even longer? We’ll be stretching ourselves to keep them at all.”

They fell silent again, considering this.

Finally Mary spoke. “Shall we let them stay for six months, then?” she said. “And teach them as much as we can?”

No one really liked this idea. They thought of the food the refugees would need, which would mean less for their own people, and the bother of teaching them all the skills they’d need to survive on their own. Each one—Mary, Wilmer, and especially Ben—wished the unfortunate cave people would simply vanish.

But they weren’t going to vanish, and the leaders of Sparks knew that they must for the sake of their consciences do the right thing. They wanted to be wise, good leaders, unlike the leaders of the past, whose terrible mistakes had led to the Disaster. So they would be open-minded. They would be generous.

With this in mind, the three leaders voted:

Mary voted yes, the cave people should stay.