The People of Sparks (9 page)

When the roamer brought out a handful of jewels, Lina gasped. She had never seen such things—necklaces and bracelets made of gleaming stones and silver chains. But only a few people seemed interested in them, and they bid hardly anything—one girl bid a couple of potatoes, but a man got them for a slightly used pair of sandals. “If my wife doesn’t want them,” he said, “I’ll use them to pretty up my oxen.”

The roamer brought out the last of her wares—packets of paper, boxes of safety pins, some spoons and forks. The doctor stepped up to buy a set of small glass bottles.

“Dr. Hester!” the roamer said. “Good to see you!”

“And you, Mackie,” said the doctor. “It’s been a long time.”

“I was hoping you’d be here,” the roamer went on. “I ran into your nephew the other day.”

“Caspar?” cried Torren in a voice so piercing that several people looked up, startled. “Where is he?”

“He was up in the apple country,” said Mackie. “I told him I was coming down here, and he said to tell you he’s heading for home.”

“Is that right,” said the doctor. She was clearly not as excited as Torren. “We haven’t seen him for quite a while.”

“One year, ten months, and nineteen days,” said Torren. “When will he be here? Did he say?”

“Should be soon,” said the roamer. She was putting the little bottles into a cloth bag. “I’d guess within the next two weeks or so.”

When the roamer’s sale was over, Lina walked home along the river road with the doctor and Mrs. Murdo and Poppy, who was asleep in Mrs. Murdo’s arms. Torren leapt ahead, his thin legs splaying out sideways. He bounced off steps, jumped onto walls, leapt up to grab branches of trees, and swung from them.

As they neared the doctor’s house, Torren, who was way ahead of them by now, suddenly turned around and raced back. “You have to get out of our room!” he said to Lina and Mrs. Murdo. “My brother will want his own room, and he’ll want to be with me. You all have to move.”

“Fine,” said Lina. “We will. We’ll go live with our own people as soon as Poppy’s well enough.”

Torren’s narrow face lit up. “Good, good, good!” he cried. “When are you leaving?”

“Not
today,
” said Lina. “Not right this
minute.
”

“But soon!” Torren cried. He skipped ahead of them again, through the gate and across the courtyard.

The doctor said not to mind Torren, he was being rude because he was so excited. But it seemed to Lina that Dr. Hester didn’t see clearly when it came to Torren. He wasn’t rude just when he was excited, he was rude nearly all the time. The doctor was so pre-occupied with her work that she hardly noticed him. Maybe if she’d pay him more attention, Lina thought, he wouldn’t be so awful.

But he
was
awful, and Lina would be glad to get away from him. Two weeks, she thought. Then we’ll meet Caspar the Great, and if Poppy is well by then, Torren can have his room back and we’ll go and live with Doon and the others.

Now and then, Lina saw people on wheels going by on the road in front of the doctor’s house. The only wheeled vehicles Lina had ever seen were the heavy wooden carts in Ember. But these people were riding beautiful, slender devices, two big wheels per person. They glided by, their feet going round and round. She wanted to do it, too! So
badly,
she wanted to. “What are they?” she asked the doctor.

“Bikes, of course,” said the doctor. “You’ve never seen one?”

“No,” said Lina, looking at a bike with longing. If she could have a bike, she thought, she could go even faster than when she ran. She could go so fast and so far. . . . She looked out toward the endless rolling hills. She could go everywhere. She could go to wherever the roads ended.

“I wish I could ride one,” she said.

“Well, you can, if you want,” said the doctor. “There’s an old one out behind the toolshed. I suppose it still works.”

“There is?” Lina nearly dropped the basket of eggs she had just gathered. “May I get it now?”

“I guess so,” said the doctor. “But would you mind watering the parsley first? And if you could just shell these peas . . . and maybe wash that spinach . . .”

Lina did these tasks in a fever of impatience, and when she was finished she dashed out to the shed. The bike was leaning against the shed wall. It was old but beautiful—made of wires and slender pipes and rods, some of them silver under their coat of dust, and some of them red. Thin, weedy vines wove among the spokes of the bike’s wheels, and cobwebs draped its seat. Lina took hold of the two handles and pulled the bike from its nest. She wheeled it out onto the road in front of the house and brushed the cobwebs and dry leaves and bits of grass off it, and then she swung one leg over and settled herself on the seat.

Now what?

She spent the rest of the morning figuring it out. She pushed on the pedals, rolled forward, tipped over sideways, and had to put her feet down. She rolled forward again but didn’t know how to turn. She fell off. She heaved the bike upright and tried again. She fell off again. After an hour or so of this, she gave up and went inside for a while.

And later, when she tried again, something had changed. She had the feel of it in her legs now, or somewhere in her. She rolled forward, she put a foot on the pedal and pushed, she rolled farther, she brought up the other foot, and magically, her body understood for a second what to do. She was sailing; her feet were going round and round. A smile broke over her face. She held on, feet going round, breath-less, breeze against her face—a whole long distance, maybe five yards, before suddenly she was nervous and dragged her feet along the ground to stop. She stood holding the handlebars, her mouth open in amazement.

And by the end of the day she had it. She could ride back and forth on the road, she could stop whenever she wanted to. She could even turn around corners without putting a foot down.

“I’m going to see Doon,” she told Mrs. Murdo. She was longing to see Doon, longing to talk to someone she really knew. Mrs. Murdo was fine, of course, but she was a grown-up. Lina wanted to be with a
friend.
She got on the bike and rode, sweeping down the river road, into the plaza, where she asked someone for directions, and out the other side of the town to the hotel.

When she got there, she stopped for a moment just to stare. The enormous old building looked to her like a wonderful place to live. She felt a sudden longing to have her own room there, back among her old friends and neighbors.

It was nearly evening by then. People were sitting on the hotel steps in the last rays of the setting sun, eating their dinners from their food parcels and talking. Some were down by the river, cooling their feet, splashing water onto their faces. Over by the farthest wing of the hotel, a few boys were gathered around another boy, who was sitting on a fallen tree talking to them. Maybe Doon was over there.

She wheeled her bike toward them—the ground here was too rough and weedy to ride on. Her old friends and neighbors called out to her as she passed, and she waved at them, glad to be back among people she knew.

When she got closer to the group of boys, she saw that Doon was among them. He and a couple of others were listening to that tall dark-haired boy—what was his name, Tigg? Tim? He’d been a cart puller in Ember, she thought. He laughed as she came up, a ringing, confident laugh, and all the other boys laughed, too.

She went up behind Doon and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around. She grinned at him. “Look, Doon!” she said. “I have a bike!”

He seemed astonished to see her. “Oh!” he said. “Lina!”

“Come and talk to me,” she said.

His eyes shifted back toward the tall boy. “Okay,” he said, but he didn’t move.

“Come on!” said Lina, tugging at his jacket.

They walked down toward the river. Lina leaned the bike against a tree, and she and Doon sat facing each other on the ground.

“What a huge place!” she said, waving an arm at the Pioneer Hotel, and talking fast in her eagerness. “What’s it like? Will you show me around? Poppy is a little better, and maybe in a couple of weeks we can come and live here, too. With you. And with everyone.”

Doon nodded. “That would be good,” he said.

“It’s kind of lonely at the doctor’s house,” Lina went on. “There’s a boy there who doesn’t like us, and the doctor is so busy she can hardly think, and her house is a mess, and I have to do a million chores.” She paused for breath. “Today we saw a roamer, Doon.”

“A roamer?”

She explained what a roamer was. Doon listened, but she saw his eyes veer back toward the group of boys.

“Who is that boy?” she asked. “The one who’s talking?”

“Tick Hassler,” said Doon.

Lina turned around and looked at him. He was handsome, she thought. His black hair was thick and glossy, and his face was all sharp angles, as if it had been carved from wood. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“Sort of,” said Doon. “I mean—I’m just getting to know him.”

“Oh,” said Lina. “Do you know which room Lizzie is in?”

Doon said he didn’t. “I don’t stay inside very much,” he said. “It’s kind of dark and dismal in there. What I like is being outside.” He pointed up into the branches of the tree, where little fluttery things were hopping around. “Remember when we first saw those?” he said. “When we’d just come up from Ember? I learned that they’re called birds. When you start really looking at them, you see there’s all different kinds. I’ve seen ones with a yellow chest, and ones with stripes on their wings, and ones with red heads. There’s even one that’s bright blue.” He gazed upward. “It’s strange, isn’t it? Why have all these different kinds, I wonder? Just for the fun of it?”

A burst of laughter came from the group of boys around Tick Hassler. Doon glanced over at them.

“Do you like it here, Doon?” Lina said. “In the village of Sparks, I mean?”

“I do,” said Doon. “I like it a lot.”

“Me too,” said Lina. “Mostly.”

“But it sort of worries me that we have to leave in six months,” Doon said. “There’s so much we need to learn.”

“Well, I guess so,” said Lina. “But maybe if we leave . . . I mean, I still wish . . .”

“Wish what?” said Doon when she trailed off.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She’d been going to say she wished they’d found the city she used to dream of. But she was afraid Doon might think that was silly.

The sun was going down. Shadows grew longer. “Show me your room before I have to go,” Lina said, “so I’ll know where to find you.”

Tick was walking away, and the other boys were following him. Doon gazed after them. “I can’t right now,” he said. “I will next time you come.”

“All right,” Lina said. She got up from the ground and swatted the leaves off her pants. She picked up her bike. “I’ll see you sometime,” she said, and she rode back to the doctor’s house feeling lonelier than she had before.

CHAPTER 9

                    
Hard, Hungry Work

Instead of getting easier as the days went on, work for the people of Ember got harder. It wasn’t just the work—it was the heat they had to work in. Every day was hotter than the last. Doon had never felt this warm in his life—it was like being cooked. All the people of Ember felt this way. They sweated, their skin turned red and stung and peeled off, and the brightness of the sky hurt their eyes. They got terrible headaches. Sometimes one of them would drop to the ground in a faint, just from being too hot. At times like these, people thought, This is a dreadful place we have come to. They put their hands over their eyes, missing the familiar darkness.

The team leaders tried to be understanding when their workers drooped and fainted. But the people of Sparks were used to the heat; beside them, the people of Ember seemed like weaklings. A few times, Doon saw the leader of his team press his lips together and drum his fingers against his leg when one of the Emberites had to sit down and rest.

Doon’s team leader was Chugger Frisk, a big, stubble-jawed man who didn’t talk much except to give directions. Every day he sent his team wherever it was most needed. Doon did all kinds of jobs over the next few weeks. He dug ditches for the pipes that conducted water from the river to the crops in the fields. He repaired the wagons that hauled the produce home from the fields. He milked the goats out in the goat pasture and made sure the water troughs for the oxen were full. He picked fruit, built fences, planted seeds, stirred vats of soap, and dug chicken droppings into the cabbage field.

Except for being so hot, he didn’t mind the work. He was getting strong, and he
liked
being strong. He liked feeling the muscles in his arms getting harder, and he liked being taller (he knew he was taller, because his old pants were too short). The feeling of being a new person in this new world stayed with him. He would be thirteen soon—not a child any- more. Work was making him sturdy and ready for anything.

Besides, as he worked he was finding out all kinds of things he wanted to learn. How did the pumps work that brought water up from the river to the fields? How was cheese made, and shoes, and candles? Where did they get the ice that kept things cold in their big ice house? What were the bushy-tailed animals that scurried up trees, and the long, rope-like animals that he sometimes almost stepped on in the grass? He wanted to know how houses were built, and what glass was made of, and how bicycles worked. It was exciting, having so much to learn. But every time he remembered that he and his people had less than six months to learn it—less than six months to master all the skills they’d need to build a town of their own—a worm of fear twisted in his stomach.

Chugger wouldn’t answer questions. He was too busy giving directions or working. So Doon often asked his questions at lunch. Sometimes Ordney answered him, sometimes Martha did. Ordney’s answers were more like lectures, and Martha’s were more like boasts. After a while it was clear that both of them were getting tired of questions, so Doon asked fewer of them. One day, Kenny followed him outside after lunch and stretched up to whisper in his ear. “I can show you where there’s answers to your questions,” he said. “Want me to?”