It was going to take the people of Ember—all four hundred of them—several days just to build their outhouses. And already they were exhausted. How long before they got used to doing this kind of work? Doon couldn’t imagine feeling so tired day after day. He had blisters on his hands, his wrists and shoulders ached, and the back of his neck felt hot and sore, as if it had been burned. And he was strong and young! What about the older people and the younger children? Of course they’d all have to work if they expected to be fed, but—
His thoughts were interrupted by footsteps crunching behind him.
He turned. There was Tick Hassler, walking toward him across the field. Doon’s pulse quickened a little. Tick moved through the grass with a long stride, and when he came to the rocks alongside the river, he stepped from one to the next easily, never slipping or losing his balance. He raised a hand in greeting, and Doon waved back.
“Thinking deep thoughts?” Tick said, coming up beside Doon and smiling down at him.
“Not really,” said Doon. “Just watching things.”
“Ah,” said Tick. He put his hands on his hips and gazed out across the river. The setting sun shone on his face, making it glow, and draped his long shadow over the rocks. Doon wished he would sit down and talk. After a while, Tick said, “I’ll tell you something.”
Doon glanced up quickly. Tick’s eyes were a blue so light it was almost startling.
“This is a very fine place you’ve brought us to,” Tick said.
“Yes,” said Doon, pleased at being given the credit.
“You deserve a lot of respect,” Tick said. “You may be just a kid, but you took action when things got desperate. You were brave.”
Ordinarily, Doon didn’t pay much attention to what other people thought about him, but there was something about Tick that made it pleasing to have his good opinion. Somehow, he didn’t even feel insulted at being called “just a kid.” “Thank you,” he said. He thought surely Tick would sit down on the rock next to him now, and they would talk, but instead he stepped onto another rock, closer to the water, so that he had his back to Doon.
They both gazed for a while at the reddening sky. Then Tick turned around and said, “Really a wonderful place. Just look at all this!” He swept his arm in a wide arc, taking in the groves of trees, the fields, the river, and the glowing red ball of the sun.
“Yes,” said Doon. “It is wonderful.”
“We just need to get ourselves a little more comfortable,” Tick said. “I have ideas already. We could fix up this old building, first of all. Get people organized and working together. Get new glass for the windows, maybe. Pipe some water in from the river. What do you think?”
“Sure,” said Doon.
“Chet Noam wants to work with me,” Tick said. “Lizzie Bisco, too, and Allie Bright. How about you?”
“Sure,” said Doon again, a little disappointed that Tick had talked to all these other people before him.
“You’ll be great on the pipe project,” Tick said, “because of your experience.”
Doon nodded. Actually, there were lots of things he’d rather do than work with pipes again, as he had in the Ember Pipeworks. But it might actually be fun to work on a plumbing project with Tick. Energy blazed from Tick’s keen blue eyes.
“There’s so much we can do . . . ,” said Tick, and Doon waited to hear the end of his sentence, to hear what else he thought they could do, but Tick didn’t say any more. He just bent down, plucked a stone from between the bigger rocks, turned back to face the river again, and threw the stone with all his might. It sailed high up, a black dot against the scarlet sky, and came down with a splash in the shallow water on the far side of the river.
Then he twisted around and smiled at Doon, an exuberant, radiant smile. “See you,” he said, and he stepped across the rocks, climbed up the riverbank, and went back toward the hotel.
When he was gone, Doon picked up a stone and flung it as hard as he could. It plunked down in the middle of the river—not a bad throw, but not as good as Tick’s.
CHAPTER 8
The Roamer and the Bike
Several days passed. Poppy would get a little better and then a little worse, and Lina and Mrs. Murdo stayed with her nearly all the time, putting cool rags on her forehead and trying to get her to drink the medicine the doctor gave her. When Mrs. Murdo wasn’t caring for Poppy, she was prowling around the medicine room, inspecting the doctor’s jumbled collection of herbs and potions and powders, making notes in a tiny notebook, and rearranging things, trying to create some order.
Dr. Hester was often gone, seeing patients in the village, and when she was in the house she was doing ten things at once, or trying to, and being interrupted by patients who came to the door at all hours. It seemed to Lina that the people of Sparks were constantly cutting themselves, spraining their muscles, getting rashes, and falling ill. The doctor would give them medicine or bandage their wounds, and a few days later the patients would bring something in return—a basket of eggs, a jar of pickles, a bag of clean rags.
Lina had never seen anyone so disorganized as the doctor. She peeked into the medicine room once when the doctor was out and was amazed at the clutter in there—shelves and cupboards and tables piled with stuff in bottles and stuff in boxes and stuff in jars, all higgledy-piggledy. How Dr. Hester found anything she couldn’t imagine.
It took the doctor a couple of days even to get organized enough to figure out how Lina could help her. But when she did, she began giving her one chore after another, and sometimes several all at once, often forgetting that Lina didn’t know how to do them.
“Could you go and water the asparagus?” she’d say. Then before Lina could ask what asparagus was, and where to find it, and what to put the water in, she’d say, “And then can you rip some of those rags in the kitchen basket into strips for bandages? And when you’ve done that, maybe you could wipe the floor in the medicine room—I spilled something the other day, I think over by the window. And the chickens, the chickens—they need to be fed.” And then she’d be out the door, leaving Lina to remember the string of tasks and figure out how to do them.
Everything here seemed extremely inconvenient to Lina. To get water, you had to go outside the gate to a pump and work a stiff handle up and down. To go to the bathroom, you had to go out in back of the house to a little smelly shed. There was no light at night except for candles, and at first she’d thought there was no stove to cook on. “Oh, yes,” said the doctor, “that’s the stove there”—she pointed to the thing like a black iron barrel in the corner of the kitchen—“but I hardly ever use it in the summer. Too much trouble to keep the fire going, and it’s too hot anyway. We mainly eat cold food in summer.”
When she did want to cook something—boil a pot of water to cook an egg, for instance, or make tea—the doctor had to squat down, stuff some dry grass and twigs into the stove’s belly, and set them alight. Sometimes she used a match; sometimes she hit what looked like two rocks together until they made a spark and the grass caught fire. Then she had to feed in bigger and bigger twigs until the fire was finally hot enough. This fire seemed fairly safe to Lina, though she didn’t like to get too close to it; at least it was contained in its iron box. It wasn’t free to leap out at her like the fire in the fireplace. Fortunately, the doctor didn’t make another fire in the fireplace after that first night. As the days grew hotter and hotter, the nights were no longer cool. Extra warmth was the last thing they needed.
One day—a week or so after Lina first came to the doctor’s house—a patient came with news to tell as well as a wound to bind. She was a scrawny young woman with brownish teeth. She had a bad scratch on her wrist where she’d scraped it against some rusty wire. “There’s a roamer in the village,” she said. “Just arrived this morning.”
“What’s a roamer?” Lina asked.
The doctor, tying a rag around her patient’s wrist, said, “Roamers go out into the Empty Lands and bring things back.”
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“From the old places,” added the patient. “The ruined places.”
“My brother Caspar is a roamer!” said Torren. “And when I’m old enough, I’m going to be a roamer, too, and we’re going to be partners.”
This was the first time Lina had sensed real happiness in Torren. His little eyes shone with hope.
“That will be exciting,” Lina said. “Is it dangerous to be a roamer?”
“Oh, yes. Sometimes you run into other roamers trying to get the same things you want. Sometimes you’re attacked by bandits. You have to fight them off. Caspar has a whip.”
“A whip?”
“A great long cord! As long as this room, almost. If people get in his way, he lashes them.” He lifted his arm overhead and brought it down as if he were lashing something. “Whhhhtt! Whhhhtt!” he said.
“Now, stop that,” said the doctor absently, tying the final knot in the rag. The patient left, and Lina and the doctor and Torren, along with Mrs. Murdo, carrying Poppy, went down to the market plaza to see the roamer.
A crowd had assembled in the plaza. Lina looked for Doon, but she didn’t see him. She saw only a few Emberites, in fact; most of them must have been working in other places. But a great many villagers were there, clustered around a big truck. The truck was loaded with barrels and crates, and on it stood a brown-skinned woman with wiry muscles in her arms and legs. “I have been in the far north,” she cried out in a shrill, strong voice, “out in remote corners of the Empty Lands. I have traveled roads where I saw no human being for weeks on end. And in these distant regions, I came across houses and farms that had never before been searched. I have treasures for you today.” She beckoned with a long brown arm. “Step up and look.”
The crowd pressed forward. Apparently this roamer was known to the villagers. Some people called out greetings and questions.
“Did you bring us any writing paper this time, Mackie?”
“What about seeds?”
“What about tools?”
“And matches?”
“And clothes? I’m so tired of wearing homemade patchwork!”
“I have all that and more!” the woman called. “Come close. Special things first.” She bent over an open crate and rummaged around for a moment. When she stood up again, she was holding a blackened iron cooking pot, so big she had to use both hands to lift it. “What am I offered?” she cried.
“Half a bushel of dried apricots!”
“A bushel of peas!”
“Barrel of cornmeal!”
The woman listened, cocking her head, her eyebrows raised. She waited until the offers stopped, and then she pointed at a tall young woman with shiny black hair who had offered five loaves of apricot cornbread. “Done!” she said, and she lowered the pot into the young woman’s hands.
For the next special thing, the roamer reached into a big cardboard box. She brought out a smaller box colored blue and held it high. “Soap flakes!” she cried. “Twenty-four boxes of them!”
Dozens of people bid for these. They were all gone in minutes. Then came more cooking pans, two thick jackets of shiny material, rolls of rope, garden tools, books, a pair of scissors, some doorknobs, some nails. There were a few odd, useless things, too. For half a dozen carrots, one woman bought a pair of faucets, one with an H and one with a C. “What will you do with them?” asked Lina. People here got their water from long-handled pumps that stood at certain spots in the village. No one had indoor running water. “I’ll turn them upside down,” said the woman. “They’ll make good candle holders.”
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.