Zenith Read Online Free Page B

look in your mirror, brush your hair and your teeth, have a shave.
    Grumpa would look wistful. The idea makes Tuck laugh. He can’t imagine waking up and staring at your own face instead of rushing out to fish or load up a gondola or seal a leak in a rusted boat. Not that Tuck does any of that, himself.
    He likes to look in the mirror, though it only shows his face in bits. Long, sun-bleached hair that blows across his face. Gypsea eyes, a deeper blue than his faded windwrap, narrowed by sharp winds and blades of sun. Weather-tanned cheeks, scoured by salty air. His Ma’s mouth. His Da’s strong nose.
    Grumpa told strange stories of how people once lived fixed to the Earth. He’d always use the old word, no matter what Ma said.
    Earth , he’d insist, rounding out the word. Not Urth. Earth! A good old word. It’s you youngsters who’ve made it a curse.
    It’s you oldsters who cursed it, Da would mutter, just too low for Grumpa’s crusty old ears. Tuck could hear, but Da would never explain what he meant.
    Tuck never could get his head around the idea of Earth. A world steady underfoot? That didn’t shift to the dance of the ocean? Even the word Earth is odd. It always made him snigger when Grumpa said it, all proud anddefiant, because Tuck couldn’t think of it as anything other than a curse.
    There were cities, Grumpa would tell him, and he’d rub his watery blue eyes. Great cities with homes and shops and tall buildings fixed to the Land. The cities would stretch on and on, but the Land stretched further, as far as you could see. You’d have to walk for days until you reached the sea. Before the fuel ran out, he added, you’d just jump in a car or a plane and go anywhere you wanted, anywhere in the world, in no time at all.
    Cars and planes? What are they? Tuck wanted to know.
    A plane, Grumpa explained, was a boat with wings that flew across the skies like a giant bird. A car was a boat that travelled across Land. People lived in houses fixed to the Earth. Tuck has taken the biggest rock he ever dredged up with a catch of fish, held it in his hand and tried to imagine Land as a rock bigger than the whole of Pomperoy. He has even tried to imagine it stretching as far as the sea. But he can’t.
    Sometimes he wonders if Grumpa dreamed it all up.
    Yet some people say there is still Land. Once, during a bad outbreak of sickness, one of the boats unchained from the rest and set out to sea. It was so long gone that everyone thought the family was lost. Many moons later the boat returned. Only some had survived and they were wounded and stunned with fear. They told a tale of a fiery island where a ferocious people live. A place where water thunders from the sky and boils up from the earth, they said. The ground runs with molten rivers and people bake to stone under a summer sun that burns day and night.
    Since then the Pomperoy gypseas have stayed anchored to the rig, safe from the terrors of Land. This patch of ocean is home. An unbroken horizon means security andpeace. Tuck’s gypsea heart beats to the rhythm of the waves. The spirit of the ocean dances in his soul.
    Now, he strolls the walkways around the lagoon that is the bustling heart of Pomperoy. A richly patterned windwrap catches his eye.
    That windwrap is a beauty. It belongs to his friend, Pendicle, and was sewn by his clan of industrious aunts. Tuck would do anything to have a windwrap like that. Instead of the Prender family emblem he’d have the Culpy crescent, a sharp silver moon, emblazoned on its back.
    Pendicle is with his father, doing the early-morning stocktake of the Prenders’ gondola fleet. Each boat is stocked with a jumble of old world goods, dredged up from the ocean. With a bit of ingenuity, any piece of junk can be crafted into something new. Tuck waves at Pendicle, but the look on his friend’s face warns him not to get any closer, at least not until Pendicle’s father has gone. Tuck is no longer welcome anywhere near Prender