About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
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Friday, February 24, 2006
Anjsbourg
Category: story, 05:32 PMAnjsbourg. I remember that Allain and I stood on that ridge for a long time, staring down at the valley below us. We were both silent - it felt as though uttering a single word would have been somehow improper, as if what the place demanded was silence. We looked down over the scrubland, and the thin rim of broken houses around the outside until, in some wordless agreement, we walked down the gentle slope and into the remains of the city.
As we approached the bottom of the valley, Allain pulled on my coat a little with one hand, stopping me. He drew out a device, a radiation detector - I think you call them Geiger counters - from his pocket and did a broad sweep around us. Nothing. The odd flutter of background radiation, but nothing out of the ordinary. Not that we'd really been expecting any radiation, but we knew we had to be careful. Allain's eyes met mine - he was frowning, looked a little worried. I wondered if he was going to tell me to go back to the car. I wouldn't have gone, of course, but I would have understood his asking. Whatever happened here had happened a long time ago, but an atmosphere remained. Maybe it was just the reminders of such a quantity of human suffering.
We walked along the perimeter of the city, where the broken houses were. I was struck by how foreign they looked, how clearly unlike Perplex City. Where roofs or parts of roofs remained I could see that they were made with some pink-coloured tile and each sloped gently to one side, as if they'd been swept that way by a giant hand ruffling through them. I looked at those roofs, thinking about how the water would drip off them when it rained, and how they'd make a good place to sit in the sun. I wondered if the people here ever used to sit on their roofs, or if it just wasn't done. I thought of how there was no one to ask, and I felt like crying.
We walked on. Around a corner, between two houses, there was a mosaic on the wall. There was a sun, with a face in the middle, its mouth its eyes screwed tightly shut. There were four men standing underneath holding pointed poles - each one had a different expression on his face. One was smiling, one was crying, one was frowning and red-cheeked with anger, one had his eyes closed as though he was asleep. On the other side of the picture, the artist had put growing plants, with flowers of green and gold, red and purple. Allain and I stood and looked at this for a long time. I ran my fingers over the surface of the mosaic. To whoever made it, to the people who looked at it, it was probably as clear as day what it represented. But we had no way to know.
Further on we passed by houses with stone benches outside, set at the right angle to catch the afternoon sun, and a larger building, decorated with carved mazes like you see on some buildings in the old Town. In one house, the roof had collapsed downward, making a large sheltered area where some raccoon-like animals had built a nest. Many of the other buildings made homes for nesting birds. It seemed to me that we might have been the first people here in a hundred years, in two hundred years.
And then, we rounded a corner. There was a place, behind a large colonnaded structure where it looked as though there had once been gardens, and a triangular-shaped pool. And there, on a slight rise in the land, sheltered on three sides by collapsed walls, were two large, modern tents. Proper tents - the kind you can buy in any camping shop in Perplex City today.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Travelling to Anjsbourg
Category: story, 07:24 PMI'm so sorry I'm writing infrequently. Out here, my contact with the key network is so limited, and so much of that has to be used to keep up the pretence to my friends and my family that I'm still working at a nature reserve in the mountains. I'll try to fill you in on as much as I can, but I think the story of what's happened in the past two weeks will take a while to send. I hope you can be patient.
Firstly, Allain's insisted I make it clear to you all that we haven't been travelling for 3,000 miles in a straight line! We take what roads or tracks exist, and they tend to be winding and circuitous. Added to that, we had to go nearly 1,000 miles out of our way - 500 there and 500 back - to go around a range of mountains whose name I don't even know, not to mention numerous more minor diversions around forests, lakes and ravines. There are no bridges or tunnels or ways cut through the trees. No one has been this way before us to make it easier for us. When we come to a river that's too wide to cross, we have to go upstream until we find the place where it's narrower. Still, as the crow (or one of your aeroplanes) flies, we're about 1,600 miles from Perplex City now. Sometimes I wonder if we're going to fall off the edge of the world, like Madna does in the stories. Maybe, like him, we'll meet our shadows on the other side.
After I last wrote to you, we began travelling even more slowly. We came across more abandoned houses, slowly at first, only one every 10 or 20 miles, and then more frequently, even two or three clumped together. They were all in the same state of disrepair, all looked like they hadn't been inhabited for centuries. But still, we're looking for Claire Castille, we had to check every one.
As we travelled further, we found that some of the houses had strange marks on them. Only to one side - the side we're travelling toward. We started to see these marks on some of the larger rock formations as well. Black streaks, etched into the rock. Like the stones at the base of a campfire, like the air burned on them. Allain's been making notes and collecting samples and taking pictures with his key. We don't talk about what we think might have caused them. We both have the same suspicion and it has to do with the war, with Viendenbourg, with what we've come here to find. It seems to make Allain happy to collect the specimens, although I don't know what he's planning to do with them. He says his mother always taught him how important it was to collect "scientific evidence" even in the days they used to go for country walks together, looking for signs that spring was coming. I can't help wondering what Claire's been looking for evidence of, what Allain's looking for now.
But, after several days of travelling like that - slowly, meticulously, collecting samples, coming across more and more scarred rocks, I think we've now found what it was evidence of. We brought the car up a low hill, just enough to conceal the valley below from sight. We're used to this now. We go slowly, in case there's a sheer drop the other side. There was a falling off on the other side of this rise, a dip in the earth, enough so that we had a view across maybe two or three miles of valley. Empty valley, for the most part, filled with scrubby plants, a river running through it down towards the sea. A good place for a settlement. Someone else must have thought so too because, on the outskirts of this valley, where the rocks curl over to give a little protection to the area underneath, there were houses. Broken houses, but houses, in a wide half-moon shape, extending around the circumference. Like scraps of crust left in a pie dish after the pie had been tipped out. The remains of Anjsbourg.
Friday, February 3, 2006
Back on the road
Category: story, 04:51 PMWe've been travelling for just over two weeks now and, as I expected, my key signal has been intermittent. For some reason we seem to have hit a good spot the past few days, perhaps because we're travelling throughcountry at relatively high altitudes, so I've taken the chance to read through, and reply to, a lot of mail from home. I see a few of you noticed that I'd posted something to my blog - it seemed like the best idea. I didn't want my dad noticing that I hadn't posted anything and wondering why. I feel worse and worse about lying, though. Perhaps because what I say is getting further and further from the truth.
So, an update. For the past two weeks we've been heading north and west, averaging about 200 miles a day, taking it in turns to drive. We're not travelling especially quickly - lots of the areas we're going through aren't properly mapped, the roads are poor and we often have to stop to navigate. Also, we're not travelling at night - we don't know what's out here and we don't especially want to run into anything big (a cougar, a mountain, a human being) that comes up on us unexpectedly. Still, we've been making progress. The days have been getting noticeably shorter and colder as we get further north - we're both glad of the fur jackets we bought back in Tanraga, despite the irony of wearing fur when all my friends think I'm rescuing cute animals from danger.
I'd say it's beautiful here, except that that doesn't begin to describe it. It's huge. It's the hugeness which is so overwhelming. I mean, I thought I'd seen hugeness in the city - I've been to the top of Ascendancy Point, I've taken boats out from Alchemy Bay. But that hugeness is nothing compared to this. The land we've been travelling through this past week is so flat that it feels like the sky is right on top of the ground, like you might bump your head on the sky at any moment. We've been driving along a coastal road for the past three days - the sea's a choppy dark-grey here, so different from the coast of Perplex City. There are enormous birds which hover in the sky, staring down at the patches of scrubland we're driving through, then dive down to pick up some of the smaller badger-like creatures which eat the vegetation here. Allain knows the names for all these animals - he tells me, but I can't seem to hold them all in my mind.
Allain himself is doing better. He's come out of himself a little - he had been so withdrawn. But he's been getting nightmares. He mutters and shouts out at night in the tent, so that I have to wake him gently. He doesn't seem to remember what these nightmares are about when he wakes up. Or if he does, he doesn't tell me.
Anyway, we're getting closer to our destination. Or at least what we think is our destination. We've been following the signs and messages Claire Castille left for us. Those coded messages have led to more extensive information, with a trail we're following now - yesterday we passed a rock formation shaped something like a table-and-chair which she had said we would. (I don't know how she knew about this - either she must have been here before us, or she has access to photographs which aren't available publicly.) She called it the "Anjsbourg gate". And today, just before sunset, we found a ruined house. It was the first sign of human habitation we've seen in more than a week. We went to look around - it was just a stone cottage, built with its windows facing the sea. Its roof was gone, and so were half the walls, but there was still enough to see that, once upon a time, someone had lived here. It gave me a strange feeling. What kind of place are we going to?