Islands in the Sky

1.6

Sema was close to despair. Her home was gone. Everything she’d ever known had been destroyed, and she no longer felt safe, because the pirates might return.

She thought for a while about leaping from the island and ending her loneliness right then. She considered it seriously, if a little bleakly, considered simply not bothering with living any more. She probably would do that in the end, she decided. It made sense to spare herself a little suffering. She was tired and hungry and cold, and had been hiding for days, and right now she didn’t especially care if she died.

Leaping from the island would be a relief, but first, she had a duty to perform. She needed to attend to the dead. She had failed them in life, by not warning them of the pirates quickly enough, but she wouldn’t fail them now.

She did the best she could. She gathered then up, as carefully as possible, although some had been burned inside their houses. She gathered them up, seeing the now-still faces of people she knew, people she’d laughed with and loved and teased. She laid each on a square of wood, and dragged them, one by one, to the edge of the island. She said some words over each of them, not the right words, but the best words she could think of, that they had been a good friend, or a kind person, or that people had liked them a lot. She said her words, and then slid whoever it was out into the sky, to be free and at peace and away from the pain of the world of the islands.

She wanted to do more, but she couldn’t. There wasn’t anything else she could manage. She said the words, and slid her friends and family off the island, and when she was finished she cried for an entire day. She just sat where she was, and wept.

And then, when she was finished crying, she slept.

She was exhausted from hiding, and fear, and the physical effort of dragging people around as she had been. She was exhausted by grief and loneliness, and wanted just to sleep. She slept, and woke, and cried some more, and then started trying to decide what she ought to do next.

She was planning ahead. She wasn’t thinking any more about following her family into the sky. She didn’t realize it until several hours later, but she had begun planning as soon as she had awoken. Attending to the dead might have saved her own life, she decided. It had given her something to do, something to concentrate on, a purpose, when she felt at her worst. It had needed to be done, anyway, no matter whether she killed herself or not, so she had done it before she decided about herself. She did it, and wore herself out, and then slept, and by the time she awoke the last of the fires had burned out, and the pirate island was out of sight, and she felt a little less awful, like it might be worth trying to work out what to do next.

She still wasn’t completely sure that she did want to stay alive, but she decided she might as well plan as if she was going to, since she wouldn’t especially need plans if she wasn’t.

So she planned. She tried to work out what to do now.

First she decided that if she was going to stay alive, she needed to leave the island, and she needed to do it soon. She didn’t quite know how she would, yet, but she needed to get away, to not be here, in the remnants of the village, where the memories of everyone she’d ever known constantly reminded her of their loss, and that she was to blame their deaths. She needed to get away from the island. She couldn’t live here on her own. She needed to go somewhere else, somewhere she feel safe.

She thought about how.

She kept thinking about the pirates’ boat.

Now that she’d seen the boat, she understood how it must work. She thought of the children’s game of tossing pebbles off the island, which floated alongside, and tossing twigs which did not. Human waste, everyone knew, thrown over the side, fell cleanly into the world’s fires, as did a worm, dug from the soil, but rocks and soil, parts of the island which crumbled away, those stayed as they were, floating alongside until the wind blew them away.

Sema thought. She thought about the boat, and dirt, and dirt’s power. It was the dirt that floated, not that which grew in it, or ate of it. Everyone knew that. It was the earth which floated, and not anything else. Dirt and rocks and soil and clods, it didn’t matter what, they floated.

So anything which had dirt inside, that must float, too.

A boat, filled with dirt, with a sail to catch the wind, that would fly. That would let her travel between islands.

Sema had never thought about this before. She had always thought of the island as solid, as there, a thing. She had assumed the only way between islands to wait until they bumped together. Now she understood that wasn’t so.

She could move through the sky on her own.

She would move that way, and soon. She just needed to build herself a boat.