Islands in the Sky

4.1

Cassa’s chambers were higher up in the tower than those of most of the rest of her family. Lower rooms were usually thought to be better, because lower meant less climbing up the endless stairways, although being too low was considered unsafe because one was too easily surprised during an attack on the tower.

Cassa didn’t mind the stairs, because they helped keep her fit for her morning practices with Konstantin, and she preferred the view from higher up the tower as well. Most of all, though, she liked being further away from her relatives. She thought it was useful to keep some distance from them all.

Sometimes, Cassa wasn’t completely sure that the rest of her family understood their greatest danger was actually one another, rather than an outside enemy attacking the tower. The tower was thick-walled and secure, and the entranceway lobby was fortified and guarded by a score of soldiers at all hours of the day and night, with several hundred more guardsmen nearby to call. An attack was very unlikely to succeed, so much so that an actual war between towers hadn’t happened in decades. The greatest danger members of Cassa’s family faced wasn’t wars and rival families, it was one another. It was themselves. It was a cousin suddenly deciding to alter the inheritances one night, while everyone else was sleeping.

That was an eternal truth of a family like Cassa’s, but her relatives all seemed wilfully to forget it. They all seemed to want to spend time in each other’s company, which Cassa didn’t quite understand. She tried to avoid her relatives, as much because she found them slightly vapid and annoying as because she feared for her life, but also for the sake of her safety as well. Spending all her time with her cousins and mother, drinking and eating and talking together, that had just never seemed sensible to her.

She preferred keep her distance from the rest of her family, and part of how she did so was by living higher up in the tower. She thought it was useful to be further away from everyone else, especially while she slept, just in case any of her cousins began to have any clever ideas. And as well, she liked having a better view.

She was a daughter of the Middletower family, the name-family of the tower, so really she had the choice of any rooms she wished to use, without having to explain her reasons why. She could have any rooms she liked, so she took the ones she had. Even though they were unconventionally high up the tower.

Most towers were organised with the public rooms at the bottom, the watchhouses and meeting rooms and store rooms as well. Especially store rooms, for anything which was not especially valuable or for trade-goods which required frequent moving. Then, higher, were the family’s suites of private chambers, on the lowest of the floors considered safe, and the rooms of their most trusted advisers and wonderworkers too. Above those were the chambers of other advisers and workers, their status decreasing as they rose up the tower, until the domestic servants lived in the highest rooms, so above them were only longer-term storage areas such as granaries, and more guard-positions and watch-posts and sometimes water-storage on the roof.

Cassa’s chambers were several floors above any others of her family, up with the common workers and servants, although her suite of chambers was as large as one of the family suites downstairs. Her rooms were on the side of the tower which faced the direction the city moved in the sky, because Cassa liked the idea of somehow looking forward, towards where Anew-Hame would go. It also happened to be the side away from the granary and firewood winches, which was more pleasant as well, not to be woken by creaking ropes, or looking at nets full of cargo being lifted up past her, to the top of the tower.

Her chambers were as set of rooms that had been divided and rewalled from a dozen smaller rooms. She had chosen these rooms when she turned fifteen because it formed a solid, secure section of space which included a bathroom, and because she wanted to be away from everyone else. The Middletower, like most others, had a core of stairs and piping at the centre, and then wide-open floors, with very few structural walls. Engineer wonderworkers could not now build in that way, build without internal supporting walls to hold the beams for the floor above, or the roof. The ancients had different methods, and had managed to make these large open spaces inside buildings without the walls being structural. In most ancient towers, the inside walls could be removed without much danger, and so often they were, with some care. Often it was more convenient to make larger workrooms and day-chambers around the outsides of a tower, where there was light, and have storerooms and sleeping quarters further inside, away from the sunlight, where it wasn’t especially needed. Often, also, it was easier to move bathrooms toward the ancient piping, bringing the family’s private bathrooms, and common bathing areas for servants together, on either sides of walls, rather than try and lay new pipes all through the existing ceiling spaces, which often ended badly and in floods.

Cassa had picked out these chambers when she turned fifteen, and had always been glad she did. It was quieter up here, and felt safer away from her family, and it gave her a degree of privacy most of her cousins did not have.