Islands in the Sky

5.4

The next day Sema walked along the docks to Quen Tosal’s wharf, and returned the borrowed rope to his ship. The ship was still being unloaded, so she asked when they were next sailing and they told her they hoped the morning after next. Sema thanked them, and then went across to Quen Tosal’s warehouse and waited to see him for most of the afternoon. When he was free, she told him she had arranged for him to be paid directly by Li-am, who was selling the firewood for her. Quen Tosal simply nodded, seeming almost disinterested, but happy enough with that arrangement.

With Quen Tosal organized, Sema went to make ready for her next trip. She took the coins she had, and went and bought food and water. The first food she bought was a large bag of barley flour. She bought it, planning to make flat cakes of bread and cook them on a fire, but then she thought, and decided it was a little silly to make all the effort she was to bring wood back to the city, only to burn it herself instead of selling it to other people. She thought, then asked around the shops and markets and found out the price of flour, and of already-prepared flatbreads. She tried to guess the value of the wood it would take to cook a loaf, and how many flatbreads a bag of flour would make. She thought she was better off just buying bread, especially since she knew it would keep for several days. She would keep the bag of flour she already had, to cook with while she was on the firewood island and while she sailed too and fro, but it was actually cheaper better just to buy her bread already baked, she decided, so from now on she would do that instead.

She bought bread, and several large plastic bottles for water, and paid to have those filled, and her buckets too. She bought peas and two eggs and some vegetables as well with the last of her money, and then she sailed her boat around to Quen Tosal’s dock and tied it to the woodcutters’ ship and slept.

It was a good idea to have got ready the night before, as it turned out, because she was still half-asleep when the ship set out the next morning. She woke, and looked around, and realized they were already sailing, and then went back to sleep.

She woke a little later, and then sat on her boat as they sailed back to the woodcutting island, and when they arrived, she began collecting more sticks. She collected sticks, and added them to her pile on the shore, and then loaded those sticks onto her boat. It was a better trip, this time. Sema was more comfortable as she worked. She had more food and enough to drink, and that made everything more pleasant.

Sema returned from that trip, and made the same arrangement with Li-am as before, that she took just the coins he had in his hand when her unloading was finished, coins for about half the wood, she thought, and he took the rest and paid Quen Tosal from his share. Sema had thought about that quite carefully, while she gathered wood, and it seemed better to her that Li-am paid Quen Tosal, rather than she did. It seemed less likely they would trick one another than trick her, she had decided, and especially, less likely Quen Tosal would be cheated by Li-am if Li-am was dishonest. It seemed better to make the two more powerful people argue with each other about their shares of coins, rather than let them simply demand more from Sema. Sema had been quite proud of that idea.

Sema made four more trips, and everything seemed to be going well. She gathered more sticks. She earned a few more coins. After the second trip, she bought an axe of her own, and after the third she bought several large cargo nets from warehouses along the docks, and used them to carry more sticks back from the island. In Anew-Hame, people were actually still buying Sema’s firewood, too, and both Li-am and Quen Tosal seemed happy with their shares of coins. Sema was getting a little more money than she spending with each trip, and she was actually eating as well, which seemed like the most important thing.

Everything seemed to be going well until, on the fifth trip, on the way back to the firewood island, Sema heard worried voices up on the ship’s deck. She looked up, puzzled, and saw the sky ahead of them was stained with smoke, thick dark smoke just hanging in the air.

Sema didn’t understand. She stood up, and tried to see past the ship, but couldn’t very easily.

The smoke was heavy, blowing slowly, not the same kind of smoke as filled the sky near Anew-Hame. It was a richer smoke, a smoke like something more than firewood was being burned.

It was smoke that reminded Sema of the day the pirates had burned her home, and the smoke which had come from the houses then.

Sema was afraid, and it seemed the woodcutters were too. They pulled Sema’s boat close to their ship, so she could climb up onto their deck. She climbed up, and then they all stood there, and looked, and wondered what it meant.

The approached the island, perhaps foolishly, until they could see the entire island and all the trees on it had been burned. There was nothing left but soot and ash, blowing slowly in the wind.

Something terrible had been done to their island, something wasteful and pointless and wrong. They stood there on the ship’s deck, watching the ash blow into the sky, watching smoke drift, tasting soot, and wondering who had done this thing.