Skyland (5 page)

Let me see Your beauty close, my
lady,
he prayed.
You are highest, You are supreme. No human
can assault You.

He twitched as the ship spoke again.

"Launch in two minutes. Passengers please
be seated and make yourselves comfortable,"
the nice voice
buzzed from a speaker that Harper couldn't see.

Beside him, the laughing city folk (now city
refugees) wandered to seats around one of the tables. The old
bearded villager sank into a chair by the window and bent his face
to his forearms. His lips moved silently. The others villagers too
moved to seats by the window. They all shared the same fearful
glances towards – and then quickly away from – the Sky.

"Launch in one minute,"
said the
ship.

The ship began to rumble gently. The seat
beneath Harper began to quiver just a little. Then his stomach
swooped as the little lights far below became even littler, and
they were flying. Zara's intake of breath beside him made him look
over. She had her eyes closed. Her hand in his was shaking more
than the ship.

"Shh, shhh," Harper soothed.

"Tell me when we are away," she said.

"Open your eyes, my Sky. You won't see Her
again."

Like the little old man she covered her face
with one hand and peeked over it. Harper gazed out in awe at the
well-lit city moving gracefully beneath them.

It's not violent... flying. So
elegant...

An assault on the Sky. That was what the Sky
Reverends had always called flying. It seemed impossible that it
should feel so peaceful. He'd always imagined a much harsher, maybe
even a painful experience.

"Look up, my Sky," he whispered into Zara's
ear; she had squeezed her eyes shut again. "We are going to pass
through Her."

She lifted her head.

The buildings dipped and twisted; the bubble
of city lights reached far out into the country and shone on the
fields and the brown trenches like dirty swirled thumbprints and
then shrank and blurred into the burned up prune. Harper leaned
forward. He frowned and squinted at the sight. Zara's hand was on
his arm now and it hurt.

All of Skyland was beneath them, a dark
globe against a darker space.

"Zara, where is it? Where is the Sky?"

"I don't know, love..." She shook her head
beside him. "I don't know."

Chapter
Six

in which there is a
chair
...

The chair's shape didn't matter.

Nothing whatsoever mattered about the chair,
except the fact that it was empty.

The chair was empty and large and glossy
with a thick varnish that amplified the red of the wood, and a deep
seat that looked like it had sat under too many asses. It hadn't.
It had been made in that shape from the beginning. But none of its
qualities made the slightest difference to its functionality.

Nothing about the chair served any
purpose.

Not like a stool.

A stool served to rest a tired body on. A
stool saved the knees from the wear and tear of squatting, it saved
the pants from the stains of sitting on dirt floors, and it saved
the legs from the soreness of standing. A chair did not have any
special or useful purpose. A chair was just a stool that somebody
decided to make fancy.

At least, that's what the chair maker
thought.

The chair maker didn't want to make fancy
things, he wanted to make useful things. He wanted to make beds for
resting in and tables for eating off of and stools for sitting on.
He wanted to forget about chairs and just be Sam the carpenter.

But he wasn't.

The customers with the big wallets and the
big asses did not want stools. And they didn't want beds. And they
didn't want tables. Not from the carpenters anyway. Their expansive
mattresses, deep and plush and heavy, would require an amount of
wood that could see a carpenter, and his customer, thrown behind
bars for Consumption. Same for the tables which had to hold the
lavish platters of delicacies for the charity dinners – almost a
nightly occurrence in some parts of the city (the charities' food
supplies were exempt from the Consumption laws.) Tables and beds
made a living for the city's metalworkers, but not for its
carpenters.

And the carpenters' customers wanted
chairs
.

Stools did well for sitting, but not for
putting food on the table.

So Sam the chair maker made chairs.

One chair could fetch a hundred thousand
Suns, enough to buy ten years of kale and half a ton of the best
fertilizer to grow it. Not that the chair maker bought much kale or
fertilizer. Every extra penny went back into the wood. The
scavengers drove a hard bargain, and the long-healed scar on the
chair maker's arm, running from wrist to elbow, was a constant
reminder that arguing was dangerous. Compassion, too, kept his
arguments silent, compassion for the most desperate Skyland had to
offer, those who would travel hundreds of miles just to get an
armful of twigs.

And in ten years' time, he hoped, there
would be something more worth buying than kale, and fertilizer
would be cheap. Everybody hoped.

And maybe then there would be no more
chairs.

In ten years time, when some quick-growth
trees had grown back, and wood for chairs wasn't so hard to come
by, then the useless things wouldn't be the symbol of wealth and
extravagance. The price would fall, of course. But the chair maker
didn't think he would mind. It would be a fair trade for a living
planet. And for the possibility that he could return to being Sam
the carpenter, making stools and tables and beds, as he had learned
to do since he was a child when trees still ringed the city nearly
a century before.

The reddish chair with the thick varnish and
deep seat was empty.

This bothered the chair maker.

Not so much that it was empty, but that it
would remain empty. It might be a useless item but nobody was ever
even going to try to make a use out of it.

Pity
.
Such a pity.

He walked in front of it and turned around
to set himself down on it – to make it useful, just this one, just
for a moment. But as he put a hand on one arm, his fingers brushed
a divot in the wood, a tiny nick.

The chair maker sighed.

He straightened up, turned around again and
sat instead on the little three-legged stool beside it. He ran a
hand over the arm of the chair, finger pressing into the one divot,
then running along the length of the arm looking for others.

It
was
a pretty thing, the chair.
Plain, unpainted. It was the wood the owner'd want to show off. It
had been well kept over the years, nicks sanded away, varnish
replenished periodically to preserve it. The cherry grain would
have glowed ruby in the afternoon light if there had been any.

But there wasn't any afternoon light.

The ship blocked it all out.

The varnish on the chair only reflected the
dim sheen from the one candle in the shop – a luxury, but also a
necessity for the detailed work of the chair maker. Half a mile
away, the closest ship still cast gloom on the stool maker's
workshop. He squinted at the surface, sanding lightly here and
there smoothing out imperfections – scratches and divots and one or
two splinters that stuck up through the top coating. It would get
another coat of gloss that night to mask the touch-ups.

Someone laughed.

The chair maker smiled. He looked up from
his work. He looked out the window to the shadow of the ship.
People were starting to gather around its base. Some walked slow,
bent under giant packs, others moved easily, wheeling carts piled
high with their worldly possessions, still others slunk in from the
country empty handed. Some had binoculars, hands clutching them or
waving them about in excitement. Flight was not uncommon for city
folk, and these were most all city folk, the villagers and farmers
were to scared to go near the rockets.
Abominations
they
called them. The city folk were much more comfortable with their
closeness to the Sky. But piercing the heavens right through to the
other side was a rare event, and they were excited.

More people were laughing now and chatting
and shouting.

A child ran around, arms outstretched,
rumbling like a plane.

Like sapphires, the growing crowd glittered,
many dressed in their best blue for the occasion. Some in clear
blue of a bright day at noon. Some wore the stormy grey-blue of a
world that only existed for most of them in stories, a memory – or
a hope – of the ancient clouds full of rain, deep and wide and
frequent. Some wore elaborate patterns of mixed shades from the
pale color of a baby's eyes to the midnight depths and everything
in between. Some only wore Sky-colored headbands, ribbons, scarves
woven through hair or around wrists, around necks – even those who
couldn't afford a wardrobe of the holy color celebrated the day
with what they had.

And here and there, in between the
celebrators, the brown-clothed country folk walked.

The chair maker had put his own cobalt
jacket on to celebrate the occasion. He set down the sandpaper on
the seat of the chair and brushed off the wood dust from the
sleeves of his coat. He got up, knees and legs rested from sitting
on his own simple seat and went to the window.

He leaned on the sill and grabbed a piece of
kale out of the window box. He rubbed it and waved it around a bit
and blew on it to get off some of the dust. It was still crunchy
when he put the leaf in his mouth and started chewing. But he
smiled as he chewed. The kale didn't taste so bitter today.

A man even older than the chair maker,
walked, bent under a bag the full length of his torso and much
fatter. He was moving slowly towards the ships

"Roger!" The chair maker leaned out the
window to shout. "Roger!" He waved to the older man who stopped and
turned.

"Sam." His head still bent under the giant
bag that spilled over from his back onto his neck and the back of
his grizzled head, his eyes looked up towards the chair maker.

"Wish you luck... One last time."

"Just me, Sam? Just me? Still not coming,
then?"

"Still not."

The older man shook his head and the bag
wobbled precariously. "You could do well."

The chair maker smiled. "I know."

He
could
do well. There were few
trees on Skyland and thus few carpenters. They worked mostly on
little trinkets made from sticks saved from the compost in the
brown fields. Trinkets and antiques. Anything bigger than a pinky
and made less than one hundred years ago was a rare commodity. His
skills were in high demand among the wealthy – most of whom were
leaving on the ships. He
could
have a place in their new
home, wherever that was going to be.

But he was old.

He was old and tired and stuck on this dry
rock of a planet, for better or worse.

"Save my spot for someone with the energy to
fill it," he said.

Rodger shrugged awkwardly under his burden.
"Have it your way."

"You know I won't fly in the Sky for
anything. And Belle won't either. We'll stay right here and
petition the Sky from solid ground. She'll look to us, she
will."

"And not to us?"

"Who knows."

"It's a lucky man who gets into the heavens
before he dies."

"More brave than lucky, I think."

"You're really sure, then? You're really
sure you haven't got the braveness or the luck to come with
us?"

"Yes old man!" He laughed. It was a nervous
laugh, because how else could someone talk to someone they'd never
see again? Sam didn't know because nobody he knew had ever left
before. "I've never been brave and you know it. And I'm already
lucky standing where I am right here. I'll be better off when you
lot leave already. All the Suns I'm getting from the passengers
will go a long way here."

"For sure, for sure." The older man looked
down into the dust.

"You know I'd give you some, but the rich
snot's not paying me till I deliver the piece to his ship.
Otherwise–"

"No, no"

"And I don't even know what kind of currency
they use over wherever you're going. Maybe they don't even use
Suns. Maybe they use Moons or something."

"Hah! Moons..." The old man chuckled.

"Yeah..." The chair maker shifted awkwardly.
He did not like to talk about his currency. He felt guilty about
the huge payouts, but they were far from lining his pockets.
Carpentry was an expensive vocation.

"Speaking of moons...." the old man outside
the window gestures over his shoulder. "I've got to go meet
one."

"You do. Go on. Say hello to the Sky for me
when you see Her. And the moon when you pass it."

"Will do, will do."

"Good luck."

"To you too."

The older man turned and started to move
slowly away again towards the ship, bent under his giant pack.

The chair maker too turned away from the
window and went back to his stool and back to his chair. He ran his
hand over the cherry wood yet again. No more marks there. He
brushed off the dust and blew on it to get more off. He took out
the varnish to seal the spot. His jaw clenched, teeth grinding
together as he lifted the top off. He snorted against the fumes.
One wrinkled hand covered a dry cough.

Air... if only there were just some fresh
air...

But the air of Skyland was never fresh,
anyway. Even with the window wide open, there was only dry dusty
atmosphere in the workshop. Air enough to sustain life, but not
satisfy it.

He went to the window and closed it. He took
a scarf from a hook on the wall and tied it over his nose and
mouth. There would be sand and grit in the coating of varnish
anyway. Everything on this planet held dirt on it and in it like
the kale. But the chair maker tried to keep it off his work as much
as possible, blocking out even the slightest hint of a breeze.