The Book of All Skies, page 12
“If we’d explored a little farther, we might have been on this road a long time ago,” Imogen mused.
“But we wouldn’t have been moving so quickly,” Del replied, then she laughed at her own defensiveness. It didn’t matter what series of choices and accidents had brought them to this point. After all their tribulations, they were on their way to civilization.
A second cart appeared from behind the hill, traveling toward them. Both slowed down a little as they approached; Del could see two people sitting side-by-side in the front. She tried to read their faces, and wondered if it would be polite to make some kind of gesture in lieu of a verbal greeting as they passed. But their host paid no attention to them, so Del just averted her gaze.
Clouds spread across the stars, and rain began to fall. The man stopped the cart, then clambered back between Del and Imogen and pulled up a kind of hood: a hinged frame with the same kind of material as his tent’s windows. When he started the cart again, three lamps lit up below him at the front, illuminating a stretch of the road ahead. Del couldn’t see what the lamps were burning, or how they’d been ignited, but from her present vantage she had no way to get a better look.
She turned to the side, away from the hill. There were half a dozen patches of light in the distance – nearby towns, she supposed – shimmering through the rain. Exactly what was bounteous in these lands remained unclear, but there certainly seemed to be an abundance of fuel.
They passed another cart coming the other way, lighting up the road in the same fashion as their own, but between the rain and the opalescent glass of the lamp housings Del still couldn’t make out any details of the flames.
“If these people can travel so effortlessly, why did they never bother visiting us?” Imogen complained.
“We stared at the gap for generations without realizing how narrow it was,” Del replied. “If the Tolleans didn’t cross it, maybe no one ever grasped the possibility before, on either side.” As they spoke, three more carts passed them, all equally swift and luminous, dispelling any notion that these contraptions might be rare.
“So if the Tolleans were only ever talking about a path through the mountains ... do you expect to meet up with some of our competitors soon?” Imogen asked, with just a trace of sarcasm.
Del said, “Nothing would surprise me any more. If there are two ways here, maybe the other route also just needed fresh eyes to reveal it.”
As they continued around the hill, the number of carts traveling back and forth along the ring road increased, as did the number of turnoffs feeding and tapping these flows. After a while, Del no longer needed to look out for the side roads themselves; she could see them from afar, painted across the landscape with the light from the carts.
The man leaned back in his seat and yawned. Del didn’t want to think about the consequences if he dozed off while the machine was moving, but it was hard to know how to engage with him politely without distracting him from his task. After fretting for a while, she bent forward and touched his shoulder gently; he glanced back enquiringly, unoffended.
“Thank you for all the help you’re giving us,” she said, hoping that some of her meaning would be conveyed by her tone and demeanor alone. In any case, he smiled amiably and returned his gaze to the road.
The rain stopped pelting the hood above them, and though the sky remained overcast it barely mattered: the carts were present in such numbers now as to far outshine any stars. Glowing towns and cities came and went in the distance; Del wondered if the people here had learned to navigate by these terrestrial lights, instead of relying on the constellations.
As they passed through the Hoop, the man announced gleefully, “Yerada!”
“It’s the name of his homeland,” Del realized. It even sounded like a land to her foreigner’s ear. However long the two groups had been separated, the whole system of nomenclature might well have dated from a time when Sadema had presented no obstruction to travel. But if the hint of a shared history was comforting, that the world had then raised mountains high enough to sever all ties, and that enough time had passed to erase all memories of their prior common experience, induced a kind of temporal vertigo that she couldn’t outstare; she could only look away.
After one more quarter-circuit of the hill, the man slowed the cart and turned onto a spoke road that stretched out across the gently undulating ground. Carts traced out the highway in light, and flowed along the side roads that Del could see ahead of them, but even away from these trails, everywhere she looked there were buildings lit up like the most extravagant palaces in a children’s tale. Her eyes were beginning to water from the endless dazzle; this wasn’t an assault as painful as Erema’s sky, but it was still far more intense and relentless than anything human-made that she’d encountered before.
“Our friend might not have been bird-watching,” Imogen suggested. “He might have traveled that far just to have a chance to see the stars without all of this glare.”
The cart took one of the side roads. Del saw a group of people on foot, deferring to the perilous machinery by confining themselves to a narrow path along the road’s edge. It turned again, then after traveling a short way down another street, it left the road and entered a small courtyard in front of a house of dark bricks.
The man gestured to them apologetically with a raised palm then jumped down and walked into the house. “He’s going to have to explain to someone that he’s come home with a couple of unexpected guests,” Del conjectured.
“We still have our tents,” Imogen replied. “If we’re not welcome here, there’ll be somewhere we can camp.”
Del admired her self-sufficiency, but comfort aside, she was fervently hoping they wouldn’t end up adrift in this strange culture. The man might have been skeptical about their claimed origins, but at least he knew exactly where he’d met them; to anyone else in the city, they’d just be a couple of oddly-dressed travelers who might or might not be faking their inability to speak the language.
The man emerged, looking slightly chastened but relieved, and motioned for Del and Imogen to follow him. They grabbed their packs and walked after him into the house, down a corridor then into a brightly lit room with four chairs and a table. A lamp was hanging from the ceiling, but when Del glanced up to try to examine it she had to turn away.
She could smell fish cooking and looked around for the stove; this time, there was a strong heat blotch but no light apparent at all.
A woman entered the room and inclined her head briefly, regarding them with a mixture of curiosity and irritation. Del returned the gesture awkwardly, wishing she’d made more effort back in the wilderness to learn some basic greetings and etiquette.
The man dished out the meal onto four plates and they all sat together. He offered them no utensils, but Del watched him using pieces of bread from a stack in the center of the table to pick up the food, which was already finely cut, and she did her best to mimic him. The fish tasted glorious; it was kind of the couple to share what had clearly been prepared for the two of them.
“I think they’re fattening us up for later,” Imogen whispered.
When they’d finished eating, the woman showed them a room where they could wash and excrete in private, and Del let Imogen have use of it first.
“Thank you,” Del said to the woman, who replied with a curt phrase that might have meant anything.
Suddenly, Del found herself smiling. It was all she could do to keep herself from reeling around, staring up at the blinding lights on the ceiling. The two halves of the world had been living their lives for all this time, if not oblivious to each other’s existence, certainly ignorant of most of each other’s history. Maybe her friends had died in the process of making the reunion possible; maybe they’d survived. But either way, it was up to her and Imogen now, not just to preserve their own lives, but to complete what they’d started and bring the divided world together.
Chapter 21
The visitor to the house stood before them, placed his fist on his sternum, and said, “Jo plen Lados.”
“What’s he doing?” Imogen asked Del.
“I have no idea.”
Their host copied the gesture, and said, “Jo plen Halem.”
The visitor regarded them encouragingly.
“It could just be their names,” Del guessed. She put her fist against her chest and said, “Jo plen Del.” Imogen seemed unconvinced, but she offered her own name. The visitor – Lados? – was pleased, so they’d either deduced his true intentions, or convinced him that they’d learned some other lesson entirely.
He turned to Del and uttered a string of syllables that ended with a fair approximation of her name. She gazed back at him apologetically; he tried again, speaking more slowly. “Sere makom lemere pedra, Del.”
Del supposed it was a simple greeting; she repeated the sounds as best she could, substituting “Lados.” Lados rewarded her with a smile that couldn’t quite hide his gritted teeth, and he insisted on another few rounds of refinement before moving on to his other pupil.
When Imogen had mastered the phrase to Lados’s satisfaction, she turned to Del and whispered, “What have we done to deserve this torture?”
“We need to learn their language,” Del insisted. “It’s the only way we’ll get anywhere.”
Imogen said, “I’m willing to do hard labor in exchange for food and board. Do I really need to talk to anyone, to dig a ditch? They can just point me in the right direction and mime an appropriate shoveling action.”
“Do you ever want to go home?”
“You think they’re going to build a bridge for us, if we just ask them nicely?”
Del didn’t reply; put so bluntly, the notion seemed preposterous. But until they understood much more about this society, they had no way of knowing whether it would require a struggle a thousand times greater than Montano had faced, or whether a better guide to their prospects was the spectacular diminution of effort involved in traveling from land to land.
Lados led them patiently through several more phrases, with Halem helping out when the lesson required two speakers, as well as supplying props from around the dining room as examples of various colors and food groups. Del hoped she was at least beginning to get an ear for the sound of the language; however impatient she was to acquire a meaningful vocabulary and understand the grammar, without the shortcuts she’d been accustomed to as a student back in Apasa – a second, shared language that her teachers could use to sneak extra information into her head – everything would depend on the clarity of this one, phonetic means of exchange.
Eventually, Lados deferred to Imogen’s increasingly undisguised misery and gave them a rest. Halem handed them some fruit to eat, without asking them to name it first, and the four of them sat and chatted in their own tongues with their fellow native speakers.
“That’s the most exhausting thing I’ve done since we left home,” Imogen declared.
Del hoped this was intentional hyperbole. “It’s like using a muscle. Once you grow accustomed to it, all the soreness will fade away, and you’ll have the pleasure of gaining a new strength.”
Imogen snorted with amusement.
“So what do you tell your underwater diving students,” Del wondered, “if they hate their first experience?”
Imogen said, “I tell them not to come back.”
Del had no idea if Lados was a professional teacher, or just an enthusiastic friend of Halem who had volunteered to try out some ideas, but he was not yet willing to concede defeat with either of his pupils. He produced a stack of paper and proceeded to draw the forty-four letters of the local script, then he guided Del and Imogen in their attempts to copy and memorize the symbols. Though they looked like nothing Del had seen before, they were not overly finicky or ornate; the hard part was learning their names.
“Why does it matter what order we write them in?” Imogen asked irritably. “I don’t want a job sorting index cards or shelving books.”
“It’s easier to remember them all if you have them in a definite order,” Del suggested.
“What if I find it easier to remember them if I draw all the simplest ones first, then add the ones with increasing numbers of extra strokes?”
By the time Imogen had completed her first full recitation, even Lados appeared weary. Del wished she could do something to relieve the tedium for him; she was hardly in a position to engage in a sparkling intellectual conversation, but maybe she could offer him a welcome trace of novelty.
She said, “Draho” (thank you), gestured at the letters while calling them “Limna” (yours), then proceeded to write – “Calla” (mine) – her own set of nineteen.
Lados watched with interest, or at least polite attention. She hadn’t expected him to recognize the symbols; they had rough equivalents in many older scripts, but the resemblance grew increasingly obscure with age, and if anyone had asked her to match her own letters to a subset of the ones she’d just learned, she would have floundered.
When she was finished, Del put the sheet aside, but then she realized she’d wasted an opportunity. Quickly, before Lados decided to resume the lesson, she said, “But these are the ones the Tolleans used,” and started to draw them.
She was only halfway through when Lados started whispering excitedly to Halem. He didn’t interrupt her, so she kept writing; when she’d finished she slid the page across the table to him. “That’s the Tollean script. Tollean. Lim punra?” Do you know it?
“Punra,” he replied.
Del picked up her pencil and wrote a question in Tollean: Did these people come here? Are they still here?
Lados replied apologetically, “Xala depunra.” He didn’t know ... the words? He recognized the script, but that was all.
He must have read the disappointment on Del’s face; he made a gesture with a raised hand that she took to mean that this wasn’t the end of the matter. He turned to Halem and the two of them spoke for a while; Del couldn’t understand anything they said, but from the long pauses and thoughtful frowns, she assumed that they were trying, and failing, to conjure up the name of someone they knew who might actually read Tollean.
Lados rose from his seat and departed, bidding them a perfunctory farewell without stopping to turn it into a lesson. Del heard his cart starting up in the courtyard. The woman who shared the house, whose name Del had yet to learn, called out to Halem, and he left the room.
Del said, “The Tolleans came here. We can be sure of that now.”
“Can we?” Imogen was doubtful. “Maybe the Tolleans just used a lettering system similar to one that was once used here – thanks to some ancestral language that dates back to before the obstruction at Sadema.”
“You’re right,” Del conceded. “That’s possible.” But she wasn’t giving up hope that it meant something more.
“I need some air,” Imogen declared. “You want to go for a walk?”
Del found Halem and managed to assemble enough fragments from her lessons to express her intention to leave but return soon, sprinkling in enough draho, she hoped, not to sound ungrateful that they’d been given lodgings here, or presumptuous about the duration of the arrangement. Halem, in fact, seemed to grasp the message long before she stopped talking, and gave no impression of taking offense that his guests might wish to go for a stroll on their own.
Once they’d left the courtyard and started down the street, Del found the constant flow of mechanised carts traveling beside them both wondrous and unnerving. That any ordinary person here could own a device that let them travel at such speed was astonishing, but she wasn’t sure if she could trust them to remain fully cognisant of the minority among them who still moved around on foot.
Most of the buildings they passed looked similar to Halem’s house, constructed from the same dark bricks, in the same style. There had to be fields and springs somewhere, to feed all these people, but Del supposed there was no need for such things to be especially close, when produce could be moved so easily.
“I don’t like being dependent on Halem,” Imogen confessed. “He’s been kind to us, but we have to find a way to stand on our own feet.”
“You could give diving lessons,” Del suggested.
“What if people have never done that here?”
“Then you’ll have no competition, and you’ll be rich and famous in no time.”
Imogen laughed. “Well, they must have need of conservators too.” She stopped and gazed, frustrated, at the line of speeding machines. “I still can’t tell what it is they’re burning.”
Del said, “A couple more language lessons, and you’ll be able to ask.”
“That’s optimistic. What if we have no word for it ourselves? I’ll ask what fuel is in his cart, Halem will reply, ‘Fzzbugurble’, and I’ll have learned precisely nothing.”
“So then you ask him where it comes from, who grows it or makes it, and how. If a child in Yerada can learn about Fzzbugurble, so can you.”
Imogen said, “I don’t have the patience to be a child again.”
“We’ll be fast children,” Del promised. Imogen just grunted skeptically.
They didn’t dare try to cross any of the streets, with their ceaseless mechanised processions, so they walked in a circuit around the land bounded by four of them. By the third time around, Del was growing weary of the lights and noise, and she believed they were approaching Halem’s house again. It was hard to be sure, when the buildings were so similar.
“What if we walk in, and there’s an entirely different family there?” she said.
Imogen turned to her with an expression of horror. “You were thinking that, too? Maybe there are a thousand extra Hoops here, threading the city, so if you walk in a circle anywhere at all, you end up somewhere new.”
Del felt the skin prickling on her forearms. “You’re joking, aren’t you?” She glanced up at the sky, but with the glare from below washing out any trace of the stars it was impossible to tell if it contained a transition line.
