The Book of All Skies, page 13
Imogen gave her a look that seemed to imply that her need to ask was more alarming than the idea itself.
“Dal! Imagine!”
Del turned, and raised a hand to shield her eyes. Lados and Halem had stopped a short distance behind them, riding Lados’s cart. Halem motioned to them to get on.
“Oh, now comes the cannibal feast,” Imogen muttered.
Del said, “They must have found someone who can help.”
Imogen followed her reluctantly, and they both clambered up onto the back of the cart. Lados started the engine again, chatting excitedly with Halem as they sped away.
The cart negotiated the intersecting streets, pausing at some crossroads, rushing through others, turning left and right in a sequence that seemed far more complex than mere geometry should require, as if they were ricocheting through the innards of some huge, gleaming machine. The city was beautiful, in its own strange way, but Del could not imagine ever feeling at home here.
When they finally stopped, it was outside a building far larger than any house. Lados jumped off the cart and set off toward the entrance immediately, as if he was afraid that whoever had agreed to assist him might change their mind if he didn’t rush back to assure them that the foreigners he’d described really were on their way.
His companions followed him into the building. The foyer reminded Del of the museum in Apasa, but she couldn’t see any exhibits. A few people they passed in the corridors gazed at them for a moment in puzzlement before politely looking away; perhaps the Thenans’ style of dress was far enough from the local norms to incite some interest, but not quite bizarre enough to induce alarm.
When they caught up with Lados, he was waiting for them beside an open doorway. Del wasn’t sure why he looked so nervous; perhaps he was afraid that she’d make a fool of him by turning out to be less interesting than he’d promised. He composed himself and stepped forward, into view of the room’s occupant, and spoke quietly: “Excuse me, we’re here,” or something close to that; Del had reached the stage where she wasn’t sure whether she was recognizing words she’d learned in the new language, or merely inferring their meaning from the context.
As they entered, a woman rose from a seat beside a paper-strewn table and approached them. There were shelves all around the walls of the room, packed with books and stacks of paper.
“Jo plen Grana,” she said, addressing Del directly.
“Jo plen Del. Sere makom lemere pedra, Grana.”
Grana welcomed everyone, then ushered her guests into seats around the table.
“This feels like a test,” Imogen whispered.
“Good,” Del replied. “One advantage of telling the truth is that the more they test our claims, the better chance we have of being believed.”
“You’re so innocent sometimes, I can’t believe it.”
Del thought: And you’re so cynical sometimes, I want to punch you.
Grana wrote something on a sheet of paper and passed it to Del: a short passage in the Tollean script. For a moment her mind was blank, then she recognized the words and translated them for Imogen: “Can you read this language?”
Del wrote beneath it: Yes, though not very well. It’s not used anymore by my people, and all we have of it are fragments.
Grana read the reply, and spoke to Lados and Halem; her demeanor suggested a wary fascination. Del couldn’t blame her for remaining cautious; after all, if Grana herself understood Tollean, merely knowing the language proved nothing about Del’s other claims.
Where do your people live? Grana asked.
On the other side of the mountains at Sadema, Del replied; the Tolleans – or at least the ones she’d read – had used the same name as her contemporaries for that land. And in the other direction, across the landless skies. She repeated everything for Imogen, half expecting to be told at any moment that she was handling the whole encounter the wrong way, but so far Imogen was listening in silence, apparently willing to accept that this was a valuable exchange, conducted in good faith after all.
How did you come here? Grana responded.
Del struggled with her choice of words; she wanted to be precise, so as not to cause confusion, but if her Tollean had been good enough to express the relevant concepts perfectly, she probably would have known the answers to a great many questions much earlier. My friends built a bridge, she wrote. It rose from the land into the sky, spanned three landless skies, then almost touched the land here. Two of us walked across it, but then it fell.
Grana regarded her with polite skepticism. Del gestured that she wanted the sheet back; she had questions of her own.
How did the Tolleans reach this place? she asked.
They came under the mountains, Grana replied.
Is that way still open?
No, Grana wrote.
Imogen must have seen Del slump beneath the weight of disappointment, before she’d even uttered the translated reply. “What did I expect?” she said. “With people hunting for so long and finding nothing.”
Why is it closed? she asked. What happened?
Grana wrote: The Tolleans who remained in their own land filled the tunnel with rocks. At that time, it might have been cleared again, with great labor. But there have been quakes and avalanches since, so I doubt that anything could make it traversable.
Del read and re-read the passage, trying to be sure that she’d understood it correctly. Some Tolleans must have migrated to this side of the mountains, raising children and maintaining their own language long enough for Grana to have access to at least as many examples of it as Del had ever seen.
But then, those who had chosen not to follow them to the Bounteous Lands had deliberately sealed the tunnel behind them.
Why was the tunnel filled with rocks? Del asked.
Grana paused to contemplate the question, and consult with Lados and Halem. Del wondered if the claim might be apocryphal, or even a deliberate reattribution. Maybe the people here decided that they’d received as many Tollean migrants as their land could sustain, or their culture could absorb without friction; she could understand that. But if it was the Tolleans who were migrating, on the most part, why would they be the ones to stem the flow?
Your side is better placed to explain that, Grana replied. Those actions were your choice, not ours.
Chapter 22
“These people must be dangerous,” Imogen declared, as Lados started up the cart’s engine and waited for a gap in the traffic.
“You’re right,” Del replied. “Just look at how shamelessly they’ve fed us, sheltered us, taught us their language, and spared us the effort of walking.” In fact, the sound of all the carts that had done away with walking was beginning to give her a headache, but there was no point confusing the issue.
“We haven’t seen their bad side yet, but clearly the Tolleans did.”
“As witnessed by precisely none of their writing,” Del countered.
Imogen said, “Their writing is ambiguous about everything. You were never really sure that they’d found a way through the mountains, until now. So who knows what they thought when they got here.”
“Maybe it was the opposite,” Del suggested. “Maybe most Tolleans admired this place so much that those in power on our side were afraid that too many people would migrate, and their empire would trickle away.”
Lados finally managed to get the cart onto the street, and they set off back toward Halem’s house.
“You make it sound as if that had to be self-serving,” Imogen replied. “But is it so terrible to want to preserve their own culture, if their people were being seduced by all the shiny baubles on the other side?”
Del said, “If the greatest danger we face is admiring this place too much, I can live with that. And now that we know the mountains are blocked, that only leaves us with two ways to get home: a new bridge built from Celema, or a new bridge built here.”
“Designed by, paid for, built by whom?” Imogen challenged her. “To what end?”
“Even if we have nothing to trade with the Bounteous Lands,” Del argued, “there must be people here who are longing to see the rest of the world, out of sheer curiosity.”
“You could be right about that,” Imogen conceded. “But people have all kinds of whimsical desires they can’t pay for.”
The cart turned into Halem’s courtyard. They disembarked, then Lados bid them farewell and drove away. Halem opened the door and motioned for them to enter; Del was as grateful as ever for his hospitality, but she was already cursing herself for all the questions she hadn’t asked Grana when she’d had the chance. The Tollean language was like a tunnel through the mountains, but it was a narrow one; Grana might be the only person in this city who understood it.
As they walked down the corridor, she saw the woman who shared the house sitting in the living room, reading a book. Del entered the room and spoke haltingly in the local language.
“Excuse me, please. Thank you for everything. Please, what is your name?”
The woman looked up from her book and regarded Del balefully, but then the clumsy speech must have tickled her enough that she broke into an unwilling smile.
“Jo plen Raida,” she said.
“Sere makom lemere pedra, Raida,” Del replied. “Jo plen Del.”
“Sere makom lemere pedra, Del.”
Del didn’t have the vocabulary to ask if Raida was Halem’s wife, a relative, or just a friend, and in any case she wasn’t confident that it would be considered any of her business. “Do you enjoy reading?” she asked.
Raida stared at her in disbelief, as if she’d never been asked anything so foolish, but then she replied, speaking with exaggerated clarity to correct Del’s pronunciation: “Yes, I enjoy reading.”
Del said, “Thank you,” and left the room, unsure if she’d done more harm than good, but glad she’d at least tried to break the ice.
“What was that about?” Imogen asked her, when Del joined her in the dining room.
“Just trying to be polite.”
Halem was chopping vegetables. Del approached him, and gestured that she’d be happy to help, but he waved her away.
“What do these people do for a living?” Imogen asked. “Bird watching and taking in freeloaders can’t put food on the table.”
“There’s a vegetable garden in the back yard,” Del replied. She’d seen it from the window of the room Halem had given them.
Imogen sighed. “What paid for the house? What paid for the cart? What pays for all the fuel?”
“I don’t know.”
Raida joined them for lunch, and Del decided not to annoy her with further attempts at conversation. She contented herself with listening carefully to her hosts, recognizing a word or two and trying to piece together the likely meaning of each exchange.
After the meal, Raida left them, and Halem wouldn’t let Del help wash the plates. She sat at the table, wondering how she was going to cling to her sanity while she waited for the next language lesson. She could not expect Halem, Lados or Grana to spend all their time teaching her things that every child here knew – but if her hosts wouldn’t allow her to help out around the house, what should she do? Every moment she wasn’t learning something new about this place made her feel like she was standing beside a pile of timber, more than big enough to build a bridge stretching back to Celema – but useless to her, because she didn’t know where to start.
Imogen rose and fetched the stack of paper they’d used for their lessons from the sideboard where Halem had placed it. She sketched a picture of a figure in a diving suit standing on a riverbed, with an air pump on the bank.
Halem had finished cleaning up; he glanced at the picture and laughed, then started to walk away, but Imogen grabbed him by the sleeve.
“This was my job!” she said, in her own language. She pointed to the immersed figure, then to herself. “This is what I’m good at. Can I do it here? Can you help me find a way to do it here?”
Del was embarrassed, but Halem looked intrigued, so she struggled to translate, stringing together the few words she knew in circuitous constructions that she hoped might point roughly toward Imogen’s meaning.
Halem took a seat, and the three of them exchanged words and sketches, gradually converging toward a shared understanding.
“We don’t do it here,” Halem said. “But I like it.”
Del translated for Imogen.
“Don’t do it in this city?” Imogen pressed her. “Anywhere in Yerada? Anywhere in the Overgap?”
Del tried a sequence of crude maps, to see if Halem would assent to the presence of a diver in some adjacent land; he grasped what she was aiming at, and drew a heavy line through all of them.
“Nowhere, it seems,” she told Imogen.
“Yes, I got that.”
“So ... ?”
“So I’ll be the first,” Imogen decided. “That might not be so bad.”
“And how do you plan on making this happen?”
“Didn’t you just say that Halem liked the idea?”
“Didn’t you just lecture me on unaffordable acts of whimsy?”
Imogen turned to Halem. “You inherited money, right? Or you made some smart investments, and now you’re living off the proceeds?”
Del said, “He has no idea what you’re asking, and you know I can’t translate any of that.”
“He might not be spectacularly wealthy, but he clearly doesn’t do any actual work. He’s a businessman looking for a new venture, and we’re going to put this proposition to him. We just need to polish our language skills a little more.”
Del laughed. “You want to direct all of our efforts into starting a diving school?”
“You want to sit around the house brooding, until that lady kicks us out?”
“She has a name. She’s called Raida.”
Imogen said, “I know you want to build a bridge. But right now, I don’t think anyone even believes that we came across the gap. That’s the first obstacle. If you ever get past that, then you’ll have to sell people on the idea of spending time and money building something that no one here knows how to build – and which we’ve already told them fell apart the very first time we crossed it.”
Del was on the verge of retorting that if Imogen was going to mock her ambitions, she shouldn’t expect any help with her own. But then she thought: If all of those objections are true, what would be the best way to overcome them?
They had to find a smaller project to embark on with the Yeradans, in order to prove themselves. The only way forward was to demonstrate their competence, make new connections, and earn people’s trust.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll help you. Let’s see if we can start the best diving school from here to the mountains.”
Chapter 23
Halem looked nervous as Imogen helped him into his suit.
“Are you sure this is safe?” he asked Del.
“Imogen was fine, wasn’t she?” His suit was different, fitted to his size, but he’d be using the same pump and helmet.
They’d set up the pump, and a small floodlight, near the end of a jetty that extended for twenty strides or so over the river. Imogen had wanted to incorporate the Overgap’s electric lights into the helmet itself, but Halem had vetoed that until they could recruit someone suitably qualified to advise them how to do it safely. “Water and electricity don’t mix,” he’d insisted, bemused that this wasn’t obvious to his collaborators. Del had tried to explain to him that her culture had either lost, or never possessed, half the technology he took for granted, but he seemed to find that as hard to accept as any of her other outlandish claims.
Imogen said, “If you get into trouble, just release the weights then tug on the safety line.” She started the pump and attached the air-hose, then Del helped her lift the helmet and lower it into place, with the corselet resting on Halem’s shoulders.
He’d braced himself, and he didn’t flinch. Imogen set about bolting the corselet tightly onto the suit, while Halem looked out through the faceplate, taking slow, deep breaths. Del could hear the demand valve clicking open with each inhalation.
“Is everything good?” Imogen shouted.
Halem raised a hand with his gloved fingers spread wide, which Del had learned was a sign of approval. She helped Imogen attach the weight belt, and this time Halem staggered slightly.
“If you need to release the weights,” Imogen yelled, “just pull the tag.” She mimed the action, and Halem copied her, touching the tag to confirm that he could reach it.
He walked slowly toward the ladder at the edge of the jetty, and began his descent. Del adjusted the angle of the floodlight; from where she stood all she could see was the reflection of the bulb in the surface of the water, but Imogen had assured her that the light really did reach down to the riverbed.
Halem disappeared below the water. Del moved along the jetty, searching for a point where she could see him instead of the glare from the light, and finally managed to catch sight of him stepping off the ladder. The water wasn’t all that deep here, which made it a good choice for beginners. But as he walked along the sand, the wind rose up, rippling the surface so it caught the light again in shimmering patches and bands, making it almost impossible to see how he was faring.
Imogen said, “He’ll be fine.” She pointed to the safety line: the sheath lay slack on the planks of the jetty, but any relative movement of the cord within would pull on a spring attached to a bell striker. “Nothing can go wrong so fast that he wouldn’t have the chance to let us know.”
“And you think we could haul him up in time?”
Imogen laughed. “At this depth, I’d just jump in and cut off the weights.”
“What if his helmet’s filling up with water?” Its buoyancy only countered its weight when it was full of air.
“I’d cut through his suit around the edge of the corselet.”
