The Book of All Skies, page 5
Clarissa nodded in assent. “But if I mention that, they say if tides are to be invoked at all, there are plenty of moons to account for them.”
Imogen said, “It can always be both. The world might well be cooler if there were no moons at all, but that doesn’t mean they’re sufficient.”
Del had read of numerous attempts by people to quantify all the possible sources of heat, and the rate at which it was lost to the void, but without a map showing the full extent of the world the whole endeavor was plagued with uncertainty. The idea that the five of them sitting in this room might actually progress from sharing their armchair opinions on the matter to settling such questions once and for all seemed almost comical in its hubris. Still, it would be equally absurd for her to grow more skeptical of Montano’s plans every time she thought of another potential benefit.
“These are the personal supplies that each of you should procure before departing,” Montano said, handing out sheets of paper. “The expedition will cover the costs, of course.”
Del looked over the list: a tent, a sleeping bag, items of clothing meeting various requirements, some suggested categories and quantities of food, and a bare minimum of pots, plates and utensils.
“We’ll be able to restock our food and water regularly, most of the way,” Montano promised, “but it seems prudent to have some non-perishable food in reserve from the start, just to cover all contingencies.”
“Later, though, if we do ... cross over?” Del wondered.
Clarissa said, “There ought to be the same kinds of plants and animals there as we’re used to. If there’s water, there’ll be fish, and if there’s soil there’ll be roots and berries.”
“The mountains in Sadema have kept us divided for a long time,” Imogen noted. “Who can say how the different sides might have diverged?”
Silvio was skeptical. “A barrier for us is not a barrier for every last seed, or spore, or insect. And whatever you think of the people hoping to paddle along an underground river, I’d bet you anything that fish have been swimming back and forth beneath the mountains all along.”
“If we cross over,” Montano said, “our first concern will be to understand the land we’ve arrived in. If it’s full of friendly Tollean traders offering us delicious food, all the better – but if it turns out to be desert and wasteland for a hundred skies, we won’t just march on, unprepared. We won’t take another step until we’re ready.”
Chapter 6
“How’s the warehouse?” Del asked Jachimo.
“A bit boring, compared to the museum,” he conceded. “But they pay me better.”
“You can’t live on-site, though.”
“I wouldn’t want to.” He shook his head, irritated. “Stop fretting about me! I’ve landed on my feet. And I’m not here to rake over the past; I’m here to wish you a safe journey.”
“Thank you.” Del looked around the garden at the families of the other expeditioners, gathered in groups beside the lanterns, laughing together. She’d chatted with them all, and performed the same party trick as she’d done for the investors, reciting a plausible guess at how a greeting in Tollean might be pronounced. But now she was just impatient to depart.
“Try some of the cake,” she suggested to Jachimo, pointing to a plate on the table beside them. He obliged, then held out the last piece toward her.
“No. I’ve already eaten too much, and ... ” She found her pack and hoisted it, pretending to stagger under the weight.
“So who’s going to guard you against robbers?” Jachimo asked.
“We’ll look after ourselves,” she replied. “Since Orsino, I’m not sure I’d trust anyone who makes it their profession.”
Jachimo pretended to be wounded. “That’s my profession, too.”
“You know what I mean. And what are they going to steal? My dried tomatoes?”
“Montano must be carrying some gold, to pay for all the workers he might end up hiring.”
“No, I think that’s all been arranged between the investors and their banks. He does have letters of introduction, but it would be difficult for anyone else to make use of them.” Del hadn’t enquired into the matter too closely, afraid that any excessive curiosity might arouse suspicion. “His family has done business all over the world,” she said. “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing, on the commercial side.”
“And the geographic?” Jachimo asked pointedly.
“Well, he’s trusting in his sister there,” Del replied. “And I’m in no position to judge the correct laws of gravity by staring at the formulas she wrote. So I suppose we’ll find out exactly how brilliant she was when we get to Celema.”
“I want you to be safe, that’s all.”
“I know. And I promise you, I’ll be careful.”
Montano climbed up onto a table. “Thank you for coming!” he yelled, then he waited for the guests to fall silent. “Seeing our friends and family here, to wish us well and offer us encouragement, has left us in such ebullient spirits that we will set out with our steps quickened and our loads lightened. When we return, we’ll be weary from our travels, but I believe we’ll be bringing back answers that have been lost for a thousand generations. Until then, keep us in your thoughts, as we will keep you in ours.”
He jumped down and picked up his pack. Jachimo embraced Del, and they parted; she ran to catch up with the others, who were already striding out of the garden.
They walked along the road in silence, past the grand houses of Montano’s neighbors. Other people were going about their business, and they didn’t glance twice at the group; away from the well-wishers assembled for the party, no one knew or cared what they were doing.
Del looked to the west and found the museum on its hilltop, silhouetted against Ladalla’s stars. “If we were standing on Takya,” she mused, “the stars themselves would rise and fall in the sky, just as Takya rises and falls for us.”
Silvio laughed. “Are you trying to make my job harder? Up there, you couldn’t navigate so easily by the stars – but it looks as if Takya turns in a way that keeps one side facing the world. So the world itself would be fixed in Takya’s sky, the way the stars are fixed in ours.”
“What if the world turned too?” Clarissa wondered. “Would it pass through the Hoops, so we kept finding ourselves beneath different skies? Or would it drag the Hoops along with it?”
Montano said, “I’m not sure that anything could make the Hoops turn.” He gestured to the north-west. “My sister climbed the hill once. She stood near the Hoop, and threw a piece of wood straight at it – slicing the wood in two, while the Hoop showed no sign of being disturbed in the slightest. Even the sharpest, tautest wire would be set ringing by an encounter like that, but she couldn’t discern the tiniest vibration.”
“You think that settles the matter?” Clarissa asked.
“Probably not,” Montano conceded. “Still, she said it was the most enjoyable experiment she’d ever done. The main lesson I took from it myself was to keep my distance, so I don’t end up in pieces.”
They reached the road to Ladalla, and then the stretch where Del had confronted Orsino. She had heard no news of the book turning up in any respectable museum, but she was still clinging to the hope that the recipient would at least take the trouble to have it professionally restored, and not just leave it in a private viewing cabinet to crumble away, unread.
As they approached the edge of the Hoop, Del found it hard not to feel a sense of unease, unassuaged by the fact that she’d suffered far more on her last journey from Orsino’s stone than from any violation of geometric propriety. A tangled thread didn’t mean she’d be trapped, so long as she could still unwind it; once she started around the hill, she’d retain the same ability as always to change her mind and retrace her steps.
“If we stayed at this edge, and just circled it until we hit the nub ... ?” she joked.
“We could try the same measurements,” Montano conceded. “And see if the gap was small enough to bridge. But that would be a lot of work, for no reward.”
Del wondered if he’d actually considered it, but then decided not to gamble with his chance of trying for the real thing at Celema. A successful bridge here would have made it easier to attract investors, but a failure might have scared them all off.
At the ring road they turned right, keeping them in Thena so they could enter the Hoop from the west. It hadn’t rained for a while in Apasa, and it seemed that the dry spell had stretched at least this far; their footfalls raised a cloud of dust, too fine to see but dense enough to irritate their eyes and throats. When Del looked to her left, the two skies were filled with nothing but stars, leaving the edge almost indiscernible.
They completed the first circuit in silence, save for the occasional cough, but as they came full circle Silvio proclaimed, “Welcome to Beremma!” His parents lived here, but they’d come to the farewell party, so they were probably still enjoying the hospitality at Montano’s house.
“How many skies have you seen for yourself?” Del asked him.
“Maybe ... thirty?” he guessed. “I know, that’s not a lot, but don’t worry, I’ve memorized the charts for all of them.”
Del was astonished. “All of them?”
“The ones we can reach,” he clarified, though Del had taken that as given.
“Is that something they test?” Clarissa asked. “For your navigator’s license?”
“Yes. They put you in a domed room and project points of light onto the ceiling; you have to say which land you’re in, and where. Each candidate is shown a dozen different skies to identify.”
“And what about the paths?” Imogen challenged him. “If I name any two lands, can you tell me the paths that will take you between them?”
“Of course!”
“My head hurts just thinking about packing that much information into it,” Imogen confessed.
“Well, my whole body hurts just thinking about walking underwater,” Silvio replied, “so it’s a good thing we won’t need to exchange professions.”
Del decided not to remind him that all five of them might need to don diving suits for part of the journey; she didn’t want to dwell on that prospect herself.
Halfway through the second circuit, the ground beneath her feet began to feel less parched, as if there had been rain not long ago. She inhaled deeply and caught a whiff of some sulfurous vent nearby, but that was preferable to breathing in grit. They passed a woman with a wheelbarrow piled with vegetables, coming the other way, followed by several other farmers and traders taking the same route. When one man enquired where they were going, and Montano replied, “Celema”, the man laughed as if it was a nonsense word.
The sky over Tullena bore wisps of cloud, and one exceptionally bright star to the north. “Do you know what that’s called?” Del asked Silvio.
“No,” he admitted cheerfully. “I know the shapes of the constellations, but not their names, let alone the names of the stars. Some of my friends learned all of that, and they say it helped them, but there are so many Hunters and Fish and Ploughs and Castles, in different positions in different skies, to me it just seemed like a recipe for confusion.”
They circled through Tullena, Kerema, Sedalla, and Mossema. The names of the lands stretched back beyond recorded history, and they must have meant something to people at the time, but any system behind the choice of syllables had been lost. Del watched the hill changing shape with each circuit, the stars replaced, the clouds come and go. In Mossema, a long stretch of the ring road had been invaded by weeds, mysteriously resistant to the heavy trampling to which the rest of the surface attested.
“Only fourteen to go,” Clarissa muttered, as they passed through the Hoop yet again. “I feel like a rat on a wheel.”
“Didn’t the Viteans train birds to carry messages from land to land?” Imogen recalled. “I don’t know why that stopped.”
“When the owners fell from power in the Palloran revolt,” Del replied, “most of the birds ended up in the wild, and the practice died out.”
“If the air wasn’t too thin at the gap ... ” Clarissa mused.
Montano laughed. “We could send a raptor over with a message, and see if it came back with a reply?”
“Why not?” Clarissa protested. “It might even be part of their natural behavior. Not the messages, but the crossing itself.”
“Maybe you can get them to string a rope ladder for us, while they’re at it,” Imogen teased her.
“Maybe that’s what the Tolleans did,” Del suggested.
Silvio said, “If someone had the patience to set up camp in Celema and just watch the birds, who knows what they’d see?”
They were in Peralla now. Del looked up and spotted a single moon, cutting a black disk out of a smattering of stars. Silvio could probably tell her the ratio between its passage and Takya’s, but she’d be gone from its domain long before the information was any use to her. The only count that mattered now was the count of their remaining orbits around the edge of the Hoop.
The conversation had fallen away again. Del listened to the footfalls of her companions and imagined it was a drumbeat urging her on, even as her own steps did the same for them.
Chapter 7
When the travelers entered Zeruma and turned off the ring road onto a highway running due east, Del half-expected to find herself staggering and giddy, like a child who’d been whirled by a parent too long finally deposited on solid ground. But though her balance remained undisturbed, she did feel disoriented from abandoning the circular course after so many repetitions; she kept glancing to her left expecting to see the hill in some form, and the edge of the Hoop rising from its peak.
“Here’s Yarun, up ahead,” Silvio announced. Del had already noticed a few lamps in the distance, but she’d kept silent, afraid she might have hallucinated them out of a sheer longing to be surrounded by buildings and people.
“We can rest in the tavern here,” Montano said. “Get a meal and some sleep.”
“We have our own tents!” Imogen protested.
Montano was amused. “There won’t be much more luxury like this along the way, so we might as well take advantage of it.”
As they entered the town, a heavy rain began to fall, which was enough to settle the matter for Del. Yarun looked small compared to Apasa, and the residents she glimpsed as heat blotches through the downpour seemed intent on hurrying away to their homes, but the tavern was right on the road, lit up and unmissable.
Inside, half a dozen diners were seated; some glanced at the group with looks of momentary curiosity, then turned back to their meals. Montano placed his pack on the floor beside an empty table, and caught the eye of the landlord.
“Take a seat,” the man said. “I’ll be with you shortly.” As the five of them converged on the table, Del finally realized how weary she was. She had run longer distances than the path here from Apasa, but she’d never walked a tenth as far with a comparable load.
“More Apasans off to claim their prize in the mountains?” a man from a nearby table enquired. The jibe sounded friendly enough, but they were all too tired to respond immediately, and Del felt a growing tension in the silence, as if it might be taken as a kind of haughtiness.
“Not in the mountains,” she replied, as cheerfully as she could. “When the tunnel-diggers go one way, we’ll go another.” That seemed like a reasonable compromise between downright evasion, and stating their intentions so explicitly as to invite a long discussion of their merits. In any case, the man just laughed and wished them luck.
The landlord brought a menu, and Del chose the first thing listed that promised to be hot and drenched in gravy.
“Are most people getting ready to sleep here, or have they just risen?” she wondered, addressing her companions in a low voice out of fear that the question might sound foolish to the locals.
“They look pretty warm to me,” Silvio replied.
“What do you mean?”
Now Silvio was confused. “You’ve never used that?”
Imogen said, “It’s not that widely known in Thena.” She turned to Del. “Most people’s body temperature is lowest when they rise. We follow the moons, but where there are none, people seem to take the cue from each other’s heat blotches.”
“Oh.” Del was embarrassed; she thought of herself as well-read, so how could she have lived so long without knowing how their neighbors decided when to sleep?
The food came, and it lived up to all her hopes for it, leaving her with a glorious warmth lingering in her belly. “A hot breakfast isn’t enough to confuse the matter?” she asked Imogen.
“Maybe for a traveler trying to make a quick judgment,” Imogen conceded. “But when people get to see more of the cycle, I think they tend to slip into the same pattern without even thinking about it.”
Montano spoke to the landlord about rooms; there were only three available, but the floors would be more than wide enough for a couple of sleeping bags.
As the five of them headed up the stairs, Del paused and glanced back toward the diners lingering contentedly at their tables; it seemed obvious now that they were drowsy, succumbing to sleep not emerging from it. Was it a coincidence that even at this remove, people were following more or less the same schedule as she’d been following when she departed? Or was there enough contact between neighbors to maintain a degree of synchrony over every land that could be reached by circling the same Hoop?
But as she turned away and continued her ascent, it struck her that she had no way of knowing exactly how long she had spent on the journey, and where the moons actually stood at this moment in Apasa’s sky.
Chapter 8
Del was woken by angry shouting: an unfamiliar voice, yelling commands.
She clambered out of her tent and saw a woman approaching, wielding a dagger. She stumbled back and turned, preparing to flee; the woman screamed, “Stay where you are!”
