Islands in the Sky

1.7

Sema kept thinking. She was trying to plan properly now.

She thought about food, and how much there was left on the island. She decided she ought to check, so she didn’t eat the last of it without realizing. She went through the burned houses, and gathered what there was. A little barley and oats, some toasted already, from corners where it hadn’t been burned and where the pirates hadn’t found and stolen it. A few weeks worth of wrinkled apples from cellars, if she ate nothing else. No meat, no eggs, and nothing with much taste. She especially didn’t care about taste, but she thought she’d need to eat something more substantial than apples sooner or later, or she might become sick.

She looked around the fields. There were no livestock left, and the pirates had burned the barley, and even though the winter wheat crop was still growing, it would be months before it was ready. She wondered if the wheat would help her situation, but decided not. It would be too difficult for her to harvest and mill it on her own, difficult enough she would probably lose a lot of it as she worked, and even if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have enough grain to replant the fields anyway.

Not to replant them, and eat until spring, too.

If she stayed, the choice was simple, looking at what she had. She could eat what grain there was now, and starve next year, or she could starve herself now and plant it, taking comfort in the knowledge there would be wild wheat and barley waiting for whoever came to the island next, long after she was dead.

It wasn’t really much of choice.

She walked around, thinking, miserable, and decided that she needed to go. This was her home, and the memories were painful, but she still felt a little sad at being forced to leave.

That was assuming she was actually going to leave, she suddenly thought, rather than just leaping from the island and ending her loneliness now. She thought about it for a while, wondering if she should, but then decided she wasn’t going to leap, and that she mostly already knew that. She wouldn’t be bothering to plan like this if she was just going to jump over the side, she thought. So she wasn’t going to jump, that meant she had to leave. And if she was leaving, she needed to leave now, soon, before the food ran out, and before winter began. Before it was too cold to survive here.

She needed to go, so now she’d made sure she had food, she went back to thinking about boats. She thought a lot about boats, and how they might work.

She experimented. She put a rock in a cup, and threw it over the side of the island. The cup fell and the rock floated where it had been. She held a rock out slowly, slower than she’d ever done before, and as her hand passed out over the edge of the island she thought she felt a little tug against her hand.

That tug was interesting.

She dropped a rock onto the island, and as she expected, it fell. She dropped it again, at the very edge of the land, closer and closer to the edge, trying to find the exact spot it tugged at her hand. She did, in the end, with a little trial and error. She found a place where the rock shifted sideways as it fell, shifted ever so slightly, as if blown by a soft, peculiar wind. It fell sideways, in the faintest of curves, impossible to see, and then floated in the air, right beside the shore. Touching, but separate. Part of the island, but not.

Sema knew she had dropped it halfway above the island, halfway not, but that close to the shore, it slipped outwards on its own.

That was interesting to know, too.

She did it again, thinking and watching as she did. Thinking about falling rocks helped take her mind off her grief. She dropped rocks, and found a pattern. There was some force catching the rocks right near the edge of the island. She dropped several more, at different heights, and worked out the place where they began to go sideways as they fell. It was a line, rising up from the edge of the island, but moving slightly inwards as it rose. Not a completely vertical line, not straight up from the edge. A rock would move further on its own, the higher it was dropped.

It wasn’t an upright barrier like a fence, Sema decided. It was more something akin to a shadow being cast, a shadow which fell a little sideways through the air.

She thought about that, and shadows, and what shadows hid.

She thought for a long time, and then decided she’d had it backwards. It wasn’t the rocks that floated in the sky on their own, after all, but something below which pushed upwards against them. A rock above the island was shadowed from this push, and fell to the island like any other rock. A rock off the island’s side, or near the side, that was caught by the force that held the island up, and then the rock floated on its own, a new island.

It seemed important, but she wasn’t quite sure why.

She thought about it for a while.