Islands in the Sky

1.9

Sema’s first boat was a wardrobe, filled with dirt because that was easier to shovel, with the lid nailed closed after she filled it just to be sure it didn’t suddenly tip over and fall open and pour its dirt, and therefore its ability float, out into the sky. It had no sail. It had no way to steer, and probably wouldn’t catch enough wind to blow anywhere anyway. All the same, it had a plastic rope tied around it, anchoring it to a tree on the island, just to make certain it didn’t drift away.

She pushed it off the island, and watched it float for a while.

It floated.

It floated, and didn’t settle. It also didn’t drift off on its own, or get left behind by the island, or do anything else alarming. It just sat there, tied to a tree, doing nothing.

She watched it for a while and decided that as a boat it worked.

She had made a boat.

She was quite pleased with herself.

She pulled the wardrobe back tightly against the shore, a short step from where she was standing. She tied another rope around herself, just to be safe, and cautiously stepped out. The wardrobe swayed and settled as it took her weight. It swayed, but stayed as it was, floating in the sky, and didn’t sink any lower than it had been. She was certain that it didn’t sink lower, because she had pushed a stick into the earth bank level with the top of the door before she got on, and stick remained in the same place.

She sat down on the lid, carefully, and stayed as still as she could until the wardrobe stopped swaying. She watched the stick, suspicious, ready to jump off if something awful happened.

Nothing happened. The wardrobe hadn’t sunk any lower when she got on, and it didn’t settle lower while she sat there.

She was safe enough, she told herself, even though she didn’t feel completely safe. The wardrobe swayed and rocked alarmingly whenever she moved. It rocked too much to be useful to travel anywhere, she decided, but she would worry about that later.

She sat there, thinking.

She was miles above the ground. It was a little terrifying, sitting like she was. Sitting on a wardrobe, in the sky, with nothing holding her there but a sensible idea and her observations and some dirt.

It felt slightly unnatural, sitting like that, even though she’d spent half her life sitting at the edge of the island, dangling her feet over it. The drop didn’t bother her especially. It wasn’t the drop, and it wasn’t the open expanse of sky. She was used to both those things. It was that she was off the island, for the first time in her life. She was playing the rock-and-stick game, but with herself as the stick, and that was an odd, odd thing to be doing.

She felt unreasonably safe on the shore of the island, she realized, even though the drop was the same, and the earth there could easily crumble beneath her. She felt that way because the island was ground. The island was land. It was safe. And now, all she was sitting on was a box, and nothing more, and that was a little unsettling.

She sat there, and thought a little more, and realized she was actually afraid of falling. She had been cautious, and tied herself to the island with a rope. It was an odd thing to do, when a few days earlier she had been planning to jump off the island anyway. Something had changed, she supposed, and she thought she understood what. Now she had some hope, and something useful to do with herself, and so she didn’t actually want to fall off any more. And that was probably a good thing, she thought.

She decided she’d sat there long enough. She wasn’t learning anything new. She climbed back off the wardrobe, and thought about what to do next.

The swaying of the wardrobe was her last big problem. She threw a rock onto the wardrobe, and watched carefully. The rock bounced, and fell off the side into the sky, but the wardrobe hadn’t shifted when the rock landed on it. The rock was smaller than she was, small compared to the size of the wardrobe. The rock wasn’t large enough to make the wardrobe sway, she decided, and that was another interesting thing to know. It mean the wardrobe only rocked when she sat on it because her weight was too great compared to the size of the wardrobe, or the amount of dirt inside, or something of that sort.

She needed a larger boat, she decided. So it sat steadier in the sky, and so she wouldn’t fall off it. And so she could take supplies with her, if she managed to find any supplies. That too, she supposed.

She thought about how to make a bigger boat. She thought about it for a while. The easiest way would be a single larger container, but that would be difficult to actually do. There wasn’t really anything large enough on the island, since the pirates had burned the only cart, and even if there had been, Sema didn’t think she was strong enough to pull something so large to the edge of the island on her own. There was a limit to how big a thing she could push around. Instead, though, she could use several smaller containers to hold a larger amount of rocks or dirt. She could use several containers, and drag them around one by one, and then fasten them together on the shore.

She would use more wardrobes, she decided, and tie them together somehow. Tie or glue, or perhaps nail them, she would work that out later.

She went and found wardrobes. Enough had survived in the half-burned houses for this to work. She found all the wardrobes that were left in the village, and began to work out how to make a boat. She hunted around, and found nails, and rope, and some leftover glue made of boiled animal skins.

She began dragging the wardrobes out of the houses, and over to the edge of the island. It was a difficult, exhausting, irritating work. It wore her out, and she squashed her fingers and banged her shins several times before she finished. It took most of the morning, and a little of the afternoon too, and when she was done she stopped to eat a few apples and think about what to do next.