Islands in the Sky

1.10

Sema went over to the line of wardrobes she had moved, and thought about what to do.

It would be easiest to fasten the wardrobes together one at a time, she thought. To line them up along the shore before she started, but actually do her nailing and tying and gluing in smaller steps, each wardrobe to the next, filling each with rocks as she finished and pushing it out into the sky. That way the weight she needed to shift at the end would be much less, she thought, since she would be making the boat wardrobe by wardrobe, rather than all at once.

She began to do that. She had nails. She had as many nails as she needed, once she worked out how to pull them out of burned pieces of wood, and straighten them, and scrape them on a rock to resharpen their points. She had some glue, and some rope, and she had many, many nails, because there was so much broken wood lying around the village, although she had to walk quite a long way to gather enough medium-sized rocks.

She pushed, and nailed, and as she finished each wardrobe, she pushed a little more of the boat out into the sky, and as she pushed, she listened to the rocks inside the wardrobes shifting around.

She seemed to have been right about how a boat would work, she decided, about the island’s upwards shadow and that dirt and rocks were repelled from beneath rather than floating upwards on their own. As she pushed each wardrobe out, off the island, she heard the rocks inside it moving on their own, shifting and bumping against the wood. The rocks weren’t just shifting from the wardrobe’s movement as she pushed, she decided, and they were moving differently to what a sideways shove would cause too. The rocks were lifting upwards, as they came clear of the edge of the island. Rocks which had one moment been resting inside the wardrobe, inert, suddenly began to lift upwards on their own. Sema was sure that was what was happening. She could hear the rocks shifting, and feel it a little too, a kind of gentle knocking as the first of them began to move, bouncing against the top of the wardrobe, and then more knocking as a few more joined the first, and then it was all of them together and a sudden lift in the wardrobe as it began to float on its own.

She was pleased with herself for working that out. She was glad she’d been right. It made her feel better to know why a boat would float. It helped to know that, since she was planning to climb onto it and sail away. She was right about it being easier to build this way, too. The fastened-together wardrobes were much easier to push around, once one end of the boat was floating off the island and weightless in the sky.

She worked. She worked for a while. She had nine wardrobes, so she arranged them in a square, three by three. She thought, and left the middle wardrobe empty of rocks. It was large enough for her to fit inside, so she would sleep in there.

She thought some more, and then pulled her half-made boat back to shore, and took out all the rocks, and painstakingly turned it over. She fastened pieces of wood to the underneath of the wardrobes, across-wise, making extra supports holding the wardrobe she would sleep in to all the others. That felt safer. Then she turned the boat back over and did the same to the top, and then all around the sides. Now the boat was more boat-like than it had been, now a single solid thing made up of nine separate boxes enclosed in rigid frame of wood.

As she nailed, she noticed there were drawers in the bottoms of many of the wardrobes. She left those free of planks, deliberately, creating little cupboards that slid upwards to open and which she could use for storage. Then she filled the wardrobes with rocks again, all except the middle one, and then nailed more wood across their opening doors, holding them closed, and holding the boat together, and holding the rocks securely inside, as well.

She pushed it off the island, still tied to a tree, and it floated, happily. It didn’t even creak and sway as she climbed onto it, now.