Islands in the Sky

2.3

Anew-Hame was a jumble, a wonder, the largest city in the world.

It was four miles long and three across and built upon half a hundred large islands, all captured and bound together, with several hundreds more smaller ones pushed into the spaces in between.

Each island had originally been a different kind of land, once upon a time, down on the surface, long ago. Each island had been different, and all had been pulled together into a city with no particular care about how each was placed. Some were rocky, some flat, and some had once been the sides of mountains. Some had been pieces of ancient cities, with towers that rose hundreds of feet into the sky, and some had been open grasslands with the ancient farm fences still in place.

Whatever kind of land each had once been, most were now lost beneath the city, forgotten, covered over by houses and markets and workshops. They were forgotten except for the odd changes in height all over the city, where flat streets suddenly went up steep stairs, and where bridges tilted as they crossed gaps in the sky. Sometimes, there were changes in the texture or colour of the soil one walked upon, stepping from one squeezed-together island to another, but otherwise, the islands beneath the buildings were all but forgotten, mostly because the buildings themselves so readily caught the eye.

The buildings were odd, a jumble as well, different styles and colours, made of whatever material was ready to hand. Sometimes that was the rubble of older structures, torn down to make more room, or even those torn apart when the world rose into the sky. For more recent construction, though, it was the wood of felled trees, or stone quarried from other islands and shipped to Anew-Hame. Most often, most commonly, the material used was stone. There was a lot of stone used in construction in Anew-Hame, because even though stone was more difficult to quarry than wood was to cut, once the stone had been quarried it was much easier to work with. Once quarried, it could be easily moved from island to island simply by being bundled into nets and towed around, weightless in the sky. Most of the buildings around the outsides of each island were made of stone, dragged into place in this way.

Not always, though. Sometimes, this dragging could become complicated, because the air between islands of Anew-Hame was not just empty sky.

Between the islands were the cables which tied the city together, and also water-pipes and un-magic wires running between islands in a complicated, tangled web. There were many bridges, as well, which the inhabitants of the city used to get around. Some of these bridges were mere links of wire, but most were more complex, safe pathways of fastened-down stones with handrails to keep people from falling. A few, the largest on the major roadways, were wide enough for carts, and were even made of metal, or of stone strung on cables, and many of those were surfaced with wood as well.

Anew-Hame was chaotic. The city was busy, overcrowded, and always short of space. People built where they could. In places, near the heart of the city, people even built on the pipes and cables. It made sense to do this, because it was so very easy. Stone was stone. It was weightless, and floated well enough wherever it happened to be. It simply needed securing in place to hold it steady, and once there it placed no burden on whatever it was attached to, a pipe as much as an island. Such a platform of stone could make the base of a house, which soon become a tiny, one-building island. Then others would come, and a wall would be a new fastening point, or a ledge would hold a plank-end, and soon another set of buildings would grow, almost, as if out of nothing.

The city spread and grew and changed as people added new buildings to islands, and tore away anchor cables they didn’t wish on their houses. And in Anew-Hame, with the example of the ancient towers to catch an architect’s eye, people built upwards as often as sideways. They built upwards, in a glorious jumble of materials and styles and designs. It wasn’t uncommon to see a four-level house with different walls and colours on every level, as it had been added to as the residents could afford to build more.

For all the crowding, though, not all the islands in the city were built upon. Sometimes, when an island was covered in particularly fertile soil, it was still used as farmland, even when surrounded by the bustle of the city. There were still some fields, and even carefully managed forests remaining in the city although these were being eroded slowly, over time. They survived until someone decided the land was more valuable for buildings, and then the spaces of farmland and pasture disappeared. Even so, looking across the city, there were patches of green amid the grey stone and grey wood.

For all the different kinds of buildings in Anew-Hame, many of the more obvious one were large structures built by the ancients. Islands containing these had been sought out and retrieved by the first city-makers, and most especially those with the sky-reaching towers.

The towers of the ancients were unusual, narrow buildings soaring thirty and fifty levels upwards, and rising over the city as the city floated over the world. They were impossibly tall, so high even the city below was lost from their tops, and far higher than anyone knew how to build any more. The towers simply stood, and seemed impervious to age and weather, and no wonderworker or thinker now alive quite knew how or why. Some though it odd they had never fallen, but most were just accustomed to that fact, and said there was much mysterious about the ancients, and this was just another sign of their power.

The towers were strong. They had to be strong, to still stand. They had thick walls, usually of the ancient’s made-stone, the odd strangely-smooth rock which the ancients used for a lot of their construction, and which lasted forever, or so close to forever it had not yet been seen to wear away. The towers were so strong they became unintended fortifications, and then the homes of the wealthiest and most powerful families, both as signs of their status, and for their defensibility.

The towers were unique for their height, but not especially for their age. Ancient buildings were everywhere in Anew-Hame, and most were formed of made-stone as well. Some of these buildings were small, only the size of large houses, but some were vast, cavernous empty spaces, built for mysterious purposes, but now usually subdivided into tenements, beneath the secure roof, and filled in with apartments or livestock or workshops, and being re-used in sensible ways. As well as towers, and houses, and the huge empty barns, there were vast old bridges in two parts of the city, bridges that had obviously once carried roads wide enough for ten carts. Those bridges were not used as bridges any more, for they no longer went anywhere particular. Instead, walls had been built beneath their arches, so the bridge formed the roof of many buildings set side-by-side.