Islands in the Sky

2.4

Anew-Hame was large. Anew-Hame filled the sky. In Anew-Hame, alone in all the world, one could stand and look around and see nothing but a city, and think of the distant past when people didn’t live in the sky.

Anew-Hame had spread beyond the built-up city. Towed along behind the main cluster of urban islands were others, agricultural islands, where crops were grown and animals pastured, a string of fertile land, linked by narrow foot-bridges and bound together by cables, stretching out another fifteen miles through the sky. Out there, too, there was a great reservoir, a piece of land from which a spring must have once flowed, and which was now filled by captured rainwater. It sparkled on sunny days, and turned grimly grey in rain, and a few people even kept the ancient art of using boats in water alive on it.

Boats on the water, rather than in the sky.

The reservoir was important to Anew-Hame. Water was piped across the city, through a blocked-up gully and into water tanks and square made-stone cisterns, allowing several months worth of water to be kept on hand for when the city floated through a drier part of the sky.

The city needed that water. The city was crowded and busy and terribly alive. Out there, beneath the smudges of smoke, beneath the haze of soot, there was bustle and chaos and countless people.

Countless people, all working and living and trying to keep themselves alive.

There were many parts to the city. There were many parts which all fit together to make a whole. There were roads and open squares and animal pens near the markets. There were abattoirs and butcheries, too. There were tanners out at the edge of the city, at the front-wind edge, the direction the city was moving, and so downwind of everyone else. There were harbours, where boats of fisherpeople set out to harvest the sky, catching passing birds in nets and bringing them back to land. There were merchants and explorers and scavengers, artists and soldiers, thinkers and readers. There were people who claimed to be magicians, but who all knew were not, and there were wonderworkers who were almost magicians in that they repaired the machinery of the ancients. There were winemakers and candle-makers and clock repairers too, workers in all the wonder-crafts of the ancients, keeping the splendours of the past alive.

There was the mundane as well. Of course there was the mundane. In addition to the water-pipes, there were sewers too, taking waste out to the edges of islands where it fell harmlessly to the ever-burning surface below. The city had learned its lessons at the very beginning about the dangers of open cesspits, of plagues and diseases, and had never used them again, but the sewer pipes sometimes blocked and teams of children went to clear them. It was an unpleasant trade, although a vital one, and there were less unpleasant industries, too. There were countless industries, all the industry imaginable. There were mills powered by oxen, and foundries and carpentry-shops and stables. Stables, because long ago Anew-Hame had saved horses and oxen when other places were eating them in desperation, and it had since bred up its herds again. Anew-Hame needed its horses and oxen. The city was so large that draught animals were needed to get around, and there were parts of the city so far from an accessible island-edge that boats could not to used to move all the freight that needed to be moved.

Anew-Hame was wealthy. Anew-Hame was the centre of a thick web of trade, which spread out through the sky, across the world, gathering riches back to the city. Anew-Hame traded, mostly of necessity. In part, this was habit and reflexive greed, but mostly it was dire necessity. The city was home to so many people, and had built over so many of its islands, that was no longer possible to feed or clothe all of people from the land which was available. The city had to trade to survive, to eat, and so trade it did.

It traded raw materials, and turned them into cloth and leather and steel. It gathered food into itself, and sent made-goods and relics of the ancients out into the sky. It traded, and grew rich, and it stored what it did not need now to trade later. It stored a vast wealth, an unimaginable wealth. There were whole islands of stockpiled ancient steel and cloth, set aside to use later. There were armouries and forges which turned that old steel into new goods. There were merchants who traded in the ancient relics, such as plastic storage containers and books and light-globe bulbs and durable clothing. There were traders in plastic-sheeting sailcloth and traders in plastic pipes. There were scavengers who picked over empty islands, and explorers who sought new islands and towed them back to the city. There was a guild which oversaw the last of the ancient’s weapons, who repaired and maintained them, and made new bullets so they could fire again, and there was another guild, the wonderworkers, which did the same for the ancient machinery. There was one wealthy family, not Cassa’s but one of the most powerful in the city, whose wealth was based on their control of a warehouse full of ancient light-globes. The warehouse was secure, heavily guarded and fortified, and the light-globes were wealth because this was the last supply which was known. More light-globes could not be made, although people had tried, and the light-globes still mattered because, perhaps alone in Anew-Hame of all the world, the wondrous machinery of the ancients which produced the un-magic still ran, and lit the globes, which lit the city at night.

The machines still ran. That was a wonder in itself. At least, some of the machines still ran, and many more were adapted to work in new ways, and the ancient machines were so well-made and efficient that they were useful, even so. There were boilers which heated whole buildings, and which now ran on dried dung, and there were spinning and cutting and drilling machines whose belts were now turned by hand, rather than un-magic. There were the city’s pumps, too. The city’s water system ran on ancient un-magic pumps, which were now pumped by windmills, and even so they worked better and more efficiently than any pump which could be made new. There were those machines, which had been adapted and made useful, and there were many more besides, but most precious of all were the un-magic-making machines, the light-making machines, which rattled and hummed and ran on pressed olive oil, and fed their mysterious un-magic unto the webs of wires, which ran to all the corners of the city, and made all the light-globes glow at night. Those machines, and the wire-web, were maintained by teams of wonderworkers, and it was they who most truly deserved that title of all, for that smokeless, flameless, steady light from nothing but oil and a thin wire, that was truly a wonder.

That was Anew-Hame, through and through. Anew-Hame of the wonders, and Anew-Hame of the night-time lights, probably the last place in all the world those lights could now be seen. Anew-Hame was many such things. Anew-Hame the wealthy, and Anew-Hame the powerful. Or perhaps, Anew-Hame which had always kept people safe, because first and foremost, and even though many forgot, long ago Anew-Hame had been a safe haven, the only safe haven, as the world had come apart.

Anew-Hame was a jumble, a confusion, a wonder. It was a complicated, busy, thriving, and terribly unique thing. It was the largest city in the world, or at least, the largest the people of Anew-Hame had ever found, which to them was the same thing.

It was also Cassa’s home, and had been her family’s home for generations, almost since the Gods War, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.