Islands in the Sky

4.3

Cassa sat and thought, and watched the tap drip, but she didn’t run any more water. She didn’t run a bath, or do more to wash than splash her face.

She was careful of water. She was careful because she had been aware of what water meant to her family since she was a child.

Her family, the Middletower family, had been hostile to the Watertower family for years. For almost as long as Cassa could remember, her family’s great weakness had been water.

The Middletowers were merchants, and for the most part traders. They traded, and had interests in fishing as well, and so were wealthy in found-goods and artefacts, but were far less secure in basic staples and necessities. Grain there were many suppliers of, and those families who did not grow their own grain went to some political effort to maintain a fluid and balanced market for grains, making sure no single supplier could take charge. Grain the Middletowers could always get, but glow-bulbs and plastics and forged metals they had to trade for, and water they were always desperately short of.

Water was scarce, because the Watertowers, a rising house and arrogantly assertive, had their tower beside and overlooking the city’s main reservoir and the distribution chambers and pumping windmills which sent water all over the city. The Watertowers didn’t control the actual water, simply the supply of water, but since some kind of insult or slight a decade ago they had been charging Cassa’s family ten times a reasonable price for it.

Cassa’s family made do. They harvested rain as much as they could, and had laid illicit pipes to allies’ towers, and to the city’s main pipe networks in sympathetic parts of the city. The Middletowers made do, but water was always a little scarce, and had been all through Cassa’s childhood. Baths were a rarity for her, unlike for some of her cousins. Baths were a rarity, because she was aware of her family’s weaknesses, and unlike some, she took care not to make them worse.

Now the situation was different, though. Now the situation had suddenly changed.

As it had turned out, quite oddly, Cassa thought, water had been at the heart of her marriage. Water had been central to an agreement between the Middletowers and the Cloudviews which had been made in secret before the wedding.

Cassa had not known, but had found out afterwards, a few days ago. She had found, and begun to appreciate quite how elaborate her grandmother’s tricks were.

The Watertowers, the family’s enemies, controlled a lot of the city’s water, but not all of it. By no means all. Others still had some to supply as well.

Nothing was ever entirely controlled or exclusive or homogenous in a city a complicated as Anew-Hame. Once someone had control of a resource, as the Watertowers did water, and once they began to use their control as a weapon, which the Watertowers were, that made the resource more valuable to some, creating a gap in value between the price everyone else paid, and the price a few paid. Into that gap of value, that ability to resell for profit, other traders quickly moved.

In this case, those traders were the Cloudviews.

The Watertowers had water, and the Middletowers had none, and the Cloudviews had a little water of their own. They had a small reservoir, and good relations with the Watertowers that allowed it to easily refill, and they had some commercial pipe networks as well. Best of all, the Cloudview tower was adjacent to the Middletower and uphill, as it were, in the direction from which the city’s water naturally flowed.

It had all fit together quite nicely.