Islands in the Sky

4.4

Willem had known of the agreement, it turned out, and had told Cassa, who had then gone and asked her grandmother to explain it to her properly. And her grandmother had shown Cassa a map. As a reward for finding out about the agreement, Cassa half-assumed.

The map had made her grandmother’s plan clear. It showed where hoses were to be laid along the backs of houses, and over rooftops, and across the cables which held the islands together, all in secret.

The map showed the route of hoses, and Cassa looked at it and suddenly understood. She had seen the ancient hoses before, had handled them enough that she realized what all this meant. The hoses were strong and flexible, and could be laid very quickly. They could probably be laid between the Middletower and Cloudview tower in no more than two or three nights. And once laid, once concealed as they would be, on rooftops and beneath the island-binding cables, they would barely be visible. And even if someone noticed them, even if someone was deliberately looking, there were hoses and pipes and un-magic wires everywhere in the city. Hoses weren’t significant unless one traced out their whole path, and understood where the water was flowing from and to, and no-one would do that. No-one would care.

It was a clever plan, Cassa thought.

She looked at the map, and saw what this was, but then she asked her grandmother questions anyway, to make sure she understood it all. To make sure she knew everything she ought to know, now she was privy to the scheme.

Cassa asked, and her grandmother talked. Her grandmother seemed happy enough to tell her.

The agreement, her grandmother said, one of the conditions of Cassa’s marriage to Willem, was for the Cloudviews to supply water to the Middletower, and allow Middletower to refill its cisterns and take more water as was needed.

Cassa had simply nodded. The importance of that was clear.

The Middletower cisterns had not been full in decades. They had barely been wet some years. A drought a generation ago, as Anew-Hame moved through a dry part of the sky, had emptied the cisterns, and then the feud with the Watertowers had prevented their refilling ever since. When the cisterns were full the tower had a year of water, if they were frugal perhaps more, and storing that much water once again would be a great achievement for the family. A terrible weakness of theirs would be gone. Because storing water and food were what made a fortification fortified. Stone walls were good, and people to fight were useful too, but stores to eat and drink meant you could stay inside and ignore the world and be safe indefinitely.

Cassa’s bride-price was water, she supposed, and that stuck her as quite funny. Especially, when unlike her cousins, she hardly used more water than a servant.

Cassa’s bride-price was water, because an arrangement like this needed to be made as a long-term agreement, an ongoing trust that would last for months and years, not one that would be broken in a week. It needed to be that way because the hoses were thin, quite narrow, and brought only a little water at a time. Once water began to flow, it would flow all the time, all day and all night, and over weeks and months the amount of water being moved would be considerable. But that needed time. So an agreement like this needed to be sealed with a longer-term contact. A contract like a marriage, Cassa realized. A contact which spoke of a long-standing trust between the two families involved.

Cassa looked at the map, and understood all that, and told her grandmother that she did and would do what was needed. She would keep the Cloudviews happy, or at least not angry, for the months it would take to refill the cisterns. She wouldn’t drive Willem away, or harm him, or do anything else to interfere in this plan.

She would do as her family needed her to, she said. Although she might take baths a little more often, now.

And her grandmother had smiled and nodded.

Cassa was a little annoyed she hadn’t been privy to the plan in the first place, but she supposed it was a lesson of some sort. That she would only know what she found out herself, on her own, or something of that sort. Everything with her grandmother was a lesson of one sort or another, the same way it was with Konstantin. Cassa was used to constantly being taught, even when she would rather just be told. It had become so common she no longer especially cared.