Islands in the Sky

Chapter 5.1

The first trip Sema had made to the wood-cutting island had been more successful then she had hoped.

She had gone with Quen Tosal’s ship. She had tied her wardrobe-boat to the ship, and been towed along behind it, and they had sailed to an island that seemed to be uninhabited, and which was covered in trees. There the people from Quen Tosal’s ship had got off and begun working. They worked quickly and efficiently, and had all seemed to know what to do. Some began felling trees, while others cut and stacked logs which had been left on the island to dry, or split them into firewood and carried the split wood onto the ship.

Sema had watched for a little while, curious about the way Quen Tosal’s people worked. She had watched, and then begun collecting sticks of her own. There were a lot of sticks around, so many that in some ways her work seemed easier than that of the woodcutters. She had found sticks everywhere. There were many among the still-standing trees, small branches which had fallen in the wind, and there were more in the cleared area where the trees had already been cut, presumably dislodged as they were felled.

Sema found sticks, and gathered them up, and carried them back to her boat. As she had planned, she broke them with her foot and stacked them on the deck. She left unbroken any that were too thick to snap, and put those on her boat as they were.

After a while, presumably noticing the longer sticks, a woman came over to Sema and silently handed her an axe. Grateful, Sema said thank you, and quickly broke her longer sticks into pieces, and then went and returned the axe and said thank you to the woman again. She had assumed the people working alongside her would be watching her, and probably reporting back to Quen Tosal. That they didn’t disapprove of her, and would offer help if she needed it, that was very reassuring to know.

Sema collected sticks from in among the trees at first, and did that for most of the first morning. Then, once she had watched the woodcutters work for a while, and noticed they were trimming smaller branches from trunks and just discarding them, she asked if she could pick over their scraps. The woodcutters said yes, as long as Sema didn’t get in the way. Sema said she wouldn’t, and did her best not to. She stayed in the forest while they worked, waiting until they stopped to eat, and only then did she go into the area where they were working to retrieve the smaller sticks she could use.

She worked all the first day, and then she slept on the ground, on the shore, exhausted. She woke the next morning, a little hungry, and began finding sticks again.

She was hungry because she hadn’t taken enough food. She didn’t have enough food, or the coins to buy any more, so she had set off anyway, knowing she would be hungry but thinking it didn’t particularly matter. She wasn’t unused to hunger, and didn’t mind it occasionally, not if it was only now and then. It was worth being hungry for a while, she thought, knowing she would eat properly when she got back to Anew-Hame. She had lacked food, and lacked water as well. She had found out as she was making ready to leave the city that water, like wood, came at a price, a coin paid at the pipe-ends and fountains before a container could be filled. Sema didn’t have any coins, so she had traded three empty plastic buckets for a bucket-full of water, and hoped that would be enough, or that she would be able to catch a little rain as they sailed.

She had been hungry, and thirsty, but she had worked as hard as she could. She gathered wood as fast as she could, with no idea how much she needed. She filled her boat with sticks. She filled it quickly, and filled it so full that there was barely room for her to sit inside it too. She had filled the boat as best she was able, piling sticks onto the deck in heaps, so much so she probably couldn’t have actually sailed, or steered, or done much else than sit and be towed, by the time she was done.