Islands in the Sky

6.7

Sema watched the shadow of the approaching island grow larger, and block out more of the sun. It was coming towards them fast. It must be moving more quickly than they were.

Sema was scared. She was so scared she was calm.

The captain was shouting, and the sailors were trying to change the sails, there was panic and fear, but Sema just stood where she was. There was nothing useful she could do. She didn’t know how to help sail a ship, and she’d already decided not to abandon everyone else and try and flee on her wardrobe boat, so all she could do was stand there, helplessly.

She had no part to play. She had nothing to do.

She had nothing useful to do, so instead she watched and thought.

The trap was clever, she thought. Whoever had planned this trap was frighteningly clever and determined, to wait out there, hidden in the brightness of the sun, just in case someone came along. In part it was a coincidence, she supposed. The woodcutting ship had simply had bad luck. Later on in the day, when the sun was higher, they would have seen the island-ship much earlier, had time to see what it was and try to get away. It was bad luck that they had met it now, but it wasn’t only luck. It was cleverness as well. The cleverness to organize something which might very well work, as well as the good fortune to have it happen in an advantageous way.

Sema was fairly sure that this ambush had been planned. The island-ship had been lucky with the sunrise, but they had also been clever to assume that as soon as the burned island was seen, everyone would look towards it, and so something in the other direction, away from the island, that would probably pass unnoticed.

Just as Sema had passed unnoticed, standing behind a door when she was a child.

The people on the island-ship could probably guess the direction from which anyone sailing to the woodcutting island would come, Sema thought, since the newcomers would be from Anew-Hame, and the city’s approximately location would be known. If they wished to, the people on the island-ship could work out a line between Anew-Hame and the woodcutting island, and see where that line was, and then wait slightly off to the side of the line, to the east at dawn and to the west at dusk. They could wait in the sun, deliberately, in the hope of catching someone in exactly the way they had.

Sema wondered if that was what they’d done. She wondered if they’d actually thought about it that much, and whether they’d really moved their island each noon and each night so as to be in the best position for an ambush if the possibility arose. Sema would have, if it had been her. If she was determined enough to wait at one place in the sky in case someone came along, and to burn a whole island to bait a trap, then she would certainly be determined enough to sail back and forth in the hope of making her trap more effective.

Sema thought they probably had.

It was clever to hide like that, she thought. It was clever to work out how to hide at all, in a clear-blue empty sky, using nothing more than assumptions and navigation paths and an understanding of how people behaved.

It was very clever, Sema thought, so clever she almost wanted to meet the person who had thought of this. Except that the person who had thought of this was probably about to try and kill her.

Except for that.