The Broken Colossus, Abura, Akvatar
Summer 82, 514
--------------------
The sand had come, a late summer storm from the continent. It was not the violent storms of the deep continental desert, where flesh and bone could part with the abrasive breezes, more a dust storm then a sand-storm, but it had been eerie nonetheless to Minnie. The sky had spent a week or more the color of dirty copper, and the air of the city was a murky hue, deepening shadows into a rough granular depth. Minnie had given up trying to leave the office of the House for the duration, for the hatch at ground level would pile with silt, and she feared each time she opened it that the silt would blow in and damage one of the geldboxes. For the first time, the sky of Abura left her deeply, powerfully homesick, sick for a good wet storm that slapped clean the rooftops, and left the grass slick with good clean mud.
But now, finally, the wind had stopped, and the sky, when she had awoken for a moment in the midday, was back to its punishing, blue-white clarity. She and her apprentice had swept the walkways, and cleaned the crevices of the hatch's queer seals, and Semiyr had carefully checked for damage to the tower itself.
It had been an exhausting day despite the relief of stepping into the open night air, and as the moon suckled the horizon, and the Morning Star peered over the surface of the desert, Minnie tied her ankles and poured her tired muscles into the long pool, swimming long, slow strokes along the length of it, enjoying the feel of the spring-water on her tired back, across her belly, down the muscles of her neck. She had not realized how tense they had become in the storm, how much her body had protested the dour sky. She hinged her jaw back and forth and rolled slow circles of her head on her spine as she swam.
Then, she climbed out, untied her feet, and tied the ribbon into lengthening hair. She crawled down the broken stone at the end, and to the hand of the great fallen statue. It was full of water, as always, and she clambered up to sit on the curve of the thumb's tip, stretching her feet and dipping them into the surface of the water.
Her bag held one of the odd sea-lanterns, which she swirled gently, and rolled into the palm of the hand. It glowed, casting blue white light placidly across the contours of the fingertips, enough that Minnie could draw out a wax tablet. She dried her Qalaya-Hand on the wet waist of her skirt, and snapped the tablet open, beginning to write in a small hand.
She'd spent much of the summer working on passages of a biography of Charm Wright. The work was comforting and familiar, and gave her the comforting feeling of keeping her word to a friend. She hummed softly to herself, a chorus she'd half-heard in a little expedition to the art gallery, something low and sad and, to be frank, far beyond the limits of her singing skill. But she picked out a (highly simplified) melody of it, the only noise in the still air. The desert stretched before her, like a sea frozen in time.
It was in this way that Captain Wright acquired for the Sailor's Guild a safer berthing the port of Sunberth, ending a period of nearly three years of interrupted trade. The return of the Zeltivan ships to the shores of the city, rich with medicines, trade goods and, of course, mizas raised according to Captain Almire Hightiller, "a literal shout of goodwill from the foreign shore, and a spontaneous carnival that tested the virtues of my crew to the utmost." The grain acquired, in turn, alleviated the shortfalls at home, effectively ending the political machinations of the Chancellor of Navigation at the University.
She clucked her tongue, and marked the margin, with a note to revise - the machination of the Chancellor had been sufficiently subtle in this time, that it would be important to offer more concrete claims and evidence if she was to include them in the history, but it was important to include them, as they had been so instrumental in delaying the end of the grain shortfalls. She mused about how she was to get the records. She doubted they would be in the local library.
But these thoughts could not hold her long, for the water was tremendously, beautifully cool on her ankles. She wondered where Gypa was, but it was a quiet sort of melancholy, and added to rather than detracted from the quiet beauty of the scene. She marked a section break, accepting that perhaps it was not an evening for research, tonight, it would wait.
I had a dream, last night, a beautiful dream, that Lanie had come home and Mara was still alive, and they had written to me here. Only instead of words, the letter had hands in it, Mara's hands business like and practical, and Lanie's running wildly over my face. I think, the dream grew confused, and the hands were MY hands and my face was Lanie's face, then, only I could still feel them, and I was waking then, and found myself half=conscious of the dream, and trying very hard to catalogue the contours that the fingers found, to know how Lanie looked, now, how the shape of her face had changed. When I woke, of course, the feeling was a mishmash, nothing magical about it. I could not write a hand, though I wonder if Qalaya could - could one write so clearly that the writing literally took shape and lived of its own volition? It would make a beautiful opera - a lonely writer writes into existence a paramour, perhaps.
She smiled, thinking about it, and penned, very roughly, a verse for it.
My pen hath poured its ink into a tongue
And then abjured the tongue, to form a word -
MY ears, already writ, then bent and heard
The song the lips, en-voiced of me now sung.
She smiled a little. It was not beautiful, of course, she found it a little bit too past tense, so that it lacked the urgency of writing life into existence out of sheer desire. She looked out over the desert again, considering.
x
Summer 82, 514
--------------------
The sand had come, a late summer storm from the continent. It was not the violent storms of the deep continental desert, where flesh and bone could part with the abrasive breezes, more a dust storm then a sand-storm, but it had been eerie nonetheless to Minnie. The sky had spent a week or more the color of dirty copper, and the air of the city was a murky hue, deepening shadows into a rough granular depth. Minnie had given up trying to leave the office of the House for the duration, for the hatch at ground level would pile with silt, and she feared each time she opened it that the silt would blow in and damage one of the geldboxes. For the first time, the sky of Abura left her deeply, powerfully homesick, sick for a good wet storm that slapped clean the rooftops, and left the grass slick with good clean mud.
But now, finally, the wind had stopped, and the sky, when she had awoken for a moment in the midday, was back to its punishing, blue-white clarity. She and her apprentice had swept the walkways, and cleaned the crevices of the hatch's queer seals, and Semiyr had carefully checked for damage to the tower itself.
It had been an exhausting day despite the relief of stepping into the open night air, and as the moon suckled the horizon, and the Morning Star peered over the surface of the desert, Minnie tied her ankles and poured her tired muscles into the long pool, swimming long, slow strokes along the length of it, enjoying the feel of the spring-water on her tired back, across her belly, down the muscles of her neck. She had not realized how tense they had become in the storm, how much her body had protested the dour sky. She hinged her jaw back and forth and rolled slow circles of her head on her spine as she swam.
Then, she climbed out, untied her feet, and tied the ribbon into lengthening hair. She crawled down the broken stone at the end, and to the hand of the great fallen statue. It was full of water, as always, and she clambered up to sit on the curve of the thumb's tip, stretching her feet and dipping them into the surface of the water.
Her bag held one of the odd sea-lanterns, which she swirled gently, and rolled into the palm of the hand. It glowed, casting blue white light placidly across the contours of the fingertips, enough that Minnie could draw out a wax tablet. She dried her Qalaya-Hand on the wet waist of her skirt, and snapped the tablet open, beginning to write in a small hand.
She'd spent much of the summer working on passages of a biography of Charm Wright. The work was comforting and familiar, and gave her the comforting feeling of keeping her word to a friend. She hummed softly to herself, a chorus she'd half-heard in a little expedition to the art gallery, something low and sad and, to be frank, far beyond the limits of her singing skill. But she picked out a (highly simplified) melody of it, the only noise in the still air. The desert stretched before her, like a sea frozen in time.
It was in this way that Captain Wright acquired for the Sailor's Guild a safer berthing the port of Sunberth, ending a period of nearly three years of interrupted trade. The return of the Zeltivan ships to the shores of the city, rich with medicines, trade goods and, of course, mizas raised according to Captain Almire Hightiller, "a literal shout of goodwill from the foreign shore, and a spontaneous carnival that tested the virtues of my crew to the utmost." The grain acquired, in turn, alleviated the shortfalls at home, effectively ending the political machinations of the Chancellor of Navigation at the University.
She clucked her tongue, and marked the margin, with a note to revise - the machination of the Chancellor had been sufficiently subtle in this time, that it would be important to offer more concrete claims and evidence if she was to include them in the history, but it was important to include them, as they had been so instrumental in delaying the end of the grain shortfalls. She mused about how she was to get the records. She doubted they would be in the local library.
But these thoughts could not hold her long, for the water was tremendously, beautifully cool on her ankles. She wondered where Gypa was, but it was a quiet sort of melancholy, and added to rather than detracted from the quiet beauty of the scene. She marked a section break, accepting that perhaps it was not an evening for research, tonight, it would wait.
I had a dream, last night, a beautiful dream, that Lanie had come home and Mara was still alive, and they had written to me here. Only instead of words, the letter had hands in it, Mara's hands business like and practical, and Lanie's running wildly over my face. I think, the dream grew confused, and the hands were MY hands and my face was Lanie's face, then, only I could still feel them, and I was waking then, and found myself half=conscious of the dream, and trying very hard to catalogue the contours that the fingers found, to know how Lanie looked, now, how the shape of her face had changed. When I woke, of course, the feeling was a mishmash, nothing magical about it. I could not write a hand, though I wonder if Qalaya could - could one write so clearly that the writing literally took shape and lived of its own volition? It would make a beautiful opera - a lonely writer writes into existence a paramour, perhaps.
She smiled, thinking about it, and penned, very roughly, a verse for it.
My pen hath poured its ink into a tongue
And then abjured the tongue, to form a word -
MY ears, already writ, then bent and heard
The song the lips, en-voiced of me now sung.
She smiled a little. It was not beautiful, of course, she found it a little bit too past tense, so that it lacked the urgency of writing life into existence out of sheer desire. She looked out over the desert again, considering.
x
