Who am I to fret about the flesh of my soles? Vilu wondered. To the contrary: he embraced the pain, the hardening.
Other Galderkhaani adults who knew the boy laughed and dodged as he raced toward the sound of the sea. The vast waters were an unlikely beacon, his birth mother, Otal, had said, because the surface boats did not interest him.
“You were birthed in a tower in Mendokhaan—you should run to the sound of the wind!” she had said.
Perhaps she was right; he did not see the woman very much since she moved to Aankhaan, so he could not discuss it with her. But the wind was a tease. Now it was here, now it was there. What was the point in running after it? He always knew where the sea was, and where there was sea there were fish and where there were fish there were airships. Even his teachers approved of that reasoning—despite the fact that Vilu desperately longed to be in that selfsame fickle air!
It’s like playing with a thyodularasi, he thought. Part of the fun was that you never knew what it would do!
Unlike most of the citizens of the coastal village, Vilu did not care about the water for any other reason. His one passion was for the great airship that launched from the tower on the warm dawn currents, then spotted the legions of fish and sea giants and signaled the smaller airships and boats. He loved Standor Qala’s ship so much that he even began to learn the flashing mirror-talk they used to communicate.
The young boy swung past the other housing complexes and decided to avoid the market that was sure to be crowded. Leading with his head of dark curly hair, he angled into a net street where the large fine-mesh sheets were suspended on high horizontal bars for repair. Workers were deftly handling bone needles and large coils of sinew that came from the herds of lumbering shavula that were bred for food, clothing, and rope. The net workers who knew Vilu, including two of his mother’s lifelong men friends, Moge and Ura, stepped aside to allow him passage as he approached.
“You’re not going to make it!” Moge said, laughing as he jabbed a calloused finger at the boy. “The approach horn has sounded!”
“I will make it!” he gasped. “I am not old like you!”
Another horn blared across the rooftops and through the streets.
“The airship is at the mooring tower,” Ura added tauntingly, using hand gestures as he spoke. “You’ll have to run harder.”
“I’m trying!” Vilu said, throwing his arms up in a universal gesture of emphasis.
Vilu heard the dull flap of the great airship’s wings as it soared across the tops of the homes, following the coast toward an imminent docking at the tower. The great oval shadow of Femora Loi’s vessel was followed by the shadows of the much smaller airships and the nets they used for cloud farming. The multitude of long tapering shadows covered the net street with a design that looked like spots on a sacred ymit as it slithered through the coastal sands. Vilu loved to see the coastal flagship of the great fleet move from the fishing vessels like a teacher leaving its young to play, but he did not look up, he could not.
Though it was frowned on, since many elders were still asleep, Vilu cut through the radial arm of a small home belonging to the jutan, the old man who represented their town in the capital city. He dashed through one flap and out the other before the servants even knew he was there. That deposited him in a dark alley where thyodularasi gathered to rest in the shade and wait for scraps from passersby. The head of one of the sleek creatures rose and it honked as Vilu passed. The boy waved, missing in his attempt to pat its head as he raced by. The animal barked after him.
Vilu smiled back at the animal, looked ahead, then stopped running so abruptly that he scraped the soles of his feet with the suddenness of it.
The boy was at the mouth of a large courtyard that was built around a great oval pool, a hip-high basalt construct where ice water was melted for the many homes. Within the encircling wall the pit was cut deep in the packed sands, with long spokelike lumps marking the location of underground pipes that carried water from this pool, and others like it, throughout the village. Typically, before and after school, children sat astride the mounds and rode them as if they were the heralds of the Candescents riding their winged, heat-breathing opirati. When the mounds leaked, those games included splashing until the repair teams arrived.
Today, there were no children or their parents, talking, often loudly, about matters involving lovers or some political issue concerning Priests or Technologists—issues that Vilu did not really understand or care about. The scene in the courtyard was like nothing he had ever experienced. Nearby, in the alleys and streets that were used by people—not like the one he’d just gone through, which was frequented by thyodularasi—he saw small groups of adults huddled, watching in uncommon silence. They too were staring into the courtyard, which was not quite silent.
Beside the pool, on the side nearest Vilu, was a stone hut where the water guardian lived. He was an elderly citizen whose job it was to make sure people did not swim or drown in the pool. Normally, when children were riding the mounds, the tall old man, Lasha, was outside, where he pretended to be Tawazh, the primary sky god, chief herald of the Candescents. He would wave his arms in large gestures, ordering his minions to survey the northern regions beyond the sea, the eastern lands beyond the mountains, look for signs of the high gods’ return. Sometimes Lasha’s companion, Fen, emerged wearing a white cloth over her head and declared herself to be a Candescent, the only one greater than Tawazh, and yelled at Lasha to stop playing and pay attention to the white, furry little mensats that had interrupted their morning walks to leap into the water at the far end.
Today, Fen was already gone to her job as a record-keeper at the House of Judgment and Lasha was not being godly. He was fighting with a woman—fighting and losing. His back was against the rear wall of his narrow hut, his arms raised to protect his face, his belly turned away, protected by his hip. The woman was scratching at him with stiff, sweeping hands, kicking with agile legs. When he wasn’t trying to protect his eyes the old man was trying to grab and restrain the woman’s wildly moving arms.
Vilu stared through the bright morning sunlight, just as the others were doing. The thyodularasi he had passed moments before waddled from the shadows of a doorway, thumping over on flippers. These ended with stubby, webbed fingers from which the animal could extend four sharp claws per flipper. Absently, Vilu brushed the animal away by its whiskered snout. It grumbled low in its throat and nuzzled the boy anyway. Vilu ignored it. He had never seen physical conflict and was riveted. Violence was forbidden, unworthy, punished with banishment—and the boy was suddenly more frightened than anything else.
Fighting, he thought. Violence in Falkhaan of Galderkhaan.
His mind could not process that fact—even as he began to move toward it, one leg before the other, the same way he waded through the waves at the shore despite the unknown creatures and dangers and long, serpentine ymits that lay within. There was something that drew him to the struggle… and to the woman whom he did not recognize.
As he approached, the blazing sun was no longer in his eyes and he finally saw the many faces in the windows of the adjacent homes, peering from behind the shades, from around the barely opened door flaps. Youthful faces, adult faces, everyone watching. Like him, most had never seen a physical struggle… except as play.