Zomi looked up. “Oh, that would be great! Teacher, can we? Can we? If we get some honey, I’ll make a cone out of paper and cut off the tip so that I can write the zyndari letters using the dripping honey. And we can get some lotus seeds and coconut shavings—”
“If you put as much energy into practicing your letters as you do into dreaming up new foods, you’d have mastered proper handwriting by now!”
Zomi glared at him for a moment, lowered her eyes, and went back to writing. Her hand moved across the slate very, very slowly.
Luan sighed again. Not every mind learns the same way. A knife needs to be sharpened against stone, but a pearl needs to be polished with soft cloth. I found infinite joy and comfort in the solitude of repetitious drilling and practice, but perhaps a different method is needed for this one.
“Do you want to learn to fly the balloon instead?”
Zomi dropped the slate and climbed up to stand next to him in an instant.
“First, you have to find out where the winds are,” said Luan. “Remember, a balloon has no way of propelling itself. It must ride the winds.”
“Why do you ride around in a balloon instead of an airship?”
Luan laughed. “Airships require the special lift gas from Mount Kiji. They’re reserved for the Imperial air force and government business.”
“Maybe there are other gases that will do just as well.”
“Maybe. But I don’t know of any such gases. Besides, I like balloons. Airships are about getting from one place to another, and one worries constantly about propulsion. Flying in a balloon, on the other hand, is… more relaxing.”
Zomi picked up Luan’s drinking gourd, uncapped it, and turned it upside down over the side of the gondola. Luan leapt to grab the calabash.
“Easy! Easy! You just need a little bit to test the wind! Don’t waste all the wine. This is all I have until we get to Ingça on Crescent Island.”
“You drink too much anyway.” But this time Zomi took care to tip the gourd over gently and watched as the thin stream went straight down into the sea. “No wind below us.”
“No wind in a direction different from the one we’re heading in,” corrected Luan.
“How do you find out where the winds are above us?” asked Zomi. She squinted at the sky above them. A few wispy clouds dotted the empty blueness. “We can’t pour wine upward—oh, how I wish I were a cruben, and then I could spray water up through my blowhole and see the winds!”
Luan rummaged in the footlocker at the bottom of the gondola and retrieved something that looked like a stack of paper. He pulled on a ring at the top and the stack of paper sprang up into a cube-shaped lantern with pleated paper sides and an internal bamboo skeleton that had been folded into a compressed shape. The bottom was open with a wire crosspiece that held a candle inside the paper lantern.
“That’s really neat!” said Zomi.
“It’s my invention,” said Luan, pride in his voice. “These floating lanterns were known since time immemorial, but I came up with the collapsible bamboo skeleton that would allow them to be easily transported.”
Luan attached a thin silk string to the bottom of the lantern, handed the string to Zomi, and lit the candle. As the air inside the lantern grew heated, the balloon began to float.
“Lean out the side of the gondola,” Luan instructed. “Let the string out. This is a kite-balloon, and you can use it to sense the direction of the winds above us.”
As Zomi guided the kite-balloon’s flight and told Luan her observations of the direction of the winds at various heights, Luan noted them down on the slate. When Luan decided that they had taken enough readings, he asked Zomi to pull the kite-balloon back and extinguish the candle.
“Now, tell me: If I want to go in that direction”—Luan pointed to the southwest—“how would I do it?”
Zomi looked at the slate, upon which Luan had drawn a neat table of heights and wind directions based on her readings. “There’s a strong northeastern wind if we go up… three hundred feet?”
Luan nodded. “You have just made Na Moji proud.”
“Remind me who he was again?”
“Na Moji was the founder of the Patternist school of philosophy. He lived centuries ago, when Xana was a land far more primitive than the other Tiro states. He tied silk ribbons to wild geese and proved that the birds migrated south for winter and returned north for the spring. He was also the first to devise a kite with two strings so that they could be guided to trace out dizzying patterns in the sky.
“Na Moji believed that nature was a book whose language was mathematics. By careful observation and testing, we can plumb its depths and map out its patterns. Even the gods are subject to the patterns of nature, though they are able to read more of it than we can.
“You have created a map of winds with the kite-balloon, and now you’re ready to fly wherever you wish. A balloon, of course, is at home in air, the natural element of Patternism.”
Zomi looked around at the sky and the sea, but now instead of emptiness she seemed to see gusts of wind as broad, three-dimensional avenues and streets in an invisible city. A big smile broke out on her face. “I like Patternism! More! Teach me more!”
Luan chuckled. “Well, the next task you have to accomplish is to actually raise Curious Turtle into the wind, and that requires a different school of philosophy.”
With Luan’s help, Zomi grasped the dial overhead and twisted it. The flame shot roaring up out of the liquor stove, and with a jerk, the balloon began to rise.
“Gentle! You’re trying to guide the flame, not wrestle it!”
Zomi twisted the dial back slowly and the flame quieted down a bit, slowing the ascent.
Luan continued, “The flame heats the air inside the balloon, which expands. The excess air escapes the balloon, causing the hot air inside to be less dense than the cold air outside. And in this way, the balloon gains altitude like the Imperial airships. Heated air acts a bit like the lift gas from Lake Dako on Mount Kiji.”
The breeze picked up, and the balloon began to drift southwest. Zomi continued to twist the dial slowly, lowering and raising the flame by turns until the balloon leveled off.
“What you have just practiced is an illustration of the Incentivist school of philosophy,” said Luan. “As the name indicates, its natural element is fire.”
“I don’t understand,” said Zomi. “The Incentivists believe in burning things? Oh! Like the way Emperor Mapidéré burned books!”
“What in the world gave you—never mind. No, the Incentivist school was founded by Gi Anji, the youngest of the great sages. He’s a modern, not an ancient Ano. Gi Anji believed that people are by nature lazy and resist change, and it is the duty of the wise ruler to incentivize them with proper rewards and punishments.”
“My ma used to have a much simpler way of saying that: ‘Get out of bed or I’ll throw a burning lump of coal in the blankets.’ So these Incentivists do like burning things.”
Luan chortled. “I suppose that is one way of looking at it. What Gi Anji meant was that the stress the Moralists placed on cultivating virtue was misplaced. Most people are irredeemably selfish, and it is sufficient for the ruler to adjust the laws to encourage the right behavior. For example, if you increase taxes on farms but lower them for pastures—”
“What do you have against farmers?”
“Nothing! I was using an illustrative example.”
“Can’t you use another example? I don’t like taxes. The tax collectors are always so mean to my mother and me.”
“All right.” Luan thought of his old friend Cogo Yelu, who could talk about taxes for hours, and smiled. “Suppose you want to encourage the arts and letters. Rather than exhorting the people to be more studious, it’s better to make learning a requirement for positions of power.”