Chapter 76: Day 75

Day 75,

It was dark when we woke up this morning.  Woke up to Maiko’s shouting and a great deal of squawking.  We were now due west of Cloud Tower instead of South and were in its morning shadow.  Beyond that, we’re high enough now that the air’s gotten thin enough to notice and the temperature’s legitimately cold.  Compared to what we’re all used to anyway.  As such, while every night on this trip at least a couple of chickens had huddled next to Maiko, it looked to be the island’s entire population that had surrounded her last night.  

Dealing with the cold ourselves, Maiko actually put a shirt and pants on voluntarily while the rest of us have put on those cloaks and wrapped them around ourselves.  She’s still the only one I haven’t caught shivering though, myself included.  Meanwhile, the chickens have ceased their usual running around and huddled together in one dense circle of feathers in the spot that Maiko vacated.  I wonder if they mourn her absence.

Mild discomfort aside, the view is fantastic, if a little vertigo inducing.  We felt the island pivot again last night, so we all spent the morning down at the arch waiting to see if it would try docking with Cloud Tower.  Looking down and out I was able to see the entirety of the Village’s island for the first time, as well as many of the surrounding islands.  High as we were, I still couldn’t see that blank white edge of the world Pat told me about, only more islands and ocean spreading out to the horizon.  Then again, I may just be overestimating how much elevation affects horizon distance.  That said, the islands did look to get both larger and further apart as they got away from the Village.

And then of course there’s Cloud Tower itself.  To call it breathtaking up close doesn’t do it justice.  As mind-bending as its height is, its width is enough to swallow the Village multiple times over on a single floor.  Looking its direction as we drew ever closer, it was hard to see anything else.  If you focused your vision right on its center, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine for a moment that you were indoors staring at a wall of an impossibly large room rather than outside gazing upon the exterior of an equally impossibly large structure.  And even as high as we were (and in the distance I could see wispy traces of cloud that seemed not too far removed from our own altitude), we still couldn’t make out anything resembling a top.  Indeed, if anything this close up, if one gazed skyward it almost seemed to lean in towards you as it reached into space, its perfect linearity in paradoxical defiance of eyes accustomed to the curvature of the earth.  Or perhaps I’m simply hallucinating as I try to comprehend its scale.

One additional point of disorientation for the morning.  Since I’ve been in this place, and for the others’ whole lives, Cloud Tower’s been a marker of North, but now, as I mentioned, it was our East, and soon, it would be South.

As noon approached we passed out of Cloud Tower’s shadow and were officially north of what I am increasingly certain is the marker of this world’s equator.  This granted us a prime seat for the spectacle of that shadow that had seemingly stretched to the western horizon rapidly shrinking to nearly nothing at the Tower’s base.

Looking down at the water nearly distracted us from what was happening up at our level.  I think we were directly north of Cloud Tower by then and near enough that we could hardly see anything else if we looked south.  Anything else that is, except for the other floating island now between us and the Tower that had been spiraling up from the east.

That other island was maybe twice the size of the one we ride now and was a scarce fifty feet away from us when we felt the slight inertial bump as we slowed to a stop level with it, the arch we stood under directly aligned with one on that other island.  And extended out from that matching arch was the crumbled stump of a bridge or pier constructed of that same white stone.  I can only imagine that in some bygone age it would have connected these two islands and we could have stepped across to ride it… where exactly?

After a time the islands began to move again, ours going to the west and south in a mirror of this morning’s journey and the other continuing its upward spiral around the Tower to the west.  Will it continue circling around the Tower, climbing ever higher?  How high?  Surely not to the top, or else anything on it would surely die and it was not without vegetation.

Little else has gotten done today.  The thin air meant we kept winding up winded as we tried cleaning the house, and besides, I think we were all too distracted by Cloud Tower’s proximity, to the point where we hardly even spoke much.  Lin and Cass seemed put on edge by it although they couldn’t quite articulate why.  Meanwhile, Maiko and I kept catching ourselves staring at it, focus on whatever we’d been doing before lost.  Even writing this entry took longer than usual as my eyes kept getting drawn up off the page.

Thinking about that other island, I can’t help but wonder, is that where Priscilla and her husband ended up?  Given her fascination, possibly even obsession, with the floating islands, that one seen so regularly but always out of reach must have been maddening.  Did she try some scheme to cross that gap and fall?  Or perhaps become stranded on the other side?  Or maybe in her day the bridge was still intact and she used that other island to access Cloud Tower and disappear into its heights as other outsiders have?

 

Maiko just asked Lin if she could share her tent tonight.  Cited the cold and the chickens as reasons.  And those probably really were the reasons but Lin still got terrifically flustered.  It’d almost be cute if I weren’t worried about the two of them accidentally hurting each other.  Emotionally speaking.  I wonder which will happen first, Maiko catching on or Lin saying something?

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