Archive of Our Own

Upon the tender zephyr’s breath the glider drifted. Our two dear tired orphans upturned their faces towards the glow of the evening interlude. In their novelly and duly earned sense of completion they each believed they were at the end of their escapades, therefore oscillating between rue and relief, when verily they were arching on the cusp of another…

Sheeta was wishing for a way to harvest clouds. Especially sunset ones, because they came in all those colours: this one a golden fleece and that one a great bloom of fairy floss and another a feather from a robin’s breast. She dreamed of the yarns she could spin from them, the lovely pinks and yellows she could weave into little warming tapestries for her cherished yaks. Would they be warmer than cotton quilts? Clouds got to be kissed all day by the sun, after all.

Sheeta sighed. Her ancestors might have known how. She would likely never, though, not now. But then maybe it was better that way. For every wonder, there was a horror in Laputa, it seemed; and for every benison, a curse. Grandmamma had taught her that, and she would not be soon forgetting it.

In the meanwhile Pazu admired Sheeta. By prefiguration his eyes were skyward pointers, but that was beginning to change. They were level now, revelling in the vespertine beauties right beside him: the sun burnished Sheeta’s cheeks and ignited the coasts of her hair, whose shorter length engendered other differences someway. He reconsidered; more belike it was the process wherethrough she had lost her tresses that had transformed her. Sheeta’s eyes were focused on someplace faraway, which was all well and good, but not when she had travelled a way nigh a frown.

“Hey, Sheeta,” said Pazu to ease her out of her reverie. He nodded skyward. “Over there—isn’t that the spitting image of a fox-squirrel?”

“It really is!” Sheeta laughed into Pazu’s back. “Do you see the one that looks just like one of the robots?”

“I see it.” Pazu’s spine arched against Sheeta’s chest. His voice lowered. “Sheeta… Do you think… do you think everyone’s all right up there? All the animals and robots and trees, I mean.”

Sheeta bobbed her head against his neck. “I can’t be sure what kind of trouble they’ll run into, but I know the crystal will protect them no matter what.”

Pazu swivelled his head and looked at her with broad, sunny eyes. “Thank goodness! I feel better hearing it from the queen herself.”

“Oh, Pazu,” she sighed, and buried her face as far as it would go into the nook between his shoulder-blades. She slid her cheek against his spine and looked yonder.

Quite curiously the sun shuffled behind the sea, spreading itself wide across the horizon: a heavenly dollop of butter sizzling into the waves. The sky blushed, sprouted green, then bloomed purple, whereafter all its petals shed, till the stars were winking and waving at the world below. Sheeta hurried to find Pazu’s pouch that by some magic produced his old davy lamp and a small phial of antiseptic. She struck a match over the wick, and dabbed the liquid onto Pazu’s cheek with their last clean handkerchief. Despite how she tried to soothe and shush him by petting his hair, he still flinched and gritted his teeth. “Ow!”

“I know it hurts,” she cooed, wiping away the last of the blood, “but this way it’ll heal nice and fresh.” Sheeta dug deeper into the pouch. Also within it was a tin spool whose label featured an illustration of a lovely smiling nurse. Out rolled these medicated plasters Sheeta had never encountered before, with handy adhesive edges she could simply pad onto his poor cheek, and flat they stayed. In addition to those measures she plopped a kiss over the dressed wounds, that they might heal faster, or at least with less pain. So startled was Pazu by this gesture that he jerked his head fast enough to bump foreheads and noses with Sheeta, whose head rang like a struck bell from the impact.

“Sheeta!” he yelped, cupping her cheeks with the hands he had been hiding from her all that time. His palms had never been soft, just like hers, but out of all the many times she had touched them they had never scraped her as they did now. “You all right?”

Through the fading pang she smiled. “A little dizzy, but it might be my hair. My head feels lighter than before, so I have to learn how to balance myself all over again.”

“It can’t be!” Pazu rapped her forehead with a knuckle. “Wow, Sheeta, I think your head’s harder than mine…”

While she still had the chance Sheeta seized Pazu’s hand. To no avail did he try to wriggle his way out of her grip. “Show me,” she said, forcing his fist open. On his palms were scrapes of skin hovering over smeared blood, and popped blisters, and splinters that had pierced him past his calluses. At this Pazu inhaled heavily, turned away, and chewed his lip. Sighing, Sheeta picked the slivers out one by one until the glider began to descend and they had to locate another lift to ride.

First ascertaining their bearings in the darkness, they scoured the sky for familiar stars. So their eyes stopped at the asterism that was to him the Saucepan and to her the Plough in the belly of the constellation they both called the Greater Bear. From there they followed her tail to her adjacent cub’s, whereupon they steered to an updraft that might aspire to it. And then they were well due true north.

For a time they soldiered on with the solicitous wind, reconfiguring the luminaries to their own appellations: the Pickaxe, the Yoke, the Town, and the Mountain. Alas, it is the nature of air to be mercurial, and soon the brumal boreas chucked them back against the tides of the great cloudsea, which descended upon them without ruth, blustering and buffeting the poor glider rearward till aft became fore. After no small struggle, the aircraft managed to land at the edge of a ledge that was unknowably far from their intended destination.

“Uh oh,” Pazu chuckled, picking crumpled leaves from Sheeta’s choppier hair, “I don’t think we’re going to make it to Gondoa by dawn.”

“It’s all right, Pazu,” said brave Sheeta. She tugged hard on his arm. “Do you hear that?”

Pazu cupped a hand over his ear. “Water!”

“We should follow it downstream. We’re bound to run into people that way, right?”

Pazu made a noise of agreement and tucked Sheeta’s hand inside his. Neither of them ever let go in the dark as Pazu taught Sheeta how to whistle, to lift their spirits and to assure each other of their presence when words were too much to produce or receive. Not a hundred steps from their landing they happened upon a vacant bothy. Whoever had slept in it last had been kind enough to leave behind candles and firewood and non-perishables and even a pretty deck of old maid for them. Under those was the logbook. The last entry read:

We have now enjoyed a week of wedded bliss, replete with the utmost salubrity and beatitude, at this Arcadia. Our final day was a most beauteous and serene one, and, verily, one could not have envisioned a venue for one’s own honeymoon with more virtue or better character. Dear friend, we hope you too are, durst I say, hanging in there. We hope for our spare provisions to serve as adequate contingency, for we cannot bear to imagine any other mountaineer, or adventurer, or what-have-you, to have a poorer time of it than we have on this land that has given us so much. If they do not, then know that there is no shortage of clean and exquisite sardines for which one can fish with one’s natural tools in the river.

Godspeed and felicitations!
Humbert and Luise von Gikkigen.

“How good of them,” Sheeta exclaimed. She examined the instructions on a can of pocket soup. “We should leave something when we leave, too.”

Pazu flung firewood into the hearth and a match after it. A most marvellous fire crackled animate and crowded the room with heat and light. “Yeah! Although, the signs say non-perishables only...”

“We’ll think of something,” Sheeta mumbled, before she went to fetch water from the stream.

After that they whipped up dinner in minutes. The soup was not… quite as good as egg on toast, but was serviceable when they sprinkled a bit of salt over the top, appreciating it for how it nourished and filled their aching bellies. The canned peaches tasted much better, all sharp spice and syrup and good soft flesh. Of course, while Sheeta ate just like a cat, Pazu opened his mouth wide before each bite, slurped, and smeared food all around his mouth.

Sheeta produced a newly cleaned hanky from her pocket and reached out. “Pazu, you’ve got some—”

His tongue circled his lips and rendered her efforts obsolete. “Mmm-mm!”

Sheeta laughed. “It’s good?”

“Great!” Pazu clapped his hands over his thighs and pumped a fist. “I feel like I could take on the world now! But first, there’re still a few cans left…”

“Let’s save them for later.” Sheeta smiled. “That way we won’t have to worry about breakfast.”

“Good idea.” He grinned back. “What should we do now?”

Sheeta reached for the logbook. “Maybe we should read the rest of this? It might be useful.”

“All right,” said Pazu, and flipped to the page previous.

They read together, with Sheeta finishing each page two sentences before Pazu ever did, but her patience was never tried waiting for him. Before long her prediction was proven right. The nearest town was a three day trek by foot; Sheeta insisted that shoeless Pazu would not last a third of that time, and that they had the glider to worry about, besides. Therein also were tales of survival, kerfuffles with colonies of mice and the odd errant deer, and avalanches and blizzards and tempests through which this little haven had helped so many.

“I think the last ones to have stayed here must have loved each other very much,” said Pazu, when they reached the first entry at last. It had taken them a good hour, with all the fidgeting and discussion in between, but neither of them knew that, for sans a clock or a view of the moon the world outside had as good as lapsed to a standstill.

“Oh?”

“They sounded so happy! They had to have had their own problems. But love helped them see the good in each other, which means they found the same thing in the world.” Pazu bobbed his head righteously.

“Well, how would you know?” she asked, not for coyness, but genuine curiosity. “Have you ever loved someone like that?”

Pazu cocked his head. “Yeah! You,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Now, patent as the statement is to us, hitherto oblivious Sheeta herself had only ever entertained the idea in her private sessions of playing house in the many chambers of her illimitable mind. Thus, the gentle reader can imagine and share her joy as Pazu admitted to a reciprocation of her good affections.

“Pazu!” Sheeta gasped, clutching her chest to contain the heart bating behind it, “me too! Oh, I’m so glad you feel the same way.” He snuggled up to him, and he snuggled right on back, spreading warmth across her waist with hands that tickled her mirth even when he did not try.

“Heheh! We should celebrate.”

Sheeta released him. “How?”

“Suppertime!” he said, which ended up being a jar of sugar plums and Turkish delight that stuck to their teeth. Pazu chucked them into his yawning mouth and Sheeta gently grazed whilst they played two rounds of old maid with the radio playing in the background. When their favourite song came on, at once Pazu scattered his cards, leapt up, and performed a deep bow, proffering his hand as he had when they first met; a giggling Sheeta curtseyed accordingly, fanning out her pantaloons as if she were wearing a skirt instead.

“May I have this dance?” asked Pazu. Despite his attempt to deepen his voice, he didn’t manage to sound much older than he was, but they both had the good humour to laugh at least at the effect of the failure.

And Sheeta tweeted, “Why, it’d be my pleasure.”

They got close. Each locked a hand into an interlacement of fingers. Sheeta put her free palm on Pazu’s stronghold of a shoulder and he set his just shy of her hip. Slow and near and so very warm, they only did the boxstep, forward and athwart and back, but as they moved their feet beglamoured the floor beneath them and soon they were twirling and whirling across the ballrooms of Laputa, under shipshapen chandeliers and over marquetry of turquoise and carnelian and lapis lazuli, Sheeta clean in a pretty dress and sparkling heels and tiara of superlative power and Pazu a sight for sore eyes, spruce and splendid in the panoply forbidden to all but the queen’s favourite. Their entire family, blood and chosen, were there to fare, applaud, and revel; and the music they made mingled with their blood, enriched marrow, ushered magic into their breath.

After the galdr the dwimmer dwindled and they were overcome by sadness, inexplicable and grave. They broke their stance to hold each other for a long time, simply and instinctively, each mooring a trembling chin on the other’s shoulder. They remained so as they listened to the broadcaster say his goodnights and the long fuzz and skurr of static that followed. Although their hearts still throbbed for Laputa, they could skirt around the topic of it with finesse now; because, while they had already learned how to think about it, they had yet to learn how to talk about it; but they were learning, even in silence: especially in silence.

“Do you think there’s anything else on now?” Pazu at last said into Sheeta’s ear. “Maybe we could do that again!”

“Let’s see…” She broke from him and tottered over to the dial. As Sheeta switched channels, a serial recitation caught their ears, and so that became their first and last dance for the night. They gasped and held each other at every cliffhanger until they could guess the resolutions beforehand. That was about when the yawns began and the chatter ended; thereupon Pazu passed flame to the candles and Sheeta snuffed out the hearth. As soon as the wax warmed it perfumed the air with essence of frankincense and vanilla and eradicated any scent the embers threw. Sheeta hoisted herself over the pallet and Pazu made for the floor.

“Pardon me,” Sheeta said to Pazu, “but aren’t you going to sleep?”

“Yeah,” he replied, pointing to the ground, “right here.”

“That can’t be very comfortable.” Sheeta patted the empty space beside her. “Why don’t you come up here?”

“Eh?” Neither could tell the other’s colour in that dimness. Pazu linked his hands around his back and drew hearts with his still bare foot. “You don’t mind?”

“Of course not.” Sheeta smiled; Pazu advanced. As he wriggled up beside her she spread the cloak to accommodate him too. “Besides, it’s pretty cold up here.”

So the two curled themselves within each other. She tucked her knees against his chest and linked her arms around his back and his broad, balmy chest shielded her from the cold.

“Sheeta,” Pazu said, when they were to dance the waltz of sleep together, forehead to forehead.

From this lack of distance they looked to each other like Cyclopses out of a storybook picture, either set of two big brown eyes merging each into one. Yet even like this Pazu didn’t scare Sheeta one bit, only ushered her into unbounding warmth and solace; likewise, Sheeta to Pazu remained a gift fallen from the sky over which he had no trouble rejoicing. “Yes?”

“Your hair—it still smells like Laputa!” he mooned, sounding such that you might believe he was already dreaming.

Sheeta sampled Pazu’s scent too. “Ah! So does yours.”

“I think it was those strange flowers,” he yawned. “Shame we’ll never know the name of them.”

Something dropped inside Sheeta. She unfolded her legs and hugged Pazu closer and faster. “Maybe your father named it in that big book of his…”

“Ah, you’re right! Let’s check tomorrow,” he yawned once more. “Sleep now. And sweet dreams!”

Ah, yes, at first both their dreams were goodly enough. They were at the age when sweet swevens come easy and many, with the glister and glamour of novelty and invention; they advance like an anthem set to a march, singing reverdies for minds too young to be pared of greenery yet.

Sheeta was home, somewhere green; it was neither Gondoa, nor Slug Valley, but the doves were murmuring and the yaks grunting, and from the voice singing out in her own heart she could tell it was where she was supposed to be. But soon Pazu began to make such fitful noise in his sleep that Sheeta broke from her own a little before her ordained time. Unbeknown to her, Pazu was swimming through that nameless underwater town in Laputa, beside the silent coelacanths and the singing mermaids, in his dive for hidden treasure. Through banners of seaweed and fortresses of coral gleamed an oyster. The shell opened to his touch to reveal a paragon big as his fist. He plucked it to give to Sheeta, but it was so heavy in his hands that he had not the air to last him the struggle towards the surface. But then Sheeta swam down, swift and slick as a seal, holding his cheeks and aligning them mouth to mouth to pass breath from one pair of lungs to another. She seized his hands and freestyled them to air, to the lush young light of dawn.

“Sheeta!” Pazu yelled, to discover that they were both still lying on the solid pallet, with Sheeta’s hands dry upon his cheeks, and her sweet face beaming upon him, her manner all as in the dream.

“It’s all right, Pazu. Pazu,” she murmured. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“Kind of.” Pazu shook off the last of the phantom wet. He smiled back with all his teeth. “Not really.”

Sheeta opened her mouth, as if she was about to say something, but her stomach spoke for her before any words would form. “Oh!” she giggled.

“Sounds like it’s time for breakfast!” pealed Pazu, leaping from the pallet and landing an akimbo stance. With his arms he reached for the sun; with his feet he hugged the earth. Up jumped Sheeta beside him to perform her own stretches, after which she switched the radio on just in time for the daily calisthenics broadcast. The music and accompanying exercise roused their blood and chased the haze of sleep from their minds. Upon breakfast they advanced after that, like winter-starved rodents, although they did not descend into the savagery that would be to divide the fudge pudding in anything other than perfect halves, nor did they commit the devilry that would be to leave the next lodgers sans rations; nevertheless, guilt gripped them for having no contribution of their own to show for their consumption.

“There must be something we could leave,” said Pazu, who began to rummage through that enchanted pouch of his again. To his surprise the search yielded three sovereigns he had received what felt a lifetime ago. Dola must have put them back there when he wasn’t looking. He wished she hadn’t, though; he wanted nought to do with anything of Muska’s. To squeeze out his desire to cast them away, Pazu gripped the coins until the heads were imprinted into his palm. “These,” he said. “We’ll leave these.”

“Good idea. Let’s keep one, though.”

“But, Sheeta—”

“We need to get you new shoes. And who knows what kinds of trouble we’ll run into…”

Pazu acquiesced. The coins jangled for the last time in his hand before he let the first and second slide to the table to leave one soundless and alone in his palm.

Sheeta began to scribble in the logbook. Pazu looked over her shoulder to see what she was writing.

The weather around this area has been favourable all week, except for a bit of a bluster last night, and the slight chill that has crept in since then. The lodgers before us were very nice to leave some foodstuffs for us. We have tried not to consume them all and leave some for you, but we are sorry to say that we have already eaten all the fudge pudding. We could not help it. Please forgive us. Herewith are two sovereigns that might help you in some other way. Maybe when you get into town you could have hot pudding! Or shephard’s pie, or potato and gravy, or pumpkin soup, or whatever you like. Treat yourself to the very best you can afford!!! We are sorry we could not do more for you, but we wish you all the best, Pazu and Sheeta.

“Neat,” Pazu said. “Can I add a little something?” With Sheeta’s assent he opened his hand to receive the pinion and drew a valedictory robot at the corner of the page.

“Ah.” Sheeta took stock of her pockets one last time to find inside them a lone, fremd bloom, from Laputa, perhaps. Between the papers and in the robot’s open hand Sheeta pressed it, where it would be safe whilst it metamorphosised into a bookmark for the next reader to take along on new adventures worldwise.

❧

They gained headway while light still limned the paths wind and rain and time had sculpted through each dale and glen and hill below the great swallow-way, now true blue and partly cloudy at fifty percent humidity: perfect weather for a picnic. Not half a day had passed since their departure when they stopped at the outskirts of a tall city of many spires and big square houses coloured like candy, where cars crowded the thoroughfare and the hour ruled over the sovereign.

“Are you all right to walk?” Sheeta asked Pazu once they got to solid ground again. She stared down at his black swollen feet.

He wriggled his toes. “I’m fine!”

Sheeta furrowed her brow. “Maybe you should wait for me here while I—”

Pazu pouted. “But Sheeta! What if the shoes won’t fit?”

And Sheeta could only laugh. “Okay,” she said, linking her arm through Pazu’s, “we’ll go together. Tell me when you need to rest, okay?”

They made for the nearest money changer while avoiding macadam and flagstone like the plague. Some society ladies in their mink stoles and impearled heels pinched their faces at the two, thinking them tatterdemalion ragamuffins to be pitied or exploited as aesops for the recalcitrant children they dragged along to some form of unwitting torture or another. By the time they made past the third block they had amassed pockets heavy with farthings and the odd shilling from bystanders who told them over and over again how ever so unfortunate it was for such adorable children to be both motherless and penniless in these hard times. They always scrambled away too fast for Pazu and Sheeta to return the money or even exchange a word of thanks.

“These people sure are generous!” said Pazu, after the fifth donation, noticing how he could hear himself walk with all the coins jangling in his pockets. “Rich as sin, too. I guess this is what city folk’re like, huh?”

Sheeta blushed rose-red. “I suppose we do look a little out of place here.”

“Imagine if they knew who you really were!” Pazu laughed.

“I’d rather they not,” Sheeta mumbled. “I didn’t realise how grimy we’ve gotten, though. We should—”

“Halt!” a gravelly voice rasped somewhere behind them. A woman in bleak bombazine, austere of countenance and advanced of age, examined Pazu and Sheeta from her calash drawn by two handsome Cleveland bays. Wheels skirred to a stop beside them. “Is that you, Jimmy?” She held up her gilded pince-nez to her lined, knowing eyes. “By Jove! It is you! For what saucy reason are you gallivanting around town in those filthy rags? With such a sweet-looking girl, too. Up you get, up now!”

“Uh, pardon me, ma’am, but I’m not your Jimmy,” Pazu said, taking off his hat.

“Oh, balderdash,” she grumbled, and craned Pazu up into the coach by the back of his shirt. Sheeta obediently followed as Pazu let out a little shout. “Do you know the grief you’ve caused your mother! And why is it that you suddenly sound like a little Welshman? Where exactly have you been!”

“With all due respect, good ma’am, my name is Pazu, and I have never set foot in this city before.” He placed his fists neatly in his lap. He opened one of them to gesture to Sheeta. “This is Sheeta. We are both orphans and would like to get to Gondoa as soon as possible.”

The woman snuffed incredulously and crossed her arms. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and squinted. “I will not be made a fool by the likes of you, young man. If this is what you call a joke, it is not in the least bit clever; so do not be so assured of your own excesses in wit or good taste. You will grow up into a right cad if this behaviour continues! I shall get you in a bath at once. Onward, Eugene!”

Pazu crossed an arm athwart Sheeta’s chest to secure her to her seat as the carriage hobbled over cobblestones and speed bumps. They went so fast that their vision reeled. Before they realised it, their ride stopped at great lace gate that guarded a greater house, and their benefactress was leading them out, tucking a hard, smooth hand in each soft wrinkled one. In a stately manner she walked them through marble pillars and ormolu garniture, to separate bathrooms, where they were then left alone to attend to their respective toilettes.

Of the two, Pazu was superlatively flummoxed. While he scrubbed the soot out of his skin he wondered who this Jimmy that the old woman saw in him was. The only person he had ever been told he resembled other than his father was his mother; you have your mother’s eyes, the same shine, said his father, and you’re as stubborn as your old man, so whenever you’re looking up at something, or to somewhere you want to get to, well, that’s how I know you’re our son. Presently, Pazu dropped his soap, splashing suds onto his face, and spent the rest of his time therein trying to ease the sting in his eyes.

When Pazu and Sheeta met again at the foyer they smelled the soap from their respective tubs on each other. Frangipani and lemongrass coated Pazu while Sheeta had sweetened her skin with honey and milk, and both were rather redolent of the same butter in which those scents had been embedded. However, Laputa still lingered on their clothes and neither one had been sure whether they could quite bear to wash it out, and so both had erred hither of caution.

But Pazu would soon not have much of a choice. “Now, we must get you cleaner attire,” the stranger said, dragging Pazu into a nearby room, where she proceeded to unload a bevy of clothes upon him.

“Ma’am, I must say, I am not—”

“Silence! Try this, and this.” Pazu caged a grumble. The mismatch spoke for itself: nothing fit Pazu; everything was too small in the shoulders or short in the leg. In fact, the clothes seemed to have been made for a child at least three years younger. “How long have you been gone, Jimmy? You’ve grown ever so much, oh—I shall have to take you to the tailor again. Come, now, the both of you,” she said, gripping them by the shoulders and seeing them out with all the force and speed of a storm. The only obstacle that could impede her was her own mirror image.

Her reflection tugged at the black cordon at her throat and stroked the harsh bombazine of her bodice. The mouth opened; so this was why she had all this time been wearing such a lack of colour!

“Oh!” the woman cried, her face falling into her hands. “O day! O day! I am mistaken. Forgive me, Pazu, was it?”

“Yes, it’s Pazu,” he said, reaching out for her. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

“I’m afraid senility has gotten the better of me.” She shook her head and conjured up a broidered handkerchief into which she sobbed and sneezed most effusively. “You cannot be my Jimmy. However—the resemblance… No. You may not be my Jimmy, but I still wish to help you, all the same. Will you let me?”

“You’ve already done so much for us, madam,” Sheeta spoke up. “We wouldn’t want to burden you any longer…”

“No, no. Consider it remuneration for my rudeness earlier, if you must. Let me at least get you new shoes.”

In unison Pazu and Sheeta said, “But—”

And were silenced with: “Hush!”

Thus they were driven to the local cordwainer, whose hanging sign evoked the story of the old woman who lived in a shoe, her articulated whip coming down on the children with every creak of the chain. Leather and shoeshine stole into their noses as they stepped in and triggered the doorbell above them.

“Oh, Mrs. Davidson! Welcome, welcome,” said the man, whose nametag read THEODORE. “Who you got with you?”

“New friends,” Mrs. Davidson said, pressing a guinea into Pazu’s palm. “Treat them well, all right, Teddy? I must be taking my siesta, but if you two children run into any trouble, you know where to find me.”

“Mrs. Davidson! We can’t possibly take—”

Alack, she had already gone.

“Well, come closer, my boy. We’ll need to get your foot measured, won’t we?”

Pazu frowned after Mrs. Davidson. “Mister,” he said, obeying, “do you know who Jimmy is?”

Theodore’s face fell as he took Pazu’s measurements. “Aye, that I do, but it’s not a happy tale, not at all.”

Sheeta pressed her hands together. “We still owe it to Mrs. Davidson to hear it. So please.”

Theodore sighed. “Well, if you insist. Mrs. Davidson’s been getting on in years, so sometimes she forgets things she oughtn’t. Poor Jimmy’s been singing in the sky for a few years now. Her first grandson, he was, and she loved him with all the heart she had left after Mr. Davidson got his wings to the kingdom above. Good news is there’s another baby on the way, but she doesn’t remember that either.”

“How awful!” Sheeta cried. Pazu took her hand, rubbed it. “And she lives all alone?”

“M’afraid so. Woman’s too proud to keep any maids, like anyone else at her age with her money.”

“Did Jimmy really look anything like me?”

“I think it’s the way you are that did it. Every time she finds a new Jimmy it’s because she sees a part of the old boy in him. With you, I think, it’s the mud, and that look you got in your eye.”

Pazu blinked more than necessary. “Is there anything we could do?” he asked, frowning.

Theodore gave a little shrug. “Not much to do but pray she’ll heal.” He pointed to a shelf behind him. “You’re in luck. You’ll likely be a good fit anything on that shelf.”

“Right,” Pazu murmured, presenting him with Muska’s coin, “I’ll take the brogans.”

“Done.” Theodore flipped the coin in his hand, scrutinised it, and showered Pazu in a minor fortune in change as well as the lagniappe of a pair of good socks. Sheeta helped Pazu squeeze into his new boots by pulling up the tongue while he pushed down on the sole. Once the foot was in, they sighed together with relief and walked out with much heavier footsteps.

“Should we go back to the glider now?” asked Sheeta, hand warming Pazu’s.

“I can’t help but think we stay and do something more for Mrs. Davidson.”

“Me too,” sighed Sheeta, squeezing, “but I don’t know what!”

“Hmmm.” Pazu scratched his chin. “When I first became an orphan it helped to be around people, just to listen to them speak. It was so quiet at home, all the time, I couldn’t bear it! That was when Mr. Duffy brought me the doves. Whenever I heard them sing I got the strangest feeling. I just knew that the world’s a good place to be in, always. I got the trumpet soon after that, so I could make music for myself, wherever I was.”

“It was the same for me,” Sheeta said. “Except I did anything that took my mind off it until I was strong enough to think about what had happened and know it was the truth and that I couldn’t change it. The year after Mama died turned out the best harvest I ever had. I thought she was looking out for me on the other side, but it was really me learning to look after myself.”

“The trouble with Mrs. Davidson is that she keeps forgetting. It’s like going through what we went through again and again, all alone.” Pazu scratched his head. “Ah, I don’t know! Well, I think the least we can do right now is to write her a thank you card.”

“And get her some flowers.”

“Yeah! We can figure out the rest later.”

They exchanged nods of determination. Past bakers and butchers and apothecaries were boutiques and antiques. Nobody asked to shine Pazu’s shoes, because they looked so spanking new, although a few people tried to sell Sheeta the daily paper, since she looked so bright.

“Look!” said Sheeta eventually, her fingertips spreading condensation across the vitrine. “A trumpet!”

“Boy, I could use a new one. Do you think…?”

“I think so! We’ve enough money.” Sheeta opened the door for Pazu and waited for him to slide past. “You could play a tune for Mrs. Davidson! Maybe she’ll feel better, then.”

“Ah, you’re right.” Pazu strode up to the counter and asked to try first. Once allowed, Pazu licked his lips, puckered them into perfect embouchure, and buzzed a self-composed étude into the mouthpiece. The trumpet’s voice blared rich and bright towards each corner of the room and reached beyond, rallying the ears and hearts of bystanders outside who could not help but stop and stare at this young man with the huge lungs and ariose gift. The frissons rippling through Sheeta only paused when Pazu put his instrument down. “I’ll take it!” he chirped.

Their attentions were next waylaid by a shop full of homeless hand-me-downs on the same street. There they bought a pretty clasp in honour of Sheeta’s new hairdo, a big glittering thing in the shape of a forested castle, with hanging charms of pixies and other woodland critters that reminded them both so much of Laputa, that tinkled as she walked. When Sheeta wore it no one accosted them with sympathies or condolences any longer.

For Mrs. Davidson they bought from a charming wooden kiosk a big bouquet held up by a teddy bear’s paw, with chocolates planted amongst the blooms. Sheeta kept it close to her person as Pazu practiced the happiest abblasen he knew by heart and received a few pennies for being very good at it.

Eventually they turned a corner where the sound of Pazu’s trumpet was covered by the most plaintive caterwauling they had ever heard. “What in the world is that?” asked Sheeta, squeezing Pazu’s arm.

Pazu put his trumpet down and cupped a hand over his ear. He made a noise of friendly inquiry. His hearing directed him to an alleyway at the front of which was a crate with a tiny mewling tabby trying to scratch its way outside it. “Aw, poor dear,” said Pazu. Thereon a note read: “My name is Cordelia. Please love me!” Pazu was very gentle with her, because you could see the bones of this cat jut out small and sharp, and when Pazu went to stroke her shoulder-blades, he was visited by the sudden and acute cognizance that he could snap them with his fingers as easily as his feet could crunch autumn leaves. “Should we take her with us?”

Sheeta moved to touch the kitten, too, but recoiled at the last minute. “Would it survive all the way to Gondoa? We better not…”

“Oh!” Pazu raised his forefinger. “I have an idea! D’you think she and Mrs. Davidson would get along?”

Sheeta grinned. “I bet she’d appreciate the company!”

“Then it’s settled.” Pazu strode forward and Sheeta followed not far behind. By the time they showed up at Mrs. Davidson’s doorstep again, Pazu’s feet ached more than if he had gone barefoot; by estimation of precedent, he would break in the brogans as soon as he needed another size up.

Sheeta knocked. “Mrs. Davidson! It’s Pazu and Sheeta. Excuse us. I-if you have the time and don’t mind, we have something for you.”

The children stood by the door patiently enough, unlike Cordelia, who refused to stop screeching no matter how many coos or scritches she got.

“Sheeta?” Mrs. Davidson said. “Pazu! Welcome, welcome. Di—”

“Uh,” Pazu said, “do you like cats, ma’am?”

“Oh, I love them.” Mrs. Davidson smiled ruefully. “When I was about your age I had one of my own, though I could not keep her for long.”

“Well, we found this lil’ kitty out on the street. She needs a good home,” Pazu said. “We heard that you lived all by your lonesome, so maybe...”

“She is such a sweet little thing…” Her face mollified and her eyes glittered like a young girl’s. She scooped Cordelia up with one hand as if she had done it before, held the kitten to her face and scratched Cordelia behind her ears till her screeches lowered to a continuous purr, because at last here was someone who wholly understood the kitten’s pain.

“Well, we’re glad!” said Pazu, taking off his hat. Sheeta put the teddy by the door. “Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for us. We promise not to intrude again.”

“Patience! So soon? It is already evening. Would you do this old woman the favour of livening up a dinner alone?”

“Oh, we couldn’t possibly burden you any more than we already have,” said Sheeta, raising her hands, “and you have Cordelia to keep you company now.”

“Ah, indeed. However, I could not live with myself to leave such poor darlings without bed and board.” Mrs. Davidson held her door wide open. “In you go.”

Pazu was about to echo Sheeta’s request when his uproarious stomach pulled him from its granting irrevocably. And that was how Pazu and Sheeta came to dine with Mrs. Davidson as they talked of their escapades heretofore. Mrs. Davidson was rich enough to own a shiny phonograph, so while they ate they listened to music all scratchy and fuzzy and warm as otherworldly voices heard in a dream. They laughed at Pazu’s jokes even when they didn’t understand them for involving fuselages or engines or aerodynamics. Pazu and Sheeta voiced their gratitude for every course; for hors d’oeuvres, they wolfed down devilled eggs, angels-on-horseback, and toad-in-the-hole full of thyme and chives and gravy and fresh sausages; the main course was a princely shank of lamb buried under rosemary and fine seasalt that Pazu and Sheeta ate very sparingly, not because a single scrap of the wittles tasted any less than holy, but since they were near stuffed from entrees, and were holding out for dessert. Forsooth, their strategy was most provident, for Mrs. Davidson whipped up a perfectly formed trifle for each of the children for the finale.

At nine o’clock sharp, Mrs. Davidson tucked Pazu and Sheeta into separate beds in a single room. Mrs. Davidson read them The Adventures of Arete the Acme, a lushly illustrated surreal romance anent a journey of belonging, though the recital was more for Mrs. Davidson than the guests, for she felt that somewhere little Jimmy was listening. Thereafter she kissed their foreheads and murmured, “It has been ever so lovely to have the house full of laughter once more, and I thank you for that.” Cordelia purred in her lap. “Do stop by again.”

“We promise, Mrs. Davidson,” said Sheeta. “Thank you so much for dinner and having us.”

Mrs. Davidson put her hand to her heart. “Oh, you really are too sweet. I shall press your gift of flowers in my favourite book, the good book, that I may remember you both by them until then. Good night, little ones.”

And so she put the sleeping Cordelia atop the nearest drawer, to watch over the children. In synchrony Sheeta and Pazu scrambled out of their blankets to push their beds together, that they could sleep side by side, for it gave them the greatest comfort to know they would be able to catch each other in their night terrors.

“I’m really excited,” said Pazu, in the moments before slumber, “to see where you grew up. Finally.”

“Me too,” said Sheeta. “You’ll finally be able to meet Rabten, and all the yaks, too! Erda, Aird, Yu, Yam, Bran, Tulip and Tuk and Thyme…”

The names went on and on. It was their version of counting sheep; Sheeta could not recount all the names of her herd before sleep draped them, sending them deep through dream to stand at last at the doorstep of tomorrow.

❧

Dawn rose with a long reach. It stretched over each supplicant hillside, and dashed across all flat places, streaking the fields with gold and launching colour into every sunward water and vapour. All turnsoles unfurled and craned in aspiration. Pazu and Sheeta left betimes for fair weather. They pushed themselves into the valley, searching for the right shift of lift till they were northward bound.

Yonder clouds still offered peace in friendly flocculence. Pazu taught Sheeta the birdcalls commonly heard on his side of the sea, and Sheeta got so good at them that eventually a stonechat perched itself on the rim of their glider and demanded to court Sheeta by fluffing and fanning out his wings in tandem with an incessancy of bows. While there were a few calls whose mastery Sheeta and Pazu shared, after they’d flown for a few hours Pazu’s lead waned and Sheeta’s waxed, and so soon she was teaching him how to converse with the sandgrouses and babaxes of her home.

Sheeta was in mid-mimesis of a crane’s call, whereof most would agree is not such a euphonious one, when she spotted her own ridge, which she had always likened to the spine of a dormant dragon, and her chirp thereupon turned into a yelp. “We’re here!” she cried. “We’re here!” They landed between the tarn and the farm, tumbling out of the glider together.

"Hurrah!" Pazu laughed, lifting Sheeta into a celebratory spin that dizzied the both of them. Sheeta tried the same with Pazu too, and found that she could, and although she could not lift him as high she did manage to take him on an extra twirl.

Their laughter died down when they got a little closer to Sheeta’s barn, though. It looked different from before. The thatching was fresh, and the logs didn’t match, and none of her yaks were inside.

“Somebody’s been here,” said Sheeta, suddenly afraid; it were as if small creatures were all at once pinching at her breast for pieces to squirrel away.

Pazu’s brows bunched together. “I’ll go check to see if there’s anyone around.”

Pazu gambolled up the nearest knoll with his trumpet. There he pealed a ricercar that echoed back to them from the bluffs. He stood for a few moments with his hands before him and crossed over the instrument, as if he were listening to the feedback of a teacher who was very wise and doubly kind. Soon there was a reply from high above, by the great prized conque of her village. Its rich long smooth sound lapped Sheeta’s heart with waves of comfort and felicity.

“Everything’s all right,” Sheeta hailed at last, so that Pazu could hear. She could see his big smile even from that distance. He came stumbling down, although he would have rolled if he knew it wouldn’t damage his instrument.

Pazu clasped Sheeta’s hand. “Let’s go to them.”

“They’ll come to us.” Nevertheless, Sheeta squeezed it; Pazu squeezed back with the same strength. “Follow me!”

Dragging Pazu behind her, Sheeta ran home to find it mostly unchanged: dust had settled in all the usual places; the loom was still set on her last weft; and all the arrases weaved by her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother still hung watchfully on the walls. Their footfalls stirred the dust from the floorboards as they ambled to the pantry.

“Let’s eat!” Sheeta said, bundling her best treats in her arms. “You must be hungry. It might take them a bit to show up.”

At first they sat opposite each other, but neither could bear to sit through such a prolonged state of distance and so they rearranged their chairs to be neighbours at the table instead. They ate sitting abreast, with a view of the fine weather through the cobwebbed window, which would be needing a good scrub when they could will themselves to do any work. They coated their bread in big slabs of butter and sprinkled thereon hundreds and thousands in the form of little dinosaurs and roses and stars in every colour a human might perceive in the world. These Sheeta had hoarded for birthdays by herself and special occasions with others and times when she needed fast pick-me-ups. And the first day of her homecoming was as eminent a reason as any. Their gladness increased manifold each time bread and sugar crunched under their teeth.

Thank goodness, sweet reader, for fairy bread. Have you ever tried it? It tastes not unlike how one imagines a rainbow would. There are alternative ingredients for this most wondrous recipe: think saccharine for the diabetic, margarine for the vegan and special blends of bread available at the local supermarket for the gluten intolerant. You certainly deserve to taste happiness in culinary form. Perhaps you will want to prepare a plate before you embark on the story at hand, for there is a long journey ahead yet. Please take care!

Anyhow, we shall proceed onward, if you are ready: Pazu and Sheeta were each a slice and a half into their meal when they heard the yodel from afar.

“They’re here!” Sheeta yelped. She rushed outside.

Upon the hill and against the sky stood her beloved herd grunting in unison at her. Old Rabten was there too, barking at the top of his little lungs. Sheeta sprinted up to them and they bounded down to her. Soon all the yaks surrounded the girl and showed how much they missed her by licking her warm anywhere skin showed, from cheek to ankle to palm, breathing warmth into her back and her belly with their big snouts while vocalising their delight, although Sheeta wasn’t so keen of ear to have learned their language just yet. Translated succinctly, they said, “Gramercy! It is twoleg,” and “Wheresoever wended thou?” and “We love,” and “We love,” and “Lunch!!!” It should be noted that exclamatory mood in the yak language has its own rules with regards to intensifiers, but the patient reader may consult a book of yak grammar for a better and more thorough analysis and discourse anent the ramifications thereof.

“I missed you all,” Sheeta said in response to every grunt, and wished she had as many hands as Marici to pet them all at once. Rabten wriggled and woofed his way through the wall of yaks to paw at Sheeta’s lap and show off his wagging tail. Sheeta obliged him with scritches to his ruff while she looked to Tashi. Her handsome leathery face opened in a smile. “Thank you for looking after them for me. What happened?”

“They tried to torch the place,” she said, shaking her head. “We saved it in time. The fire never got inside—it’s plain luck you live so close to the tarn!”

“Oh!” Sheeta cried; she boiled. “Did they give the villagers any trouble?”

“Aw, nothing a few pitchforks and muskets couldn’t fix,” Tashi said. She pushed a few yaks out of her way to take her own turn stroking Sheeta’s hair. “Look, lassie, why don’t you live closer to us? We can protect you in case anything like that happens again. It’s not easy going at it alone.”

“Well, I don’t like to think about what might happen to the land if I left it, and the people who were after me aren’t any longer.” Sheeta smiled. “Besides, I’m not alone anymore.”

“Oh?” She quirked her mouth and lifted a brow, her eyes aligning with Sheeta’s to identify a boy racing up the hill to greet them. “Ah, I see! A fine catch. Good for you, Sheeta.”

“His name is Pazu,” she said, and before she knew it he was here and shaking Tashi’s hand. “Pazu,” she said to him, “this is Tashi. She’s such a lovely person, I’m sure you’ll get along just great!”

Pazu grinned at Tashi. “Capital! It’s a pleasure, ma’am.”

“Oh! It’s likewise with me,” Tashi laughed, then turned to Sheeta. “I thought you looked a little different, Sheeta, although I thought it was a slant of the light. But no, you’ve grown.” She pressed Sheeta to her big soft bosom. Sheeta wrapped her arms around her waist. “It’s not been a fortnight and here you are, shot up like a reed!”

“A fortnight?” she asked, dazed, afloat still.

“Yeah! They took you half a moon ago, at least.”

“It feels like I’ve been away much longer than that,” Sheeta said into her breasts. “I’m glad to be back, though.”

“As am I! Ah, it pains me to say it, but it’s about lunchtime for the goats, so I better take my leave. If you ever need me just have your boy play that er—”

“Trumpet!” apprised Pazu helpfully.

“Yes, trumpet. I must say, you have the gift for it.” She smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “You take good care of Sheeta, all right?”

Pazu nodded with determination. Both watched Tashi climb up the hill till she was no longer visible.

“Pazu,” Sheeta said, then, hand on a yak’s nose, “this is Yam.”

“Nice to meet you, Yam!” Pazu outstretched a hand to pet the thick, warm fur on his snout. “Those are some nice horns you’ve got there.” He turned to Sheeta. “Say, how do you tell them all apart?”

Yam shook his head in disapproval.

Sheeta smiled. “Well, you just have to get to know them. Yam’s got spots in his ears. The boys are a bit bigger than the girls. And see? This is Asha, you can tell because she’s got her own little beauty mark here.” Sheeta stroked the big white star under her forelock. “Easy, right? Besides, they all sound different. You’ll know who’s who if you listen closely.”

“Huh. I’ll try…” Pazu swivelled on his heels to face the herd. He outstretched his arms. “Everyone! Let’s be friends,” he bellowed. “I’m in your hands now! I mean, er, hooves?”

Whilst Pazu continued his introduction, sniggering Sheeza tiptoed to the vegetable garden out back to uproot as many sweet potatoes she could carry. When she returned the yaks were still eyeing the boy incredulously. Time for an intervention! She snuck the tubers into Pazu’s palms, as recompense for that one time with the doves. Now the yaks’ suspicion melted into oblivion, and all of them at once advanced upon the poor boy, nudging his torso and slobbering on his palms for a chance at the golden prize.

“They like you,” Sheeta laughed.

Pazu did too. “You think so?”

“Of course.” Now Sheeta put her hand on the nose of another yak. “But they won’t forgive you if you keep mistaking them. Be sure to memorise their names carefully.”

Pazu saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”

And that was how they passed the whole day out on the pasture, with Sheeta introducing each yak to Pazu and entrusting to him the names of all the flowers that grew on her mountains but not in his valleys. There were so many to go through, and it took them unto gloam for Pazu to learn them all, when they were honoured with one of those gently unreal sunsets that made one wonder about the lifetime of light as it spanned the gold of green evening to scatterings of late lilac sky. How far and long had it travelled to touch how many eyes, in which colours, with what forms?

With their backs to the dewed grass they stared up at the denuded night so much more gorgeous for its unveiling, its beauty inspiring the same and more questions thriving like wildflowers within them, meadows and fields of cosmic mysteries, as many as the stars, growing like galaxies they explored with fleets of theories. Even the view from the crow’s nest could not rival in clarity this Gondoan sky, whose true hazeless black accentuated even the feathery resplendence of nebulae, so that they at last understood why people called it the Fort of Gywdion, or the Milky Way, or the River of Heaven.

“They’re so beautiful!” Pazu said of the stars. “There’re so many I get dizzy trying to count them. Heck, I get dizzy just looking at them!”

Sheeta faced him. “You’ve never seen them like this?”

“No, not this many back in Slug Valley. Tad,” Pazu choked, “Tad said it was something to do with the smoke and the lights and—”

“Pazu?” Sheeta sat up. “Pazu, what’s wrong?” She did not mean to smear the tear across his cheek, because before she did she had not known it was there.

“Aw, you saw me cry,” he laughed wetly, hiding his face behind his wrist. “Suppose you don’t think I’m a milksop now?”

“Never!” Sheeta gripped his shoulders, half for rage at how her facilities betrayed her, for she had not volunteered herself to this wildfire sparking under her skin. “You’re the bravest, strongest, loveliest person I’ve ever met!”

His sobbing laughs crescendoed into a full-bodied snortle. “No, you are.” He scooped her face in his dirt-daubed hands, holding on as if she were the national treasure of his heartland, or as if her flesh were the water of life and his its chalice. “I can’t believe you did that for me back there, in Laputa, the twice, and at Tidith. I can’t believe we’ve been to Laputa! And back!”

But she was so sure could not be any of those things for him. Yes, she was strong, so strong, but did he know that that strength sourced her all-reaching fear? Such terrible power had chosen her whispering blood for a conduit, and she had not even known; upon her rushed remnants of blue radiance and deperdition sanguine as the robot’s beams, as Muska’s scab-black soul. She could not speak for loveliness, but she knew there was nothing less wanted by anyone than the pain she was capable of inflicting. And now her face, so hot and full of blood, flushed out the brine it could no longer curb, starved for space and expression. “But you’re sad, and you won’t tell me why! T-tell me what’s wrong so I can help! I… don’t—I don’t want you to suffer alone.”

Pazu blinked out the last of his tears. When he sensed the onslaught of hers, his arms did not hesitate for a moment to form a tight bastion about her shivering shoulders. “I’m sorry, Sheeta. I just—I just suddenly thought of my Tad. The truth is, I miss him a lot, and I wish he could be here, so I could tell him all about these incredible adventures we’ve had. The least I could do is clear his name but now I—I don’t think that’s possible anymore. And I guess I can’t stop being sad for that, and… other things…”

They did not speak until Sheeta calmed to the occasional sniffle. “Y-your father would be proud. Just think what the world would be like now if we hadn’t done what we have.” Tired, her head fell to his chest. “It must be nice to have memories of him.”

He made his voice soft and soothing. “You don’t remember yours?”

“Not very much. He died when I was really little. I was old enough to remember Mama and Grandmama when they passed, though.”

“I see,” Pazu said, wiping his nose on the back of his forearm before splaying all his limbs across the grass. “What were they like?”

“Oh, so good, so nice. Mama never said a bad word about anybody and Grandmamma always knew what to do to make someone feel better. And they were both so good at everything else; they always did the right or best thing, even if they never did it the same way. I could talk all night about them,” she claimed, but did not. “Oh, I miss them so, Pazu.”

“They must be where you get your kindness from,” chuckled Pazu. Sheeta did not voice her disagreement, which left another opening for Pazu to say, “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it.”

“What?”

“Laputa.” Your ancestral home, he almost mentioned.

“Don’t.” She pushed her forehead into his neck. “You did all you could.”

Pazu’s hands formed into fists against Sheeta’s back. “Not when I left you with Muska, and not when—”

“Think that way if you want,” Sheeta huffed, “but there were plenty of times you saved me, or tried to. So many I can’t count them.”

“Good. ‘Cause you shouldn’t be keeping count.” Pazu smoothed Sheeta’s hair. “We look after each other, now, don’t we? That’s what we should be doing.”

“Right,” Sheeta murmured. “Thank you for reminding me.”

“Yeah.” A star fell. Sheeta could not help but pin a secret wish on it while Pazu smiled with the remembrance of their meeting, of his long debate with himself about whether she was angel or girl. Dear reader, though he may still be shy to admit it, sometimes he still dreams of her soaring aloft, tailing a long line of white light. He said, “Thank you for everything.”

❧

At cockcrow Thyme nudged them awake. In bewilderment Pazu gazed long at Sheeta’s dew-glazed face, then to Gondoa at large, so strange and wonderful to his yet untravelled eyes. Where his valley concaved her mountains convexed; for every one of his fishing gorges, there was a peak she had climbed in turn. They had painted such places to each other with words yesterday, and vividly as either had told their stories, Pazu could barely contain his impatience to explore the cradle of Sheeta’s childhood, to indite with his feet all new epics with Sheeta as the star and he the dutiful deuteragonist, and yet here he was, limbs pinned down by her eyes. Only after the lost time found betwixt three slow blinks that seemed to stretch over an hour each did the two dive straight into chores at Sheeta’s behest.

For the longest time Pazu had had to be his own mother, as Sheeta had done all on her own, so he was familiar with women’s work, and lacked enough of a certain consciousness of self to not be in the least abashed of it. With the same alacrity he devoted to blueprinting airplanes or whizzing through cities of legend by vicarious means, he helped Sheeta milk the yaks, churn the butter, do the laundry and the dishes and the spinning. They shovelled ordure for the hearth and the stove together, too, because it was only fair to share the most gruelling burdens between all parties involved in each other’s upkeep.

They left the best and easiest work for last. Whilst Pazu kneaded dough he counted all the growth rings on the table whereat he worked. The first circle was dead in the centre, and circumambient were year after incommensurable year in what could have been an infinity of concentricity if this house had been allowed to be as big as Sheeta’s heart and subsequent love. Thus did the table’s possible provenance unfurl storied and vibrant in his mind. Perhaps it had been chopped from a tree great as Yggdrasil by Sheeta’s progenitor, and sanded by the generation after, then slammed and wept upon and laughed over and hidden under during family feuds, death, marriages, births. Or disasters and miracles both, like Laputa. Pazu wondered if the table approved of him, if it might one day come to remember him too.

“Sheeta,” he murmured, when he was done with the dough.

Sheeta flapped a lacy tablecloth over the surface of the table. “Yes?”

Atop it Pazu rested a hand, remembering and revering the rings. He smiled. “Nothing.”

Later they heaped upon plates bakestones, rarebits, and a good hearty pot of cawl all cooked by Pazu, because the viands gentled the upheaval of hiraeth inside him; and Sheeta’s grandmother’s special cream cheese cake, given form from almonds and cashews and honey and her own yaks’ cheese and a confidential ingredient passed down from woman to woman through the many years. They closed their eyes and thanked heaven or whomever responsible for their good luck in being there together, with their small hands and soft words, and without colloquy, for they knew that though the divine was manifest in different forms in each of their minds, their forked paths thence and thence led to the same end hence.

Just as they were about to tuck in a knock sounded at their door. Pazu, ever the thespian, puffed out his chest and strutted before Sheeta in the fashion of a handsome hero on a playhouse poster. Sheeta only laughed at him. “We’re no more than fifty people here. It can’t be someone I don’t know…”

“What if it’s a white puma! Or worse, a cyhyraeth!”

Sheeta blinked incredulously. “A cyhyr…aeth? Hmmm, we don’t have those here.”

“Ah, but you never know,” chuckled Pazu, and opened the door.

Sheeta ended up being right. It was the postboy Temur with their telegram, sniffing the air. “Oh, boy, does it smell good in here!” He looked to the ceiling as if he were trying to remember something important. “Right! Your telegram, Ms. Sheeta.”

Sheeta received it without breaking their gaze. “Would you like to join us?”

“I would, but I’ve already eaten.”

However, Sheeta had already wrapped a hoard of barfi into a little basket for Temur to take home for his family. “Well, do come next time! And take this with you.”

He raised both his hands. “Oh, I couldn’t!”

“But you must! Remember the time you brought me the wool? The dye? Besides, it’s what friends do,” Sheeta said. Her smile, though not meant for Pazu, still got his heart racing. “Take it.”

After he acquiesced, they said their see-you-laters and saw him out until his figure faded over the hill home. Then they could properly salivate in anticipation of the feast.

“Well!” Pazu rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Let’s eat!”

Sheeta concurred and dipped tonguelong into the broth. “Ah! It’s delicious.”

“Mrs. Duffy taught me the recipe,” Pazu said, and downed a spoonful of swede bobbing about in the peppery liquid, “speaking of which, the telegram!”

Sheeta took a big bite of rarebit that stretched strings out of the cheese on top, which she had to chase up with her teeth. She passed the telegram over. “Here you go.”

Pazu unfolded the page and read aloud:

we are well stop however that pirate has taken up residence in your domicile stop she won’t evacuate unless you and sheeta return stop you are welcome to do so any time stop actually please do stop naloopen stop

Sheeta made a face. “But Pazu, Erda’s, well, she’s still got a little one on the way. I’m worried about her. You see, calving season’s from May to June and I wonder if there’s something wrong to make her so late. Anyway, I want to keep an eye on her until the calf’s out nice and sound.”

“No worries! He’s probably making things sound worse than they are because he’s mad about having no one to boss around.”

Sheeta fidgeted in her seat. “Oh. Does that mean you’ll go back?”

“Why, I’m staying right here with you like we planned. I’ve never watched a baby being born before,” he said, whereupon Sheeta pounced him. Cheek smooshed by cheek, Pazu’s words formed round, “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

“Ah, thank you! I’d really like that.”

“Me too!” he tweeted, hugging a laugh out of her lungs. “Don’t you worry about it, Sheeta. I never thought I’d say this, but that’s the great thing about being orphans, isn’t it? We get to choose where we go and who we’re with.”

“Yeah!” She kissed his cheek. “I choose you, too, by the way.”

Joy rioted in Pazu’s brain. It took him a long time to recover from it, though after dinner he did manage to write up a reply, with Sheeta hooking her chin over his shoulder:

baby on the way stop can’t come yet stop best wishes stop

And that was that for the time being.

❧

Twice the people will halve the work, say those native of Gondoa, where survival is so oft based upon partnership. This value is held by all from matchmakers to statesmen and now by the two toiling on Sheeta’s estate. With a helper here, each day free time cleared the afternoon schedule for play. Sheeta and Pazu spent these respites in a state of utter ataraxia on the exploration of natural rockeries, of crystal peaks, of vert foothills, whereat they discovered pika and snowfinch nests, pink salt lamps, and nearby shrines chiselled by the elements; or on idylls apricating with the yaks out on the pasture as in the old songs and paintings.

Today the two were recumbent during a domestic adventure behind the thresholds of the field. With her thumbnail Sheeta slit a globeflower stem wherethrough she strung a stalk of red clover. The next on the chain was a daisy, and after that a big bloom of bugloss.

“Sheeta,” asked Pazu, mimicking her craft with jurinea and oxlip, “What do you want to be when you grow up? You’re so good at everything. Cooking, sewing, and this…” His tongue pressed against his upper lip as his broad fingers and short nails endeavoured towards precision. “You helped my dream of finding Laputa come true,” he murmured. “I want you to see yours through too.”

“Hmmm! I suppose I haven’t really thought about it before.” She gesticulated for Pazu’s hand. Gladly, he gave it to her and around his pinkie she looped a blue poppy. Her hero would have accolades from knuckle to knuckle, wrist to elbow, flowers overflowing from his pockets for all time. “I try to just focus about getting from this day to the next, one harvest to another.”

“I see!” As at last he got the flower through his eyes sparkled like struck flint. “Farm life’s tough, huh.”

“Very.” She pushed another ring onto his nameless finger and grinned up at him. He beamed back. “But it’s not so bad! I’ve got Rabten and Tashi and the yaks and...”

“…And?”

Sheeta shook her head. “Pazu.”

“Yeah?”

“What do you want to do?” Her strength seeped from her at the idea of Pazu gone off on his own. “I bet you had other plans…”

Inexhaustible supplies of ambitions, in fact, and new truckloads every day. “Me? I want to be an inventor when I grow up!” His voice and eyes and breath escalated. “I want to complete my ornithopter, first. That’d make the journey between Gondoa and Slug Valley a lot faster, I think. More reliable, too. Then I’ll design more planes and catch lightning and build engines to run all kinds of things! Maybe—maybe even a robot, one that won’t hurt people, but help them.” He looked down. “And I still want to clear Tad’s name.”

“Oh, I see!” Sheeta laughed. “You’re so smart, Pazu. You’ll go far! To the moon, or the stars...”

“Aw, shucks,” he chuckled, scratching his good cheek. “Thanks, Sheeta. But what about you?”

“Ah! Well, you know, now that I’ve thought about it, I don’t know if I could just choose one thing I want to be… But I have lots and lots and lots of dreams, too.”

“For example?”

“Hmmm. Well, it’s just a little, silly thing, but I’d like to win the yak races for once.”

“Yak races?” Pazu tied the ends of his flower chain together.

“Mhm! They’re on next next week but I don’t think I’ll be able to go this year.... Oh, well.”

“Then we’ll go next year! I can come too, right? I wanna see you win.” With his completed gift he garlanded Sheeta’s head in a crown of colour; already and always she was a winner in Pazu’s heart.

“Sure!” Sheeta laughed. “But aside from that, there are other things I want. Really important things. After what happened at Laputa, I’ve been thinking and… I want to—I want to fight. All the bad things, you know? Somehow. I know I shouldn’t, but I get so angry thinking that people like Muska must be all over the world.”

Pazu lifted an eyebrow. “Why shouldn’t you be angry? If nobody ever got angry then nothing’ll ever change. ‘Cause ‘anger is the root of revolution;’ that’s what my boss always said when they went on strike, anyway. Something, something—for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and retaking the means of production—blah, blah, he said, when he was angry at other people. When he was angry at me he told me the right kind of anger would make me into a better man. Er, ah, I think the word for it is ‘indignation’.”

Sheeta laughed. “You agree?”

“I dunno… I get his point, but no matter how angry we get and right we are we shouldn’t hurt people because of it. If we did that we’d be as bad as Muska.”

She nodded. “Grandmamma said that there’re always other ways of fighting.” Sheeta began to bedeck Pazu’s other hand. “Like not giving up. Not giving in. But giving as much as you can to as many people as you can. It was her way of… her way of fighting back? Her weapon was good deeds. No, that isn’t right. It wasn’t really a weapon, more like a medicine for things she was fighting against in the first place. Which is why I think it worked so well.”

“Ah, that makes sense.” Pazu bobbed his head up and down.

“But the world is so much bigger than I thought!” she said, the green and blue she had seen aboard the Tiger Moth expanding her understanding of the universe into boundlessness. “It probably needs a lot of medicine. I want to learn, Pazu, learn to help.”

“You want to fly again?”

She nodded gravely. “I don’t ever want Laputa to happen again. And I don’t want to live in the skies, like Dola and the rest—I don’t think my ancestors did, either. I need the farm, and the farm needs me.”

“Hmmm.” Pazu spent awhile trying to solve the conundrum. “How did the song go again, Sheeta?”

She recited the lines that had so many times offered her comfort:

“In earth embed your roots,
With wind abide to roost
With seeds endure beyond winter
To sing in spring with birds aflitter.”

“Right! It doesn’t say anything about flying being out of bounds, does it? In fact, all that about living with the wind and singing with the birds seems to encourage it now and again.”

“I don’t know when I’d find the time,” Sheeta sighed. “Maybe near the end of autumn, after the harvest and the seeding I can go with you.”

Pazu took both her hands. “Yeah! And you know what, Tad said if we go far enough south we’d end up in a place where it’s actually spring!”

“Really!” Sheeta stared at the grass. “You know, I wonder what parts of Grandmamma made it into me. She would never even think of leaving the farm. I scare myself sometimes. To think that poor village was my—” Fault, she wanted to say, but before she could Pazu pushed a hand against her mouth.

“Never think that! You didn’t know, no one did—”

“Eksft Mska,” she said behind his hand. She sighed into his palm and felt him shudder in response. “Wt’s rng?”

“Oh, wow, it’s just—” he breathed. “Your lips are really soft! So warm…” He lifted his palm and nudged hers with his fingers. “That feels so nice!”

“Ooooh, let me try,” Sheeta insisted. She too sunk fingers into Pazu’s lips, tracing the shape, and thought of clouds and pillows and angel cake and bird wings. Pazu even mouthed her hand as she did so, pretending to bite, and Sheeta discovered that the inside of his mouth was even softer and warmer than the outside of it! “You’re right!”

Before they thought to see the effect of two and two together, a voice hailed from afar: it was Temur with the mail again.

The telegram read:

pazu stop what have you done to that sweet girl stop return at once or you’re fired stop

Dear reader, Pazu reddened to his ears! In his embarrassment he would not even let Sheeta look over his shoulder. It may be of relevance to the reader to know that there is another proverb in Gondoa: two hearts together will double the trouble. And also the one which states: One heart within another is like fire inside a hearth, and a heart unaccompanied is as a hearth sans its house.

❧

At some ungodly and otherwise unimportant hour a thunderstorm jolted them awake. Pazu and Sheeta knocked heads as they both moved to sit at the same time. Rain battered and pattered the roof so well it was a miracle it didn’t collapse over them, although within minutes they were exposed to a leaks in the roof Pazu made a mental note to fix tomorrow. Their sleep had been so deep that poor Rabten’s howling hadn’t been enough to stir them from it.

“Rabten?” Sheeta called out. “Is there something wrong?”

She lowered her hand to find the dog’s fur wet. Teeth tugged Sheeta’s negligee.

Years of trust and communication between them marked this as a distress call of the most urgent degree. Wolves upon the herd perhaps, or worse, a snow leopard on the prowl. Shocks as sharp as the lightning outside split Sheeta’s nerves. She lunged for the musket by the bed and sprinted outside, the thunderbolts there all the light she needed. Big violet, violent dendrites of electricity cracked forth like a whip from the heavens. The clouds alternated between flame or sea colour throughout the furore. Wind uplifted Sheeta’s skirt to billow about her waist, but the situation at hand was far too exigent to be worrying about modesty.

Rabten raced as a beacon ahead of Sheeta. Behind Sheeta half-lidded Pazu trailed them with lamp in hand and hand on mouth. He took an umbrella with him; however, it got turned inside out in an instant and was not much use to either of them after.

For Sheeta the short journey to the barn could not be over soon enough. Whilst in reality the trip extended to no more than ten minutes, when at last Sheeta arrived, she leapt to Erda’s side at once with all the guilt of a midwife who is late past parturition. She saw the progress of her sac, and rubbed her warm, distended belly. “There, there,” she said. “It’ll be all right. I’m here.” Then Sheeta rolled up her sleeves to her armpits. “Pazu!” she called as he came in. “Boil me some water, and get me ethanol if there’s any left.”

“Ah!” Pazu’s eyes dilated to their full size. He scrambled about. “Where is it?”

“On the bottom shelf of the pantry,” she said, and he was out before she could say anything more.

The round trip took half the time of the first one-way amble. Sheeta sanitised her arms up to the shoulder, though on her mother’s advice she left intervention for the last and worst case scenario.

“Is there something wrong?” Pazu asked as he towelled himself off.

“I don’t know yet.” Sheeta gripped her elbows. “I hope not.”

Once Pazu was dry he shuffled over to Sheeta with another towel to shake the water out of her hair for her. “Should I call Tashi?”

“Maybe later if things get really bad. I don’t want to bother her at this hour and…” She curled a hand inside one of Pazu’s. “I think it’s best if we stayed together right now.”

“Okay!” Pazu said. He draped his arms around her to ward off the flu and did not let go.

For kalpas they waited. Two hours in Pazu drifted off to sleep, with his head perched on Sheeta’s shoulder, and a long line of drool creeping down the corner of his mouth. Sheeta didn’t budge in the slightest, for she was in equal parts afraid of waking Pazu as she was of losing sight of the mother-to-be in her most vulnerable state for any more than the fraction of a second it took her to blink. Erda watched Sheeta, too, with her big wet eyes, the calm in her face the only indication that the night might turn out all right after all.

Another hour passed before Pazu snapped awake. “Guh? What’d I miss!” he mumbled. “Is the baby out yet?”

Sheeta shook her head and bit her thumb.

“Maybe I should go and call for help?” he asked, but he was already sprucing up his vest and combing his hair with his fingers.

“She’s my responsibility.” Sheeta pushed one of her hands over his nearest. “Hold her tail for me.”

Pazu gulped and did as he was told. Sheeta’s heartstrings tangled together when she thought of how welcome the spell of delivery would be presently. She buried the feeling. Assiduously she gleaned a ratty old handbook and from its instructions managed somehow to check and correct the presentation of the calf and ease the passage as unobtrusively as possible.

All the while Sheeta had tempered her countenance with the noblest equanimity you might find on one as tender as she, as when Muska had held her at gunpoint, only this time it was not her own life she wagered, which to her was a much direr prospect. You could not at all tell what trepidation she faced, for with a mollifying voice and nary a breath in between she effused hortatories, such as, “Brace up, dear! You’re doing great,”; “Keep up the good work!”; “That’s the spirit!”; “It’ll be fine, Pazu!”; “Come on out, little one. Don’t be shy. The earth would be happier to have you in it. There is all the grass and broth you could want, and friends to make, and you can run and run and run wherever you wish, around and around the whole wide world, though you should make sure to stop if you ever run into a miracle. I would know, since they happen all the time to me. Your mother and I are here to protect you, no matter what, so there really is nothing to be afraid of.” One would think that when the calf at last debuted on the heels of dawn, it was the sheer cheer wherewith Sheeta had greeted her that had pulled her out, though of course it was poor Erda who was verily performing the menial labour.

Oh, gentle reader, how beautiful that calf turned out to be! She had a great big head, and eyes to match, dewy and pitchy as the hour of her birth and consequent name. Sheeta got Pazu to keep his distance to let Erda lick her clean in peace. The calf shook its head, its little ears flopping about, enjoying now the cool morning breeze.

They watched her struggle to stand, first floundering on her spindly forelegs, then falling on her bony tush before she reared again with her hindlimbs. The calf did her best and utmost. In no more than ten minutes she discovered the joy of hooves, stumbling and wobbling with hobbledehoy steps until at last she could stride proudly unto her mother’s udder for a good long drink.

“Amazing,” Pazu gasped. “Mothers are something else!”

At last Sheeta could relax. Her shoulders fell back, she breathed deeply, and she found the time and liberty of thought to wipe the sweat from her brow. “This was Erda’s first calf. I haven’t had to deal with a heifer before.”

Pazu shook her hand. “But you did so well, Sheeta!” He turned to Erda to shake her hoof, too, then realised how ill-advised that might be, so he settled with felicitation given from afar with a raised thumb. “Congratulations on the bonny lass,” said Pazu to Erda.

The yak grunted happily in response.

Sheeta laughed sincerely but tiredly. “I keep the farm for them, you know,” she sighed. “I’m always happy to welcome a little one into the world, but I worry about it all getting out of hand someday. They just keep multiplying, soon I’ll need to herd them farther and farther for grass, but I don’t think I could bear to sell or trade any of them. They’re family, Pazu.”

“We’re double the people now. We’ll manage somehow. They can help with the ploughing, right? I know a lot of good people in the valley who might want one. We’ve got plenty of grass there.”

“Well, what’s the weather like, year-round? Is it always so warm there? Yaks don’t do well in hot weather.”

“Ah, it rains a lot, and it’s what foreigners from the south call chilly most of the time.” Pazu grinned toothily. “Nothing some oatmeal and hugs can’t fix, though.”

“Oh, then that’s a mighty idea! Maybe we can get Dola to transport a couple over, you know, after she builds that brand new airship.”

Pazu nodded, though he had gone all silent by then. Only when Sheeta put her hand on his knee did he speak: “Say, you think you’d have space for me?”

“What d’you mean?”

He looked at her with a nervous smile and shy yet determined eyes. “In your family.”

“Why, of course! You’re already a part of it as far as I’m concerned. You’re always welcome here.” She hugged his neck. “Actually, I think it’s more than that. Family is when you’re with me even when you’re away. There’s always a room just for you, here.” She put her hand to her heart. “That you live in, even when you’re not here. I’m sorry if I’m not making sense… Do you know what I mean?”

“I know exactly!” His face lit up like a flash-lamp. “I feel as if I take the ravine and everyone I ever knew to be in it with me wherever I go. Now you, and Dola, and Ben, and the boys, too. And I know you all would think of me the same way I think of you. That’s why I never feel so lonely anymore.”

“I mean, I would miss you so much, if we had to be apart, but it’s for that reason that you never really leave.” Sheeta grinned, and faced the door of the barn. Outside it was already light, where the storm had ceded to serene skies. With their prior conversation the two could bear to be apart for a little, so then as Sheeta led mother and child out to pasture, Pazu waddled up to town to send Mr. Duffy another telegram:

boss no stop not sheeta the yak stop got her out tonight stop beautiful baby girl stop regards stop

❧

The next telegram read:

question mark question mark question mark

And so Pazu sighed and replied:

weather’s bad stop will come soon as calf’s strong stop sheeta says two weeks stop

With a good amount of coaxing Sheeta was able to convince Pazu to show her the entire correspondence. Sheeta laughed at it on her grandmamma’s old chair, rocked by carven tigers, her small feet barely touching the floor warmed by the full skin of a snow leopard that had pounced upon the herd only to fall to one true shot from her grandfather’s musket.

Over her lap sprawled a vivid quilt whose other end covered Pazu’s legs. At Pazu’s behest she showed him all the treasures of her family, explaining what she could and theorising with him on what she could not.

Sheeta could not remember when she had begun to work textiles. It may have well as been since she was old enough to command her fingers to string a thread through a needle. With fabric from her yaks she had achieved half her trousseaux, and a few fine pieces every year that would serve as gifts or profit. Her caskets overflowed with the work she had planned to sell at the annual festival market: silver-threaded fish swam about in pools of silk; peacocks spread their plumage across fans; and flowers bloomed against the eternal spring of green wool shorn from sheep in March. Pazu weighed in his hands little slippers with toes that curled to a point, dizened on either side with tendrils that reached around to secret chimeras on the heels, there to guard the girl who wore them from unwanted pursuants. Sheeta had made those from scratch, from leathers and clothes she had traded for grain. Blankets and hangings and carpets contained intricate scenes from life, with the herders in harmony with the sheep and the yaks, children rolling knucklebones, cavalcades upon the steppes, newlyweds picnicking under the broad embrace of oaks ripened to the goldfall of autumn. In the fibres were woven entreaties for abundance, the frayed and unfinished spaces at the ends left so as wishes for daughters’ lives and loves to never reach their end; and these formed the realities and dreams of the women of Sheeta’s family for hundreds and hundreds of years. With them around Sheeta never quite felt alone.

The further back Sheeta said these textiles were, the more of Laputa they found in them, with the oldest providing an accurate map of the garden grounds on one side and a chronicle of the city’s downfall on the other.

Pazu was the first to tear his eyes away from the loss immortalised, instead choosing to pick up a ragdoll with finely parted hair and happier associations. “Did you make this?”

Sheeta nodded and made another green stitch in her new pet project. She had had a vision, coming home, of a saddle blanket for the calf with the vast roots of Laputa branching across it, for when she would be big enough to ride.

Pazu pointed to the lined wolfskin hat she had made last winter for one of the elders, who had died before she could finish it. “And this?”

She nodded again. “You can have that one. It gets cold up here.”

Pazu dropped it over his head, but the brim of the hat sat on his nose. “Ah. I don’t think it fits.”

“Uh oh,” Sheeta said, emerging from the quilt. “I’ll have to make you one. Come here.” She beckoned with a hand.

Pazu obeyed. Sheeta got her tape and measured around his head.

“May I ask what you’re doing, Sheeta?”

“I want to make you some clothing,” she said, and though a Gondoan man might understand the deeper implications of this desire, Pazu presently did not. Sheeta took his shoulder measurements, too. “Stand still.”

“Can I help?” asked Pazu.

“It’s not men’s work,” she warned.

“What is men’s work?” he wondered. “I mean, before I got here, you had to do absolutely everything at the farm. So you were probably doing some of it. And the same for me when I was all on my own.”

Sheeta smiled. “Well, as long as you don’t mind. I know some boys would rather be off to war than do women’s work.”

“Well, let ‘em try having no women in their life at all! It’s pretty tough,” he laughed, picking up her hands. His eyes gleamed. “Tell me what to do, Sheeta.”

Well, in sooth, Pazu was useless with a needle aside from the most rudimentary mending, and that was why he had been relegated to the tasks of combing the wool and holding the shuttle. Sheeta would teach him to dye, when she could procure the colours she wanted for her new projects. Yet she had to let him have that sense of achievement, so today she taught him different types of stitches: running and split and lazy daisies. Pazu even succeeded in stringing together pompoms, which they immediately took out to dress the new mother.

“Lovely,” Sheeta said, stringing the pompoms on her horns. She stroked the side of her head only to frown. “Her hair’s matting…” She rummaged through her apron to retrieve a brush.

“Can I try?” Pazu asked.

“Okay.” Sheeta handed over the comb. “Be gentle!” Sheeta found a tangle and gripped the hair above the knot before she brushed. “Like so.”

“I guess it’s pretty hard having long hair, huh,” Pazu said.

Sheeta fingered the tips of her own crop. She looked down. “I do miss it, though. Sometimes.”

“Aw, it’ll grow back.” Pazu shrugged. “You’ll look just as beautiful in the meantime.”

What a dear! Sheeta had the oddest thought, then, a kind of urge to find out if his palate was as sweet as his words. So she sunk her hands deep into Erda’s coat. Sheeta began to braid her beard, a little too tightly. She had gotten was up to the end of the first plait when Tashi came calling from up the hill. Sheeta hastily fastened the braid and went to meet her halfway.

“Sheeta,” Tashi said, pushing a basket full of cheese into the girl’s arms. “You going off to the races this year?”

“Oh. I mightn’t be able to, with the new calf and Pazu here and all. I want someone to be there for Erda.”

“You should go! Take Pazu for a spin.” Tashi winked. “I could stay here and look after the house while you’re gone.”

“Oh, would you?” Sheeta cried. This was the best thing that could happen for the herd; having the town vet there for her yaks was probably better than anything else she could do for them.

“Of course, I’ll need to ask you a favour too!”

“What is it?”

“Help me sell off my embroidery like last year, I know you’ve got some goodies to share, too.”

“Sure! I’d be happy to.”

“Then it’s settled. Make sure to stop by the temple to leave the monks some butter, too.”

“When can you come over?”

“As soon as tomorrow morning.” Tashi pat Sheeta’s back. “Rest up tonight, eh? You’ve got a long journey ahead.”

“Will do,” said Sheeta breathlessly, and was true to her word.

Conversely, Pazu was overjoyed at the opportunity and thereby hardly slept the whole night.

The next morning Sheeta showed Pazu how to ready Aird, the most docile of all Sheeta’s yaks. Sheeta stroked her long braided beard and strung pompoms over the tips of her horns, looped tiered tassels of variegated colour around the base of them, then over her withers wrapped caparisons with cowrie shells sewn on and a bell on each end, and across her back a mandala, all of which were Sheeta’s own work. This was practice in decking even grander trappings on Tuk, fastest of the herd, though he was less receptive to the processes.

Pazu went looking like the foreigner he was, though he had been given Temur’s wolfskin hand-me-downs, which he donned with a prepossessing jauntiness. And Sheeta dressed herself in her best robes, with the crosswise sash and the orphery, though she had grown too much to fit it properly, so she wore it unbuttoned with a camisole underneath, but did not look any less comely for it. She did her hair up in the waterfall braid she had taught herself since coming home and clasped it in place with the jangling castle. For now they remained gentle cascades, but in time they would become their regular cataracts again. She could not wait for them to grow long enough to fashion the marks of beasts out of her hair: dragons’ horns, and horses' manes, and tigers' claws.

The whole way down the mountain they were full of mirth and fanfare; together the jingle-jangle of the yakbells and Rabten’s yapping and Pazu’s trumpet solos segued into an unlikely symphony of joy, the little mirrors sewn onto the yaks’ finery throwing medallions and rainbows in their wake and fore.

❧

Pennants of every colour flapped in the wind, which for once one could not hear, for all soughs were covered by the small talk of the yaks and the loud boasts of the competitors, and mountain songs, trill of dulcimer and echo of alphorn, the sounds a radius of hurly-burly that extended to all attendees not yet arrived. Smoke from the fires could be seen as far as any peakless place leagues around as men made their own grey clouds from the ground up. Life flavoured and animated the otherwise unyielding earth, and from above the blue smell of ether and summer blessed all.

Amidst the phalanx Sheeta identified a familiar face. It belonged to a handsome, swarthy rider, no longer young but not yet old, his restrained gravitas and kind demeanour presenting him as being of the breed of man whose story one was most desirous to hear in the midst of however motley a crowd.

“Shuna!” Sheeta said. At his reach she arrived, whereupon they embraced, her head only coming up to his abdomen. Shuna hooked his thumbs under Sheeta’s armpits and raised her effortlessly, and with the utmost tenderness, as if she were his own child.

“How’ve you fared, little one?” he asked. “Look how you’ve grown!” He pinched her cheeks and kissed her nose. “Beautiful as the dawn, you are.”

Sheeta blushed a little. “So much has happened! I don’t think you’d believe the half of what I’ll say.”

“Ah, I’ve survived some strange adventures myself,” he admitted, “there’s no story of yours I wouldn’t trust, Sheeta.”

Her flush deepened. “Really? Could you tell me about the strangest ones?”

“Hm. I think you’re old enough to hear the one about how Thea and I met,” chuckled Shuna. “Let her tell her side, too.”

“She’s here, too? Yes!” yelped Sheeta. “Say, do you think she could teach me more about weaving like last year?”

“I’m sure she would be happy to,” he said, holding her hand. “I see you’ve things to sell. Why not do so alongside us? We fear the crowd’ll take advantage of a girl so young.”

Sheeta cocked her head. “But I brought my musket.”

“Did you forget about the year we met?” he laughed, his hand over his stomach.

“Shuna!” Sheeta broiled at the mere memory of her utter lack of dicker know-how. At the perfect time Pazu caught up to relieve her of it, his hands behind his back, uncharacteristically diffident.

“Oh, hello,” said Shuna, meeting Pazu’s eyes. “Are you one of Sheeta’s new friends?”

Pazu introduced himself with a beam and a tip of the hat. “And you, sir, um, ah...”

“A close comrade, like yourself.” He grinned just as widely as Pazu did. “Let’s go to Thea. We’ve got a nice fire going, and plenty of food in the caravan.” As they walked, he added, “You both must be tired! Gondoa’s a long ride from here.”

“And so’s your home,” Sheeta pointed out.

“Yes,” sighed Shuna, “but we do get the best prices here. Besides, with all our children grown and gone off on their own escapades, Thea’s got to have her fun some other way.” He looked ahead to the stables. “Ah, there she is. Come here, lad.” Shuna eased Pazu forward with a hand on his back, towards a ruminant most goodly and noble of form. “Be good, would you, Yakkul? Say hello to Pazu.”

Yakkul was of a creature with a long limber neck that otherwise resembles the silhouette of an elk, except for the horns, which are like those of a gazelle, and a ruff and disposition that would not be so unfamiliar to readers who have encountered the soft-spoken charms of the rough collie. Feeding Yakkul was Thea, a fair and equanimous woman of Shuna’s age and bearing, steel-eyed, at once more distant and present than her husband.

“Shuna,” said Thea. She looked to him as an owl to her stars, and he at her as a dolphin to his ocean. Then her eyes stopped at the girl beside him and softened to sea-grey with fondness for her. “And Sheeta!” she gasped, bent down and opened her arms to the girl, who leaned upward to touch the woman’s lowering forehead with her own. “You’ve done something to your hair,” Thea murmured; she brushed it with her fingers. “I like it. I wore mine just like this, at your age, except I had these, even then,” she said, stroking the two thick beaded braids that framed her face, which still struck all beholders with the same force as when the first time Shuna had seen her in the squalor of the citadel, somehow resplendent in her rags and scrupulous even in her indigence. That was reason enough for Sheeta to enjoy the new style; pride welled up in her, in being able to wear her hair the way someone she so admired had. Any trace of her earlier reserve vanished.

Sheeta hugged Thea again. “Thank you! I’m so glad. But you know, I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. My hair got blown off with a gun, if you would believe it,” she hmphfed, though Pazu, for one, had never heard her hmphf before.

Thea winced for a trice in which she remained stiff as a statue, for she knew Sheeta had never in the slightest been inclined to hyperbole or dishonesty. Then she reverted to her usual sangfroid, which betrayed nothing, except her commiseration. Thea bent down to kiss Sheeta’s brow. “Well, you’ve earned the look of true adventurer now. Very becoming. So tell me all about what’s happened since we saw you last. And who this is.” She put a warm, hard hand on Pazu’s shoulder and passed him a flocculent sheaf of winterfat that Yakkul munched forthwith, which did notstartle Pazu so much as excite him; he loved to make new friends, no matter how many legs they had. “Go on. He likes to be pet.”

“Thank you. My name is Pazu. Enchanted, ma’am.” He swirled a hand over the cheeks of the red elk, whose warm breath blanketed Pazu’s face as he nuzzled him with a wet snout and eventually attempted to eat of his hair. At this everyone laughed.

“Sheeta,” Thea said, after she recovered, her hands sliding down her shoulders. “I think you’ve grown a little. I have good clothes that would fit you now, to save you from making them yourself. Would you want them?”

“Oh, would I!” Sheeta said with bright eyes as she trailed along behind her towards the yurt.

This left Pazu alone with Shuna, which freed up space for some interrogation. “Sir,” he asked, “do you have your own farm, too?”

“No need for formalities. Please call me Shuna,” he said, smiling, “and yes, I own and work a few.”

“Wow! Then are you here to compete?”

Shuna demurred. He turned to Thea. “My wife is.”

“Oh! In the yak races?”

“In the horse races.”

Pazu crossed his arms and nodded to himself. “She looks tough. Good thing she’s not up against Sheeta. She’s even tougher!”

Shuna laughed. “Ah, I think some things are better left unknown. Here they come!”

“Shuna,” called Sheeta as she helped Thea unload her merchandise. “You said you’d tell us about how you and Thea met. I think it’d make this part a little more interesting.”

“Ah, I guess a promise is a promise. Would that be all right, my love?” he asked Thea. When she nodded he continued, "It’s been a while since I’ve told it. My apologies in advance. So! My kingdom lies to the southeast. We do all right now, but it’s always been a hard place, surrounded by glacial mountains that block out the sun from the valley. The soil’s poor. One day we had a guest, who bore these strange golden seeds, that were said to be able to curb the hunger of my people. They’d been winnowed, though, and I was told to go west to find them in farmable form. I took Yakkul here,” he said, stroking his snout, “and journeyed in that direction for a month. That’s when I met Thea.” He put his hand on her lap.

“What happened, then?” asked Sheeta in amazement.

“Well, it’s up to Thea to decide if she wants to tell it. It’s her story, too.”

At once the children turned to her with both sets of hands clasped. “Tell us, Thea?” pleaded Sheeta. “Pretty please?”

Thea guffawed, “Well, all right, I’ll tell you what, if you win the races I’ll give you the rest of the story.”

In entreaty Pazu looked to Shuna, but he shook his head, curled his arm around her shoulders and kissed Thea’s lips. Pazu looked away and spread the corner of Sheeta’s display carpet while she did the one adjacent. Thea turned her nose up at Shuna fondly, and at once they appeared as adolescents rather than the parents they purported to be.

“When do the races begin?” asked Sheeta, laying flat the embroidered shoes, and silken sleeves, and in time all of her own and Tashi’s paraphernalia to be sacrificed to lucre.

“The afternoon,” replied Thea. “we can have a bit more fun until then. I’ll teach you the herringbone stitch.” She waved a hand towards Sheeta. “Come. Watch.”

By the time Sheeta had mastered the new technique the women’s work had all been sold or traded. Meanwhile, Pazu had managed to hit two bullseyes with Shuna’s bow, and had exchanged debriefs with him on the various customs of their respective countries as they together nibbled the traditional refreshments of Shuna’s kingdom.

“Drink,” said Shuna to Pazu, offering him a buff-coloured liquid encased in a landscape in lush blue.

“Thank you!” Pazu gulped the strange beverage down; it tasted at once savoury and bitter. But it was creamy and warmed him well and softened the passage of his throat and surface of his lips, and was quite agreeable after he had rolled it experimentally in his mouth awhile, and when Shuna mentioned that it was good for his growing bones, Pazu almost drained his cup, because he was always thinking of getting bigger and stronger for Sheeta, to be able to defend her, after what had happened with Muska, not that he ever wished for anything like it to occur again. Just in case and you never know: his father had always preached that. For this he would have drained his cup if Shuna had not stopped him.

“Pazu,” Shuna said, urging the cup low and topping it up. “We have a way of serving this in my country. After every sip you must refill it for your guest. This way you’ll let them know that you wish for their plenty never to empty, and that you’re always wanting to give, that they deserve to receive always.”

“Oh,” Pazu said, sipping delicately now, recalling how Sheeta had without fail filled up his cup all the times she had served him the drink. “So that’s why!”

As Shuna smiled the corners of his eyes crinkled, which only added to his peculiar charms and made Pazu love him more. Pazu was about to take his third sip when the signal for the race sounded. That was when Pazu, Shuna, and Thea all followed behind Sheeta as she strode up to Tuk with fortitude. Pazu helped her mount the yak and heartened her with carefully curated words and touches, which was the most he could do beforehand.

The conque sounded and the race began. The yaks advanced in a sort of lumbering gallop, spurred by the words of their masters, and some with leather whips. Others were pulled by the rings hooped through their noses, and a few were driven by their horns. Sheeta needed nothing but a saddle to support her thighs, a stirrup for her growing legs, and a rein for gentle rearing; Tuk had the biggest horns and corresponding ego of any yak here, was very eager to win on his own, so it was easier to let him do his own thing, lest he squat or buck in the middle of proceedings.

The racers streaked colour across the course, rainbow blurs against the black of their furs. Like a hawk of the plains Pazu pinned his gaze upon Sheeta. She began in the middle of the throng, neither faster nor slower than the majority, but when half the yaks began to taper in power at the intermediary stage, Tuk ran on with bullish persistence. Canters macerated to trots for a greater moiety of participants by the last third of the race. By a hair’s breadth Sheeta was losing out to a tall boy on a white steed and was about to be overtaken from behind by a girl with heroically large hair on the back of a dreadlocked piebald.

“Sheeta! Tuk!” screamed Pazu from the sidelines, his hands curled around his mouth for amplification. “You can do it! I believe in you!”

And that cheer seemed to spur Tuk to ever swifter speeds; the yak kicked up his heels and charged forward with his horns, as if it were an autumn duel, and his opponent the banner of the finishing line so close before him. In a flash the race was over, Sheeta victorious by the tip of a horn.

"Hip hip huzzah!" bellowed Pazu above the roar of the crowd. Then he sprinted faster than Tuk had to Sheeta. With a deep bow Sheeta received her accolade of shining scarves and a big velvet pouch of taels. Once she was free to walk she raced to Pazu and showered him with her guerdon. Thea got there second, and Shuna last, though he compensated with what he did next. He took Sheeta up by the waist and tossed her upward. The crowd gathered circumambient, then, together casting the young girl into the sky and recreating the cradle of the earth as they received her with a thousand hands that were any of the hourly colours of earth or cloud.

Thea was next for the horse races. Imperious, on her stout steed she sat upright as a pillar, at a sharp right angle, her profile piercing the sky. She had one hand on the reigns and the other curled behind her back. At a gunshot’s notice she hunched over and tensed her thighs to carry her forth to the fore. A grassland horse’s trajectory is totally unlike the one of the yak; though the breed is not as long of limb as his Arabian and English brothers, or as swift, he is able to fare much longer and all the more stubbornly; and he is much more disparate still to the red elk, who does not run, but leaps and soars over the mountains of his native habitat. This stallion’s mane flared in the wind, the sun flinting the waves to flame. The severity of Thea’s unbreakable stance testified for the discipline for which she had won this freedom, all the ground in the world yielding to the woman who rivalled the wind.

Up unto halfway through the race Thea led by a wide margin, whereafter her black beauty went head-to-head with a dusty cloud of a steed. She just as soon stopped when the rider was thrown off the back of the horse, spooked, for some reason or another. Thea waited till the stampede branched around them as a river around a rock to rush from her own horse like a typhoon to the fallen rider. She rubbed his arm and spoke comforts to him with a smile that could part clouds, breathtaken.

“Shuna!” she yelled. She had once been a shepherdess, who had sung to bridge village to village, with the great lungs passed down numberless generations of mountain dwellers, so her voice carried all the way to her husband, who came at her beck like a golden eagle to his falconer. “Help me lift him up on Yakkul. We’ll need to be fast. He’s bleeding.”

He did, and they entrusted their new friend’s care to the nearest physician. Yakkul’s return journey halved in duration.

“Is the poor chap all right?” asked Pazu, with his brows drawn together.

“He will heal,” said Shuna, “though slowly. I don’t think he’ll be able to compete in the races next time. I guess that would mean less competition.” He was looking at his wife. “You would have won, if you hadn’t stopped for him.”

Thea laughed heartily. “Ah, what does it matter. It wouldn’t have been much of a victory, anyway. If only they had a race for red elks! Now that would be a sight. None of those horses would have stood a chance against Yakkul.”

“Don’t be a poor sport, now,” Shuna chuckled, curling his hand around Thea’s waist as she folded herself into his embrace.

“The yak races are another thing altogether.” Thea reached out for Sheeta and stroked her hair. “It takes some real skill to win those. Congratulations, Sheeta.”

Shuna said, “Indeed! How about some food to celebrate? I’ll treat.”

Thereby did all four of them march to the stalls with big eyes and esurient bellies. O reader, Gondoa and its contiguous sovereignties, whose loyal and hardy peoples are invariably the kind you would fain befriend during one of their jubilant wassails, warrant a visit alone for the aforementioned hospitality and bonhomie; and another journey still for the splendour of its illustrious landscapes, which span heaven and earth, peak and vale, water and wood, and is unlike any other in the world with the enlightened manner wherein artifice weds nature and together offer all the catholic array of a mandala. It is difficult to decide whether the food is the crux of the argument, out of the many merits of the region, for the country is a pillar of gastronomic delight with few peers in the known globe.

Here there were as many colours of spices as those of faces or flags. On the steppes green now the oft thin dead air thickened and quickened with cumin and chilli, fennel, allspice and anise, coriander, cardamon, tarragon, cinnamon. Enticing them were naan risen to perfection, and sweet fried dough, and great juicy skewers sizzling with fat. In big tubs sat yoghurt and cheese and butter and milk pink and fresh from the udder. They munched on such sweetmeats and slurped scores of tender noodles each longer than your armspan bathed in broth of lamb and crushed bone, kept company by nuggets of meat blanketed under scallion medallions. This they did beneath the shade of a king cypress to the euphony of the opera, performed by real fairies in masks of the luminaries present at the beginning of time and the cosmos.

“Aaaah!” cried Pazu, as he swallowed a piece of grilled mutton with a sip of soup. He fanned his mouth with his hand. “So hot! So spicy!”

Sheeta reached over his lap and sampled through her chopsticks the bowl of noodles in question. “Are you sure? There’s barely any chilli in there! I made sure to ask the chef to go easy on you. I know most foreigners can’t handle too much spice, but I didn’t think your tolerance would be this low...”

His face warmed to the colour of a crane’s crown in spring, either out of embarrassment or an overspiced tongue. Neither could be sure.

Pazu rubbed his nape and tittered, “Great Scott, Sheeta, you must have a stomach made out of iron!”

“Like your head?” Sheeta giggled, until Pazu did too, as well as Shuna and Thea thereafter.

As lief they ate of all that was available to them till their stomachs were full to bursting, and spent that energy on proper participation in the festivities: the appreciation of butter sculptures; and the blithe dances of the snowlions that had descended from their frore alpine climes to pour their gift of livegiving milk into the golden cups of the devout; and partaking in the more worldly capers that encircled the bonfire, together, to drumbeat and heartbeat, after which all four of them sat around the orange licks of flames and with an air of conviviality told each other the stories they had promised one another.

Pazu went first. “Well, I was working down the mines one day when I saw a girl falling straight from the sky! It turned out to be Sheeta! I thought she was an angel or something. The pirates and the military were after her, ‘cause she had this necklace that could take us to a place called Laputa, a castle way up inside a cloud! The pirates turned out to be good people, so we teamed up with them to get there, and well, we did…”

Sheeta took a stick and started drawing the fox-squirrel and the many-eyed beaver into the ground. “There were these animals, and robots, and gardens, and all these beautiful statues and buildings and aviaries, and…”

Shuna narrowed his eyes. “These creatures… I’ve seen them before, too.”

Sheeta gasped, “Have you! Where?”

“Well, I’ll tell you on my turn.” Shuna smiled out her doubt. “You go right on with yours.”

Sheeta cocked her head but did not dwell overlong on the subject. “We ran across another robot before. And you see, the pendant awakened it. It wasn’t its fault, the poor thing—but it did hurt a lot of people...” She looked to her lap. Only when Pazu stroked her back did her eyes return to their whilom height. “We discovered that it was the key to Laputa’s power. The military would have used the city for terrible, awful things, so we had to—we had to destroy Laputa itself.”

“It couldn’t have been easy for her. Sheeta’s the rightful queen to the throne, after all,” added Pazu, with due awe.

“Pazu!” she chided, aping his method of stopping speech with a hand. “I was never fit to rule anything. I… I abdicate!” she said, remembering the word from a tome of her late father’s, for what was a queen without her land, or worse still, one with none who held her in their hearts?

“Oh!” Thea chuckled, throwing her head back. “I didn’t know I was in the presence of more than one member of royalty. Due apologies, Majesties. Have we entered into a summit, Shuna?” She looked to her husband and pinched his arm. In that moment both appeared to be at play.

Pazu and Sheeta blinked blankly. “Eh?”

There was a long pause, and the children noticed how much effort it seemed to take for Thea now to look them in the eye. “Shuna’s a king,” Thea sighed, “and I was a slave.”

“Thea!” gasped Sheeta. “I never knew… all this time I should’ve been calling him His Majesty or Sir or Lord? Or something like that?”

Shuna opened his mouth to speak but Thea covered him with her own voice. “Oh, no, he doesn’t like to be called any of those things.”

“And what about you?” Sheeta asked. “Shall I call you queen?”

“Absolutely not. I’m Thea, and he’s Shuna, as we always have been. Please think of us as friends, no more, no less,” she said, with a smile, “though I was made to play a blueblood once. Manhunters roamed the land, then. One day a gang of them ransacked my village and enslaved my little sister and me.” She clicked her tongue and pressed nails into Shuna’s proffered hand. Silently, he received them. “At the time I was glad our parents weren’t alive to see it. It was a pitiful display. We were taken to this citadel, full of men and women just like us, and filth and all things vile and foul, and there our slaver said to any man who looked at us that we were descended from royalty. Shuna here fell for it.”

Thea knew what Shuna wanted to say: No, I fell for you; yes, but not then; not yet. He did not say it. “That’s not why I went back for you.”

“You came back all the same,” said wife to husband, then to the children, “Shuna freed us after we refused to be bought. A caravan full of us. The others could have escaped too, but for them it would’ve meant more running, perhaps towards certain death. They understood what I and my sister couldn’t.” Thea rolled her shoulders back. “Freedom is its own burden.”

“But—” interjected Pazu. Sheeta attempted to silence him, to no avail. “Wasn’t it worth it? I mean, you’re both here. That’s gotta mean something…”

Thea laughed. “Of course. It means everything. I was about to tell you that freedom’s one of the only burdens worth bearing.” As is that of the heart, as the Gondoan proverb and a certain young woman from the distant land of Ingary would tell you. Yet Thea doubted that she needed to tell them this. “I don’t envy my husband for his throne. He’s bound in ways I’m not; in a few ways it’s easier to be a woman. Will you remember that, Sheeta?”

Sheeta nodded emphatically. “I will.”

“Although,” Thea said, “your being queen might make that a bit of a difficult situation.”

“I-I just abdicated!” Sheeta looked down. It was not as if she had any subjects, either.

“Fair enough,” laughed Thea, who was always laughing, these days, unlike nights of yore.

“That was awfully brave of you,” said Sheeta to Thea, “going through what you went through, in once piece! You’re incredible.”

“Yeah!” echoed Pazu.

“The alternative was death, I suppose. It was a gamble.” Thea grasped Shuna’s hand, as if it were a rope thrown over the edge of a sheer cliff. “Got more than I bargained for. Tell them the rest, Shuna.”

“Yes, dear,” Shuna spoke up. “You see, at first I didn’t think we would see each other after we rode to what I thought was the end of the world. The manhunters were on our trail. Yakkul went with the girls to the north, and I stayed to fend our pursuers off. After the battle I saw the strangest thing. A great white face in the sky, a flying moon, trailing light, so much light. I followed it down a gorge; I thought that surely it’d lead me right to the land of the god-men. What strange things I saw! Forgotten gods were my handholds, and the bones of dragons my bed. There were crystals on the cliff, near the end, when I got to the sea, such a barren place, it was. There I slept, until a new tide came in, or ebbed out, and all of a sudden I was on a shoal that came up to just my knees. Life was everywhere. All manner of animals gone from this world were there, including those you just drew—” He stared at his hands, then rubbed them together, to hear the calluses scuffle, to test the reality of them. “That bounty came at a great sacrifice. I managed to get the seeds the old man told me about, but I remember nothing of what happened in the two years after that. All I know is that time passed differently, in that place.” He looked to Thea. “Will you tell the rest?”

She nodded. “I took refuge in Gondoa for a year, while Shuna was gone.”

“Really!” gasped Sheeta. “But I don’t remember—”

Thea laughed, “You weren’t born yet, Sheeta.”

“Oh. Then did you know my mother? Or my mother’s mother?”

“I think so. I sheltered with a mean old woman, not related to your family, I don’t think. She had a good heart, but always found fault with all I did, though she must have had her reasons. A year passed without any news of Shuna until one night Yakkul found him. He had gotten so slight, and he couldn’t speak, or remember anything, or respond to his name. I wondered if he was still human, had feelings. He was like a caveman! I kept him in secret, and your grandmother was always the one giving me extra provisions to feed him. It meant so much to us that she did that; Gondoa was a lot poorer back then.”

“That sounds like Grandmamma,” Sheeta said, “she was the one who asked me to look for bailey being sold at the festival, the one when we first met, remember?”

“Ah, yes,” Thea said, scratching her chin.

“They’re really good crops!” said Sheeta. “Say, did you ever get the seed back to Shuna’s country?”

“We did, eventually. The summer after, the old woman wanted me to marry one of the villagers for another working hand, but I said I’d marry the one who could ride Yakkul. Shuna made a spectacle out of it, and soon after that he returned to his usual self, thank the heavens. We married, then, and stayed in Gondoa for a year. The journey home was long and difficult, but we got through it all right in the end.” Thea smiled.

“So you see,” said Shuna, “we’re hardly in a position to doubt your journey to Laputa.”

“You believe us?” Pazu asked, eyes wide. It did not occur to him that people would ever believe him with such ease, adults especially.

“Of course. It’s not the kind of story anyone makes up,” Shuna said.

“But what happened on the journey home? When were the children born?” asked Sheeta, with stars and hearts in her eyes.

“I’ll save the journey home for next year,” chuckled Thea, “and the one about childbearing for when you’re a little older.”

“We’ll trade you stories, fair and square,” Shuna laughed. “Make sure you have lots of adventures until then, all right? We’ll tell them to the world, wherever we go.”

Thea added, “We’ll do our best, too, of course.”

Pazu put his hand over his heart. “All right! We’ll do that, right, Sheeta?”

“Right!” she said, falling into his shoulders.

“Oh! And eat up,” Shuna pushed a plate of momo arranged like the petals of a lotus before them. “So you can grow strong.”

“Drink, too.” Thea planted a cup beside each dish.

Pazu and Sheeta duly did so, amidst riddles and arias and anecdotes and toasts shared betwixt all four of them. Their stories continued unto time without end in the ongoing narrative of their action and speech and thought and dream. Whenever Sheeta sipped thereafter, Pazu refilled her lack at once, as he had been instructed by Shuna. They drank and drank and drank. Laughter is like liquid, lifegiving and necessary; and the four were not without mirth or drink for a second altogether.

All through the night no cup was ever empty.

❧

Steadfast reader, if you will, we will now zoom into the sky pirates perched in the meanwhile like intransigent gargoyles over Pazu’s estate. Peradventure before we embark you might think it beneficial to take egress in an intermission and pour yourself a glass of water, or bake a cake, or embrace your companion, or admire the sky in its current configuration and seize the unique opportunity to take a daguerreotype of it? The writer’s earlier comments about the necessity of merriment and hydration were made in all solemnity, and she would hate for this tale to divest you of those. Take leave if you must, for the story will remain here when you return, if you so choose to honour it still with your audience. This story is an important one, and she is telling it the best she can, but she will understand your decision, whatever it may be.

Now, onward to Dola and the gang! In one of their recent incursions (they preferred the term liberations) at the Castle of Cagliostro they had uncovered another amulet, with the insignia of the royal family of Laputa sealed upon it in gold alloy. Turned out the damned things were scattered all over the world, one for each blueblood, perhaps even one for each inhabitant. Such a tiny thing, in the wrong hands a destroyer of worlds, portable in a baby’s palm.

Dola had snatched it back for Sheeta. Poor girl had lost a veritable heirloom, and Dola knew all too well how that felt, more so considering her orphanhood, and doubly as she shared her womanhood. Dola decided it was exactly like losing a wedding ring that had been in the family since the very progenitors looked at each other and agreed to crash and crash until the collisions resulted in babies and/or love that smelled like old age and tasted of fresh tears. Now, through the soap-and-sink saga all that was a woman’s alone to give a daughter, and kept in certain, was her trousseaux and perhaps a glory box of beguiling eyes, or yielding lips, or a familiar shape reborn in slip of hip or bend of waist, all so useful in the pirate’s business. Yet the pirate’s business was only so essential because the things that it got were so difficult to attain by other means. Hmphf! In this day and age a woman couldn’t even give her child her own name in some parts of the world. Mayhap she would not marry, and that would be as good a choice as any, but even so, it was the gesture that counted. And let us say that if the alternative were true, Dola would not be surprised to see that the man standing at the altar ten years down the line to be Pazu with his big grin, nor would I suspect we would either, gentle reader.

Besides, there was nothing wrong with reaping a reward here or there. Most of their profit had, in fact, been financed by the ostensibly respectable museums of the world, whose curators dated the treasures to ancient civilisations from which the Laputans must have stolen them. They had disbursed more, of course, for the zip across their lips on the matter of accreditation, which usually pinned the discovery upon some stuffy tobacco-smelling professor in tweed who had never even cogitated in the slightest an expedition during his entirely sedentary life, but was nevertheless valorised for so-called advances in excavation at some archaeological site that had never yielded a splinter of a Holocene latrine, in articles written in the craven and contemptible passive voice, only more infuriating for their tergiversation through nominalisation. Respectability! Why, it was no more than a farce. The Laputans had been no better. The appraisals had been clear that there had been among the loot jades from Thina; ivories found off the coasts of Zipang; cartouches rightfully belonging to Kemet; astrolabes of lunar provenience; goblets whose origins were no other than the ruins of Troy, won no doubt by bloodshed and puissance that could massacre gods in their golden time. The Laputans had been no more than sky pirates with more firepower than anyone else in the world.

A moon after the fall of Laputa, Pazu and Sheeta returned to Slug Valley. Just how fast did children grow? It’d been two or three decades since Dola had birthed one of her own. Pazu and Sheeta came to them with clasped hands, some extra height, and the smell of the farm all about them. They were still small enough to gather in her arms at one time, though she knew in a few years they would thrive into constitutions too large to be at once contained and soothed in one of her hugs. But they would grow quite nicely to fit each other, and after that last adventure she was confident that that would be enough.

They called out for Dola in a chorus with all the sweetness of twin seraphim.

“It’s good to see you,” said Pazu.

“You too, kid. I’ll keep this short,” Dola said, “I have another job for you two. I’m upping the pay.” She dangled the pendant before them, as if she were attempting hypnosis with it. “Interested?”

Sheeta drew back and muffled a shriek in Pazu’s shoulder. “But how? Oh, Grandam, we must get rid of it!”

Pazu pet her hair. “Shhh, Sheeta. Sheeta. Laputa’s gone. It couldn’t do any harm now.”

“The spell of destruction was the very worst spell,” Sheeta choked, “but there were others almost as bad. In the wrong hands…”

Pazu stroked her hair, still woven through with Thea’s colourful cloths, after having practiced the motions each night to get her to sleep. “Aren’t you the only one who knows them?”

“If we’re lucky,” Sheeta almost squeaked. “What do you—what do you need us to do, Grandam?”

“First of all, I want you to have this.” She dropped the pendant into Sheeta’s shivering palm. “We picked this lil’ beauty up in Cagliostro from that clown of a count. Pure coincidence that we found it, really. Yanno, we’d been tracking yours for years. What we didn’t know is that it wasn’t the only one. After a bit of… negotiation, he gave us a few pointers,” said Dola.

Sheeta stared agape at her own open hand. “B-but I thought—”

“We did too,” grumbled Dola. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to get to the bottom of this.”

Pazu pumped a fist in the air! “I’m in!” Then he looked to Sheeta. “Unless Sheeta isn’t.”

Sheeta held her breath and his arm. She counted all the stars winking in his dark eyes, and remembered how weeks agone she had seen all the pretty blue ones in the mines with him, whereafter even a grounded girl like herself could not help but craft fantasies of Laputa. The same thing was happening now, and her steady curiosity tided over her fear. “We go together,” she promised. “Always.” She squeezed him. “On the condition that someone else keeps the pendant for me.”

“But my dear, I want you to have it, to replace the one you lost—”

“It wouldn’t be the same, anyway.” Sheeta shook her head. This new necklace hadn’t the memories of the old one, and she trusted it even less to know her will. Moreover, Sheeta presently felt like Uncle Pom, overwhelmed by the formidable and gargantuan power manifest in such a small stone. “Besides, I’m not quite ready yet, to bear it. Would you hold it for me, Dola? Just for a little while?”

Dola pursed her lips and complied with a harrumph. “Just this once!” She allowed herself to smile crookedly. “I just don’t want you to grow up an ingrate. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do. Thank you. And Pazu,” Sheeta added, facing him, “I just—I just don’t want you to be disappointed if… if… we can’t prove what we’ll see. Or if we don’t find anything at all.”

“That’s okay, too!” Pazu laughed. “I think deep down Tad only ever cared about what I thought of him.”

Sheeta nodded and looked to Dola. “When do we leave?”

“Now.” Dola crossed her arms.

“Whoa, Grams,” Pazu said. “Can I at least say goodbye to everyone this time?”

“Now look here—”

“Please, Grandam,” Sheeta seized Pazu’s hand and dragged him towards the staircase. “We’ll be right back.”

Dola yelled, “You better be! We’ll leave without you if you don’t show up by tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, Grandam!” shouted Sheeta as she ascended the roof, at last free from the power of the pendant.

Pazu floundered up behind her and almost cried on the spot when he checked the dovecote and found all his feathered friends there cooing at him as if nothing had changed, even though everything had. Well, that’s probably what he would have liked to report, because before anybody could see he indeed shed a few secret tears behind his forearm.

Someone touched his shoulder. He turned around to see it was Sheeta. She took his hands and dropped crumbs into his palms in place of his withheld tears, which could not be dammed for very much longer.

“Sheeta!” White wings fluttered all about them. Neither could separate wingbeat from heartbeat any longer. They hugged and laughed and cried as scores of beaks kissed their cheeks and hands. “Thanks for sticking with me, everyone,” chuckled Pazu through his tears to the birds, who cooed… and cheeped? Pazu peeked askance into the dovecote to discover that it had become a nest for some peckish hatchlings and a few vociferous squabs. “Jiminy, looks like you’ve been busy! Well, keep up the good work. I’ll have to get going again, but I’ll be back. Will you stay put for me?”

“I think they’ve made up their minds already,” Sheeta said, wiping Pazu’s cheeks with her bare palms. “We’re almost out of feed, though. Let’s get some more.”

Pazu nodded and followed.

The crags grinned down at the town wherethrough they promenaded arm-in-arm. Past the patisserie they found Mr. Duffy at the barber’s getting his moustache trimmed. He almost cut himself on the razor when he saw Pazu and all but jolted upright.

“Pazu!” Duffy huffed; with a wave of his hand the barber withdrew to make space for the boy.

“Boss!” replied Pazu. Mr. Duffy raised a hand as if to strike the boy before he relented and put his arms around him instead, with half his whiskers untrimmed and the shaving soap still on him, transferring the scent of almonds and vetyver to Pazu’s cheek. Pazu relished this greatly, feeling it made him seem very grown up and impressive to Sheeta. This was true, but little did Pazu know it had nothing to do with the way he smelled.

“Wfft!” sighed Mr. Duffy. “Do you know how worried we have all been about you, boyo? What in the world happened?”

Pazu looked up at him. “I didn’t think I could come back. ‘Cause I left with the sky pirates, and their captain told me I’d be an outcast forever if—”

“Sheer tosh!” grumbled Duffy, holding Pazu a little tighter. “Don’t go and tell me you’ve turned into a pirate now. Even if you did, we’d still love you.”

“Boss…” Pazu murmured. “I’ll have to leave again, soon.”

Mr. Duffy held Pazu’s shoulders at an arm’s length. “I see,” he said contemplatively. “You’ve become a man! So do what you must. We’ll always be here, as will a spot for you in the mine, y’hear?”

“Right,” said Pazu. “And how is everybody? And the tracks? Uncle Pom? Mrs. Duffy and Madge?”

“Well, see for yourself,” instructed Mr. Duffy, with a pat on Pazu’s head. “All of them are still at the old places.”

Some of the old places looked quite new, though, like the railway that now only had one track running precariously upon rotting stilts through it in the wake of the great chase. Often Pazu found himself blinking twice in the double light of memory and hindsight: is this really how it all was when I left it? Or am I what’s changed? Is it the angle of the sun or my head?

The toot of the train he always rode malingering remained ever the same, much to his great relief. And Huw was so himself when he halted the locomotive and said from above, “Oh, Pazu! Looks like you’ve been busy. Got a second date, eh? Nice!”

“Ah!” Sheeta clapped her hands over her cheeks. “So this counts as a date?”

Pazu rubbed the back of his head and chuckled. “If you want it to?”

“Of course I want it to!” Sheeta tilted her head.

Huw laughed, delighted to play matchmaker and chauffeur. “Then where’s the venue? There’s a great magic lantern show in the next town, and a fair three down—”

“Actually, we came to thank you for last time,” Sheeta said. “Uncle Pom, too…”

“Old Pom? Ah,” said Huw. “The ride’s on me. I saw him last this morning, headed home. I’ll get you there, no worries.”

Each child took a turn to shake Huw’s hand and promise to see him again as soon as possible when they stepped off at Uncle Pom’s home, which was built onto the face of the bluff, with a little chimney on the top of it, and a weathervane above that: amidst the woodsmoke spun a vermillion dragon that Pom had wrought himself when he had had steadier hands.

“Uncle Pom!” said the children in unison when they saw him, crowding either side of him with their limbs.

“And just where did you go, little ones?” Pom reached behind him, and as though by magic produced two steaming cups of hot chocolate, with marshmellows floating upon the froth. “Ah, don’t tell me. I can tell by your eyes that you’ve been to Laputa after all.”

“You believe us?” asked Sheeta, wide-eyed.

“I believed from the beginning.” Pom grinned. “You can tell me all about it.”

“You first!” insisted Pazu. “How’re the rocks?”

“Oh, they’ve been quieting down recently,” he said. “Since then, I believe I’ve been hearing coblynaus telling knock-knock jokes in the mines—which means we might just strike gold yet.”

“I’ll tell the boss to keep an ear out for them!” promised Pazu. “We—we have to go again soon.”

“Ah,” said Pom. “Then let’s hear all about what you’ve been up to.”

And Sheeta was the one to tell him the story. They talked hours away, like the last time, now not beneath blue underground stars, but in golden light percolated through lace. They waved Pom good-bye a little before sundown, after which Pazu gave Sheeta an indoor tour of the mines he had not been able to do in their earlier rush.

“You know, I’ve never seen a town built into the mountain like this,” said Sheeta, looking down at all the houses tiny beneath them as they tiptoed a threadbare bridge connecting one entrance to another. “It’s amazing how people managed to build houses this high…” A chilly williwaw whooshed, rattling the rickety abutments. Sheeta wobbled a little in her step and let out a little squeal. That was Pazu’s cue to reach out with his big, warm hands and cradle her at the waist, to catch and steady her before she ever fell. “Phew! Thanks, Pazu.”

“Scared?” he asked, with a waggish grin.

Sheeta shook her head. “Not at all!” And what she wanted to add was: How could I be, with you here? But she needn’t do so, because she knew that he already did too. Pazu was as good an apotropaic as volucite ever was.

Nonetheless, Pazu was extra tender with Sheeta from then on, keeping a diligent grip on her hand as he led her off the long bridge and, to her amazement, into the stables at the heart of the cliff, where they pet the calm horses and fed them their surplus of apples.

The inside of the mountain was as intricate as the outside of it, though instead of being adorned externally with seemingly impossible houses, they had been tunnelled with delicacy into a network that was its own city of hidden refectories and shelters and unstruck ore mapped to the long-gone voices of ancient earthquakes. And somehow Pazu was able to walk them right out of it and into Mrs. Duffy’s before the sun ever set.

“Pazu!” cried Mrs. Duffy, pillowing both the children in her big bosom. Madge joined in too, wrapping her tiny body around Sheeta’s leg. “We’ve been worried sick. Where have you been?”

“The most amazing place,” sighed Pazu. “I’m sorry I couldn’t say goodbye properly last time. Sheeta was in danger!”

Mrs. Duffy crossed her arms and hmphfed. “I told you to take good care of her!”

Pazu turned bright red, and pushed his gaze to his feet.

“Oh, but he has,” cut in Sheeta, “truly, and he does his best for my sake all the time.”

Mrs. Duffy only laughed. “It seems Sheeta’s taken on the job I left for you, young man. So it is with women.” She tousled Pazu’s hair and raised his chin. “I’m glad you both came back safe, anyhow. Though I hear you plan to leave again?”

“That’s right,” Sheeta answered. “We’ve no feed left for the birds, and wondered if you’d have some?”

Of course she did, so they walked with bags of seeds, safflower, and broken shells they had picked on their way back to Dola and the gang.

“About time!” bemoaned akimbo Dola upon their return. “We leave, now.”

“Just a little longer,” insisted Pazu, with lips held stiff. “I have to make sure the doves are fed.”

“Can you help?” twittered Sheeta to Louis, who left his idling by the door to leap into action at Sheeta’s instructions, and was soon joined by the rest of the boys. Begrudgingly did Dola acquiesce and help the children mix the seeds and bind them with flour, shape them with cookie-cutters or their imaginations, ribbon them, and hang them in the branches of the nearest trees, swinging star-seeds in the breeze.

Dola was about to demand their departure when they finally finished, but at once lowered her voice when she looked upon the sweethearts: Pazu with one cheek flat against his knuckle, and the other squished under Sheeta’s head. Some drool wound down his cheek to the tabletop, and both were smiling in sleep. She looked around, and saw Ben and all her boys in comparable states of sopor, snoozing against walls and floorboards and one another’s shoulders. Now Dola inhaled sharp and laid a blanket over each and every one of them before she surrendered to another night dreaming grounded. In every house she had lived in she had been the last to slumber, even at her age, and she savoured it for the perennial gift of silence and trust the sleepers gave to the waking.

Outdoors, the hymning colliers shouldered their pickaxes on the way home, while the coblynaus maundered through the mines to prepare for their midnight feast of anthracite and sorrow, sounding clink and crumble with stones they rolled underfoot, ghostly whistling knock-knock jokes as they scoured for veins of ore for their yet quick friends, until the slag heaps that had looked the part of molten monsters in the unsure dawn were revealed to be mere mullock, and smokestacks could be seen hurling black curses to the firmament.

By the lark-light all present in the house roused to Pazu’s impassioned matin on the roof, above him an incandescence of doves winging them vale and godspeed.

❧

The Atlas Moth lived up to her title. She was twice the size of the Tiger, with fronded antennae and maplike wings modelled after her namesake, and state-of-the-art built-in navigation, or so Ben claimed. She docked enough lifeboats fit the whole crew and an excess of guests, and an extra flaptor for the newest members. Now at her threshold were two notches that would be joined by more monthly until Pazu and Sheeta reached their full height. Like her forebear this frame was of wood and the exoskeleton it supported the thickest canvas money could buy.

Poor Sheeta just couldn’t be convinced that her friends would be safe inside it, though, not with one of those pendants boarding it too. Sure, it would save her, should she fall, but what of the inadvertent catastrophes she could precipitate with that power? Certain spells her mother had taught her might not have done what she wanted them to at all, or did them at some cost she wasn’t willing to pay.

Under the tutelage of Ben, Pazu disappeared into the grimy plexus of the engine room for most of their time at sky. No longer was he easily available to comfort her with caresses and sweetness, which might as well have been for the better, because she worried sometimes that she burdened him with talk of her troubles, or that he wearied of listening to them. So Sheeta spent most her time alone, hunched over the deck, shivering because she could not help but be away from concerned parties when she did. She was so nervous that she oversalted dinner, though all of the boys were far too nice to have said anything about it.

Sheeta admitted to him the first night aboard the Atlas Moth, while lost in a storm, “I’m scared, Pazu. Excited, too, but…”

Pazu’s arms formed a shield around her. “The thunder?”

“No, what we find. I don’t want Laputa to happen all over again.”

“It won’t,” he assured her, tucking her face under his chin. He had come to her with all his skin fuliginous, but his eyes bright and wide as polished china with pudding in the middle. Despite that Sheeta had done her best to scrub him clean, Pazu still smelled faintly of petroleum, which to her own wonder she liked. “Laputa’s gone.”

“I don’t think the magic is.”

“You’re the only one who knows how to work it,” he said, his thumbs swirling over her knuckles. “Besides me. Oh!” For a moment he went utterly still. “You don’t trust me? But I promise not to tell, ever. Ask anyone I know; I always keep a secret!”

Sheeta giggled into his shoulder. “Oh, Pazu, it’s not you I’m worried about.”

“Then who?”

Sheeta tried to turn away, but Pazu stretched to rest his hands on her shoulders. Even that fraction of him seemed so balmy and inviting that she rolled right back to bask in the fullness of his embrace. She whispered, “What if I whispered the spell of destruction in my sleep? What if I were angry, so angry I couldn’t help but cause harm?”

“You wouldn’t.” They touched foreheads. “I trust you not to do that. We all do.”

“Maybe this is what Thea meant when she told us that freedom is its own burden.”

“If that’s what you think, then let me help you carry it.” Pazu sighed. “You always try to deal on your own. I wish you wouldn’t.”

Sheeta balled up her whole body. “That’s not true.”

“Since when? You tried to go up against Muska all by yourself, thrice. It’s the same thing.”

How she wanted to tell him she would never want him to follow her into death a second time! But the memory of it alone seared her tongue before she could squeeze out the words.

“And what about you?” she said instead, sharper than she intended. “You always walk back into the trouble I try to get you out of! All I want is for you to be safe and sound. Don’t you understand that?”

Pazu blinked fast in the dim moonlight. He laughed, loudly, because the commodiousness of the Atlas Moth allowed the rest of the crew to be cabins away. “Aren’t you glad I did? ‘Cause I am.” He nuzzled her nose. “If it’s sleeptalking you’re worried about, I’ll stay up. I’ll wake you before you do anything you wouldn’t want to.”

That got her feeling a lot better, and manifolds braver. She nuzzled back. “But you’re a growing boy,” she echoed something Thea had said, “and you need lots of rest and good food to keep you strong, to nourish you.”

Those words traversed into the innermost keep of his heart and negotiated his surrender from within. “Awwww! Then we’d have to think of something else. Say, do you know any spells for good dreams? For silence?”

“I know a spell of binding. And blinding. There’s another for healing, and finding, and shielding, and banishing. I’m actually not sure what it does.” She touched the pendant at Pazu’s throat. She got him to wear it, because volucite after Tidith invariably pilloried her own neck. “And there’re more, but I don’t know if I remember them right. I’ve only ever used two, and you saw what happened both times.” She hid her face in his chest. “And who knows who’s listening? Or who knows that I know? The world’s not safe, as long as I—”

“You can’t think that way! We’ll figure it out somehow.” He curled his forefinger under her chin and lifted it to have her look at him again. “Besides, who else other than Muska would know the truth?” He laughed, bitterly this time. “I bet you each and every one of my dreams that we’re the only ones left who believe in Laputa. I’ll eat my hat if not.”

“Please don’t do that. Your hat looks mighty nice on you. And I worry about what it would do to your poor stomach.” Sheeta stroked the hair over his precious forehead. “Your dreams are awfully handsome, too.”

“Thank you.” He sighed. “But my dreams are not nearly as important as you, Sheeta.” However, what he failed to mention was that nigh all of them were of or involved her. “Neither is my hat. So maybe we should just give up if it’s bugging you. Throw the pendant into the sea, like you wanted the last time... I’m such a cad. I shouldn’t have let you come with me to Laputa, ‘cause you said you never wanted to find it. It’s not likely we’ll find the place in this weather anyway.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Pazu shrugged. “We’re already lost, thanks to this blasted storm. Laputa had a dragon’s lair guarding it. This place could have a similar line of defence. Plus, we don’t know if we’re even going the right way… That count seems a suspicious sort, no?”

A sort of dull spite spurred Sheeta, then, though it was not pitted at Pazu, but at her own constant fear and the lack of the power that would encumber it. Again she searched the twinkles in Pazu’s black eyes, and the memory of their meeting, for strength; she chased and caught it, after a few belaboured breaths. This time she grabbed his cheeks. She could do this, she thought, for him, and for herself. She cupped her hands around the pendant and summoned up the right words in a low voice. The stone threw blue beams that after a lambent dance tapered into one arrow pointing straight through the porthole, to someplace farther than the horizon.

“Sheeta!” He pointed. “What did you just do?”

“This is the spell of finding.” Sheeta took his hand to lope them over to the cabin at the end of the hall. Pazu pulled on her arm as she knocked on the door, but she paid him no heed. Out came Dola half-asleep in her negligee, her upward hair looking like a blue flame in the moonlight. Sheeta said to her, “Sorry to wake you. Can you redirect the ship?”

❧

When it was Pazu’s turn to scrub the deck, Dola called Sheeta to the captain’s cabin for supper and a girls’ night in. “You deserve a timeout, poppet,” she insisted. “What with cooking for all those good-for-nothings, and covering that Pazu’s hide as well as you have.” She swept a gnarled hand, rough and workworn unlike Mrs. Davidson’s, but as gentle and as warm, against the curve of Sheeta’s cheek. “Come in, come in.”

A somehow quaint spirit of cupidity graced the commodious room. Floral perfume and potpourri dominated each corner of it. Sunlight fell freely through the mullioned windows, though there were heavily brocaded curtains to afford privacy when Dola desired it. The walls had all been covered with plush pink velvet tufted with diamantine darts. Bejewelled coffers, so full that they would not close, dripped pearls and solitaires from the tips of their tongues. Upon the vanity was the chess battle that had raged between Dola and Ben for a few days now: Ben was white; Dola was black and winning. Books of eclectic subject matter were strewn all over: peripluses stopped the door, telegramese dictionaries stood officiously by the bedside, and dime novels dotted the armchair. Armaments of scimitar and musket were mounted next to the bed, fit for a queen and a few escorts, wherein, Sheeta was aware, Ben must have slept with the captain sometimes. Over that loomed a large jellyfish lantern embroidered with Chinoiserie willows and swallows, trickling beads and sequins and silk flowers that cast pretty shadows over the sheets.

“Help yourself,” Dola said, waving a hand over the coffee table. “I baked ‘em myself!”

The porcelain was delicate peachbloom, with bunnies and camellias on the borders, and laden with lucullan delights: perfect myrtle shortbread fingers; little gingerbread ballerinas; speculoos with tiny storybooks printed on them. They were situated around an epergne in rose-tinted glass whose flowers each enfolded a cupcake. Some were shaped like butterflies, and others like high heels. Sheeta poured both Dola and herself chocolate milk from a ewer of Aquarius into cups held up by the embrace of cherubs. She picked a sandwich-looking cookie, which to her surprise melted ever so sweetly in her mouth, and in that moment she believed the frosting might as well have been celestial snow. “These are so good! Do you think you could give me the recipe for them?” Sheeta stared long at a portrait of a voluptuous young woman standing akimbo, with a gun at her hip, and long pink plaits, smirking winsomely at all beholders.

“Coming right up! Take some of my cookie cutters, too. And I have some moulding pins I think would suit your fancy,” Dola hummed, and scribbled down the ingredients and the steps. When she looked up, she followed Sheeta’s line of vision to the portrait. Her eyes went wide and dewy. “Lucky I had a few copies made of that one. The original went down with the ship. Brings back so many memories, hah! I was quite the knockout in my day.”

“You still are!” said Sheeta, from the bottom of her heart, for when she thought of strength and beauty Dola’s wild pink hair, her portentously aquiline nose destined for the skies, and the valleys beside her eyes deep with happiness and conversance were what came to mind; along with the faces of Thea, her mother, and her grandmother; and all the bits and bobs that made them who they were and ever would be. Through them she saw the wills of all those women navigating their own freedom. That was what Sheeta wished others would see in her, when she grew into all her friends.

“You are a confection!” guffawed Dola, enveloping Sheeta in a bear hug, which felt good, now that this time she had buried no loot in her embonpoint. She whispered with a wink, “Just between you and me, I think so too.”

Sheeta grinned. “Who painted it? It really is a lovely picture. I’m sure there’s a great story behind it.”

“Ah! Well, two score and five years ago, I fancied myself a veritable army of one. I’m an orphan, too, yanno, though not the kind you are. No one wanted me from the start! I don’t blame the woman who gave me life, if it was her decision, though the man is another story altogether now! Hmphf! You can imagine how hard it was growing up a penniless orphan in that dirty ugly city of mine. Naturally, I wanted everything I didn’t have. All that glittered, all that was gold, diamonds to wear, wine to drink, banquets to attend, the power to do what I wanted, when I wanted.

“Most of all I wanted out of that hellhole—I used to nick the pennybloods for a little bit of escapism, and oh, oh the wonder, I don’t know how to tell you what they meant to me! Literary merit or no, they opened the wide world to a street rat like yours truly. Through them I flew to Cathay and Persia and Bharata and Abyssinia and Tenochtitlan, and a great number of other places. They always had these great covers and illustrations—sometimes in full colour!—of all these dashing heroes and heroines having such wild adventures in lost civilisations crammed to bursting with treasure, or swimming and singing with dolphins and wrestling with orcas through libraries under the sea, or climbing up the top of the food chain in jungles full of maneating beasts, or even making love with aliens on other planets. My favourite character was a sky pirate—a female sky pirate, no less, a Maid Marion of the skies, though she was her own Robin Hood, and all the merry men too. Now that is the kind of woman I wanted to be. I wanted to go places, taste and do and have it all, you know? But I didn’t know back than that I could do much better than stealing a bit of bread ever and anon for my bosom buddies… and despite everything, that’s just what I did, became my own hero, jacked me my own dirigible with my first motley crew, and was as free as a bird, touring the globe hither and thither and yon. I was a cosmopolitan cosmopolitan! And let me tell you, it was better than the books! …Mind, they might not have been the best books. But! The point: See what happens when a woman allows herself the freedom and impunity she deserves?”

The dumbstruck Sheeta nodded slowly. She dipped a madeleine into milk and nibbled it politely, though she really wanted to down each viand in one bite, like you might do with popcorn at the movies, which were not known to Sheeta until a decade or two later, when she frequented them hand-in-hand with Pazu on showboats and in cinemas for some of their most memorable dates.

“And so!” Dola stuffed an éclair into her mouth in the fashion of Pazu and clapped her thigh. After she had munched and gulped, she continued with, “Er… Right! And so—hrgnf. Ah, dangnamit, where was I?”

Sheeta sipped her drink. “The story of the portrait?”

“Ah, yes!” Dola downed a macaroon. “So! I’ll tell you the story some other time, about my good friends, the anarchists, and the time we raided the natural treasury…”

Forthsooth, sprinkled throughout the next few nights would be tales of Dola’s brutally true, unembellished, and unabridged great deeds and derring-do, accompanied by the corresponding mementos of scars or spoils: the first time she had rammed an imperial ship and from it liberated prisoners, slaves of war, and the emperor’s very own crown; the first and last time she had sacrificed herself for a man and instead realised her own worth; her duels with assassins and buccaneers; her friendships and alliances with fabled courtesans, witches, and queens like Sheeta herself; the once she had stopped a war and the occasion she had started another; secret islands and ancient ruins; her rather mundane, yet no less remarkable, blood children and their day-to-day life; the immemorial history between her and Ben; the adoption stories of each and every one of her pirate sons; the whole post-Laputa shebang; the traps and cabals and subterfuges of Cagliostro; and what she would do in the future for the newest two members of her crew. Among all the raconteurs Sheeta knew, Dola was the most dramaturgical, preferring to be in-character and costumed for the role; when possible she goaded her crew for re-enactments.

For now, she said, lest she digress once more beyond recall, “The long and short of it was that we started a school with the money, free for all for art for art’s sake. And can you imagine, I was chosen to be the poster girl! I modelled live a few, times, too. But this one was the first. It was plastered all over the city at one point, and it was a joint effort on the part of my allies—someone did the line art, someone else the colouring, &c.” In sooth, there were dozens of portraits of Dola, drawn from the nights and days she had been with would-be painters either in reality or fantasy, or held in the heads of facial compositionists, or the love of children who honoured her with crayons and charcoal: some of them were caricatures, others printed with blotted ink on wanted posters, then there were the nudes privately owned and luxuriously framed. In her own words, “But this is my favourite because it’s the only one that got my nose just right!” Dola snorted. “And do you believe, that in all the new ones I try to get commissioned they strip me of all my scars, and tattoos. Consarn it!”

“That’s awful,” Sheeta agreed, “your scars are mighty impressive. I didn’t know you had tattoos, though...”

“You never asked!” Dola unbuttoned her blouse and went down to her pretty corset. She flexed a great corded arm. Sheeta eyes widened at her full sleeves of flowers and chimeras, the wings spread upon her back, at all the sirens and hearts and names etched into her skin. “I’m running out of space, but I’ve been thinking of adding your name and Pazu’s here. All my sons are around somewhere, if you squint, and they’d love to welcome a sister for once, and yes, another brother. Do you think that would be all right, poppet?”

“It would be a privilege!” Sheeta said at once, and at this she welled up with love in her eyes and equally in her heart. There was anger there too, when she thought of those who would want to erase all that art. “I can’t believe they would have the nerve to take these away from you. You wouldn’t be you without them.”

“Amen to that, my girl! Thank god for photography. Speaking of which, it’s time for a family portrait, don’t you think? I recently got you new adventure gear for the occasion!” cooed Dola, hands lifting the great lid of a stuffed strongbox with furbelowed dresses and stoles and corsets and rings that could sink ships, just not this one. From the riot of her regalia Dola dredged up culottes hemmed and tiered with luxuriant lace of many pastel colours, and a blouse with a richly appliquéd collar held together by a bright pussy bow, all looking to be the exact size for Sheeta. “These’ll hold up well no matter the terrain, and you will look like a dream at any stretch of the quest. And, well, I’ve a few party frocks for you, too. I’ve always wanted to dress up a daughter,” Dola sighed dreamily, pulling out a toile dress with a deep blue ribbon over the ruched bust, each of its sleeves a butterfly at rest, that would flutter as Sheeta swished. She inspected the fabric and saw thereon the intricate print farmers like herself, shepherdesses, and friends out for picnics; and thought how much she would like to do that with Pazu sometime.

“Oh, Grandam, I’d love to sit for a photograph with everyone, and I’m sure Pazu would too. And this dress, heavens, it’s ever so beautiful!” Sheeta cried, holding the number up to her body.

“Heheh, isn’t it? I got it bespoken by a good friend of mine. I commissioned Pazu a top hat and tails to match, but what it looks like will have to be a surprise. Now, believe it or not, the Dola Gang has been invited to the opening gala of a museum as guests of honour! In a country that hasn’t banned us from it, no less. But I just didn’t think it’d be the same without you and your man coming along. After all, you both helped us rediscover and restore the treasures Laputa pillaged, and gathered some priceless information on the place. We’ll do something with your hair when the time comes. Dye it blue if you dare!”

Glittering excitement ceded to a persistent glumness the more Sheeta thought about going to the ball. She frowned at the floor. “We’ll go, if we have the time, but there’d be no one to look after the farm, or Pazu’s doves—”

“We’ll hire extra hands for you two, when you need them,” Dola said at once, “we’ve enough money from the loot to last us a lifetime, no kidding.”

“That’s not going to stop you from being a pirate, though, is it?” Sheeta said, neither approving nor quite exasperated. All in all, Dola was a good person, with her own reasons for her behaviour, despite everything.

“Of course not, love! Now, were I not a pirate, I would not have the money to fly my own ship, nor help you and Pazu out as you deserve, nor look after my sons, nor live with all this glamour, nor be free like I am. Yes, I know, I know, there are some people who make it without bending the law. Kudos to them, the females especially. The straight path isn’t easy, either. I, on the other hand, am thankful for my occupation and will honour it by declining retirement. Moreover, I may be the greatest pirate in all the skies, but in all honesty I too have my hangups. Remember that as a woman you always need a backup plan.” Dola dusted off her hands. “Besides, just because you have a life on solid ground doesn’t mean you have to give up a vacation in the skies, right?”

“Right!” Sheeta said with a smile.

Dola grinned with all her remaining teeth. “Atta girl.”

❧

Neither of them noticed it, but Pazu’s sanguinity had grown increasingly contingent upon Sheeta’s happiness. As Sheeta regained her courage, so did Pazu his industry. Something about flying lifted Pazu’s spirits, just as strolling cleared the clouds from it whenever his mind wandered too far from earth. The inward of Pazu’s mind broadened to the size of the sky. Now it had space to be filled with lift and drag and thrust and steam and poppets and Archimedes’ screws, and so did the gears in Pazu’s head mesh at full speed to generate one invention after another. He wondered if Sheeta could hear them click. Perhaps she would disapprove of his building new castles in the sky, despite how each one rose up grander than the last, and safer, and better for life at large. One with underwater parks deeper than Laputa’s; a successor set for sidereal courses with tall turret-nets for scooping up stars; in afterthought, a balloon palace; then a winged fairground to host the universal exposition, erected with edifices each grander than the Crystal Palace itself, though attendance and souvenirs would be offered gratis. If Sheeta had asked why, or admonished him for what ends, Pazu would tell her that all of these would be without weaponry, and would serve only the powers of good. However, it was unfortunate for one such a tender age to know he could not purport them to be utopias in any capacity. Yet, he did his utmost to allay impossibility. In his good egg of a head there were cloudbound propellers expediently worn like a bonnet; pocket-dwelling, all-purpose automatons that could help with scutwork and calculations while being a friend to the lonely and the needy; epicurean repasts tucked neatly into capsules ready at a lick of water; escutcheons that could counteract any astra. He handled his designs as if tasked with the amends of the end of the world. With consummate genius all the more remarkable for his age and some leftover cogs from repairs and refinements he fashioned for Sheeta a small clockwork model of a Laputan robot that could hold and stroke her hand when Pazu was not present.

When he was not wrangling with mechanics and Ben’s demands, he read over his father’s notes aloud with Sheeta, and sometimes by the candlelight when she had fallen asleep upon him to Laputian lullabies of melodies long since forgotten that Pazu recited for her in a sequence collated from Sheeta’s memory and his father’s transcriptions. Pazu discovered new things with each foray into those notes. He met his father again in the marginalia; the tabs; and the rare, perhaps accidental, dogear; the blueprints; and diagrams done in lead with severe precision.

Pazu neither bragged nor bluffed about the size of his dreams; they were verily inordinate of magnificence, and he did little to hide this. Vicariously through his father’s notes he revisited Laputa, and discovered what had been his prospective itineraries, from Aeolia to Zerzura, with the confidence that a firsthand expedition for each was within his own reach. His wore out his ratty hardback of Gulliver’s Travels, though he never did find the name of the flower Sheeta had smelled thereof. He began to wonder if Lilliput and Brobdingnag were not fabulated as he had initially believed, but were in fact as real as Laputa. Either way, in slumber he explored them with Sheeta.

Pazu had taken Thea and Shuna’s challenge quite seriously, especially since both he and Sheeta had been so eager to hear the rest of their story. Moreover, there was a part of him, the inborn hotspur, that insisted on proving all his father’s theories right. Now, he knew that not all of them could have been; they were only theories after all, but the man had hypothesised so many, that in following them perhaps they could rediscover by odds alone another relic lost to time’s ravages, then garner credence in his stead. And failing that, in the least the one about Laputa had been true, and Pazu had always been staunch in his conviction that a failed attempt was better than none at all.

All through the long journey to their unknown destination, Pazu was assiduous in his many ventures. He was marking down a passage of interest in his charcoal-smeared notebook when Sheeta came knocking at his door.

His breath loitered in his throat. He could have devised a great many explanations for it: it had a will of its own, and was shy to be touched by Sheeta, though Pazu himself wanted so much to give it to her; or it was the belief that it would not meet Sheeta’s counterpart and thus defervescing, for the urgency of the knock might entail troubles afoot, and therefore there was an equal possibility that Sheeta had been struck with Pazu’s same quandary.

But then Sheeta came through the door, her face open and slightly rosy, bestowing to him all the breath she had, which was visible in the morning chill.

“We’re here!” she cried. The pendant at her throat blazed. “Come out and see.”

Pazu’s mouth unlatched, and a white sigh scudded out to meet Sheeta.

❧

Before them spread a plane of mist curling into itself but never dispersing. The amulet shone a familiar blue, warming against Sheeta’s breastbone. As they advanced the vapours parted at Sheeta’s advent to unveil ruins that beggared belief, carved out of a luminous stone, with the skyline winging outward in the manner of a garuda.

“We’ll be right back!” announced Dola there at the start. She spearheaded the gang to riches.

Pazu shook his head. “They’re probably gonna sack the place.”

“If there’s anything left inside,” Sheeta said grimly. They had faced each other to the exclusion of their surroundings that they had not noticed anything else. Now they gulped and looked outward.

Forthwith Pazu and Sheeta craned in wonder. It was not quite like seeing Laputa for the first time, for when they had done that, they had only an inkling of the evils of which it was capable; the day had been sunnier; and never in their lives had they looked upon scenery so demandingly marvellous. Presently the view inspired awe of the same sort. Since their return apperception helped them to notice the unassuming beauties by which they had passed all the time: moonlight sliding off a brick roof; the quiet determination of poor folk; sunny days on the pasture; rainy days by the hearth; a dear friend’s face lifted in a laugh. They had to lose the possibility of those things once, to know how much they would miss them. Thus, they did not realise how much they missed Laputa until this.

They sparked the air where their senses overlapped. Both their breasts warmed with feeling that threatened to burst forth if nothing were to be done about it. Pazu wanted to spin Sheeta above his head, though he knew he had not grown into the strength he needed to lift her high as he would like, while she—well, she did not know what she was thinking, when she gathered all her fingers to his nape and drew him close.

“Sheeta?” quavered Pazu. Charily he cupped her shoulders.

“Mmm? Give me a moment.”

Their noses convened. They had done so many times before, but for now Sheeta wanted to avoid the cartilage and aim for the soft morsels beneath. She tilted her head a little towards her shoulder, that the tip of her nose slid against the side of Pazu’s nostril. Perfect! Now in one fell swoop his lips were hers in the span of a grand and triumphant smack. Warmth stemmed from her belly and reached out for him, sprouting a leaf for each fingertip and a flower in her mouth. Her heart hatched to release all manner of winged things, her galloping windhorse feathering against the brink of her skin. His precise flavour fizzed like sherbet, with an aftertaste of toffee and something Sheeta would always call by his name. When she withdrew his lips were rather swollen, a little like how they looked after sessions with the trumpet, so she pecked them again to wish it better, and once more for good measure.

“We made it! Pazu, ah,” she laughed, bouncing on the spot. “It’s so beautiful here. I know I oughtn’t be so happy, what with what happened with Laputa, oh, but I have a good feeling this time. Pazu? Pazu. How come you’re not saying anything? Your face is all red…”

Pazu yanked his hand to the back of his head. Throughout the duration of Sheeta’s kisses he had as good as lost consciousness, he was so giddy. As he regained his bearings he put one hand on Sheeta’s shoulder for support; he was the one who was falling for a change, through the earth per cloudbank into the infinite worlds of the sky. “E-er, I was just a little surprised, that’s all. I mean, look at that,” he said, pointing decidedly to the horizon. He sighed. “I’m happy you’re happy, Sheeta.”

She melted him in a hug this time. “I’m glad I came. I think this time I’ll try to find some other way, to keep this place safe from the wrong hands, without having to—you know. I’m not sure the spell would even work on this place.”

“It might not have been built for the same reason as Laputa, and maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with it at all.” Pazu scratched his chin. His natural colour was returning to his face. “Let’s have a look?”

Hand-in-hand, Pazu and Sheeta floundered forth over a crumbled staircase polished with fog. Each step was long and rose low, as if designed for the feet of someone who walked with all their past lives riding on their back towards the next one.

Soon they happened upon a pond bounded by an arboretum of no trees either child had ever seen. Under it swam creatures with long names in Greek, such as cephalaspis or kolihapeltis sarcopterygii or steropodon galmani. The trees bloomed in tandem, and probably out of season. They ringed the water in red, orange, yellow, and green, but the resemblance of the order to that of a rainbow was too close to be mere coincidence, and nowhere else on earth was there such a tree with blooms of such rich cobalt, or another so much like a fuchsia, but full with flowers only. Stepping stones jutting out from the water bridged bank to bank. They were done in mosaic, in the likeness of all the creatures in the garden. Each one told a scene from a story continued on in the next stone. The landscape in the butterfly’s wings related to the genealogies mapped through the leaf’s veins that were further partitioned in the blazonry inscribed to the goldfish’s glimmering scales and enriched by annals on frogs’ backs. As soon as Sheeta stepped on one the stone would glow a radiant blue, with a sound halfway between a bell and a drum, pitched differently. To and fro she hopped, testing them. Soon she was dancing to her own composition, accompanied by their giggling.

Once Sheeta’s feet tread grass again, nature’s boredom sounded the only music in the derelict. Anura and insects all joined in a choir that comprised stranger singers yet. As though it were a measure against loneliness the birds doubled their gallantry in both song and display. Their trills filled all the corners left empty, and there were so many of them that sightings were common. Extinct elsewhere and endemic to the nameless city was a creature triply anonymous, which resembled both the phoenix of myth and the peacock of renown, training along a tail like a rainbow and a fanning up a crest like fireworks. One of them was pecking the ground when Sheeta fed it the last of her bagel by scattering it on the ground. It was not afraid to eat from Pazu’s hand, either.

When it finished its meal it let out a high sweet sound, flapped its wings, squeezed its eyes shut as if in delight, then unfolded its tail to face them, cordiform chains shifting like a chamelion’s skin under the sunshine. If Sheeta and Pazu spread out their arms to their full span, fingertips touching, then the distance from thumbnail to thumbnail might measure that tail’s width.

Pazu rubbed his nose. “I think he’s trying to impress you,” he huffed, “cause you’re so beautiful!”

“Me?” Sheeta laughed. “Maybe it’s you he’s after! You’re looking awfully handsome today, too.”

That plastered a seemingly permanent blush across Pazu’s face. “I’ll be! It’s not working.” He crossed his arms and glared at the bird. “He is awfully pretty,” he said, nodding to himself, “but you’re the only one for me, Sheeta.”

“Oh, wow…” Sheeta put her hands on her cheeks. “You’ve really made up your mind?”

Pazu punched his chest. “I never go back on my word!”

“But you haven’t even heard from me yet,” she hummed. “What if I really decided to fly off with him?”

“It wouldn’t matter!” He shook his head theatrically. “But you’re not really planning to go off with the—”

“No!” she laughed. “I chose you already.”

As if the bird understood, it squawked and closed its tail in indignation. It flew forward, and because the compounds were so large, they decided to follow it to see where it would bring them. Through ferns high as houses they ran instead into the great hulking head of a paraceratherium, though its demeanor was rather friendly, and tolerated a stroke of the nose when it bent down to sniff the children. It knocked down streaked fruits from a tree just as tall as it was to land at their feet, which they later ate as they walked, to discover that each layer of its flesh was a different, but no less delectable, flavour. Presently the beast looked at them with his great black eyes for an age before blinking. Then it went away, its hooves beating down on the drums of the earth.

Soon they happened upon a building they had strangely not seen in the distance. Foursquare telamons and round-hipped caryatids raised the edifice with nine hundred and ninety-nine rooms. Marble swordsmen planted in the earth their brands, whose blades had been dulled by ivy and desuetude. Sheeta remembered the same armour on the statues in Laputa, only they had their steel aimed to the sky. Mascarons scowled at intruders while spitting water at them, although you might think that when Sheeta walked passed their rictuses slapped into grins. From canephora with hollow baskets flowed bushclover and wisteria. Oscilla, half-effaced by the elements, rattled against boughs and walls. Strangely wrought windchimes sung out for one another their own infinity-act tragedy in which they were never again afforded their yearned-for company. Of all humanity’s contraptions the fate of glass seems to be one of the most dire, when one considers their agelessness coupled with their closeness to death at all times.

They stepped over a threshold below an arch with no door. It was about four Pazus high, and twenty Sheetas across. Above it loomed a mandala of a rose window that seemed to contain the whole world therein, though it had been elevated, that one could only inspect the detail, if on ground level, from its shadow. It was as detailed as any Achilles’ shield, with depictions of the cosmos, the zodiac, weddings and funerals, cities and harvests, battles and festivals, and heaven and hell, though on the ground the image smeared, flowering ethereal and phantasmagorical in the dance the sun led, gentling the colours like beads shaken in a kaleidoscope, whorl of mother-of-pearl, phosphenes at the moment of awakening.

The palace had no staircases, and the only furnishings left in it were motheaten or rotting: parchment in indecipherable cuneiform; flaking murals of vestigial blue; clay dolls that threatened to crumble at the merest touch. Time had stripped all the beds and dyed the curtains with dust. Pazu and Sheeta sidled, that they would not tread the gossamer that embraced the otherwise companionless floor, through a windowless room whose every surface was lined with mirrors, which made Pazu feel like he was in a tesseract after a while, and Sheeta trapped in an infinite regress of projected homunculi; another chamber high enough for clouds to be born in it; and one where numberless statues slept in their niches. There was also a hall with a moving floor broken into myriad shards, a golden theatre, and what had once been an oubliette wherethrough a waterfall passed. After so many rooms whose only inhabitants were palls of fust, Pazu and Sheeta leapt at the nearest door out. Sheeta was glad she had not had the opportunity to see the higher levels of Laputa, then. Beautiful as all of it was, in a way found only in tumbledown remnants, she couldn’t quite bear to think of how many people had been happy here, only to be made to leave it for some reason or another. To think of mirth and music ricocheting instead of silence.

As if Pazu had read her mind, he reached for his trumpet. He hummed into the mouthpiece slow and deep. Each note he carried solemnly to the ceiling, but more importantly to rumble below the groundwork. It would break your heart to hear such a one produce with an adroit sensibility that dark mournful sound out of the natural instrument for triumph. He was thinking of returning to his own empty house after heaving his father down the hill and over the river into the ravine to tuck him for the first and last time to sleep in the cerement of the earth. There had not been doves, then, nor known tears, for he remembered thinking, I am a man now.

And Sheeta was at her first night alone out on her farm as the sun coughed out the blood of its daily death. She had been looking down at her hands newly the angry colour of dusk, for she had never herself logged, so she realised, There is no more time, but I would know how to do this better, if I were not born a girl; look, my shadow is much older than I am; that is why she is so long. The hearth and her body had been cold all night. This was not that night. As the final note rose up high and long like a promise for the future, warmth streaked through her, and she thought, well, better that and we two now than nothing never at all.

They winged where the note soared. Both were silent when Pazu stopped, and still for a moment more.

Then they stepped out. The air smelled of summer again, late as it was, of nameless blossoms, sweetness, and grass. Here the flowers were the flowers of Laputa, anemone and cowslip and bellflower and bluebell, though they could not find the one that had perfumed both their heads with that strange, lovely scent Pazu had smelled on Sheeta their first night back on earth. Somehow topiaries of mythical beings retained their shape in this other garden. Pools glittered around them. A squirrel basked in a birdbath columned by a fairy while a sparrow preened itself beside it.

And lo—yonder sprawled a vast labyrinth at the centre of which was a tall tapering tower. Sheeta’s eyes could not quite reach the apex, but with his recently gained height, Pazu’s could, so he gripped her around the waist and lifted her so she could see.

“Say,” Sheeta said. “Where’re Dola and the others? It’s been a while since we heard from them.”

“You don’t think they got lost in there, do you?” Pazu gasped.

Sheeta wrung her hands. “I hope not! It wouldn’t hurt to check, right?”

Oh, dear reader, how one would wish for her to be right! Lackaday, it was not so. Even with the patent angular light of the spell of finding guiding them, they still had an interminable trek ahead of them to surpass. The hedges grew so dense and high that there would be no way of simply clawing or climbing one’s way out as a recourse. They looped around for what seemed like hours! Left, left, right, left, right, left, right, right, right, left; erelong the words lost their meaning, and the adventurers began to wish right was right and left would let them leave. For how long would it be, before they would be trapped by their very own minotaur? Furiously did Pazu, the spit and image of his father, scribble a map in his notebook among his sketches of their strange encounters, ever and anon raking his hair with his lead-smeared fingers as they encountered the intermittent sculpture interesting and arcane enough to warrant a more careful draft.

Eventually he realised the lines of the map had coalesced into the inverted image of Laputa’s crest. He showed Sheeta. “But Laputa was the last piece of the empire,” he said, perplexed, “and even if it wasn’t, the—the spell of destruction would have wiped out any colonies left.”

Sheeta tilted her head. “Pazu. I’ve been thinking. Maybe this is where some Laputans wanted to live, after coming down from the sky. Or maybe it was an escape plan, a secret summer palace… I saw a place just like this, in one of the oldest tapestries in the family, with these huge animals, and this beautiful garden, the kind of fruit that we ate. Plays in the golden theatre, and prayers in the hall of gods, great dances in the mirrored room. Gardeners tending to the big tangle of roots here. It didn’t seem to be Laputa.”

“Huh.” Pazu opened his book. “You know, in Gulliver’s Travels it says that the women of Laputa always ran away to a place called Lagando for new lives with other men. Or I guess other ladies. The women and children were confined to the island. Look.” He licked the tip of his finger and flipped to a tabbed page. “It says right here that ‘they long to see the world, and take the diversions of the metropolis, which they are not allowed to do without a particular license from the king’.”

“The king doesn’t sound very nice.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Maybe that’s where the families branched. Why the women in my family ran—I don’t know who she was, but I know my bloodline started with a woman. They got tired of the curfews and prohibitions and the men and their war games; perhaps they didn’t feel safe there, or wanted to be elsewhere for love, or adventure. And maybe the opposite is why Muska’s clan stayed.” Scenarios throve inside Sheeta, of elopements, and romances sprung from overactive imaginations with places never before visited by the sky people, who looked with earthward eyes unto the alien seas and mountains and saw in them an oasis of storied lives past and future. The same wanderlust jumped inside young Sheeta’s veins now, after having seen the glittering blue and brilliant green earth from the sky down, or maybe it always had, with her heritage.

“Right, that makes sense!” Pazu said in epiphany, scribbling notes into his book.

“That’s why I don’t think we’ll find much volucite here,” Sheeta reckoned, touching the crystal at her throat. “Well, I hope not, anyway, not enough to work as a weapon. Because the new necklace did respond to this place. And it still doesn’t answer the question of how or why my family left—if it really was a retreat they built after Laputa fell. My guesses are that it was too dangerous to come back, or that they lost the way, or that they simply wanted to move, or that—or that Laputa found them.”

“Maybe the answer is in that tower,” Pazu suggested, blinking fast, for all of a sudden they stood right there before it. Forthwith he found himself enfolded in Sheeta’s embrace.

“Wow! I didn’t realise it, but we’re here! Finally... Grandam? Graaandam?”

Pazu wound a reveille, but there was no callback. “Blast! I don’t think they’re anywhere around this place. Dola can look after herself and the boys better than anyone, but there might be trouble if we’re away from them for long.” Pazu chuckled and ran his hands through his hair.

“So! It’d be best to check everywhere, right?” Sheeta smiled, despite her fear. Sighing fondly, Pazu’s face softened to deliver a beam back. “And maybe there really are answers up there. It seems that whoever built this place didn’t want anyone outside my family to find it.”

Pazu walked behind Sheeta to volunteer himself to be the first line of defence at her fall. Their feet clacked up the tower, whose stairs ascended narrow and steep to heights beyond the adventurers’ stamina. Yet neither one accepted defeat by most measures, and made it to the zenith singing songs and telling jokes and playing word games and most of all, trading theories about the origins of these mysterious ruins.

The final room could not have been more anticlimactic. Its walls of rock were loose. It had no ceiling, nor revelations anywhere, though it did garner interest in its tiny windows shaped like stars. It was empty but for a mysterious lever in the middle, which Pazu pulled before Sheeta could warn him.

The floor rumbled and quaked under them. They clasped each other for dear life as both their eyes peered in desperation through the same star. The skyline flapped. A screech like an eagle’s shredded the air, though it was much louder, and a little lower, with an undercurrent of brontide in it.

“What the dickens?” exclaimed Pazu. Suddenly his eyes widened. “Ah, get out of the way!”

In the parlous gallimaufry gravity hurtled Pazu against the flagstone floor, whereupon debris crushed him bleeding and unconscious.

“Pazu!” she screamed, but he did not answer.

May the gentle reader never suffer the devastation Sheeta did then! From the rubble of Laputa she had salvaged Pazu, cornerstone of the new home she had built brick by brick with the support of his hands, tender as they were, but strong, and steadier still. They were limp now. Down crumbled their future together, from so high up that they might as well have been meteorites smashing craters into the strength she had gathered from envenomed thorns and thistles and all. She had told him before that clouds did not make solid foundations. And that there was a reason humans were born with feet and no wings. He had laughed and told her that is precisely why we chase the sky. Then he asked if she would feel safer there standing on his shoulders, and because she was honest, with him especially, she had said yes: always yes. And look where they were now.

Sheeta did not cry in the dainty and reserved manner you may have been taught a couth lady should: with feminine sounds, and a handkerchief to one cheek, and a hand over the other. Nay, all the muscles in her face served emotion now. The noises she made were all raw and throaty and shrill, shaking the welkin with sound. Her eyebrows went up and pushed against each other in a dire affray; skin wrinkled where they would not otherwise in a girl; and she flushed less like a rose than wildfire. Her gaping lips spread wide and downward in a grimace a mondaine might believe quite unsightly. She wailed into Pazu’s cheek, dropping tears and mucous over it. Between arduous intakes of breath she screamed his name, struck him on both cheeks, peppered kisses over his still goodly but blanching face, which she prayed to merely jesting, all in vain.

She held him hard enough to bruise until the tremors subsided. By then his breath was fading and pulse slowing. Sheeta dug into her past with a desperate swiftness. She found the words she wanted in the old, old memory of a bird cupped in her mother’s hands, its wing broken. She had whispered to it wishes of wellbeing, and it had bobbed its head about, quizzical, somehow stretched out its wings and fluttered away. Sheeta, she had said, if ever you cannot continue, this is how you take back the way. The words came to her in fragments, the consonants first, then the tones, and finally the vowels. Power sparked in her mouth. It took to the skies with her exhalation.

To return Pazu from that far place the pendant relinquished all its lifeforce to the journey. The volucite flashed a blue so bright it was almost white. The stone’s heat matched its colour. Sheeta’s skin scorched, so she cast the pendant to the ground, and thought that she must not look at it, for she feared the light to be blinding, like that of the sun; but when she shut her eyes she was not quit of the blue of her inheritance, just as the moments after she had whispered the spell of destruction with Pazu. In this time she put her hands together and touched her fingertips to her forehead and entreated any divinity that would listen for Pazu’s soundness.

When she opened her eyes her cherished Pazu was looking at her. Sheeta yelped with joy and tackled him headlong, heaping herself upon him as she planted myriad kisses on each eyelid, each cheek, the nose, the chin, the curves of the bud of his mouth. Heaven deliver you from ever facing the possibility of losing one you love; and instead smile upon you, that you may find crowding all your days the joy and relief that enveloped Sheeta as she regained a future with the dear aviator of her heart.

And may you always carry with you the subsequent gratitude and jubilation that Pazu did as he wriggled and giggled under her fusillade of love. “Shee—Sheeta! Aah, ahahaha, whu—what happened? It’s getting… hard to breathe….”

Sheeta withdrew forthwith. “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. But I’m so happy, because you almost—” With a short, sharp intake of breath she curtailed her own sentence. She had kissed him so roundly on the jaw that thereon sprouted a little purple cloud. She touched it. “Whoops.”

Pazu tilted his head and raised a thick, long brow. “Eh?” Sheeta opened her mouth to speak, but Pazu interrupted her by slapping his own forehead. “Aaaargh! We totally forgot about Dola and the others! Sheeta, do you think you could use the spell of finding one more time to find them?”

“I can try,” she murmured, and did so.

The pendant exuded a much duller glow. By the time it led them right out of the maze, through a path that was much shorter than they anticipated, its light was flickering and waning until at last it spluttered forth the last of its power in a final sigh, the senescent radiance licking Sheeta’s palms and face as does a dog bidding its master farewell evermore. Afterwards it chilled to the temperature of porridge long past its prime.

Fear it as she might have in the end, Sheeta had been sad to see the old pendant go, in the same way a babe might be loathe to be divested of a favourite blanket, or a schoolchild reluctant to be parted with a teddy, or a matron less eager than she would like to discard a youthful portrait by an umquhile swain. Sheeta had slept with it atop on the next pillow, fearing to touch it, for she did not wish to disturb her mother’s fingerprints thereon, but liked to have her near, in some way, when she had died. Sheeta believed memories had slept inside it, of all the weddings whereat they had been worn, and the fragrance of the air of Laputa, of grandmamma’s lullabies and aunties’ gossip, of all the secrets she had whispered to the stone when she had nobody else to tell. The new pendant could not have been a replacement, for its provenance must have been equally different. Sheeta wondered what kind of ancestor once wore this one about the neck, whose lives it had saved, which spells it helped cast, and where it had gone after Laputa had fallen from grace. To the goats and trapdoors of Cagliostro, she thought, and over three seas, on an adventure with Sheeta and Pazu of which she could not think as being more unlikely. And so Sheeta set aside moments of silence for their time together and its sacrifice in bringing Pazu back to her. Yet every time she had to choose from one thing or another and Pazu, it would always be Pazu. He had always done so for her, the once choosing her over his own life.

He looked at him now, but he did not return her gaze. He peered ahead, mouth agape and eyes wide as the horizon he faced. A breeze billowed against them. They were surprised that it carried seaspray to their noses and tongues, for they had been nowhere near a body of water when they landed.

“Those wings—that sound, the earthquake…” said Pazu. He turned to Sheeta now. “Do you think—do you think the city flew?”

“It must have done! Is it a machine? Or alive?” Sheeta answered. Those were good questions to which the world’s most eminent luminaries are finding a definitive answer yet. For now, the young pioneers were free to dream of their own. For all they knew they had been borne to the end of the world by the flying beast, left to explore a strange shore with skulls as big as omnibuses, littered with fine white fossils hither, thither, and yon, whereover obtruded nameless gods carved into the bluffs. However, it should be of note that the mobile island is currently registered under international law as the domestic chattel of a certain Mr. and Mrs. Toelle Ur Laputa.

“There’re Dola and the others!” gasped Pazu, grabbing Sheeta’s hand and leading them forward. She tripped over sand behind him. “Where have you been?” asked Pazu of their captain.

“Eh? What nerve! Here we were wasting time trying to figure out where the devil you little mutinous rascals were.” She wiped away tears from the grooves under her eyes and gathered them both in her arms. “Oh! What if you ate the wrong mushrooms? What if the mushrooms ate you? Hmm?”

“That’s funny,” Sheeta chuckled, “I remember you telling us you’d be right back.”

Dola frowned. “You’re half a century too young to be eligible for backtalk, young lady.” Then she looked up and down at Pazu and raised a brow, poking him where Sheeta had kissed him, then dusted his hair. “I’m sorry to say, Pazu, but you look like hell.”

“I know! But we’re all right now,” Pazu assured her with a grin, “really. All thanks to Sheeta. Again. She’s a real brick!”

“Mm-mmphf!” Dola squished Pazu’s head under a breast. “Some man you are! I keep telling you to keep an eye out for the poor girl.” She cupped Sheeta’s head under a great gnarled hand. Dola said to Pazu, “Do your part of the job, eh?”

“I’ll try,” Pazu laughed, mostly to himself.

Sheeta asked Dola, “Where’d you come through?”

Dola jerked a thumb behind her. “Nothing but will-o’-the-wisps and quagmires thataway.” She spat on the ground. “You’d expect a fine place like his to have… at least… some gold flaking or a trinket box here or—wait a minute! Be good sailors now and stay right where you are.”

Pazu belly laughed as Dola and the gang raced back and forth, to and from the ship every ten minutes with loaded arms transporting what seemed like all the ambergris in the world that had washed up here, a beachcomber’s dreamboat destination.

Pazu and Sheeta enjoyed the sea while they could. Pazu rolled up his trews and Sheeta her culottes. The waves lapped warm and rapid around their ankles, though their heels tried to hook back the tide as long as they could that first time. The second tide surged up tall and swift. Sheeta tried to run back to shore, but skippers’ daughters splashed up to her thighs and tried to drag her into the deep by her knees.

“Eek!” shrieked Sheeta, but she was holding Pazu’s hand. Of course, she laughed, everything was all right now.

Along that shore waterfights, dates at rockpool aquariums, and the construction of sandcastles and mermaids ensued. Eventually, when the two were sitting salt-and-sand-crusted with a realm raised around them, Pazu’s fingernail scraped something hard under the gold grains. “Eureka!” cried Pazu, lifting his hand from under a mountain of wet sand. Something sparkled in his palm. “Here. It’s for you. I could drill a clasp into it when we get home, so you can wear it around your neck.”

“Oh! How gorgeous. Thank you, Pazu.” She dusted it off and peered at the waves of iridescence playing over the spiralling surface of the ammonite. “I’ll try my luck!” Tongue poking out of her corner of her mouth, she dug deeper into the sand. She surfaced with an ormer that she immediately handed to her dearest friend. “Look what I found! It’s yours, Pazu.”

“Sheeta! There’s something inside…” He pried open the nacreous shell to find inside it a pearl, preternaturally round and large for its species, with a great weight to it. Its coat spanned a lustrous spectrum that seemed to paint it a miniature of the earth. The little knobs and imperfections on the surface only strengthened the comparison. Pazu looked at Sheeta with his mouth agape. “Have I told you? That I had a dream just like this.” However, he had been unable to rede it, until now. “Except it was me who found a pearl, and tried to give it to you, but it was so heavy, that I almost drowned holding it. But you saved me, like you always do.” He laughed.

“Not at all…?” Sheeta cupped her hand over his ear. He leaned into her fingers. “But hide it from Dola! I trust her, but I think it’s in her nature, not to be able to help herself, sometimes.”

“A pirate is as a pirate does, eh?” Pazu chuckled, and began to walk. He looked over his shoulder, to the pirates skipping over the dunes, then forward to a cliff that was for some reason sparkling. “This shore never seems to run out of surprises. It’s as if every time we try to find something in the sand, out comes a treasure out of the waves. This sea must be very, very old. More than most.”

“Speaking of which, what do you think that is?” she asked, for she too had seen the lights in the cliff. She pointed to them. “They look awfully mysterious...”

“Why don’t we find out? Last one there’s a rotten egg!”

Despite her initial protests, Sheeta became the good egg at the end of the race, when they stood huffing and puffing before a bluff that closed off further exploration. Neither could see the top of it, not only because their vision was blocked by minerals of the goodliest euhedral form: beryl and morganite and tourmaline and amethyst dazzled like a crystalline sky above them while bismuth tinkled underfoot. That was when Sheeta experienced her epiphany. She struck her palm with her fist. “Pazu! This is the sea Shuna climbed into all those years ago!”

Pazu gasped. “So it was the land of the god men we just walked out from?”

“No, I don’t think we came from that side.”

“But still! That’s swell,” insisted he, putting his hands on Sheeta’s shoulders. “If this really is that sea then a little over these crystals are dragon bones, and carved idols… We should call Dola over with the flaptors, so we can check!”

“Sure! But before, we do—there’s something I wanted to discuss with you. In private.” Sheeta tidied her culottes and took a deep breath. She had been stalling, though she did not know why. With Pazu she had walked into death. Something as good and simple as this she should be able to do, not as a chore, but a treat. Peradventure she had had not the courage. Yet after everything, it now coursed through her, loud and bold as a snowlion’s roar. “Pazu, do you think you could be my date, for the opening gala?”

“I-I’d be honoured!” He steamed like a locomotive. “Though, er, this is my first time hearing about the event in question. Would you be so good to tell me what all this is about?”

“Well, Dola and the others were invited! To the opening of an exhibit at some fancy museum they sold some of Laputa’s treasure to. It’s in a month and I was thinking that we could go together. It’d be right up your alley, I’d say!”

Sheeta herself and the sea behind her glimmered like a projection upon the magic lantern of Pazu’s eyes. In the camera of her own she steeped him in the indelible ink of her remembrance.

“There’ll be exhibits on aviation and all the other sciences and everything, right?”

“And maybe great pilots and inventors just like you!”

“Oh, Sheeta…” Pazu rested his hands on Sheeta’s cheeks. He edged his face closer, also taking care not to squish Sheeta’s nose as he did so, until their lips bridged each other’s breath and form into one everywhere. The kiss was soft and salty and so warm inside the snuggery of their mutual embracement.

When Pazu pulled back his eyes were all dewy with tears, though they cleared up by the time Charles and Louis came to pick them up on the flaptors. At evenfall they scaled the cliffs with wide eyes that descried all the ferlies of Shuna’s account. Night shuttered the sun and unveiled all the stars of its great stage as soon as their eyes reached the crown of the last god carven into the cliff.

All the crew reported back to Dola at the bridge of the Atlas Moth, where Sheeta and Pazu prepared the gifts given magnanimously from the bounty of nature to all their friends: for Mrs. Davidson, a starfish paperweight; for Tashi, a new conque; for Thea, seaglass they would string onto a necklace; for Shuna, a geode from his youth; for each of the boys, an artefact; for Dola, a branch of coral. Sheeta had stuffed a bag full of cowries to decorate the calf’s new caparisons, and Pazu had filled the remaining space in his magic carrier with oyster shells for the doves to sample the taste of a fremd, far sea.

Sheeta was rostered to the vigil, but Pazu tagged along anyway, because he knew how cold she would be up there to go alone. Huddled tightly together in the relative safety of the crow’s nest, and with midnight hunger curbed by leftover macaroons and soup in vacuum flasks, Sheeta and Pazu were visited by one last surprise: that of a second moon, its light and size a hundredfold of the distant one, wearing a cape of incandescence for its parade across the sky. For a second it lit what seemed to be the land of god men of which the king spoke, a vivid vert splash in the ocean, dotted with the flora and fauna of another age.

“Lumme!” exclaimed Pazu. “Just wait till we tell Shuna what we found!”

“We could even show him,” Sheeta said. “We’re coming back, aren’t we?”

“Well, I’ve got the coordinates down—though they might not be of much use. I hope that island will let us find it again.”

“Do you think we’d need to find another pendant?”

“I’m not sure. Laputa and that island—both recognised you, even without the pendant.”

“We should still find the ones left,” Sheeta said. “Make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands. I need to become strong enough to keep myself safe from them, too.”

“H-hey, that’s my job—

She held his hand. “Our job. To keep you safe, too. With volucite, if we must. It’s all up to me, whether the pendants turn out to be used for evil or not. I think we could do a lot of good with them. Save lives. Most Gondoans don’t stay in one place for very long. They have movable homes, or summer retreats, or winter fortresses, or all those things. Maybe I should stop being the exception. I’ll keep the farm, and come to the valley sometimes, but oh, I don’t think things will ever be quite the same again. I don’t think I want them to be. I still want to fly with you.”

Pazu said, “Oh, you’re a woman after my own heart! Our adventures are far from over, Sheeta. The world is ever so great. There were plenty of places my father wanted to find after Laputa, you see. He’s got all the maps drawn up, and there’re notes and bookmarks we could use. There’s Baltia, whose waves chuck amber ashore; and Cockaigne, where it rains cheeses and saveloys and no one ever grows old; and Shambhala, home of the Cintamani; and Argharti underground; Cantre’r Gwaelod of the songs, with the lushest farmland in all the world; Mount Penglai, which I've read to have rivers that heal any and all ailments, and forests that grow jewellery; and the loveliness of the Peach Blossom Spring; oh, and Ys by the sea; and Atlantis beneath it. They say there’s a turtle that wanders the seas that’s so big and old that people live in the jungle that grows on top of it. Oh, Sheeta, we could see it all! I’ll pick you up come autumn in the orithopter. With Ben helping me and Dola chipping in I think I could finish her up in a jiffy. Before the gala, if I’m lucky.”

Sheeta echoed each placename as she would a spell. Her tongue sounded out the shape of them into taste, summoned each into solid, until she could reach them in her heart and trusted her volant feet to do the same in time. Her next word enchanted their promise into her own spell of creation. “Yes!” she said. “Let’s do our best!”

Beloved reader, I assure you they adventured far and wide indeed, to all the places they endeavoured to reach in their troth whose witnesses were the ceaseless seas and all members of the cycling sky. Henceforth they were skykeyed, not landlocked; and to this day our champions carry with them argosies of emprise from which to draw long fireside tales of romance and derring-do, bound for etherborne somewheres, yet belonging to earth and each other ever after.