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The first thing that Sheeta did when they'd flown the kite back home was to strip the worn, singed, smoke-marked yellow blouse away from her body, and scrub the soot and gunpowder and soil off of her pale skin. The blouse and pantaloons she left to soak in the soapy remnants of the bathwater, but she thought that the stains might not ever come out of them.
She was too tired after her bath to dress again, her body limp with experience and knowledge. Pazu found her an old nightshirt that was so long, it reached her knees. She slid into that, reveling in the softness of the old cotton. When she was covered, Pazu came to kneel beside her, wrapping his callused hands around her waist and touching her upper arms, helping her up. He deposited her in the little cot she'd slept in that first night, and she slowly curled herself up under a patched quilt by the fire while Pazu performed his own ablutions.
"I suppose that I don't really have any other clothes," she said to him, pitching her voice to carry over the screen surrounding the battered tin tub, speaking over the sounds of splashing water. "My blue dress got lost somewhere in the middle of everything."
"What was that?" Pazu called back, and she repeated herself. "Oh," he said, "Well. You can borrow my things until we find something else for you."
She sighed, and pushed the ragged ends of her hair out of her eyes.
The next morning dawned bright-clean, scrubbed and polished and sparkling. When they climbed to the roof, only one or two of the doves came down, but Pazu looked so happy that they might have been multitude.
"You're happy to be home, aren't you," she said to him as they made their way back down, after sounding the aubade.
"Yeah, I guess I am," he said, and the corners of his mouth crinkled up into a toothy grin. "I never really realized how much I liked it here. Before, I thought I was just waiting - after my parents died, I didn't know where to go, so I just didn't go anywhere." He jumped down the ladder briskly, and held up a hand to help her down. "Now I'm glad that I stayed."
Her borrowed trousers flapped loosely around her legs as she jumped down too.
"Listen," he said, spooning their steaming breakfast into chipped earthenware bowls, "I want to go down to the mine today, okay? We were in such a hurry when we left that I didn't even have time to tell the Boss where I was going! Will you be okay here by yourself?"
She nodded. "Yes, I'll be fine, though I might walk down into the village later."
He grinned again. "Meet you back here for supper, then." He wolfed down his porridge, jammed a hat over his tousled hair, and then was gone, leaving only a thin trail of a song behind him.
Sheeta left for the village half an hour later, anxiously tugging at the hemline of her cotton shirt. Her own small shoes looked odd against Pazu's patched trousers, but all the same she was glad that she still had them. Everything else had changed.
"Hello," she said to the full-bodied woman in green who was standing behind the counter in the general store. "I was wondering if you sold fabric of any kind."
The woman gave her a long look, weighing and measuring, and then she smiled. "You're the little girl who Pazu was hiding, a while back," she said. "I heard this morning that he'd come back, none the worse for wear, and I'm glad of it."
"Yes," Sheeta said, "so am I."
Taking in Sheeta's borrowed clothes and ragged hair, the woman said, "You don't seem to have fared so well. Are those his trousers?" Sheeta nodded. "I thought so," the woman said. "I mended them myself a few months ago. Poor motherless lad, no one to do his patching. And fatherless too, for the last few years. Just a boy, really, and trying to fill a man's place ... it was cloth you were looking for, wasn't it?"
"Yes, I want to make myself a new dress. I feel awfully strange going about in someone else's things."
"I'm sorry, but we don't sell dressmaking supplies. There's a larger city about a half-day's journey from here, which is where I always buy goods. But miners don't exactly corner the market on colored thread."
Sheeta nodded. "That's all right, ma'am. Thank you for helping me."
She bought a handful of dried figs and a packet of almonds with the unorthodox currency Dola had rescued from the wreck of Laputa, and wandered back out into the sunlight. She walked slowly back to Pazu's tiny house on the hill, but even so she was there long before sundown - long before he started off from work.
She washed up all the dishes in the sink, carried in a new bucket of coal for the cookfire, and found a pair of shining silver scissors in one of the kitchen cabinets that she used to trim off some of the worst-burned ends of her untidy hair, trying to get all the ends cut to a similar length. As the night gathered in, she put on a pot of stew for dinner, and then went about to light candles. Looking up at the photograph of Laputa, the Floating City, the Castle in the Sky, she allowed herself to daydream, thinking about the gardens and the quiet of the Laputian graves, and the quiet mechanical beauty of the robots.
"Do you feel like you did what you set out to do?" she asked Pazu, after they'd eaten. "Finding Laputa and proving your father right?"
Pazu's brown eyes looked startled. "I guess I did - even if no one will ever believe me!" he said with a forced little laugh. "But he's still dead."
*
Three weeks later, Dola came for them. Each of those days had crawled by in the same way as the first - Pazu was off at the mine, coming back to the little house late at night, dirty and exhausted. Sheeta minded the house, prepared dinner each night, and spent more and more of her time curled up in front of the photograph, dreaming of might-have-beens. Awkward silences sat between them like a third member of their household, keeping them separate and alone. The intimacy and friendship that had been so easy in the face of peril, or in the crow's nest of a pirate ship, seemed peculiar and baseless in the ordinary light of mundane days. Pazu didn't talk about his father, and Sheeta didn't mention her home in Gondoa.
Sheeta was washing windows when she saw Dola's rickety-bright car come gasping up the hill, the pirate's flying red hair a startling counterpoint to the green grass-lined lane. She burst out smiling, and hurried to tie a ribbon round her hair - but Dola moved faster than she did, striding through the door as if she owned the world before Sheeta'd even put away her dust rag.
"There you are, dear," Dola said, drawing her into an embrace. Sheeta almost felt happy, wrapped up in her strong arms, breathing in her scent of wind and wild things.
"Dola!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh, this and that," Dola said. "Where's that boy of yours?"
"Pazu goes down the mine during the day," Sheeta told her. "But it's almost sundown now, so he should be back within a couple of hours."
Dola arched her back and stretched mightily. "Have a spare seat for a weary woman?" she said. "I've a proposition to put to you, but it's for you both, so I'd better wait."
They'd had two rounds of tea before Pazu came in, stamping his boots on the threshold to shake the rubble and dust from them. "Pazu!" Sheeta called to him. "We're in the kitchen!"
"Hello, Pazu," Dola greeted him as he reached the room. "Sheeta and I have just been talking things over."
"Dola?" he said bemusedly. "What's going on?" He looked tired; there was a coaldust smudge on his left cheekbone. Quietly, Sheeta handed him a cup of tea, and he sighed as he wrapped his hands around the warm porcelain.
"I thought," Dola said, looking the pair of them over appraisingly with her hawk's eyes, "that you two might need some checking-up on. I would've spoken sooner, but I remember what it was like for me when I first went adventuring."
"What do you mean?" Sheeta asked.
"It's no easy thing to leave the ordinary world behind," Dola said sharply. "As you have every reason to know. I never meant to go pirating - never meant to leave my village, even. Thought I'd marry the butcher's boy and die down the street from the house where I'd been born."
"Just how I was, back in Gondoa," Sheeta murmured.
Dola smiled triumphantly. "Exactly. But then that engineer of mine crashed his airship in my pastureland, and he needed a crew to get off the ground again. After a month of flying with him - I tried to go home, afterwards, and I lasted just about as long as you have before I started sending out radio signals over all the open frequencies, calling for him night and day." Her grin turned sly, and she added, "It's just as well as I did, or the first of those boys would have come into the world without a daddy."
Pazu blushed, but Sheeta was looking at the older woman with starry eyes. "He came back for you?"
"As soon as he got my message, yes. Something of the sky got in under my skin, and when I tried to go back to earth I could feel it, pulling at me. When that airship carried me above my little village, I felt happier - happier than I've ever felt before. I traded in my skirts for a pair of trousers, learned to navigate and shoot a pistol, and built a right nice life for myself."
"But what does this have to do with us?" Pazu asked, as Dola's grainy voice trailed off dreamily.
"Well, because the two of you are exactly the same, of course! Being foolish and trying to plant yourself back on the ground, when the skies and the adventures have got into your blood. You'll never be happy here again, my boy - and I can tell you for certain that she won't be." Dola cut her eyes in Sheeta's direction, nodding. "Have you looked at the girl of late, Pazu? I saw that same look in the mirror, twenty-odd years ago. Little bird needs to fly. You have to help her open the door of the coop."
Pazu also glanced at Sheeta, not turning his head, trying to hide the direction of his gaze from her - but Sheeta saw him looking. She was trying to decide if Dola was right. Her heart had jumped when Dola talked of flying, and she had felt so very alone. She thought of being back on the Tiger Moth, in the noisy kitchen or safe away with the clouds in the high crow's nest. She wanted it more than anything.
Pazu's voice, when he spoke, was quiet and flat. "This is my home," he said hesitantly, looking at the two women at his table. "This is all I've ever known. This is where -" his voice broke off for a moment, "this is where my father lived."
Sheeta held his eyes with her own. "But Pazu," she said gently, "that doesn't mean it's where you ought to live."
"Is Dola right?" he asked her, laying a hand along the inside of her wrist, his voice heavy and open and honest. "Are you unhappy?"
"No more than you are," she answered forthrightly. "And don't try to tell me otherwise, because I know you miss having adventures and doing things that really matter, and oh Pazu, I know you miss flying."
Dola had been sitting quietly, watching the two of them. Now she spoke up. "The Dola Gang has a new ship," she said, "christened the Spongy Moth. And I've need for an engineer's assistant and a cook aboard. You youngsters would be more than welcome, if y'wanted a sailing berth whilst you find you bearings."
Pazu's shoulders dropped, as if he was in the act of setting down a heavy burden. "Okay," he said. "If Sheeta agrees, we'll sign on."
Sheeta smiled at him. "All right," she said, "let me just go pack a few things first. I'll have to find something to wear!"
*
The Spongy Moth was fairly large craft of wood and varnished cloth, like skin covering an armature of bones and ligaments. She had two long wings, and a long cabin, with a tiny glass room at her bow for the lookout or navigator. Her steam-powered propellers ran along the front of the wings, and she had a long, gracefully curving tail.
In her cabins, everything was designed for efficiency. "I meant this one to be this size," Dola told them as she gave them the grand tour. "Our last vessel was an expanding affair - started out small, and kept growing as we needed more space. With this lady, though, I had the time to plan things out proper." The dining table folded up against the wall when not in use, and the cook stove slid on gimbals to open up over the sink. Everything was neat and clever, and Sheeta fell in love with it at once.
Dola's boys greeted them with cheers, smiles, and requests for dinner already, ma. The engineer grinned at them from behind his bristling mustaches, and as soon as he could get him away from Dola, he hauled Pazu off to crow over the mechanical prowess of his airship, speaking excitedly about pressure and gears.
Dola gave them a small room to share, towards the foredeck of the ship. A saffron curtain ran on track down the center of the room, affording privacy, and three little round portholes opened along one wall. A bureau away to one side proved to contain several pairs of brightly colored bloused pants, and half a dozen prettily-sewn shirts to go with them.
Sheeta was almost shocked at how easy it was to fall back into the rhythms of the Dola Gang. She cooked enormous meals several times a day, and stood her watch in the nights, and talked to Pazu in the dark through the golden curtain, and listened to the boys' not-that-witty adventure stories. She clambered all over the airship in her billowing trousers, taking atmospheric readings and trying to guess from the look of the land beneath them where they were. Dola liked for Sheeta to share her watch, at which time she would tell her somewhat more realistic tales of a free life, and run her gnarl-knuckled hands through Sheeta's still-short hair.
The hair was a problem - it was cropped, but enough of it remained that the slightest wind whipped strands into her eyes and nearly blinded her. In one of their shared dark nights, Dola braided the short strands along both sides of Sheeta's face, close to the scalp. The two bound strands formed a close coronet along her brow. Sheeta quickly realized what a useful style it was, and soon got into the habit of going to Dola's room first thing in the morning, to sit on the older woman's bed and get her hair combed out and tied back. It felt good. No one had brushed her hair for her since her mother had died, and Dola's hands reminded her of the grandmother she'd lost even longer ago.
Sheeta confided to Pazu, in the solitude of their room and nighttime darkness, that she felt rather odd about flying with a pirate gang.
"What do you mean?" he asked her sleepily.
"Well," she said, "we're taking things that don't belong to us, aren't we? Is that wrong?"
Pazu paused for a moment before he answered. "I guess it is, in the most broad sense of the word. But- " he paused again, "I don't think they could be like they are, anywhere else."
"I don't understand," Sheeta said into the dark.
"Sheeta, my father worked in the mines every day of his life, and he died young with a broken heart. He couldn't see the world the way he wanted to, because he didn't have enough money. Men like Musca, though, can do whatever they want. My - my father - if he'd been the one to find Laputa, maybe it wouldn't have had to be destroyed."
"Maybe not," Sheeta said carefully. Pazu's voice was steady, if a bit strained, but she knew how hard it was for him to talk about his father.
"People who can be free shouldn't, and the ones that should are chained to the earth until it's too late," he said. "Right now, I guess I'm doing what my father always wanted to - flying, exploring, living free. And if it weren't for Dola and her pirating, I'd still be in the mines, trying to scrape by. Dola gets to fly - if she followed the rules, she wouldn't."
Sheeta looked out her little round window into the dark sky, and thought about the months she'd spent alone on her parents' farm after they'd died, not knowing where else to go or what else to do. She thought about her pretty mother with her fine lady's manners, and her father's relics of his lost library, and the way they'd worked the land every day instead of compromising their ideals. They'd been royalty, she realized with a shock. The King- and Queen-in-Exile of the flying kingdom of Laputa. They must have known, and chosen to work anyway.
She thought of how helpless she'd felt when Musca's men had taken her away. Dola would never have let them. She would have fought like a tiger, like a raptor, and somehow manage to gain her liberty at their expense. But that was against the rules, wasn't it - for a woman to fight like that? She drifted off to sleep, still turning the question over and over in her mind.
*
"Dola?" Sheeta called, knocking on the door of the glass front-cabin. "Are you there?"
"Let yourself in, dearie," the pirate called back. "My hands are occupied, and I don't want to lose count."
Sheeta slipped into the room quietly, her little shoes noiseless against the floor. "I wanted to ask you a favor," she said, sitting down next to Dola's book of navigational figures.
Dola finished her calculation, and looked up. "What is it?"
"I want some cloth," Sheeta said.
"What sort of cloth? What do you need it for?"
Sheeta's fingers wandered to toy with the embroidery on her blouse. "I want to sew myself a dress," she said.
Dola raised an eyebrow at her. "You're better off in pantaloons, my girl. You can't do much that's useful in skirts - I know that from long experience."
"It's not like that, Dola," Sheeta explained. "It's just - I lost the dress that I brought from home a while ago, and it was made from my mother's cloth. She used a special dye that had been handed down through our family for generations, and she spun the finest thread. There were three bolts of it left after she died, and I saved them as long as I could. That dress was the last of it, and oh Dola, I would do anything for cloth of that color, I miss it so much."
Dola caressed her cheek. "I understand," she said gently. "And I know how much you must miss your mother and your father. But remember that you have to become your own self, not just keep living over your memories. It's natural enough to miss your mother's homespun, but you're more than just her child - especially considering how long you've been managing on your own."
Sheeta murmured, "Sometimes I don't think she'd be very happy with me. She was very beautiful, and very proper, and I'm not doing things at all right."
"That's simply not true," Dola said, drawing her in close. "For the one thing, there's more to right than what our mothers told us. And for another - who's to say that what was right for her can ever be right for you? Follow your own lights, dearie, and you can't go wrong. Anyone else's can get you into a pretty pickle."
Their talk turned to different things - where they were headed, what adventures they'd have once they got there, what it had been like years ago when Dola had been a girl - and Sheeta very nearly forgot about asking her favor. Until, that is, the boys returned from a raid carrying armfuls of billowing blue-indigo cloth, long swathes of it rising up to twist in the wind. "Sheeta! Sheeta!" they called to her. "We brought you a present!"
She ran out to the rail to meet them, exclaiming, "Oh, oh, thank you, thank you!" as she ran the fluttering fabric between her fingers, marveling at its softness, the fine way it moved and hung and draped, the luxuriant weight of it. It was exactly the right color, but far more elegant stuff than her mother's.
"Found this in an old storehouse," Dola said close to her ear. "Didn't seem like anyone was using it, so I liberated it for you. I remember that little blue frock of yours - I saw you wearing it when Musca had you, before you fell - and I think this should be about the shade."
Sheeta threw her arms about her in an impetuous embrace. "Oh Dola, it's wonderful," she said. "Thank you. You didn't have to - I thought - I didn't need - "
"Nonsense," Dola shot back happily. "You make yourself what ever you want, Sheeta, and seeing how pretty you look will be my reward. It's about time you got a decent cut of the loot." She stepped to the rail, and called toward her sons, "Be careful with the lockboxes, now! Wouldn't want to drop our payoff!" Laughing to herself, she vanished into the cabin, leaving Sheeta with the long blue pennants of her gift.
Sheeta went straight to work, fashioning her pillows into a rough dressmaker's dummy with the help of some wire and a long pole. The dress that she made was long-sleeved and full-skirted, so that the pretty indigo cloth could swirl around her, but she cut the skirt short, and she borrowed the fabric from one of her pretty shirts to piece together a pair of little white pantalettes to cover her legs down nearly to the ankle.
When she skipped to Dola's room the next morning to get her hair braided, the pretty blue dress danced with her movement without once getting in her way, and she felt free as a bird, to run or climb or spin as she pleased. A wide smile broke over Dola's face when she saw what Sheeta had made, and she found a handful of lavender ribbons to wind in with Sheeta's plaits.
*
Pazu came into their room at sunset, just off of watch duty and smelling of cloud and air. The saffron curtain was pulled back, the edges stirring gently as the breeze coming through the open door caught them. Sheeta looked up from her little window and smiled at him. He'd seemed so vital, so happy, these last few weeks, as if he was filled to brimming with dreams and deeds with no room left over for darker thoughts. She was glad; she'd wondered if the destruction of Laputa had broken something in his heart irrevocably, but that didn't seem to be so.
"Sheeta?" he said, coming to sit next to her. "What are you thinking about?"
"Actually, I was thinking of Laputa, and about what happened there. I don't think either of us thought that was how our adventure was going to end, but I'm not really that sad about it either."
"I know what you mean," he said. "It helps that we did the right thing."
"Pazu," she said, turning to him, "I'm glad of everything that happened back then - even the really dreadful things - because if it had been different I wouldn't have left home, or met you."
The sun stained him red-gold, sparking in his hair and lending his eyes and unearthly glow. "I have something for you," he said, reaching into a pocket. He pulled out a small, jagged blue crystal on a dark ribbon, and pressed it into her hand.
She held it up, and it glistened against her palm. Pale gold tracery marked out a pattern she knew like her own name - the crest of her family, the symbol of Laputa. "Pazu? What - "
"It's aetherium," he said. "An aetherium crystal. I know that it's not as large or as powerful as the one you lost, but - "
"Pazu," she cried, "where did you find this?"
"Well, I made it. I took some of the stones from home - you remember Uncle Pom said all the rock in the area carried veins of aetherium? - and I've been trying to extract the ore ever since. The engineer's been helping me. We've been using the furnace that powers the ship for smelting. This is all I've been able to get."
She held it up, watching the blue stone catch and refract the light, entranced.
"I know it's not much," he said, "but I wanted you to have it. I know you lost pretty much everything, and you're the Princess of Laputa, after all, you should have something like this."
"Oh Pazu," she sighed, dropping her head to his shoulder, pressing up against his warm, comfortable body. "Thank you. I don't think I knew until just now how much I missed the one I lost."
"I wanted to use some of what we learned about aetherium," he said earnestly. "Not to make weapons, or castles, or anything like that, but think of what good we could do! If aetherium can be that destructive, it's got to work the other way as well, to be productive and helpful and right. If we could use its power to grow crops, or heal, or protect - we have to try, now that we know."
Sheeta's heart beat faster, picking up the contagious excitement of his words. "Its power is of the earth. That's what Uncle Pom said. But Pazu, you understand the earth, you've worked with it all your life, and so have I. If we use it to grow things, and give life instead of taking it, I think that's using it in the right way. Can you get more of it out of the stones?"
"I think so," he said. "I think I'm really starting to figure the process out. And, Sheeta, you know the spells to work it, don't you? Your grandmother taught you. You know how to use the power in the crystals?"
"Yes. I remember every spell she ever told to me, and they were all for good, right things - all except the spell of destruction." She looked again at the gold markings on her little necklace, taking in the familiar pattern, letting warm memories of her home and her family wash over her. She held up the crystal. "Pazu, will you help me put it on?"
He dropped the pendant against her breastbone, and reached behind her neck to knot the ribbon securely. If his hands lingered there longer than was necessary, or brushed gently against her earlobe, her throat, the short curling ends of her hair at the nape, neither of them said anything.
"There," he said. "Turn around, I want to see you."
She stood, facing him in the slanting, fiery-crimson light, her blue dress looking almost purple, her braided hair looking almost gold, almost-crownlike, and the crystal at her throat threw out wild beams of pale green radiance, splashing over her in tendrils and fingers of power.
He smiled. "Now you look like Sheeta of Laputa," he said, and kissed her mouth softly, gently, shyly. His lips tasted of promises and newborn things, hopes and plans and time.