Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

I chandelled up, higher still, and looked out east. On the horizon, raised on haze, a dark green patch seemed to float. A mountain! A mountain in the sea! I kept climbing, aware that I was the second immortal ever to set eyes on Tris. The island emerged, summit first. I felt a firm companionship with it, as if it had been set there especially for me. Fluffy white clouds hung over it, and I could just see their shadows on the smooth mountainside. The crest was pale gray with distance.

There were some crags around the shoreline. Maybe they were cliffs, I couldn’t tell. I stared until my eyes watered. The haze began to dissipate, the perspective suddenly clicked, and I realized I was looking at a town. The white buildings resembled a slope of scree, tumbling from the mountainside down to the coast and perching on what must be lower buttresses of the peak. It was incredibly beautiful, so wonderful I found myself laughing. I whooped, somersaulted in the air and dived down to Stormy Petrel.

“Oh, my god. Oh god, Mist, you’re completely right! You’re a genius, Mist. I take back all I’ve ever slandered. It’s there, where you said it’d be, and it’s magnificent. Magnificent! I mean, even Awia never had anything like this-”

“Can you see it?” asked Lightning.

“He can see it,” said Mist, hanging on the wheel.

I aligned myself in the wind flow, beside the railings, facing toward her. “I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s so pretty it’s just not true. Like…” Like a piece of the Shift in the Fourlands. I paused, and described it more calmly. A scout is useless unless he gives sensible reports. At sea level, the heat was stronger; it annoyingly slowed my thinking. “I can see the town, though at the moment it’s just a speck. I can see the island’s whole west face-actually Tris is a huge mountain growing up out of the sea!”

Mist carefully noted a compass reading in her ledger with a pencil stub, and snapped her telescope out from its case. This was utterly fantastic-a new part of the Empire we-

A gust nearly sent me into the waves. I was losing too much height. I gestured to Lightning, “Chuck me that…and that,” pointing to a water bottle and a hunk of bread. He threw them from the back railing one at a time. I dived and caught them. “I can’t wait to scale the summit. I’m going for a closer look.”

“No!”

Try and stop me. I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back before your heart beats twice.”

I half-folded my wings for strength, pulled them down through the air resistance. Mist had said the town was called Capharnaum. I repeated that word aloud as I cruised, the only wholly Trisian word I knew. I couldn’t wait to speak to the islanders in their ancient language. That is, if they didn’t run away at the sight of me. I was used to flatlanders staring, or their outright hostility. Once in a Hacilith café the waiter put a bowl of milk and a fish skeleton on the floor for me when I ordered beer and a sandwich. My gang returned the following night and burned the café to the ground.

Nowadays I give Zascai something to stare at; I dress up to the role. But surely no Trisian would have heard of a Rhydanne before. I was very tempted to scare them on purpose. I’d have an eager audience, no doubt about that! They will just have to take me as I am, I concluded. After all, they’re part of the Empire and I’m their Messenger as well.

Over an hour, the island grew larger and details appeared. Dark green bushes on the mountainside became twisted trees, an olive grove. A rugged shape in the center of the town became an outcrop, and on its summit, fifty meters higher than the town’s rooftops, a bright white complex resolved into a series of elegant, airy buildings with fluted columns, much bigger than I expected. It could be the manor house. The outcrop seemed to move across my field of vision faster than the mountainside behind it, so I could tell that it was a pinnacle standing out alone.

Black flecks on the sea became big canoes with five to ten men paddling in each, riding the surf with great dexterity. They even drew their paddles in and went flying down the funnels of the waves. A white strip underlining the town was a harbor wall of admirable workmanship, nearly three times larger than the lighthouse quay at Awndyn. Rolling surf broke and peeled along it. Elsewhere on the coast, cypress trees extended right down to high-water mark, where the rocks were yellow with lichen and stained black by the sea. The trees were small and gnarled; the Trisians had no chance of ever building a caravel. Breakers boomed on the shingle, deepwater rollers thundered in parallel lines. Above their reach, an amber band of seaweed and a white band of shellfish striped the boulders.

Capharnaum was like a model. Closer now, and the model came alive, men and women in the streets. A winged lad in a straw hat cast a fishing line, and paid no attention as my shadow sped over him. I soared up, and marveled.

A warm, delicious breeze blew constantly in from the sea, like the updraft from the hypocaust rooms in an Awian bathhouse. It’s certainly difficult to find lift this good on the mainland. I was flying automatically, so occupied in staring around that I hadn’t realized how little effort I was putting in. I rode the same current with several gulls, who watched with an attitude that said: You can’t be serious. We whirled around each other, but they were the better gliders and they gained height. I peeled out of the thermal to look at the town.

I glided as slowly as I could without stalling and constantly made tiny adjustments with my legs acting as a forked tail, counteracting the air currents that now came from all directions. Even so I flew too rapidly to see much detail and I could only look down on the roofs.

Two main streets intersected in the center of Capharnaum. They were surrounded by smaller roads that ran in a neat crisscross pattern, like a grid. The houses were spaced very regularly; it was bizarre, completely different from Hacilith’s sprawl and unlike the graceful curves in which Awians build. Cypresses flanked empty avenues leading north and south into the countryside. Roughly at five-kilometer intervals along the roadside there were tall black and white posts like gibbets, with short planks nailed at right angles to them. Probably some kind of flagpole.

At the edges the street grid lost coherence and the houses were jumbled together. Trees invaded between them. All the villas were exactly the same size, square and whitewashed, dazzling and clean. The terracotta tiles on their shallow roofs looked like overlapping feathers. Their square windows had alabaster screens instead of glass; their shutters were open. They had porticos surrounding square peri-style lawns or dark green gardens, some with statues. They faced out to sea. It was quiet, unlike Hacilith, it was tranquil. I could see no poor section of town, no slums, no kids standing on street corners. It did not resemble any town in the Fourlands, but maybe when Micawater was founded it looked like this. If I flew any lower I risked being seen. With an acute sense of unreality I wheeled above the town. It’s a dream, I assured myself. It’s all a damn dream.

Here the warm wind smelled of sage and thyme, herbs growing wild. Shrubs among the boulders bore yellow flowers. At the far north and south extremes of the island, on the gentle slope before the mountainside became steep maquis, there were two other towns, smaller than Capharnaum. Both seemed connected with the sea, but pale green terraced hillsides stepped above them.

Thin air at last, I thought. I had a brief glimpse of the mountaintop-my god-is that snow on the summit? I wanted more than anything to investigate the white gleams and see if they were snow patches, and roll in them if they were, but Mist would not receive my report kindly if it focused on conditions at the peak rather than in the towns.