To Fill Home's Thirsty Cracks
By Madalena Daleziou
Laeta flinched as she pressed the salve on her nose. When she left her satchel on the coffee table, the corridor mirror revealed a pale line around her left shoulder and upper back where the leather strap had been. The rest of her skin was angering fast.
With a groan, she dipped her fingertips into more of the greenish ointment that soothed the pain but would help little when she shed half her skin on the bedsheets. Her head was throbbing like punishment for her ancestors’ sins—a constant, dull murmur behind her eyes. If wings and feathers could get sunstruck too, she’d swear hers were burning, though mother would say this was just sore muscles. It’s what you get when you don’t fly often enough.
Laeta’s hands left oily stains on the satchel as she dug into it the morning’s harvest; her palms were coated with salve more than any other part, but she could still hardly use them without grimacing in pain.
She had flown too close again.
And yet less close than anyone in her cohort.
After days and fortnights and years of failures, Leata had learnt not to sulk about her meager harvest. This didn’t mean that she was proud of the single fire bloom in her satchel, crammed between a poetry book she had forgotten to take out and the jar of ointment she carried everywhere. A single bloom, and rather battered, too. The spores it’d give would be nothing during the winter.
The sun wouldn’t subside when the summer ended. It’d still give Laeta headaches, and not even one flower as compensation. Which was cruel because the cold would still bury its teeth in the island’s flesh.
At times like this, she felt the guiltiest to be the chief’s daughter. If this weren’t the case, Laeta’s grandmother would have been all cranky because the Gardeners wouldn’t give them enough spores to burn. Chilblains would have grown on Mother’s hands, and Laeta’s little siblings would fail to warm themselves no matter how they rubbed their hands together.
For their sake, she was grateful not to live in the port town or the poor villages far north, to have been born on the chief’s mountain, with the world at her feet. For her own sake—well, she didn’t get to think of that. Sighing, she wiped the excess of cream on her tunic and took the bloom in her aching fingers, bracing herself for the Gardeners’ condescending smirks.
She almost bumped on Thomais, who walked without seeing what lay in front of her, sun-drunk and struggling to keep her satchel shut. It was swollen with blooms.
Her eyes fell on Laeta’s sole flower. There was something forced in her smile when she looked up and locked arms with Laeta. “Let’s meet the Gardeners, shall we?” Laeta tried not to flinch. Even protected under thin flowy sleeves, her arms were tender.
“You got more this time.” Laeta said to fill the silence and pretend she could keep up with Thomais as they went down the marble steps into the fire fields. She hoped she didn’t say it jealously.
“I don’t know how. I didn’t train much or anything. It just… happened.” One could easily tell that Thomais was trying not to sound guilty.
She did anyway.
☼
At the creak of the gate, Gardener Arethas lowered his little round glasses in anticipation. He hobbled towards them, leaning a bit to favor his good side as he’d done ever since he’d broken his left wing some two years ago.
Laeta had never seen his thin lips break into a smile. But his eyebrows disappeared under the sparse hair of his forehead upon gazing Thomais’ harvest.
“All this? By yourself?”
His eyebrows returned, shading his hooded lids ominously when his glance shifted to Laeta’s lonely flower.
“We got them together. A dozen or so are hers,” Thomais said quickly. “Her own satchel broke.”
“Is that so?”
Nothing in Thomais’ voice betrayed the lie but the Gardener didn’t seem persuaded.
“You should’ve seen how close she flew this time. Look how badly burnt she got.”
Gardener Atilia, younger, not yet as burdened, with two unbroken wings that still recalled her sun-romancing days, took the flowers cheerfully enough.
“No cohort has brought as much at once, let alone a single pair.” She was already on her knees piercing little holes in the ground to house each blossom. There, under the sun and rare autumn rain, they would come alive in reverse, unplucked, growing roots, and giving five or ten spores out of the single spore that, with the sun’s gaze, had birthed them. The better the bloom, the more the spores.
“Spores are spores,” Atilia murmured as if to herself. “Who cares who the flower comes from?”
Laeta couldn’t prove that this was meant as a personal insult to her. But it felt that way.
☼
Leata’s skin fell in flakes over the days that followed. The shadow of the headache she got after landing cracked. Then it broke like a watermelon, until she feared her skull itself would split, spilling over the marble steps that led to the Inner Gardens where the fire blooms were already spitting spores.
Because of it, she missed the next couple of sun flights. When the throbbing and the nausea subsided, she kept laying abed, shedding skin and making plans. The fog in her mind soon erased them from her memory.
When the fog cleared, she feigned illness for a couple more days, which she spent reading in secret. There must be another way for her to prove her worth. Another way to keep the island safe from the biting winters. Some plan that wouldn’t require her to burn. She was nearly certain she could find it if only they’d let her look instead of sending her up there.
Then again, she alone was struggling out of her cohort of two dozen. A pallid ghost since her infancy, where most of her people tanned into golden and brown undertones which only paled during the brief cold moon turns after the endless, scorching summer.
It hadn’t always been like this. Once, the sun had been kind. Once, even a human could fly on a summer day on makeshift wax wings. But no human and no makeshift wings had evolved enough to brave this new cruel sun and give him offerings. Not like Aetii had.
It seemed that Laeta’s was still too human despite her eagle-like wings.
Her room had grown stuffy. She wiped a bead of sweat with her thumb. If she stayed shut any longer, she’d start thinking of her trial and how she was bound to fail it, what with headaches confining her on the ground one third of the time.
She threw a pale green tunic overhead and flew barefoot to the bay while the island was asleep.
☼
The night carried the scent of jasmine and lavender. The rocks, sun-baked throughout the day, were still too warm for comfort, though the sand was pleasantly humid from the tide-swollen waves.
Laeta's eyes rested on the dancing private vessels where voyagers were sleeping, lulled by the sea. Once, when she was little, a captain from Astar had taken her along as she circumnavigated the island. She had never felt so alive as she had during the ship’s unpredictable rocking, with salt and water spraying her face. It was nearly as good as flying, and the sun had hardly bothered her; there was a room in the belly of the small ship, and a tent to go under when it became too much.
Now she walked along the pier, to where other, more elaborate vessels had made their temporary home. Under the night’s veils it was only when she got close to the edge that she saw another soul sitting there, legs dangling, eyes to the lighthouse.
Matt had come to the island not three moon turns ago, but it felt as if he’d always been there. An afterthought of ink, black clad and black haired, the rest of him as pale as Laeta, if not more so. He seemed to be everywhere; in the shadowy corner of the coffee room, where sun rays never found their way in; lounging at her favorite reading spot under the old pine; haunting the sleeping bay. His father was fixing ships for the island’s wingless humans.
“When else can I roam?” The two of them still laughed about how he once got only his left cheek sunburnt when he read on the same spot for too long.
“At least you can go from one shade to the other without people sending you up to the sun for errands.”
Matt sighed with longing before replying. “Well, at least you can survive those errands. Sun is a useless imp where I’m from when it bothers to come out at all. You don’t know how lucky you are. I’d let this country’s sun boil me if I could.”
He’d always voice something outrageous like that, as if to ground Laeta just when she was tempted to call him a friend.
As if a visitor could understand. He could lounge all he wanted from a safe distance in the sun’s balmy embrace. If it burnt him, well, he had nothing better to do than lie around on cool sheets and wait for the dizziness to pass. Non-islanders didn’t have to base their livelihood on the flaming orb’s whims.
“Boil, then. At least you won’t have to worry about being cold, when this—” she stretched her arms, encompassing the many foreign ships, and the rubbish they left in their wake “—is all over for the season.”
“I can’t imagine this land falling prey to winter.”
Laeta fought the urge to elbow him. His wingless kind always sailed into the sunset before things turned ugly. “Imagine harder.”
But for all her disdain, she had come to look forward to their encounters. Talking to her cohort only made her want to disappear in her room, blinds down until autumn finally deigned to show up.
The dying leaves, of course, would never mean an end to her struggles. As the days shortened, Mother would pace up and down in the halls, trying vainly to come up with ways to keep the island going. What would she do next? Send one of Laeta’s young siblings up to the sun? Go herself at her old age? If her eldest child was her cohort’s shame, how could the chief expect anyone to do their bit?
And then, there was Thomais. The cohort’s star, in love with the sun as much as Laeta was with this sweet late night, or the clouds that occasionally became her cloak and kept her a tiny bit safer—though they were not an optimal environment for spores to grow.
If one person could really help the island, that was Thomais. But she wouldn’t. Countless times, Laeta had seen her pretend to struggle, refusing to fly as high as she could. Waiting on her. And those rare times that she actually did something her potential, her cheeks would burn not with sunburn but with shame.
“Are you imagining harder?”
The words made her jump and almost slip into the water.
Matt chuckled. “You’ve been staring at the lighthouse the past five minutes.”
She had. Thinking was her one talent, apparently. Resisting the urge to pick at her peeling skin, Laeta took a flat stone between thumb and forefinger and threw it into the water with a rage that overtook her upper body and made her arm ache.
She could think all she wanted, chat with the tourist to her heart’s content but it wouldn’t help with her trials. Or keep the island warm.
“Can you find me a safe way to fly close to the sun before next spring?” she snapped, spitting his language back at him with a strong accent.
Matt leaned back on his elbows. He smiled all teeth. “I could come up with something.”
☼
Laeta screamed with wild joy for all the mountains to hear.
The tiny airship gave her stomach the sinking feeling of excitement she’d experienced many summers ago in the visiting captain’s vessel.
It wasn’t much larger than a cabinet, with flaps that looked like giant moth wings and an engine that wouldn’t stop screeching. There were sails and ship cloth on top, blocking the rays. In the sole uncovered side, spores lay on a bowl that Matt had glued into the airship’s floor.
“You made this? I thought you were only ever lounging about and reading.”
Matt grinned. “And what did you think I did when I had to hide from the sun?”
“How many spores did you use to fuel that?”
“Sixty-five, give or take. The old man at the open market charged me a month’s wages for it.”
Just as she was about to call him a friend. The expense was so huge that Laeta couldn’t even register it. More spores than she had ever made in any single year, enough to warm a house for a week. Unless Matt planned to give her his wages, too, this was never going to work. She still guiltily enjoyed the air that slapped her face.
“Now will you tell me what the trial is about?”
Laeta looked at him levelly. Part of her wanted to keep her people’s customs hidden from the visitors’ eyes. But it was no real secret. Besides, he’d be gone before the last jasmine blossoms died. Before it was time to dry the season’s last figs or make jam out of them to last them the winter.
“When an Aetius is about to come of age, they must travel to some far-off land and find another Aetius, who lives elsewhere. If they succeed within the year, they come back as adult members of their people. But I didn’t think I could manage such a long flight until today.”
She was barely able to finish her phrase when the airship sank several meters down before settling at an uncertain, shaky floating. Matt messed with the levers and the steering wheel to no avail.
“You mean that a week’s supply of spores wasn’t enough for it?”
“How would I know?” he shouted against the complaining engine. “I’ve never—” At one his frantic motions at the control panel, the airship jerked upwards.
Heart hammering, Leata held on to one of the sails. They were rushing toward the sun. Biting her lip, holding the ship cloth like a shield with one hand, she took the spores with the other. Her people all had to go to the sun when they were young, as if their youth was an offering to the flaming orb. While Laeta needed some extra help, she could still present the spores with her own hand.
They were so close now. Not even the winds could dry their sweat. “Closer,” Laeta said. “Hold on for a moment longer.”
Matt’s knuckles were bone-white as he squeezed the steering wheel. Laeta stretched her arm an inch further. The sun almost touched the airship now. In her palm, the spores began to quicken. She had taken twenty, more than she ever dared before, for she had never managed to grow more than a couple of blooms.
Now it was as if it rained flowers.
One more and she would be the star of her cohort, only second to Thomais—
The engine stopped screaming and the airship took another dive downwards. A burnt smell reached her nostrils. There was smoke in the air. She had little knowledge of the machines humans made to substitute for wings. But she needed no technical knowledge at all to know this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.
Laeta wasn’t strong, but she still had wings. “Hold on to me,” she screamed. Matt was too heavy to cling on her while she flew, but she could at least slow their fall.
When they finally sank, it was no worse that it would be had they dived off one of the high rocks around the beach. They surfaced breathless and laughing uncontrollably in spite of themselves. Laeta’s wings were twice their weight, sea-drunk, and the salt made her eyes sting. Yet, she hadn’t felt so alive since she got sent up there with a satchel and nothing else. Only moments later, when she found her breath, did she register the throbbing pain where her hand had gotten too close to the sunrays.
The back of her palm was burnt. Not sunburnt but scorched as if she had touched a candle flame.
Matt’s airship had been a good idea. But she needed a more drastic one.
☼
That winter was the cruelest yet. Laeta’s red limbs and face returned to their old paleness before splitting bloody from the dry cold. It didn’t rain once; the sun never stopped showing its face. It smiled upon them, a toothy grin that prevented none of the north winds’ bite, nor the treacherous morning frost that made Laeta’s little brother slip and break his leg as he run down to the spiral gardens. The spores needed rain to grow, and the season yielded them none.
Before Laeta knew it was spring again and she was at the bay, satchel at hand, facing the sun that was already firing the ghost of a headache behind her eyes. In her satchel she carried dry beans and sunflower seeds and what little else they would import or grow in the cold draught. An empty backpack rested on her shoulders. For whatever she was going to bring from the Aetius she was meeting along the way. And for the blooms she was supposed to carry home.
Next to her, Thomais was biting the chapped skin off her lips. There was a bead of blood in her mouth when she took Laeta’s hand. “We can do it, both of us,” Thomais said. We’ll become adults together and come back and serve the island together.”
“There’s more than one way to serve the island, you know.”
Thomais could hardly stand in one place. Her legs were shaking nervously. “It won’t be that hard. We’ll stick together. I’ll hold an umbrella over you if I must, I will—”
“What?” Laeta smiled. “Will you let me keep you away from the sun?”
Thomais hadn’t prepared an answer to that, it seemed. The roots of her long chestnut braids seemed one-note without the sun’s golden kiss. She, too, had grown paler over the brief winter, but her own pallor was still only a foreshadowing of the rich tan that would follow. Taking a step back, Laeta took in the rest of the cohort who were talking anxiously among themselves in small groups. Many were pale like her, but they all craved the warmth and none of them became incapacitated for days after a single harvest.
“We’ll serve this island together,” her friend insisted. “Promise?”
Laeta squeezed Thomais’ hand until her nails got buried in flesh. “Promise.” She didn’t promise they would be together through it all. “Look,” she told her friend “I—” She swallowed hard. There was no easy way to say that your home can’t keep you. “I—don’t worry if I’m late. North of here, and many countries up, there’s another isle. There aren’t many Aetii there, but my friend Matt has seen a few. There are clouds enough there to keep me safe most of the way and—and who knows? I might even find something new to help our people.”
Thomais’ eyes widened. Her eyebrows came together, but she voiced nothing. She wasn’t as surprised as she might have been.
“I will come back,” Laeta went on. “Promise. But if I’m late, well—” it hurt to say the next bit. But it was about time. “Don’t you dare say no if my mother names you her successor. She might have to. None of the cohort can fly as high as you. Don’t waste it because of guilt.”
Thomais ran the backs of her thumbs against her eyelids, both shut tightly. Laeta couldn’t get a single word out of her through her mother’s ceremonial speech. Only when it was nearly time to take flight did Thomais whisper: “But don’t be gone for too long.”
There was no time to answer. The silver bell on top of the highest mountain top filled the island with a melancholic ring that scared the seagulls at the shore.
“I’ll send your mother your love,” Laeta called at her friend before kicking the ground.
Thomais brought the back of the palm against her mouth. This had always been the island’s rule; chief and second. One to keep the island in order, think of ways to keep it alive. The other to fly away, in distant lands, where, perhaps, some hope would wait hidden, if none could be found in the island.
Without waiting for her reply, Laeta threw her backpack at Thomais who caught it mid-air. She knew her friend would bring that and more if she didn’t worry about overshadowing the chief’s daughter.
Laeta turned her back before they could come after her, spreading her wings to fly, not higher, but further than anyone in her cohort has ever dared. To the opposite direction, no less.
It takes heart to fly too close to the sun. Sometimes, Laeta supposed, it takes more to turn your back to it and, perhaps, bring back rain to fill home’s thirsty cracks.
Madalena Daleziou (she/her) is a Rhysling and Pushcart-nominated writer from Greece, currently living in the UK. Her work has previously appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Deadlands, and other venues. She can most often be found in a bookshop or in front of a keyboard, writing stories with too many ghosts. She tweets at @LBooklott.