Twelve

It’s as though he’s never seen the stars before, the opaque luminosity of the Milky Way, the rapid twinkle of the stars near the horizon, the reds and blues only seen just out of focus from the corner of his eye, each twinkling to white when looked at directly, the occasional sprint of a falling star breaking free of the cacophony, the great girdle binding the sky to the earth, a hero’s embrace.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks, gently pulling his arm a little more tightly about her. He leans in and puts his chin on her shoulder, still keeping his eyes on the heavens, his arm about her waist, her sitting between his legs on the roof outside his room.

“I never knew…” he replies, “it was always so hard to see through the smog.”

“They say it’s like this all over the city now. Out in the Reaches you can see almost from one horizon to another, and on a moonless night they say it’s like a sparkling roof laid over the land.”

“Why can we see it now?”

“I heard that since folk are burning more Black Wood there’s less smoky fires, so less smog. Seems to be true though, since the markets are much easier to be in.”

He’d noticed the same on his last few visits through the hawker quarter, with almost all the carts now burning the charcoal; smoky initially, but settling into a smooth, regular heat the hawkers preferred. The food was improving as a result, and more people were choosing to come down to the quarter to eat. His friend the cart jockey, always a reliable source of decent cooking was, as you’d expect, making out like a bandit, with few spots being available at his table, the carpenter resorting to standing at the edge of the awning listening to the seated patrons talk, gossip, or complain.

“Where does it come from again?”

“The Black Wood? They say it comes from out east somewhere. There’s a forest with endless and abundant trees they carefully harvest to make the wood, then it comes down the river on barges to the docks out up by Warehouse Town.”

He sits back a little to look over his shoulder to the east and the rising stars. “Out east,” he remarks, “isn’t that where they say the creeping death is? You know, the poison vines?”

She chuckles a little, “That’s just a bard’s tale, one to scare the rubes in the markets, surely?”