Tales Around Blue Blossom

The summer heat had settled over Blue Blossom like a damp, sticky blanket. It pressed on the gravel paths until they seemed to shimmer, and it made the air in the wooded stretches thick enough to taste: warm bark, sun-baked moss. The Terran had been walking through it for the better part of an hour with a roll of survey ribbon looped over one wrist and a leather satchel bumping against his hip.

“Here,” he said, stopping at the edge of the clearing below the Temple of Ala. “I think the benches should go here.”

Tula stopped a half step behind him. She did not so much halt as cease moving, drifting to a standstill the way a thread of smoke does when the wind dies. The other maids called her shvivenivien, the ghostly one, and Henry had never found a better word for it. She walked as if the ground were merely a suggestion, and her feet barely disturbed the gravel. Her violet twin tails hung still in the heavy air. The ribbons wound around her long legs, a deeper violet than her hair, stirred only when she shifted her weight, and she shifted it often enough that Henry suspected she liked being looked at. Her amethyst eyes had irises like cut crystal, and when she looked at you they seemed to go straight through. Maevin had sent her along that morning with the day’s weather report and a look that said do not let him wander off.

“This is an excellent choice, my master,” Tula observed, peering at the grass. “The temple is in view. It is also close enough to the path that visitors can enjoy the view and the shade.”

“I’d like people to sit and look at the temple. It feels wrong that something so old is so empty.” He knelt, tied a strip of bright ribbon around a stake, and pressed it into the soft earth. “Four benches, maybe five. A path from the north gate, so nobody has to climb the hill.”

He glanced at her. She was silent, but her eyes were watching and seemed to approve. She glided to the far side of the spot, so lightly that not a blade of grass bent.

The sky was a polished blue bowl without a single cloud in it. He looked at it a little longer than he needed to. Tula, standing quietly beside him, noticed.

He worked for a while. The sun climbed, and the red truffets that nested in the temple eaves sang their bright, looping song over and over. Henry tied ribbon, measured out paces, and argued softly with himself about whether five benches was too many. Tula held the far end of the measuring cord and did not complain once, though a bead of sweat slid down her temple and the heat bent the air above the grass.

It was the light that changed first. Henry noticed it as a strange stillness, a quiet that fell over the clearing like a hand over a mouth. The truffets stopped mid-note. The sunlight, which had been gold and cheerful, drained to a flat, queasy green. Somewhere beyond the trees the wind began to gather itself with a long, low sound, like a crowd drawing breath.

“Tula?”

She had already turned toward the horizon. Her eyes had gone wide, and her face wore the stricken look of someone watching her own reflection betray her. “That is not possible,” she whispered. “I checked. I checked twice.”

The first gust hit, hard enough to snap the survey ribbons straight out like flags. Branches tossed. Leaves flipped to show their pale undersides. And with a roar that rolled across the treetops like thunder, the rain arrived.

One moment the air was dry, and the next it was a gray wall of water drumming on the stones of the temple, hissing in the grass, and beginning to get them wet.

“My master, the kiosk!” She was already pointing back down the path, a good two hundred paces away. “We must run, I will—”

She stopped, because Henry had not moved.

He was unbuckling the satchel at his hip with the calm, slightly sheepish air of a man doing something he’d been looking forward to all morning. He drew out a long black bundle, tightly wrapped, with a polished wooden handle at one end. He thumbed a catch.

Fwump.

A black silk dome bloomed above his head. Its ribs ran out from the center like the veins of a leaf, and the rain struck it with a sound like quick fingertips on a drum. The drops beaded along the edge and fell in a neat, glittering ring around his boots. Tula stared at him in astonishment her twin tails collapsed against her neck from the rain that was steadily getting heavier.

“It's a roof?” she said at last.

“Portable one.” Henry grinned.

“You knew about the weather?”

“I didn’t know. I just, um.” He cleared his throat. “Terran weather forecasts are terrible. I got used to carrying one, missed mine so I ordered one.”

He held the umbrella out a bit. “Come here before you drown, Tula.”

She hesitated. A gust slapped her wet braid against her cheek, and her ribbons dripped small violet tears onto the grass. Then she drifted in under the dome and stood there both confused and fascinated. She tipped her head back and studied the ribs, one by one, her lips moving as she counted. Then she raised a single finger and touched the underside of the silk, so lightly that the fabric hardly noticed. She tapped it. The rain answered from the other side.

“It does not leak,” she murmured. “Not at the seams. Not anywhere.” She turned her crystal eyes on him, full of the purest fascination he had ever seen on her face. “How is it folded?”

“Hinges, mostly. And a spring.” Henry watched her trace a rib down to the handle and back. “Don’t you have umbrellas here? I thought something like this would’ve been invented a hundreds of years ago.”

“Um-brel-la,” she repeated, tasting the word. “No. Not as you mean it. We have roofs.” She said it as if the distinction were obvious. “The rain on Victory in summer is warm, my master. A maid in her work dress is not made miserable by it. Our hair dries before we reach the kitchens. And the paths are not left bare.” She nodded back down the trail. “There is a kiosk or an awning along every route in the estate. Stone, and older than any of us. When the sky turns, one walks to the nearest and waits. The rain does not last.”

“Unless the forecast is wrong.”

“Then one is wet,” Tula said with great dignity, “and the rain bays are not so different. Half the household would call this a bath that arrived early.”

“So nobody carries their own.”

“A roof is something a House gives to those who walk its paths. To carry one’s own would say the House had failed to provide.” She considered the silk again. “Or that one did not trust the forecast. And wood is for building. It would be thought wasteful to spend it, and silk besides, on something that is used for an hour.”

“Huh.” Henry looked up at the little black sky he had carried across half the galaxy. “So I’ve been insulting everyone.”

“Not really. Probably just confusion like I was,” Tula said and then she gestured. “Since you have this portable roof, shall we continue?”

Why not? Henry smiled and the two began to work again.