Changrakata

Over the next several days, the weather turned gradually more humid. The pale, clear sky of the Golden Desert had been shading toward a gentler blue ever since we'd found the first valley; a few weeks later, we began finding dew on the grass every morning. I distinctly remember the first time I looked up to see an actual cloud overhead.

On Chakramalsian's request, we helped him to pull back the canopy of his wagon. He'd been spending as much time as possible outside of it anyway, now that the air outside was no longer dry enough to parch his amphibious skin. "Your painting has been a marvelous help in keeping me sane during the journey," he told me as we rolled up the silk sides of the wagon, leaving the fish-painted roof overhead to provide shade. "But if I have to spend another week without seeing where we're going, I think I might actually go mad."

He spent the rest of the day with his head and shoulders hanging out over the rim of the wagon, like a dog on a carriage ride, splashing the water in its bed with his tail and pointing out every interesting piece of scenery we passed to the endlessly patient Mogen.

The next morning, there was an entire bank of clouds on the horizon, lit up pink by the early-morning sun. A flock of birds was passing in front of it - or what I assumed was a flock of birds, though something was odd about their motions. Some sort of small dragonet or flying snake, perhaps. Distracted by the clouds, I gave them a smile and little more thought.

To Chak, they clearly meant something a great deal more important. He stared at them for several moments. He took off his spectacles and put them back on. Then, with a delighted grin, he uncoiled his long body, lifted himself out of the water, and swam straight up into the air.

"We've done it!" he cried in delight, coiling in graceful loops overhead. Glittering drops of water fell from his frilled tail onto our astonished, upturned faces. "We've reached Changrakata. We're here!"

He explained the situation to us while floating weightlessly above one of the folding chairs we set up for breakfast. While we ate and talked, we watched more schools of fish swimming overhead, which I had originally mistaken for flocks of birds.

There are many varieties of airborne aquatic life all over Hamjamser, of course. The glider-eels of the Railway Regions can remain in the air as long as they keep their long ventral fins dipped in the water. The butterfly guppies of the High Fields are a common sight, darting from flower to flower alongside bees and hawk moths during the Summer months. The sailfin mer-folk of the Crumpled Reef claim to have signed a formal treaty with the Element of Water, which allows them to glide through the air on carpet-like independent wavelets. The floating Sargasso Jungle reportedly has an abundance of floating species, though they tend to be dirigible in nature, filling natural gasbags and float bladders with homemade hydrogen instead of using more mysterious means of flotation.

The conditions that allowed Chakramalsian to float weightless in the air, with his whiskers and external gills drifting lazily in currents that the rest of us felt as mild breezes, are certainly among the more mysterious ones.

The sky of Changrakata is one vast ocean.

The name of the country translates, more or less, to “Sea-Dreaming Land.” The generally accepted theory is that the air of Changrakata somehow remembers the prehistoric time when the country was underwater - something that places such as the Railway Regions or the Golden Desert, for all their ancient aquatic fossils, have long since forgotten. Whatever the cause, any creature in Changrakata (in theory) can swim in the country's air, just like a fish in water, as long as it has a firm and unshakeable belief that it can do so.

In nearly all cases, a belief this strong is found only in creatures that are actually aquatic. The skies of Changrakata are full of fish of all sizes, as well as tree-grazing manatees, gnat-like swarms of darting krill, and giant squid as massive and stately as the grandest airship. However, you will find not a single dog, cat, or hoofed thugroffler among them. Otters take freely to the skies in pursuit of fish; their dry-footed cousins, the weasels and stoats, stay firmly anchored on the ground. Chak told us that even within the Changrakatan branch of his family, he has cousins born with fins who can swim in the air, while their own finless siblings cannot.

Naturally, Karlishek and I gave it a try, doing our best to convince ourselves that we could join Chak in the air. (Mogen declined to do anything so silly, but the prospect of flight seemed more than worth a little indignity to us.) Alas, we remained firmly on the ground. To be born with feet, it seems, is to be forever a walker. *

Chak, in contrast, had no trouble remaining airborne. While the rest of us rode the wagons behind the heavily plodding gafl, he spent the rest of the day swimming: darting down to ground level to examine interesting plants and insects, gliding up above the treetops to watch the fish overhead, or simply keeping pace with us with easy, rippling strokes of his tail. It was impossible not to smile while I watched him. After so many months confined to a single wagon, unable to travel under his own power, his delight at suddenly gaining the freedom of flight was infectious. I even caught Mogen grinning at him once or twice.

We continued to see aquatic life overhead all day. The sight was disorienting at first, but all of us had seen stranger, and we soon grew accustomed to seeing birds and fish sharing the same environment. A fish hawk snatched herring straight out of the air while a sea turtle munched on jellyfish above it. A day bat performed feats of aerobatics in pursuit of gnats and minnows. Every so often, we would briefly come under the shadow of a passing cloud or pod of whales. A few of the fish came low enough, curious about our group of mostly earthbound travelers, that I was able to identify them: tuna, grapplejaw trout, paisley salmon, and a few of the omnipresent sporefish. Catfish snuffled through the underbrush in search of slugs and beetles.

The mingling of salt- and fresh-water species in a single atmosphere is apparently not unusual here. When they're sharing the air with birds and insects, I suppose the usual rules must be somewhat relaxed.

I suspect that I'm going to enjoy Changrakata.

---

* There are exceptions, of course. A previous ruler of Gillirangl (one of Changrakata's larger cities) was mad enough that she believed herself to actually be a fish, even though she more closely resembled a rhinoceros; she was able to swim freely above the towers of her palace. This belief also led to her eventual disappearance. Her madness eventually led her to conclude that the sun was a particularly fat and shining beetle hovering above the surface of the universe, and she swam off into the sky, determined to catch and eat it. As far as anyone in Gillirangl knows, she is still swimming. Several subsequent rulers stated that they would step down if the Empress ever returned, since she would, of course, have the prior claim. Statements of this kind became more common as the chances of the Empress ever returning became increasingly remote. It's quite possible that a few of them even meant it. Tolerance for mad rulers has diminished somewhat in recent centuries, though, and the current popular opinion is that swimming off to eat the sun constituted an abdication of the throne. The city's present rulers are a pragmatic bunch; they have no intention of turning over their well-run city to someone who thinks that heavenly bodies are edible.