Roar of Sky

by Beth Cato

  She knew better than to try to walk across the sand just below her. Even with her braces on, her leg muscles could not negotiate the uneven, shifting grains beneath her feet—and what manner of person wanted to walk across a beach wearing shoes? The deck allowed her to get as close as she needed to be. Cy had even constructed her a bench of orichalcum—they had a surprising excess these days, with business booming—so that in the event of an earthquake, she had an effective buffer between herself and the ground.

  The risk of geomantic activity in this part of the central coast was negligible. A short drive south, the volcanic plug Morro Rock sat in its bay, part of a chain of similar gigantic rocks dubbed the Nine Sisters. Ingrid didn’t want to live in a place devoid of earthquakes—she still wanted to help ensure public safety by drawing in energy on occasion—but she knew she didn’t dare live somewhere with catastrophic potential.

  She also needed deep mists and the salty freshness of the Pacific Ocean, and greenery. The village of Cambria offered her what she needed.

  From here, she could stare west, and she often did, as if she could see beyond the horizon to where Excalibur hovered somewhere near the Hawaiian Vassal States—obedient vassals no more. Full rebellion had erupted after film emerged of a Bayard obliterating unarmed women in a picket line. The Chinese aboard Excalibur had formed an alliance with the native Hawaiians as well as subjugated Korean and Filipino plantation laborers. Ingrid knew nothing beyond what the papers said, but she knew Lee was sending a message her way. That he remembered her—and the Kealohas. That he wouldn’t forget others who had suffered under Unified Pacific rule.

  Ingrid had also read that a sudden lava flow from Mauna Loa had obliterated vast stores of UP armaments. This had given the rebels a major military advantage on Hawaii Island, but perhaps more importantly, buoyed belief that Madam Pele had blessed their side of the fight. Ingrid had no doubt that was true.

  The Chinese possession of Excalibur had changed the dynamics of the world. Uprisings had been sparked throughout Asia, even as Roosevelt stymied the Unified Pacific’s demands for more American support. Sometimes, sitting here, it felt unreal that she had played an integral role in everything—that even now, thousands of people lived and died because of her actions.

  She was no longer directly involved in the world’s power struggles, but she still intended to fight, in her own way.

  Even with her braces on, she took the stairs with slow care, her gaze on her feet to make sure her foot placement was solid. Cold and moisture seemed to cause her muscles to misfire more often.

  She paused at the ground floor of the house to rest for a moment and take in the ocean’s shush and roar, the wind rattling through the Monterey pines, and the near-constant grinds and clicks from the workshop nearby. Fenris had worked the night through, as usual; he delighted in his new smithy and its capability to work orichalcum. More orders for custom braces came in every week, forwarded by a Los Angeles doctor associated with Mr. Roosevelt. George Augustus did similar labor at his place over near Bakersfield. The Augustus men had decided it was best for them to stay separated by distance as George continued his new life. George remained a highly recognizable figure from the social pages of newspapers, and if he were to be outed, he didn’t want Cy identified along with him.

  She continued upward. The kitchen and main living areas were on the second story, allowing Ingrid the freedom to rove barefoot through her favorite rooms, if she chose. The deck just off the kitchen granted her a full view of the rocky beach and the dark sprawl of the Pacific. This was where she had most often engaged in her writing these days.

  She had just settled into her chair to skim a source book when Cy’s footsteps padded up behind her. “Isn’t that the book you described a few days ago as ‘best used as a weapon against burglars, because it will soak in blood so well’?”

  Ingrid placed her bookmark and closed the tome. The leather-bound geomancy textbook was a solid eight hundred pages in length. If she held it on her lap too long, it restricted nerve signals through her legs.

  “I’d like to amend that with a comment, if I could. The text is so dry, the moisture from the blood might make for better reading, too.”

  Cy laughed. “That awful?”

  “All of them are.” She gestured over her shoulder to the bookshelf inside, host to a full array of geomancy texts sent along by Mr. Sakaguchi. “These books offer some instruction on geomancy, but they are far more effective as soporifics.”

  A soft clunk indicated a cup being set on the table beside her. She looked over in surprise.

  “I saw you coming up the stairs, and put the kettle on.”

  “Bless you.” She touched the porcelain with the backs of her knuckles. Too hot to drink. “Green tea. Perfect.”

  “I hoped so.” He set a steaming coffee mug down and claimed the seat across the table. “Mind some company for a time?”

  “I do welcome any excuse to procrastinate.”

  “I need to go down in a few and finesse an ankle brace we made yesterday.” He took a sip. “I never get tired of this view.” He wasn’t looking at the ocean, but at her.

  “You’re not allowed to say something like that without being close enough to kiss me.”

  “I beg your pardon.” He set down his cup, and a moment later his lips were on hers. He tasted like coffee, which she found more than tolerable under the circumstances. She cradled his face with both hands, his jaw clean-shaven and soft under her fingers. He deepened the kiss, his tongue stroking hers. A soft moan escaped her throat. His fingertips—warm from carrying the cups—wandered down her neck to tug at her collar. Her chilled skin broke out in goose bumps.

  “If you wish to procrastinate, I’d be happy to oblige you.” His eyes sparkled with promise as his fingers teased along the scooped neck of her dress.

  “Is that so?” She sounded breathless. “Any particular activities in mind?”

  His hand found her right breast and enjoyed the full curve. Her layers of clothing suddenly felt quite cumbersome. “A few.” He pulled back to gaze upon her with stark appraisal.

  “I wouldn’t mind having my braces off. Do you think a leg massage could be worked into your agenda?”

  “Always, Ingrid. Whatever you’d like.” The tone of his voice made her squirm in her seat.

  “Goddamn it!” Fenris’s voice echoed from down below, accompanied by a thud.

  Ingrid sighed and pulled back. “Sounds like he might be coming upstairs.” Fenris had made a habit of not-so-subtly granting them a few minutes’ warning before he made a visit. A precaution much appreciated by the newlyweds.

  “He might. May be best to wait and see.” His tone turned wistful. He kissed her again, his lips hungry. He kept his eyes open wide, his gaze intent behind his lenses. “I’d rather us not be interrupted while we’re busy procrastinating.”

  His hands trailed over her curves again as he withdrew into his chair.

  She stared at him in dismay. “That’s it? You’re going to stop, just like that?”

  “Ingrid, it’s taking every bit of my self-control to resist whisking you away to the bedroom, at which point, I’d be particularly cross if Fenris were to come a-knocking.” His words were even and measured. “I am trying to be patient for a few minutes more, with the hopes that we can then carry forth our plans.”

  She laughed. “In other words, we’re procrastinating in our plans to procrastinate?” She shook her head as more swearing boomed from below. “I suppose I do love to sit here and be serenaded by the birds, the sea, and the distinctive arias of Fenris.”

  “I suppose it’s a good thing we own the land around, or the neighbors’d surely hate us.” He took another sip, an ear tilted toward the stairs in wait of stomping footsteps. An interruption was sure to be imminent with this amount of warning. “I was thinking that maybe next week we could take the Bug up to San Francisco so you could visit Mr. Sakaguchi for a few days. I need to settle on some new suppliers now that the city’s g
rowing back. We could take in the sights. You could borrow more books for your project.”

  Ingrid stared into the grayness. She had once entertained the notion of being a respected geomancer, in a position to teach young geomancers. She now knew that could never be. For now, she had to continue to hide her abilities. Blum was gone, but there could be others like her out there, those who wanted to utilize her as a weapon.

  But she’d be damned if she idled away without using her insight into geomancy for something. Therefore, she was quite literally rewriting the texts on the field. Mr. Sakaguchi was setting up everything on her behalf.

  Ingrid, the housekeeper’s daughter, the secretary, the woman often assumed to be an exotic and illiterate plaything, was writing the books that would train geomancers for generations to come. Her name would be on the cover: I. Carmichael. Her identity would be neither a secret nor promoted.

  Even though half of the previous textbook authors hadn’t had a lick of magical talent, she expected her authorship to create some fuss among the curmudgeons of the ol’ boys club auxiliaries. She welcomed it.

  Ingrid might be a woman, and one of color, but she would not be silent. All her life, what she had craved most of all was respect. She wanted to be looked in the eye and to have her intelligence recognized. She would no longer ask for that kind of acknowledgment. She demanded it.

  “I’d like to take a trip up to the bay,” she said, smiling at Cy. “He’s been sending me updates on the construction of the new auxiliary, but I’d love to see it in person.”

  “It’s been some two weeks since your last letter, right?”

  She nodded as she sipped her green tea. “Yes. He’s being kept busy as the sole senior warden. He’ll have more help once the auxiliary is set to open, but for now, he’s trying to do everything himself. Of course.”

  “Mmm. He’ll have to slow down if you’re there for a visit.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. But he wouldn’t slow down for long; he had too much to do. Nor would she stay for more than a few days. The presence of other geomancers kept her pain from aggravating the two-headed snake in the fault line, but she didn’t dare test their capabilities as a buffer for long. She did enjoy seeing some of the changes in the city, though, even as many more perturbed her. The buildings were all wrong. The maps in her brain could not adjust.

  She didn’t want to adjust her way of thinking either. She didn’t want to walk the streets, her gaze studiously avoiding that of the men all around. She didn’t want to wear a servant’s clothes. She didn’t want to pretend she was Cy’s lesser, not his wife and equal. Not that they were married under the law, of course. Such a thing wasn’t allowed in California. But she and Cy had held a small ceremony anyway, laws be damned. Mr. Sakaguchi, George Augustus, and Fenris Braun had witnessed their vows. Lee hadn’t been able to attend, of course, and she had missed him with a sorrow too deep to put into words. Even so, it’d been a happy day. The sylphs had responded to Ingrid’s joy with an enthusiastic tizzy that caused her flower bouquet to grow roots.

  Ingrid remained happy, too. Life was quiet here. Neighbors minded their own business, but if an autocar became mired in mud, everyone pitched in to get it free. Cy and Fenris worked with their metal and gadgetry, and for minimal profit. Ingrid read textbooks and wrote notes and cursed about what some fool man wrote in 1883 and read and griped some more. The original sylphs from Seattle had stayed with them. They roamed the hillside and kept Ingrid supplied in strawberries every day of the week.

  She stood and dropped the textbook into the chair, which creaked beneath its onerous burden. Far below, she heard footsteps on the stairs. She and Cy shared a smile. Sure enough, they were right to procrastinate—for the time being.

  “Cy,” she said as she walked through the open door to the kitchen. As always, her eyes found the carved plaque of a qilin upon the wall, which she acknowledged with a dip of her head and a smile. “When we fly the Bug, let me take a full hour in the chair this time.”

  “A full hour?” He followed her, empty cup in hand. “That’s a long time. I’m certain you can handle it, but I’m not sure if Fenris can.”

  “If Fenris can what?” Fenris clopped across the deck and trailed them inside.

  “Handle a long stint of me learning how to pilot,” Ingrid said. “You wheezed and moaned during my last lesson.”

  “That was meditational breathing, thank you very much. I need pastries. The sylphs are hungry.” He threw open the pantry door to pull out jamu-pan she’d made the day before.

  “I just fed the sylphs at bedtime! They shouldn’t be starving already.”

  “Yes, well.” He spoke with a mouthful of yeast roll. “There are more sylphs now.”

  Cy froze. “Beg your pardon?”

  Fenris flapped a hand dismissively. “Oh, nothing like that cloud we left on Excalibur. These are itty-bitty sylphs. Maybe they hid a bunch of chrysalises somewhere along the slope, and these just hatched? I don’t know. In any case, we have more sylphs, and we need more bread.” He grabbed an extra roll as he swiped the door shut with his elbow. Seconds later, his feet thundered back down the staircase.

  “Oh goodness.” Ingrid pressed a hand to her forehead. “I’ve been worried about how our passel of sylphs is impacting the ecology here, and now we’ll need to contend with more?”

  Cy slid an arm around her waist, drawing her close slowly so that she had time to adjust her footing. Their lips met, demanding and full of promise of more activities to come. His nose nuzzled hers as he pulled back. “We’ve had to contend with far worse conundrums. We’ll manage. Besides, this means more strawberries, right?”

  “Says the man who always happens to be in the thick of some engineering dilemma in the workshop when I’m making jam.”

  “Cy? Ingrid?” Fenris called from below, a tremulous note to his voice. “You’d better, ah, come see. I think a few more, um, hatched. Spawned. Whatever.”

  Cy and Ingrid shared a look. She worked her hand into the pocket where she always kept filled and empty kermanite, just in case.

  “We’ll be right there!” she yelled down to the ground, a hand on the orichalcum railing and Cy a step behind.

  Yes, they’d handle this new crisis as they handled each catastrophe before—together, and with the proper application of both magic and pastries.

  Author’s Note

  Writing an alternate history requires carefully twining reality and fiction. Some of my changes have been on purpose; others are the result of my ignorance. I beg forgiveness for any inconsistencies and errors.

  Japan’s ambitions for possession of the Asian mainland began long before World War II. The Japanese tussled with Russia in the 1890s and 1900s, and won—and President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his integral role in their treaty negotiations.

  Chinese immigrants to America were subject to persecution, abuse, and outright murder. The Geary Act and its “Dog Tag Law” in the 1890s truly did force Chinese residents to carry photo identification cards at all times as evidence that they were legal residents of the United States.

  An early scene in Roar of Sky describes downtown Honolulu festooned with Japanese flags and banners celebrating the emperor and the Imperial military. This wasn’t a fanciful scene created from my imagination alone, but one based on a real celebration in Honolulu immediately following the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895.

  At the start of the twentieth century, six out of ten people in Hawaii had been born elsewhere. The native population had been devastated by foreign diseases; therefore, sugar and fruit plantation workers were imported from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. In my world, these demographics have shifted, with Japanese residents granted more privileges and Chinese workers shuffled elsewhere. Honolulu’s Chinatown really was largely destroyed in 1900 when an effort to burn down buildings that hosted victims of bubonic plague ended up scorching much of the neighborhood.

  The description of the
journey into Kilauea is heavily based on travelogues from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and my own January 2017 visit to the island. I journeyed down the Halema’uma’u Trail, the one used a century ago to bring guests from Volcano House to the lava lake. During my visit, the trail ended at the crater floor, as volcanic fumes had rendered it unsafe to venture beyond that point. Even if I had been able to trek farther in, I would not have had the liberties that visitors once experienced. All of the behaviors I describe—from cooking sausages over the lava to singeing postcards—are accurate to the period.

  Sightings of Pele as a white dog are a phenomenon of the twentieth century. My bibliography for Call of Fire already featured resources I relied on to write about Pele, and I want to repeat some of the most useful ones here: Pele: Goddess of Hawai’i’s Volcanoes by Herb Kawainui Kane, journal articles by H. Arlo Nimmo, and The Burning Island: Myth and History in Volcano Country, Hawai’i by Pamela Frierson. Yes, Mark Twain really did write a travelogue about his visit to the lava lake.

  I chose Dominguez Field as my characters’ Southern California base of operations as a hat tip to very real events: the Los Angeles International Air Meets held on Dominguez Hill in 1910 and 1911. Over 250,000 people attended, and for many of them it was the first time they had ever seen airplanes and other innovative aircraft, including various dirigibles.

  Los Angeles was a young city in 1906—proud of its Main Street Station, the largest building in the west—and not yet a film capital. I advanced cinema technology a wee bit to suit my needs. In Japan, silent films did host benshi to provide narration and character voices throughout the experience. Tamale (also spelled “tomale” in some books) carts were indeed a feature of downtown Los Angeles, a fascinating regional novelty described in several travel guides of the period; I combined them with Japanese yatai food carts, which were also common throughout the Meiji period. Tamale carts also sold pie and other weird new food creations called “hamburgers” and “wienerwursts.”