1 Jenine In the middle of the second semester a new student ar rived at school Her name was Jenine and she had two scars on her face running from under her eyes to just above her mouth They weren’t scars from an accident or scars she had been born with or scars from an attack They were ornamental They were the scars of ritual and tradition And they marked her as a wanderer as a no mad an immigrant of unknown origin and by tradition such people were Cloud Hunters Her family’s ship had turned up one day and moored in the harbor Jenine’s father had died lost in a storm the rumor said and her mother commanded the sky boat now though in truth there wasn’t much to take charge of The boat was not large and there was a crew of one a man so deeply tanned that his skin was almost black His name was Kaneesh His ears were studded with rings and he had a single-band tattoo which went all the way around his arm like a bracelet His head was shaved and his chest was hairless and he always seemed to glisten as if he had anointed himself with oil 1
THE CLOUD HUNTERS Jenine’s mother was named Carla and she like her daughter and like Kaneesh had two scars running down toward her mouth Her hair was jet black and she wore it long and thick often tied back in a band She was tall and slim and she looked like a warrior even when she came to the parents evenings She seemed very exotic and the perfume she used smelled strange and unusual My mother said it was musk She said it had been taken from the glands of a dead sky-whale which I thought rather cruel and bizarre and somehow intriguing Every morning Carla and Kaneesh would set sail and every evening they would return Sometimes the catch had been good sometimes bad and they would come back empty-handed with nothing in the hold If they had several bad days in a row they would journey farther afield which meant that they might not return for a week or more Carla would then pay somebody to look after Jenine and to give her board and lodging so that she would not have to miss school She wanted her daughter to have an education For it’s one thing to be a Cloud Hunter because you want to be it’s another thing to be a Cloud Hunter because you have no choice and are qualified for nothing else Yet even then your very looks are against you On the weekends when there was no school their boat would leave port on Friday afternoon and not return until late on Sunday or even early on Monday morning and Jenine would just be in time for the first lesson If you asked her what she had done the answer was always the same 2
alex shearer We were cloud hunting You find many Some What did you do Well a whole variety of things But none of them ever seemed as good as interesting or as exciting as gliding through mile after mile of clear blue sky chasing the wisps of distant vapor speeding towards the faraway patches of cloud trying to get there before anyone else did and then coming home with the tanks full of water to sell Nothing could compare to that Not in my eyes I wanted to go with them but was afraid to ask knowing that even if I did ask I would be refused Or if I wasn’t refused by them then my parents wouldn’t allow me to go Yet it wasn’t that I lacked the courage to make the journey I just lacked the courage to ask to go on it It’s strange how sometimes it is easier to act than to speak You’d think it would be the other way around (cid:82) Now boys and girls are supposedly different from each other in many more ways than the obvious And as much as boys may spend a lot of time thinking about girls when they get to a certain age and vice versa the fact is that they do not much hang out together At least not until Until they do that is But that was an until that was still a while away 3
THE CLOUD HUNTERS But in some ways Jenine was like a boy in the way she thought and the way she acted so it wasn’t so dif ficult to get to know her Maybe I even thought that I could capture her the way her mother’s boat cap tured the clouds and then I would have the essence of her possessed and distilled I thought it would be like chemistry when you reduce some solution to a mere few droplets and you can hold it in a bottle with a stopper on the top or in a test tube Well if I did think that I thought wrong You can’t capture a person that way or change them from cloud to water But you can make a friend of them simply by letting them be and by allowing them to know that you make no claims on them Then there you have it the cloud in your hand and as long as you don’t try to close your fist and your fingers around it you can keep it it’s yours But if you do try to hold it it just slips from your grasp I didn’t mind the teasing or if the others said she was my girlfriend which she wasn’t she was just a friend who happened to be a girl I didn’t overdo it either or spend too much time talking to her or make an obvi ous point of it I was just friendly that was all I was just keeping a friendship warm just waiting biding my time and then one day I would find the courage to ask the question And with luck the answer would be yes Although now when I look back I realize that I had far more than one question to ask 4
