LAquilone du Estrellas | Page 4

of the impossible kite --
acquiring the dowel by planting a langka seed at the foot of the grove
of a kindly diuata (and waiting the seven years it took to grow, unable
to leave), winning the lower spreader in a drinking match against the
three eldest brothers of Duma'Alon, assembling the pieces of the lower
edge connector while fleeing a war party of the Sumaliq, solving the
riddles of the toothless crone Ai'ai'sin to find what would be part of a
wing tip, climbing Apo'amang to spend seventy sleepless nights to get
the components of the ferrule, crafting an artificial wave to fool the
cerena into surrending their locks of hair that would form a portion of
the tether, rearing miniature horses to trade to the Duende for parts of
the bridle, and finally spending eighteen years painstakingly collecting
the fifteen thousand different strands of thread that would make up the
aquilone's surface fabric.
When at last they returned to Ciudad Meiora, both stooped and older,
they paused briefly at the gates of the Portun du Transgresiones. The
butcher's boy looked at Maria Isabella and said, "Well, here we are at
last."
She nodded, raising a weary arm to her forehead and making the sign
of homecoming.
"Do you feel like you've wasted your life?" she asked him, as the
caravan bearing everything they had amassed lumbered into the city.
"Nothing is ever wasted," the butcher's boy told her.

They made their way to the house of Melchor Antevadez and knocked
on his door. A young man answered them and sadly informed them that
the wizened artisan had died many many years ago, and that he, Reuel
Antevadez, was the new Maestro du Cosas Ingravidas.
"Yes, yes. But do you still make kites?" Maria Isabella asked him.
"Kites? Of course. From time to time, someone wants an aquilone or--"
"Before Ser Antevadez, Melchor Antevadez, died, did he leave
instructions for a very special kind of kite?" she interrupted.
"Well... ," mumbled Reuel Antevadez, "my great-grandfather did leave
a design for a woman named Maria Isabella du'l Cielo, but--"
"I am she." She ignored his shocked face. "Listen, young man. I have
spent all my life gathering everything Melchor Antevadez said he
needed to build my kite. Everything is outside. Build it."
And so Reuel Antevadez unearthed the yellowing parchment that
contained the design of the impossible kite that Melchor Antevadez had
dreamed into existence, referenced the parts from the list of things
handed to him by the butcher's boy, and proceeded to build the
aquilone.
When it was finished, it looked nothing at all like either Maria Isabella
or the butcher's boy had imagined. The kite was huge and looked like a
star, but those who saw it could not agree on how best to describe the
marvelous conveyance.
After he helped strap her in, the butcher's boy stood back and looked at
the woman he had grown old with.
"This is certainly no time for tears," Maria Isabella reprimanded him
gently, as she gestured for him to release the kite.
"No, there is time for everything," the butcher's boy whispered to
himself as he pushed and pulled at the ropes and strings, pulley and

levers and gears of the impossible contrivance.
"Goodbye, goodbye!" she shouted down to him as the star kite began
its rapid ascent to the speckled firmament above.
"Goodbye, goodbye," he whispered, as his heart finally broke into a
thousand mismatched pieces, each one small, hard, and sharp. The tears
of the butcher's boy (who had long since ceased to be a boy) flowed
freely down his face as he watched her rise -- the extraordinary old
woman he had always loved strapped to the frame of an impossible
kite.
As she rose, he sighed and reflected on the absurdity of life, the
heaviness of loss, the cruelty of hope, the truth about quests, and the
relentless nature of a love that knew only one direction. His hands
swiftly played out the tether (that part of the marvelous rope they had
bargained for with two riddles, a blind rooster and a handful of cold
and lusterless diamante in a bazaar held only once every seven years on
an island in the Dag'at Palabras Tacitas) and he realized that all those
years they were together, she had never known his name.
As she rose above the city of her birth, Maria Isabella took a moment to
gasp at the immensity of the city that sprawled beneath her, recalled
how everything had begun, fought the trembling of her withered hands,
and with a fishbone knife (that sad and strange knife which had been
passed from hand to hand, from women consumed by unearthly passion,
the same knife which had been part of her reward for solving the
mystery of