The Gradual (10 page)

Finally the questions came to an end, with some enquiries about our next planned destination – fortunately, we had been reminded the evening before that the island of Manlayl was to be our next stop. I was always strong on impressions, weak on practical details, so I was glad I had been told.

‘Manlayl,’ I said, not even being sure how to pronounce the name. It seemed not to matter. She slowly picked up my papers. These included the itinerary, where the names of all the islands we were going to visit were printed prominently. She slid them one by one under the plate of a franking machine before handing everything back to me.

She did then look up at me, and I saw her face clearly for the first time.

‘Your stave, Msr Sussken.’

‘My what?’

‘You are required to carry a stave when travelling between islands. I wish to register it.’

I remembered it then, lying half-forgotten under everything else. I pulled it out and handed it over, realizing as I did so that there was nothing on it that identified it as mine. Should I have written my name on it? Had anyone else done that?

She held the rod in both hands, looked closely at it, rotated it lightly in her fingers. Then she turned away from me and stepped across to a machine painted a dull ochrous colour, mounted on a shelf behind her. It looked as if it had been in use for many years. She pushed the end of the stave against an aperture and the whole wooden rod slid down inside. There was a short wait, the stick was sucked down a little more by something mechanical inside, an indicator light came on and went off, and then the stave popped up and free of the socket. She handed it back to me.

‘Thank you for visiting Wesler, Msr Sussken. I hope you have a pleasant onward voyage.’ She glanced at the people waiting behind me, and raised her voice. ‘Next!’

I picked up my luggage and was glad to move away towards the berth where the ship was waiting. I looked at the stave to see what her machine had done to it, but I could see nothing. No marks on it, no impressed stamp, no sign of anything. Perhaps there was a concealed strip buried inside the wood? Magnetized metal? I was glad to be through the process. I pushed the stave back into the holdall.

When I reached the ship I discovered that the gangplanks had not yet been lifted into place. I put down my bags and joined the others, already waiting on the apron. It was still fairly early in the day so the midday heat was not yet on us. After a few minutes I went across to the edge of the quay, close against the vertical wall of the black-painted hull of the ship. I looked down at the narrow strip of water that lay there, a deep greenish colour in the shadow. Staring at it I thought about this fragment of the sea, this ocean, spreading across the whole world. Why should they have attempted to keep it a secret? All these islands, unimaginably numerous, shaped but unstructured, washed by the seas, these fragments. I ached to understand the islands, but the reality confused the image.

That evening, as we sailed slowly westwards, it became apparent that the intrusive questioning of the Shelterate officials had bothered many of us. It seemed so out of step with the mellow, uninquisitive lifestyle of the islanders we had met on Wesler.

Jih was sitting with us in the saloon.

‘There’s an alert on, for army deserters,’ she said. ‘It’s a problem for the islands. When the conscripts manage to escape from their units in Sudmaieure the only direction they can take is to the north, which brings them to the islands. Most of them try to settle on the first place they come to, in the southern hemisphere, but most of the southern islands are unfriendly to deserters, or have been designated as military bases. Because of that many of the deserters have to keep moving on. A few of them find their way up to these latitudes. Different islands have different policies. Some offer automatic shelter and protection to deserters, some refuse it, some haven’t made up their minds. Shelterate arrangements are an issue all over the Archipelago. Every island has the same problem: the armies come down hard on deserters and any island which becomes a haven for them, even inadvertently, is likely to see squads of armed troops roaming the streets.’

‘Is that legal?’ one of the others asked.

‘Strictly speaking, no. We’re neutrals. But they come anyway. You will probably never be troubled by them, but because of the deserters entry procedures at most of the islands have become tightly controlled.’

The questions from my colleagues continued, but I was suddenly deep in thought about my brother Jacj. Did this explain what had happened to him? Had he become a deserter, fleeing from the army he detested? He could be anywhere, and hiding. How would I ever be able to find him?

And how would I know where to start searching? I had only short periods of time to myself, which was not what I had been expecting. Already, during our sojourn on Wesler, I had discovered that every day was filled. The daily round of hotel life, meal breaks, then all the travel to and from the venues, was time enough taken.

But other delays had emerged as matters to be dealt with.

Rehearsals, for example, had exposed a problem with uneven tempi – none of us had ever had to deal with this before. The percussionists claimed that the orchestra was constantly slipping behind them, the conductors said that the percussionists had not rehearsed adequately. There had been at least two unpleasant rows about this, and extra rehearsals followed as a result. Then we had all discovered that our performances would not run to time. They over-ran even when we began punctually, and even when we consciously tried to keep to the schedule.

And other problems: in my own case the workshops and masterclasses usually took place in areas away from the town centre, so I had to spend time travelling to and from them. More generally, a host of minor administrative crises had to be solved, dignitaries turned up unexpectedly and had to be greeted and dealt with courteously, things were always going wrong, expected events were not happening when they should, people were often getting lost, lateness was endemic, there were disputes between some of the brass section and the woodwinds, and constant tiredness, tiredness …

The ships, ancient or modern, mostly the former, gave a temporary relief from the stresses of the tour venues. The island we visited after Wesler was, as planned, Manlayl – after that came Derril. After Derril – well I can only say that although each island, each concert performance, was different, after the first three or four they tended to blur in memory. I recently found a copy of the itinerary I had been supplied with, and now I see a sort of cadent continuo, a steady beat, of mysterious names: Wesler, Manlayl, Derril, the Reever Fast Shoals, Eger, Tenkker, Ganntens. Most details of these islands fade away into the collective experience, but images remain, unlocated to particular names. They are vivid memories, unique and arousing.

We zigzagged our way across the Archipelago, veering sometimes slightly to the south, sometimes to the north, but ever westwards, disembarking, re-embarking, carrying our instruments or worrying about other people transporting them, eating, sitting, meeting and greeting more dignitaries, trying to sleep, rehearsing, performing, taking the airs of the Archipelago.

The end of the tour was approaching. Glaund and its industrial blight and its military junta seemed a world away. It was in every sense a real world away, halfway around the globe, and past concerns seemed for the time being minor and irrelevant. The music I lived for was finding fruition. I wanted to stay in these islands forever.

The weather remained hot and calm, the sea was almost invariably smooth. It rained torrentially one night while I was sleeping in my cabin deep in the accommodation deck, but I only heard about it the next morning. The prospect of islands continued and some of those delightful places turned out to be our destination of the day. I never lost the sense of excitement, the sensation of escape, as we stepped down from the ferry, went through the now predictable Shelterate and Havenic interrogations, breathed the scented air of whichever new island it was, prepared for the shock of the unexpected, took in the verdant greens of the forests, the brightness of the sandy beaches and the white-painted villas, the daunting height of the mountains, the glowing blue-white of the lagoons, and ventured into a new country.

Every port had its starkly built Shelterate office – we were learning to get through the interrogations more quickly, so everyone on the tour saw the delays as no more than a temporary irritant. Rather more interesting to me was the invariable presence of the group of young people I had noticed on arrival in Wesler.

Some of them were always there, gathered outside the Shelterate offices, casually dressed, lounging about in the sun or hanging back under their canopy. They seemed to be waiting for us: there on arrival, there as we left. For some reason I felt awkward in their presence.

I had a worrying but imprecise feeling that at first I had interpreted as threat. Why were they there? What did they want? Why did some of them carry knives? But they never approached any of us, they never said anything to us, and in fact when you looked directly towards them they barely seemed to notice us at all, letting their gaze fall. I slipped into the habit of looking quickly towards them but immediately looking away again, averting my gaze, so that I registered them without properly observing them.

After we had landed at a few islands I realized that some of them were the same individuals we saw on every island – somehow they managed to arrive at our destination before us, somehow they knew when and where we would arrive. There was a core of about five of these people who were always there to greet us.

But there were others who appeared less regularly – they all were roughly the same age, wore the same kind of scruffy clothes, lounged around in the same mannered body language of indolence or disdain. These extra people came and went, different faces, similar appearance. On the island of Quy the group had swelled to about fifteen, but other islands attracted smaller groups. The core of them remained. They did not like us, I decided, not knowing who or what they were.

Oddly, I seemed to be the only member of the tour who took any notice of them. No one else seemed to notice them, or react to them if they did.

The tour ended on Temmil, island home of the man who had plagiarized me. This fact added a piquancy of interest to my visiting the place, but by the time we arrived I was barely thinking about him at all. Everything still felt as if the tour was going to work out well, that there was nothing that could go wrong.

Nothing did, on Temmil, Choker of Air.

The main town on the island, and the only large port, was called Temmil Waterside. There was a newly opened concert hall in Waterside, a matter of great local civic pride. We were shown around it soon after we landed. It had a large and comfortable auditorium, and the best acoustics and backstage facilities I had ever encountered.

We were concluding our island tour with a gala concert – five main works would be performed, with two intervals and a period at the end set aside in case there were calls for encores. My piano concerto was to be played after the first interval – the soloist Cea Weller lived in Waterside and during our first day in the town she came to be introduced to the orchestra.

I was keen to meet her, to discuss her interpretation of my work, but our guest conductor for the night, the world-renowned Monseignior Bayan Cron, did not like the idea. I had expected that might happen, so I did not insist. However, Msr Cron did suggest I could have a brief meeting with her. He would be present.

I was with Cea Weller for only a few minutes. I found her personal manner soothing and encouraging, her approach to music brisk and professional. Her questions and observations were germane, polite and accurate, but we had barely begun to speak when Msr Cron steered her away from me.

The rehearsals went on without me, because from the second day I was running a compositional workshop elsewhere in the town. I was able to see something of the surrounding countryside. The town and harbour of Temmil Waterside were picturesque, but most of the interior was on a different scale of grandeur. It was a mountainous terrain, dominated by an active but presently quiescent volcano called the Gronner, situated in the western range. My workshop was taking place in the local secondary school. The windows of the main hall looked out across the hills, with the peak of the volcano clearly visible in the medium distance. Wisps of gases or steam were drifting about, high around the summit.

During the afternoon of the second day I was walking alone from the school building back to the hotel, when I suddenly remembered And Ante, the young man who had plagiarized my music.

I had been so absorbed by the experiences of the tour that I had all but forgotten him. Of course I had taken a mature decision, as I saw it at the time, to let the matter pass me by, but here I was, on the island where he lived. No longer was Temmil a remote place, a distant island at the opposite end of the world – it was here, this was the place, with these mountains, this town, that sea. It was even possible, probable perhaps, that Msr Ante lived here in Waterside. The recording studio where he had played was somewhere in these streets. I might even have seen him about the place without realizing it.

The days and evenings were packed. I was happy, engaged, involved in a thrilling musical adventure. I had no time for the electric guitar music of And Ante, whoever he might be.

In the day and a half before the night of the gala concert I was trying to make contact with Alynna. Before I set out, because we both knew that communications between islands and the mainland were almost non-existent, we had agreed that if we heard nothing from each other while I was away we should not be too concerned. After the final briefing before we left, I had been able to pass on to Alynna two poste restante addresses, one bureau on the island of Quy, the other here on Temmil, but when I checked with the collection bureaux nothing had arrived from her.

Even so, from every island where we had called, even for the briefest of stops, I mailed her either a short letter or a picture postcard. At least some of those, I reasoned, would work their way through the impermeable barriers that seemed to lie between us.