The Gradual (20 page)

I protected myself from the steadily increasing hot weather by wearing a long linen robe and a broad-brimmed hat, both of which I bought from a stall on the deck of the ferry between Gannten and Derril. I covered my face and arms with barrier cream. After the first day away from home I stopped shaving and soon I grew used to the appearance of my new-growing beard.

Music returned to me. Every island had a different note. I leaned on the rail, crossing the sea, staring at land. The music sounded in my head and resounded in my body: the vessels’ movements through the water, the slow rocking of the ships with their mechanical, unidentifiable sounds from deep within their hulls, the distant murmuring of the engines, and the steady vibration. Islands never failed me. Seabirds hovered and swooped in the wake of the ships and everywhere there were glimpses of fish and other swimming animals, surfacing intermittently, perhaps curiously, to see us churning past. Islands released their notes. With the sudden blasts of sirens and horns, the close encounters with other ships in the narrows between islands, I felt rhythms starting up, syncopations. When we passed between two islands I did not know on which side of the deck to be first.

Where once before I would have sought discordance, challenge and surprise in the music that I dreamed about, now I whistled tunes quietly to myself, tapped my foot as a rhythm came to me. I would stand close to the prow of every boat, responding to the slow rise and fall as we moved across the swell. Much of the time I had my eyes closed as I reacted to the sounds in my mind, or I stared away across the water to the nearest island, not focusing, just looking. Passengers on passing ships waved across intersecting wakes – soon I became one of them, joining in and waving back, loving this marine adventure, this journey into unknown zones, not only of the vast, island-crammed ocean, but also into the new musical impulses, lighter, happier, that were rising from my soul.

So a good end to the first part of the voyage. And so to Muriseay, and after waiting for him for many days because he was making a record at the far end of the island, Denn Mytrie.

The day before I was due to start the next part of my long journey, Denn took me for a drive in the hills that surrounded Muriseay City, finally arriving in a small village on the southern coast. We stopped for a long lunch: we ate on a shaded terrace overlooking the sea far below us, the white and terracotta houses ranged on the hills around the tiny cove. A score of small boats and yachts were tied up against the jetties.

I took it all in, pretending to take the view for granted, but in fact the simple beauty made me feel breathless. Denn and I sipped a chilled wine, picking slowly at the salad we had chosen for a first course. With the food half eaten I put down my fork, leaned forward so that my elbows rested on the wicker arms of the chair. I was staring down at the sea, breathing the clean air, the scent of the vine hanging from the trellis above, the flowers, the waft of strange food. Insects stridulated around us, unseen in the trees.

A huge dark ship was moving slowly across the view, heading in the direction of Muriseay City, a long way in the distance, beyond the hills.

Mytrie was not eating either. He saw what I was doing and leaned back in his own chair. For a long time we said nothing.

‘Do you realize what that ship is?’ he said.

‘I think so. A troop carrier?’

‘Yes. One of yours, I think.’

His words shocked me. I had said nothing to him about Jacj, and he meant nothing by it, but it was a sudden reminder of my old concerns.

‘What’s it doing here?’

‘The harbour in Muriseay City is a treaty port. Most of the troopships halt for a few days.’

‘Are you sure it’s one of – are you sure it’s from Glaund? How can you tell?’ The ship was flying no flag that I could see, but it was too far away for me to be certain.

‘There was another ship in the port last week. One from your enemies. Although this is neutral territory, the seigniory has made an arrangement with the army staff so that arrivals and departures are spaced apart. Didn’t you see the news of what happened a few weeks ago?’

‘No – of course not. I wasn’t here. Anyway, I’ve left all that behind. The war was a nightmare.’

‘This wasn’t about the war,’ Mytrie said. ‘Although you might think it has followed you. There was a fight on the harbour front, outside one of the R&R clubs. It was a ship from Faiandland. Nothing serious, a drunken brawl – but a big one. A lot of the men were hurt, several of them were arrested.’

‘I can’t believe it happens here.’ I indicated the peaceful view. ‘What is there to fight over?’

Mytrie pointed deliberately at the troopship. ‘This is a beautiful place, Sandro,’ he said. ‘But those ships are filled with boys coming back from the war. They’ve been cooped up on board for several weeks. They let off steam.’

‘In this place?’

‘Yes – in this place. There’s an area close to the harbour – clubs, prostitutes, bars. The authorities try to clean it up from time to time, but not much changes. The same thing happens on other islands too, where there are places for the troops to go. It’s a feature of everywhere they land.’

‘Then couldn’t it be stopped? Doesn’t it invade the neutrality?’

‘Would you know how to change things? They have a right to land here. The treaty ports go back centuries.’

Our second course was served then, and for a while Mytrie and I returned to silence while we ate. I was again thinking of Jacj, of course, who had once been on one of those ships, heading to or from the war. I had been trying to put Jacj somewhere in my mind where I did not have to think. Now there was the ship, that ship, the one I could still see, sailing slowly without a visible flag, to a berth in a harbour in a civilized city in a beautiful, undesecrated island, where there was an excess of pleasures provided for the young men crammed beneath the decks. I knew Jacj had travelled at least as far as an island called Winho, although I still had only the vaguest idea of where that might be. Jacj would therefore know everything about life on a troopship. Perhaps he was even on the ship I could see? I had despaired of ever seeing Jacj again – the interview with the woman general in Glaund had made me lose hope, and one of my most painful moments before I fled to these islands was the realization I would be abandoning Jacj to his fate. I had accepted that Jacj was dead, or missing, or lost in some other way. He would now be more than fifty years old – I could not imagine that. So much time had passed. I knew that the returning ships carried only the recent recruits, young soldiers, boys. It was unimaginable what might have happened to him, so I tried not to imagine any more.

‘Tell me what you know about the ones who manage to escape from the ships,’ I said eventually. Mytrie had left half his food uneaten.

‘The deserters?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not a problem here.’

‘But elsewhere?’

‘Every island in the southern hemisphere, or any of the ones which have R&R facilities, receives its share of deserters. All wars leak young people who want no more of it. Some of them are here – the ships are allowed into the port, and once they’re ashore some inevitably abscond.’

‘But not a problem, you said.’

‘This is a big country with a liberal government. We don’t encourage it, but we are constitutionally against war.’

‘I’ve heard about the havenic laws. I know you have them here.’ I was thinking briefly of my own arrival in Muriseay, with a longer than usual examination of my papers by the official in the Shelterate building.

‘Yes, but we are one of the main havenic islands. Many of the soldiers who escape from the ships try to hide, but on Muriseay it’s not necessary. Most of the ordinary people who live here will give them a spare bed, or even a job. Eventually they assimilate. Few of them cause trouble here, and after a few years they usually apply for citizenship.’

I started telling him about Jacj, the loss of him, the background dread that I lived with every day. Denn listened sympathetically.

‘In the Guildhall there is a register of people who have applied for citizenship,’ he said. ‘Anyone can consult it. Are you sure your brother’s here on Muriseay?’

‘No – he could be anywhere. I would have no idea how to start looking.’

‘I suppose you have to start somewhere. This is as good a place as any. The records are probably complete. At least, there’s a staff in the building who maintain the database. I don’t know about other islands.’

Other islands. Sitting there in the warm sunshine, looking out across the sea, I was distracted by the sight of other islands. Of course there were other islands. Islands always filled the sea views. There were too many to count: five or six of them were in clear sight from where we were sitting, distinct and separate, with boats around them, signs of habitation, but each of them was surrounded by smaller islets and rocky outcrops, reefs, crags. I knew already that most of those would be counted as islands too. Some were inhabited, but surely not all of them? And named? Beyond them were more shapes, but it was unclear from my seat if what I could see was higher land on the islands, or if they were parts of other islands behind or further away.

Beyond even these was the distant view that I had often experienced while sailing on the ships, the sense of enclosure created by the wealth of islands.

Islands in large numbers are like cumulus clouds: they are separate from each other but the ones further away, towards the horizon, tend to create the impression of continual banks. It was unusual to see a view of the horizon as open sea. When the weather was clear, sailing across the Midway Sea sometimes felt as if the ship was crossing an immense lake, where the shores were far away but ever-present. These distant shores were an illusion – as the ships sailed onwards the land far ahead separated into individual islands, a continuum of the Archipelago, the feature of the ocean. It was exactly the same here, from this moderately elevated restaurant terrace, a sense that there was another country, perhaps a new continent, lying towards the horizon. The islands clustered.

It soon became apparent to me that Mytrie had little interest in the subject of deserters. He had his own preoccupations, and because they were similar to mine we soon drifted back to talking about them, comparing notes: he composed, played, reviewed for a newspaper and a couple of magazines, carried out session work, travelled around, tutored. The music we wrote could not be less alike, but our daily lives were more or less interchangeable.

He told me because he had been able to visit Glaund a couple of times he had more experience than most musicians of witnessing the effects of our war – I noticed he did not call it ‘the’ war, but the war I was in, the one my country was in, my war. Again, it was not prime among his interests. Some of the many still-unrepaired buildings and streets in Glaund City had made an impression on him. He told me he had later composed a galop extraordinaire in an attempt to illustrate the repair work that was going on in Glaund City. Like everyone else in the islands he followed the news when it was reported, which in Muriseay usually meant stories about the behaviour of the troops on R&R visits. Sometimes there was coverage of important victories or retreats in the southern continent. But it remained my war, our war, not his.

We drove back to the city. I was already thinking ahead to the next day, because I was intending to book a passage, but I was so attracted to the way of life on Muriseay that I was pondering a change of plan, a possible longer stay.

When we arrived back in Muriseay City we walked around on foot for a while, looking at the cathedral, a large park, a brief visit to an art gallery. He showed me where the Guildhall was located, but we did not go in. He did not take me to the port area. I am not an enthusiastic tourist, and we soon repaired to a large, noisy coffee bar in one of the main streets of the city.

At last I asked him what he knew of my former plagiarist, And Ante. When I said the name Mytrie looked blank.

I said, ‘You played a session on one of his recordings. Maybe two or three years ago?’

Mytrie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps I did.’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘Do you remember every session you’ve played in?’

‘I suppose not. But I wondered if you recalled this man Ante. It would have been a small group. Ante would have played guitar – you were the pianist on every track.’

Mytrie looked unconvinced. But I had seen his name on the label – he had been more than an anonymous session player that time, more of a guest artist sitting in for the recording.

‘Was it rock music?’ he said.

‘It was described as jazz, but I’m not familiar with that.’

‘Not your kind of thing, then?’

‘I’m not familiar with it, that’s all.’

We talked about the record I had heard, and I began to wish I had brought it with me. In fact, it was one of the many things I had stored away in my loft at the apartment. I then mentioned that Ante came from the island of Temmil, and I asked Mytrie if he had travelled there for the recording, or if the session had taken place here, in Muriseay.

‘It would be here. I have never recorded on any of the other islands. You say he’s from Temmil?’

‘That’s where he lives. I don’t know if he was born there.’

‘And he’s been re-recording some of your music?’

‘Not recently – but he was for a long time. Several long-playing records.’

‘The fact he’s from Temmil is not a good sign.’ Mytrie was looking sceptical. ‘It’s the sort of place many people want to live in and a sort of colony has grown up, half-talented artists, people with lofty ideas who make big claims for themselves, but who really aren’t much good. They self-publish their poetry, put on exhibitions of each other’s paintings. Many business people retire to Temmil. A lot of the biggest houses are owned by exiles from your country, or Faiandland. They have money, so they can afford to pay to have books published, records released, exhibitions put on. None of them actually produces good work, and they’ll never amount to anything.’

I was remembering my short visit to Temmil and what an attractive, harmonious place it had felt like. It had stimulated me, made me wish to be there, to stay. I did not like what Mytrie was saying, or even why.