The Gradual (25 page)

After the second circuit we made a third, this time unnervingly close to the broken rocky wall, but after that she steered a more direct course back towards the mouth of the river. Behind us, waves were breaking on the sharp rocks where they jutted out of the sea, the swell itself appearing more marked, speedier in rising and falling than the height of the waves suggested. I was glad that as soon as we were clear of the islet she opened the throttle of the engine and the boat moved more quickly.

The sun remained high above, the glaring dazzle of mid-morning. There was no shade, no escape from the heat. I was glad not only of my loose robe but also for the breeze that swept against me. Around my feet, on the floor of the boat’s well, lay my heavy luggage, almost a recriminating reminder of the chore of carrying it as soon as we landed. I was beginning to hate my own property.

Renettia steered the motorboat into the main harbour, where the ferry had berthed earlier, but no large ships were tied up. Trying to orientate myself I wanted to locate the
Serquian
on which I had arrived, but there was no sign of her. Could she have sailed already? Renettia helped me with my luggage up to the concrete quay, then returned to the stern of the little boat. She said something inaudible, so I asked her to repeat it.

‘I said goodbye.’

‘No – it was something else.’

Frowning, she said, ‘Your earlier visit to Quy. I should have realized. You were here before. Before is the same as now. Sorry.’

‘But I did come through Quy before. I have remembered.’

‘Then is twice the same as now.’

She still had my stave, so she hurried up the steps and passed it back to me. ‘You must go through the Shelterate office and register.’

‘I’ve already done that.’

‘No – you do it for the first time.’ She pointed insistently at the stave.

‘Are we complete?’

‘Complete? I don’t understand.’

‘With what you do for me.’

‘There is no detriment, no gain. This is the same day, and you have slightly over five and a half hours returned to you.’

Nothing we said to each other was understandable. We stared at each other in the scorching heat, a kind of silent impasse having been achieved. I felt the sun’s rays, an intolerable, inescapable constant. They beat down on my back, they reflected up from the whitened concrete surface of the jetty.

Renettia returned to the boat, whose engine was still idling. She paid no more attention to me, concentrating on swinging the boat around, steering beneath the ropes that angled down towards two other boats close by. I was irritated with her, annoyed by everything to do with these adepts. I waited until she was away, making sure that there was not going to be some other weird or inexplicable ritual to perform. When she was on the far side of the water I loaded myself up with my bags and began to walk slowly and painfully along the jetty.

I must have trudged more slowly than I thought, because when I reached the Shelterate building I noticed that Renettia was already there, sitting with the other adepts under the shading canopy. She did not acknowledge me as I passed, and anyway I had nothing more to say to her. I did notice, though, that in the short time since I had seen her, not only had she left the boat somewhere, but she had managed somehow to change her clothes. She had been wearing a grubby yellow shirt and white pants when she was with me, but now she had on a long, gauzy smock dress.

I went into the building. There were two officers sitting idly behind their counter, with no other travellers in sight. One of the men stood up, putting on his cap, and I handed over my stave together with my travel and identity documents. I said something about the fact I had already had my papers checked earlier, but he did not react. Examination of the stave took no time at all – he placed it inside the slot and a printed sheet was immediately produced. He handed this across to me without looking at it. However, my arrival when no ship was scheduled to dock for several hours aroused his interest.

He and the other officer began going through my luggage, looking for whatever it was that concerned them. Knowing I was almost certainly carrying nothing controversial I let them get on with it. I meanwhile had a close look at the stave and saw that Renettia had inscribed several new lines along the shaft. One ran the whole length and was cut deeply. Others circled the shaft near the handle, while an extremely light spiral was etched about halfway along: it was exact and deliberate, circling the shaft four times, and at each end fading away into faintness.

‘What work do you do, Msr Sussken?’ one of the officials said. He was holding up one of my pads of manuscript paper, notation written all over it.

‘I’m a musician and composer.’

‘Is this your writing?’

‘Yes. I’m a composer. That is what I do. I write music.’

He peered at it more closely.

‘Do you intend to work while you are on Quy?’ he said.

‘No – I’m passing through, staying one night. I am leaving in the morning.’ I pointed to the itinerary, where the agency had clipped the ticket for the next part of the journey, to Tumo, dated the next day. It was clear.

‘So you are not here to work? You need a permit if you plan any kind of work, paid or unpaid. Serious offence otherwise.’

‘I suppose you could say I’m on vacation,’ I said.

The officer paused in what he was doing.

‘You suppose what?’ he said, looking me in the eye for the first time since I had walked in. ‘Are you or are you not on vacation? Are you intending to do any more of whatever this is?’ He pointed to my manuscript paper.

‘No,’ I said at once. ‘I’m touring the islands.’ I realized I was being taught a lesson. I had never before heard this warning about a work permit – was there the same rule throughout the Archipelago, or was it just on Quy?

He demanded to see the stave again, which I handed over. I watched as he scrutinized it closely. Then he asked me to open my violin case. Apparently never having seen an instrument at close quarters before he made me take it out, show him how I held it to play, then demanded to hear some notes. I told them I played it for my own pleasure, and gave him the first four bars of the allegro maestoso from my Violin Concerto in D major. The violin needed retuning, but I don’t think the man noticed.

After all this I went slowly across the harbour to the quay where the
Serquian
had berthed earlier, because when I and the woman at the tourist agency on Muriseay planned the long journey to Temmil we used the published schedule of shipping times as a way of deciding the route. She had said, casually, that the announcements of the ships’ arrival and departure times provided the best framework for planning. I had already noticed that the ferries rarely left or arrived late, and then not by much.

I was therefore disconcerted to discover that the
Serquian
was not at the berth where I had expected her to be. If she had already sailed then I wanted to know at what time. She was not my next ship for Tumo, but on an island where the sun rose in reverse sunset she was, to say the least, a symbol of the known. But
Serquian
was not there.

I went to the harbour office where there was a display board of arrivals and departures. The
Serquian
was shown prominently – in fact, her arrival appeared to be the most important of the day. She was known to be on time but was not expected to arrive until late afternoon. About an hour before sunset.

The date was unchanged.

I decided I should not be in the harbour area when the ship did dock – I did not want to see the passengers disembarking. Five and a half hours returned to me, Renettia had said. I looked at my wristwatch, which was showing the same time as the clock on the wall of the harbour office. Who would I see stepping down to the quayside from the
Serquian
?

I struggled one last time with my bulky luggage, then went slowly and painfully up to the centre of the town, looking for the hotel where I had reserved a room.

Shedding personal property has always been something I find difficult. My family owned so few material possessions in the years when I was growing up that in these financially easier times I was still careful with money, tried to keep and use possessions for as long as possible. But I knew now that most of what I was carrying around with me had become unwanted deadweight, an unavoidable penance. I was cursed with carrying my baggage through time.

Once I decided to rid myself of as much as I could it felt like a new start, a purging of the old me. It did not take long to choose what to keep: changes of underwear, my manuscript paper, my violin, the book I was currently reading, a few other things. They all fitted into the smaller of my two cases with room to spare.

The morning after I arrived on Quy I checked out of the hotel, first making use of the huge recycling centre at the back of the building staffed by a local charity – I realized it was probably likely that many of the hotel guests decided to get rid of things, and often for the same reason as I did.

Clad in one of my lightweight robes and my broad-brimmed hat I returned to the harbour.

During the night, cool and comfortable in the hotel room, I had found at last the mental space to think about what I wanted to do. Life on a ship had many constraints and distractions, and the mystical adepts, and to lesser extent the obtuse officials, maddened and annoyed me. In the calm of the night I had had a chance to reflect.

I realized that I was beginning to feel a slave to my travel schedule. When I left home I was full of fears. I had no real motive for this long journey, other than to make myself safe from the Generalissima. Solving the mystery of my brother, perhaps, and finding a new life on an island I had visited only once, and in doing so indulging in a final uncertainty: to try to meet the man who plagiarized me. A kind of desperation had gripped me.

I was used to a regulated life. Like it or not I had the Glaundian way of thinking, acting, preparing. Life in Glaund was controlled, contained, observed. There had to be a reason for everything we did and that reason had to be acceptable to the monitoring officials. My work as a musician was as close as possible to a free Glaund life, but even then I had been bound by the same restrictions as everyone else. I carried government stamped identification everywhere – the stamp was renewed every three months, causing a time-consuming visit to a government office. I always carried a minimum amount of cash, as I was required to, as everyone was required to. If I stayed away from home more than three nights at a time I had to register with the police. There were certain days of the year when the whole country was under curfew and I could not be outside my home after nightfall. I had to be assigned to a church, even though I was not religious. Like every man or woman under the age of fifty I was in theory capable of being drafted into the armed forces at any time, or into one of several mandatory occupations. I was a registered user of the internet, but access to it was strictly controlled and there were severe search limits. All emails were automatically copied to the government department responsible for overseeing communications. Social media, briefly introduced, had been comprehensively and effectively banned ever since. Freedom of expression was not permitted – members of the Glaundian public were not allowed to know what each other thought.

These were just some of the limitations on daily liberties; but there was a host of extra minor regulations applied to Glaundian life. I had grown up with them, I had forged my career within them, I had grown used to them. And, I was discovering, I had made a habit of them.

When we travel we take our expectations with us, our prejudices, our sense of normality. We see what we see through eyes trained by home.

Now, though, I was regulating myself and it was because of conditions I had never really known before. I felt constrained by time – the self-determined need to catch certain boats, confirm pre-booked hotels. But I was in the Archipelago – nothing was urgent, there were no pressures of time. No authorities knew where I was or where I was going. Even the Shelterate officials, with their banal enquiries, always seemed surprised to see me.

I knew I could follow my existing schedule across the Archipelago to the end of my planned voyage, taking the ships and staying at the hotels booked in advance. But I had also learned that the calm and shallow seas of the Archipelago were criss-crossed by hundreds of different ferries, and that there was no reason why I should not strike out on my own, make spontaneous decisions about whether to travel or not travel, stay longer on some islands, skip others. Finding places to stay whenever I landed was even less of a problem: there were dozens of inns, guest houses and hotels in every port I had visited. I was beginning to feel like an experienced Archipelagian traveller.

It had taken until now for me to realize this, to gain some idea of the freedoms I was enjoying, or at least was potentially able to enjoy.

Even so, a realization that change is possible does not lead to immediate change. In Quy’s harbour I cautiously established that the next ship where I had a cabin reserved was expected to arrive within the next two hours, and that she would be reprovisioned and refuelled, ready to sail late that evening. She was the
Scintilla Queen
, destined for the university island of Tumo, with eight ports of call en route. I confirmed my booking, telling myself that I would decide later if I would stay with the ship all the way to Tumo. I felt in conflict with myself, that I was denying a genuine change in me, but I had a luxury cabin reserved for me, and the old habit-follower in me did not want to lose it.

Then I changed my mind. When I boarded the
Scintilla Queen
it turned out to be the last time I followed my original itinerary. I never went as far as Tumo. I changed ships and my plans at a small island called Sanater. For two days I explored the Sanaterian hills, villages and cliffs, striding around unencumbered by everything except overnight essentials. I had left what remained of my luggage in storage in Sanater Base. When I decided to continue my voyage I abandoned my eastward quest and impulsively headed north, seeking cooler weather. That was hopeless because I was in the equatorial zone, but I did find an island that briefly felt a little fresher. This was on Ilkla, a place of high, windswept moors, but Ilkla turned out to be a bleak place of subsistence farming where almost the entire population seemed to speak a heavily glottal patois. It was picturesque in a bare sort of way but it was also unwelcoming. Nothing about it inspired me. If music there was somewhere beneath that scrawny grass and those rocky escarpments, it was a dull, distant beat of a drum. I moved from Ilkla to a larger island called Meequa, further south, still subject to the same winds but because of a warm ocean current it was as hot as the islands in the zone I was briefly trying to leave.