Authors: Christopher Priest
‘That is an option.’ The two women were both standing so that they were facing me. Kan was right at my side. If the intention was to make me feel I had been cornered, it worked. ‘Is that what you wish?’ Renettia said.
‘But what would happen?’
‘Kan will accompany you so long as you remain in Hakerline. You paid for that. If you wish to leave the island, she will be with you part way. If you travel to Choker of Air, you have options. I will accompany you, or you travel alone.’
‘Those are options?’
‘For you. We do what you need us to do.’
Around us, the ship was being readied for its next voyage. The main engines had started and were throbbing gently in the depths of the vessel. The passengers who had been waiting at the Shelterate office were walking across the quay to board. A drift of pale brown smoke idled out of the squat funnel towards the stern of the ship. Several of the crew moved to and fro on the deck, one of them speaking into a portable radio. An officer, smartly clad in tropical white, came down to the main deck and inspected something in a lidded compartment two of the young sailors had been working on.
‘All right,’ I said, resigned as so many times before to the fact that I never had any options at all when dealing with the adepts. ‘We’ll go to the bank.’
Kan spoke for the first time that morning. ‘I need to check your stave again, Msr Sussken.’
She took it from me, and once again she touched the surface lightly with her fingers. Renettia was watching her closely.
We disembarked. I carried my belongings easily, recognizing and fully savouring the physical vigour that had been gifted to me. We went straight to the Shelterate office. Outside the main entrance Kan gave me back my stave.
‘All you do – hand this over. Say nothing.’
For some reason neither of them would enter the building with me. I went in alone and did exactly as Kan instructed. My stave was pushed down into the scanner – after a pause it popped out again and the official handed it back to me. No paper note was printed out this time.
The two women adepts were waiting for me by the exit. We walked up through the rest of the harbour area and into the town itself. Up close, in the bright daylight, the buildings which the night before had been so crammed with celebrating holidaymakers now looked shabby and unrepaired. There was a bank two streets away. I went through the time-consuming and tiresome procedure of identifying myself, then waiting while identity and credit checks were made through the banking system. I had done this before on other islands – I always had a background nagging fear that I was about to be informed that the Glaund military junta had traced my account and frozen it. However, after a long delay all was well and I collected a substantial sum in cash: talents for use here on Hakerline, but also thalers and simoleons for the future.
I paid Renettia what she had requested.
Half an hour after leaving the ship all three of us were in a car, speeding away from the town and along the coast, Renettia at the wheel. Kan was in the front passenger seat. I sat alone behind them, my possessions stacked beside me.
I had had nothing to eat or drink since leaving the ship’s cabin, but the women gave no sign that we were about to stop for a meal. There were bottles of mineral water in the car, from which we all drank as the morning temperature rose steeply. The hills around Hakerline Promise were thickly forested, so for much of the way there were only fleeting views of the scenery or the sea. Occasionally I was able to glimpse in the distance the familiar shape of the volcanic cone of the Gronner when it came into view above the trees. Renettia brought the car to a halt at intervals while she and Kan consulted each other, speaking quickly and quietly in island demotic.
They were intent on what they were doing. Kan was using a calculating device which I had never seen before – it was somewhat like an abacus, but the beads were strung along wire guides held in a frame, made in the shape of a five-petalled flower. She fingered the beads deftly, spinning the wire frame around the central support, checking and confirming Renettia’s decisions. Once, she read out a sequence of numbers as we drove along. In one tree-shaded valley she called out for the car to be stopped – Renettia braked sharply and pulled the car over to the side of the road in a cloud of dust. After Kan had recalculated, Renettia reversed a short distance, then waited again while Kan shuffled beads to and fro. We resumed. At another place we turned off the road to follow an unmade track through the forest, before swinging across to an even smaller track to the side and eventually returning to the road we had left. Or it might have been one that was like it.
We came to a village, the road winding down from the hills into a crescent-shaped bay, where a stretch of white sand lay in contrast to the calm and translucent aquamarine of the enclosed lagoon. A reef lay about five hundred metres from the shore: the open sea beyond was a deeper blue. Dozens of small boats and yachts were sailing on the still waters of the lagoon. There were many people on the beach, but it was not crowded. Renettia drove the car along the road that skirted the beach, into the village itself. She parked in a central square.
We climbed out into the blazing sunshine. Renettia said she and Kan had to make some enquiries and told me to wait by the car. I had already entered the state of mind familiar to me whenever I was being escorted by an adept. I became passive, accepting, not enquiring, letting myself be moved around and told what to do.
So I stood meekly beside the car while the two women walked away across the sun-baked paving stones. They went together into an alley leading off the square, disappearing into the deep shadows.
When they were out of sight I glanced around at what I could see of the village. The square itself was almost deserted of people. Two elderly men sat side by side on a bench under the largest tree. They both had walking sticks propped up between their knees. Several other cars were parked on the far side. The surrounding buildings were tall, old-looking, with a kind of well used grandeur. The windows blankly reflected the radiant sky. There was a café with tables on the outside terrace, protected from the sun by overhead screens, but no one was sitting there. The interior was too dark, relative to the brilliant outside glare, for me to see if anyone was inside.
I was of course wearing my light clothing and protective hat but the sunlight was intense and heat was pumping up around me from the ground. My sandals hardly protected me from the heat of the paving stones. There was no wind even though the square opened out towards the sea. It was so humid I was finding it difficult to breathe.
I moved away to stand in a narrow strip of shade against the wall of one of the buildings. I drank some cold water from a fountain set in the wall, feeling the delicious chill as it went down. I splashed water over my face and hair, letting some of it run down over my shoulders and chest.
When I looked back across the square I discovered that the car we had been in was no longer in sight.
Everything else appeared much the same – except that under the tree, where the two old men had been sitting, a drastic change had taken place. One of the men had toppled forward on to the ground and was lying awkwardly face down, his walking stick lying at an angle across his legs. The other man was standing beside the prone body, leaning heavily on his own stick, looking around the square desperately, seeking help.
I was tempted to hurry across the square to do what I could, but something about the suddenness of the situation, together with Renettia’s injunction not to move away from the car, warned me not to.
The car, though, had disappeared. My first thought, as passive as always when adepts were around, was that Renettia and Kan must have returned while I was drinking at the fountain and had driven away without me. Nothing surprised me any more. My possessions were still inside the car, and those included my violin, which normally I would hardly let out of my sight, but I felt unconcerned. There were always reasons for what they did – their reasons, not mine. But as I walked back across the sun-bleached paving the car returned into sight. It was still exactly where Renettia had parked it. Both women were standing beside it, staring around the square, clearly looking for me.
I looked around too: both of the elderly men were again seated side by side on the bench beneath the tree.
Kan saw me.
‘You should not leave the car when we are driving you,’ she said, explaining nothing.
‘I needed something to drink,’ I said ineffectually.
‘We have found a restaurant,’ Renettia said, pointing towards the alley where they had walked. ‘More than water there. Bring your luggage.’
I collected my stuff and followed them to the place they had found. We took a table under a huge canvas shade, where an electric fan blew a cooling draught across us.
After a good meal, a most welcome and delicious meal, for which I paid, we did not return to the car but instead walked on further down the alley to the edge of the lagoon. Here a short curving jetty had been built. I was enjoying the sensation of having drunk a little too much wine, adding to my general passivity about their instructions.
Moored to the jetty was a small yacht, a simple sailboat. Another boat trip – it passed through my mind to wonder: why all that again? But I was feeling cooperative so I swung my bags into the well at the rear and sat down where they told me, to one side.
They went about the preparations to cast off, but it seemed to me they did not know much more about sailing than I did. They had trouble loosening some of the knots – Kan succeeded in tightening one and tangling the rope. I helped her untie it. There was no engine. Neither of them said anything as they struggled with the ropes but at last they managed to get the sails raised. Fortunately the wind was light, so as the little boat moved away from the jetty and headed into the lagoon it did so slowly and in a steady direction. Kan took the tiller and seemed confident while Renettia kept her hand on the mainsail’s boom, and worked the ropes as necessary. I could not help feeling relieved that a small dinghy was being towed behind us.
The sea remained calm, even when we went through a channel in the reef and entered the gentle swell of the open sea. Here the breeze was stronger. The boat sailed more quickly and I relished the wind and the occasional splashing of spray. Ahead, not too far ahead, I could see the dark green bulk of Temmil. All I felt was a sense of relief that this long journey would soon be over. I was content. The food and wine felt good inside me. I began to relax.
I dropped an arm over the side of the boat, trailing my fingers in the cool water, listening to the sound of the boat breaking through the waves. The water swirled past, a trail of thin foam and small bubbles created by the boat’s passage. The water was so clear I could see beams of sunlight shafting down, but the water was too deep for me to see as far as the bottom. I wondered what was below: a sea floor I could barely imagine, sand and rocks perhaps, fish of course and other forms of marine life, live coral growing, even wrecks or lost treasures. The sea was still a novelty to me, a romantic mystery. I listened to the intermittent, arhythmic gusts of the wind, the ropes straining under the pressure, the sails flapping and beating, the mast creaking. Constant sounds of water. Seagulls followed low above the water. Harmonies formed inevitably in my mind and I tapped my fingers against the wooden side of the boat.
Musing enjoyably in this way, I was no longer taking an interest in what the two women were doing, except that after I had been drifting contentedly in this lazy, acquiescent state for about twenty minutes, eyes half closed, I sensed a different kind of movement. The boat rocked with their footsteps.
Without turning my head to see what they were doing I assumed they were sailing the yacht, stepping past me to reach the sails, the ropes. Then a shadow fell across me, and I looked up. The sun dazzled me.
Kan was beside me, standing over me. She was holding her flower-shaped abacus.
‘We are leaving now,’ she said. ‘Good day.’
I struggled to sit upright. ‘What did you say?’
We were still out at sea. I knew that the tract of land we were moving towards was Temmil but when I looked back I could see that the hilly coastline of Hakerline was roughly the same distance behind us.
‘This is gradual balance. Time standstill.’ She thrust her wrist at me, showing me the face of her watch, but because of the dazzling sunlight and the rocking of the boat I could not see it clearly. I looked at my own watch – I assumed the time it was showing was the same, that usually being the point of checking our wristwatches.
Renettia was securing the tiller with a length of rope and as Kan stood beside me she was holding on to the boom of the mainsail.
‘You can’t abandon me,’ I said.
‘No further. If we stay with you all we have done is undone.’
‘What have you done?’ I had kicked myself out of the passive mood – now I was feeling defensive, unhappy, threatened.
‘We have brought you to Temmil,’ Kan said. ‘We have finished.’
I leaned over to look at Renettia. She was standing at the stern of the sailboat, pulling on the painter, drawing the dinghy towards us.
‘I’m nowhere near Temmil!’ I said, raising my voice. ‘I paid you a lot of money to take me to that island.’
‘You paid us standard fee,’ Renettia said. ‘Your fee is for correction of gradual time detriment, not for travel. You are safe to continue. We have provided you a boat.’
‘Safe? What do you mean by safe?’
I was standing now and in my sudden onrush of anxiety I was making the sailboat wobble alarmingly. Renettia had brought the dinghy alongside and was transferring the few things she and Kan had brought with them.
‘The boat won’t sink,’ Renettia said. ‘That’s safe. I have set the rudder, but you must control it. Wind won’t change. Press rudder against it. Tide is flowing in the direction you want. Here is your stave. Take care of it, in case you return home.’