The Gradual (26 page)

I had cancelled my planned itinerary by this time, sometimes having to pay penalties for changing my mind. I did not care: I wanted at last to be free, at least in the sense I understood it then. After the next fifty-six days and more than twenty ships later, all of which I boarded on impulse, I was feeling completely at home in my new mode of casual and unhurried travel from one island to the next. I changed ships and destinations at will. I chose short crossings and long voyages, but primarily the shorter ones – I was still attracted by the novelty of a succession of small places. Some of the places I visited did not even appear on the shipping schedules of the main ferry companies, and could be reached only by small boat. One ferry was pulled by underwater chains, across a fierce tidal channel.

All these sea journeys ravished my eyes, and once again I started responding to the rhythm of a seaboard life, to the stimulus of discovering one new place after another. Each island called to me – my mind was overflowing with music. I found the discomforts of an onboard life only relative, even on the smaller boats and the ones with few facilities. When I sailed overnight I made sure I would have a cabin to myself, and then slept soundly and ate well, and during the long hours of the afternoons, when the ships’ engines settled into a routine throbbing from deep below, and most of the other passengers went below-decks to avoid the glaring sunshine, I would find a shaded place and work happily in my notebook. Ideas for new music were coming constantly to me, sometimes in such profusion that I worried that I could not get them down quickly enough before they were lost or supplanted by others.

But the mystery of the adepts remained. I never understood why or how, but they appeared to be following me.

So long as I was aboard a ship and travelling between islands I rarely saw any of them. I knew or suspected, though, that they must be with me, also sailing on the same ships I was aboard but concealed somewhere. There was no other explanation for the fact that whenever I arrived at a port of call they were already there, able to get ashore before me, waiting for me, lined up or in a group by the entrance to the Shelterate halls. I never understood how they did that.

I usually saw the same faces: Pheelp and Renettia were invariably there at the Shelterate entrance but so too were many others. Most of them I came to know, by sight if not by name, because at every island disembarkation one or another of them would step forward and present me with a solution to my endless problem with the gradual tides of time. Money was invariably involved. There was some kind of hierarchy among them, about which of them would take the job. I never worked out how these choices were made, and anyway it seemed to make no difference.

Because my voyages and crossings were mostly short the adjustments of the detriments were often minor, although not much less expensive. Many of the detriments that emerged during this part of my journey were a matter of seconds, cancelled by a short walk along a quayside, or a drive in a car, or a climbing of steps into the main town. Once, after the chain ferry, the adjustment was achieved by a shaking of hands. It cost me ten thalers, even so.

Some of the adepts worked with me more than once: for instance, I had a second short encounter with Pheelp, who took me for a brief walk around a couple of large buildings on the island of Sentier, then brusquely abandoned me in the middle of a street. Afterwards my wristwatch was again showing the right time and I was forty thalers poorer.

Renettia also worked with me again – she took me on a longer detour, a dull car ride in residential streets at the back of a port, a long walk by the sea, time regained, wristwatch inexplicably corrected, money spent.

The wooden shaft of my stave was looking well used. Every adept made new marks. Most of these lines were short, or ran alongside existing scores. Many of them crossed and re-crossed earlier ones – in places there were so many lines they created a hachure effect. One part of the stave, close to the handle, was deeply marked to the point that the wood was scored almost halfway through. I still believed there must be something buried inside the visible wood, something metallic or perhaps silicon, with the capability of recording or noting whatever it was that happened when the Shelterate officials scanned it, or downloaded some sort of information about me into their device. But even in this relatively exposed part of the blade there was no hint that the stave was made of anything other than the wood I could see.

As well as the adepts known to me there were of course more I often saw but never worked with, and so had no knowledge of them at all, certainly not their names. There were others I saw only once – these I assumed must live on whichever island I happened to be passing through at that time, but there were more of them who followed me, or seemed to, wherever I went.

They were always there, hanging around with the others by the Shelterate office of the island where I had just landed, sometimes regarding me furtively from behind a hand, or a skein of long hair which had fallen across their eyes, or, more often, staring away from me as if I did not matter. They all carried knives.

Gradually, the number of adepts around me was increasing. At first there had only ever been half a dozen of them, then the number swelled to about ten, but after my fifth day of spontaneously chosen voyages there were at least twenty of these people waiting for me every time I disembarked. The number went on increasing the further I travelled.

And the central mystery about them remained unsolved. I never saw how they moved from one island to the next.

They did not appear to board with me. Although in some cases I was able to watch the boarding ramps after I was aboard the ships, I did not see them following me up the gangplank. They were invisible to me while the ship was under way except on rare occasions, when for some reason the adept needed to speak to me before we berthed. Then he or she would materialize quietly beside me for as long as it took, before retreating quickly to the decks below. Then when I arrived at the port, there they would be: the waiting group outside the Shelterate building, lurking in the canopy’s shade or standing in the bright sunshine. Sometimes, if it was a night arrival, they would be clustered in the glow of the harbour’s floodlamps, letting their knives dangle suggestively on chains.

It was obvious to me that there was no way they could reach the islands at the same time as me unless they were on the same boat, but I never knew where they were. Did they hide somewhere deep in the bowels of each ship? In a separate section of the vessel, reserved for them? It would have to be away from the passenger cabins, or the open decks. But if such a hiding place existed I never found it.

On the larger steamers there were multiple decks and cargo areas, and I could not search them all. Anyway, I had other things I wished to do with my time.

Some of the boats I sailed on were so small, so simple in design, that it seemed impossible that anyone could be on board without being immediately noticed. This profoundly puzzled me.

Less mysterious, but in its own way intriguing, was the fact that the adepts rarely worked alike. I recalled Renettia’s remark that what they did was an art, not a technique. Each had developed his or her own ways and the practical imperfections always interested me. There was clearly some kind of calculation involved in what they did: they balanced what they knew or felt about the gradual against what they perceived from me. The stave was crucial somehow: was it a record of what they had done, or some means of holding true whatever they had determined was the detriment? And how was that discerned, as a matter of interest?

Some of the adepts did their work by mental exercise: they stared into space, or looked down at the ground or the deck or wherever we were standing. Most of them looked out to sea but a few did so only quickly, while others deliberately scanned the islands that could be seen, or gazed towards the horizon for several minutes. One young woman took me to a beach, then stood immobile on the sloping sand – she warned me to stay well back from her and for about an hour she waited while the rising tide lapped around her legs. From time to time she turned a full circle where she stood. The waves were about to reach her waist when she appeared to break out of her trance, waded back to dry land, then told me to follow her along the beach. Throughout all this I stood in the unshaded glare of the sun.

One of the male adepts used a battery-powered electronic calculator. Another carried a little pad of paper on which he scribbled inscrutable sums. One counted on his fingers. Most of them had a pen and paper in addition to the etching knife, and they would take notes as we walked or drove along. Some of adepts ignored me as they led me through the areas of time’s tidal gradients – others were talkative, almost informative.

The first contact with them was always the same. One adept would detach from the group, approach me and request a sum of money. Mostly this happened outside the Shelterate building, but occasionally it was while I was still on the ship – once I was approached in mid-voyage, a few other times just as the ship was about to dock. The matter of the detriment was never in doubt, because it was a given problem in every encounter. Sometimes it represented time gained, but in most cases it was a true detriment, time that had been lost.

I believed what they told me.

If I ever doubted, a glance at my wristwatch was evidence enough. Although, oddly, the time difference on my watch was never the same as the detriment, and after the process was complete, my watch had invariably returned to the correct local time.

Every ship on which I sailed had chronometers which reported
Mutlaq Vaqt, Kema Vaqt
– absolute time, ship time.

My zigzagging course across the Archipelago was taking me in an overall westerly direction. Ahead, somewhere ahead, lay the island of Temmil, my final destination. I had plenty of time to think, and as I sat day after day on the boat decks, in my cabin, in the bars and saloons, I tried to focus on what I was really intending by this journey. The Generalissima and her junta gave me a reason to flee but once I reached the islands the need for flight was less urgent.

Setting aside my quotidian needs to sleep and eat, my increasingly enjoyable habit of lounging around in the shady corners of the decks, and my obscure but also preoccupying need to gain or lose time detriments, it could be summed up in one word, or one name: Ante. At the root of it all, finding And Ante and confronting him was still a motive for taking this journey.

But the constant presence of the islands, as I sailed slowly past, changed priorities. Ante was of less and less interest to me. I had hated the idea that he was profiting somehow from stealing my work, but what had I lost by his actions? What had ever been at risk? My reputation as a musician, such as it had become, was specialist but secure. His crude copies of my work had no perceptible impact on my standing, nor even on my earnings.

The more I saw of these beautiful, sun-wrapped islands the less important became the concerns of my former life. I reminded myself that Ante’s plagiarism had happened a long time ago, and perhaps was even the consequence of a coincidence, or an accident of some kind. Maybe I should be lenient, try to understand how it had happened, rather than confront him?

It was a peaceful feeling, a familiar instinct, in accord with what had become my normal outlook. I loved the easy allure of the islands, drifting from one of them to the next, and I relished my lazy new existence of lounging around, drinking and eating as much or as little as I wished. I could all too easily imagine seeing out the rest of my days on the warm beaches and in the fragrant forests of this tropical paradise.

After several weeks at sea I knew that I was drawing inexorably close to the group of islands known as the Rullers – this was where Temmil was located. I even saw the Ruller Group sketched in faintly on a chart in the saloon of one of the ships, so I knew it could not be far away. The islands lay in what was described by some of the other passengers as a picturesque jumble in the horse latitudes, not far north of the Equator. There were said to be eighty-three inhabited islands in the group, and according to a recent estimate there were five or six hundred more, small and presently uninhabited. Most of the islands were lush with forests and wildlife, with steep hills and shallow lagoons.

With the prospect of Temmil so close I decided to make my intermediate island stopovers less frequent, but there were several where I still had to change ships. One of them was a large island called Demmer. I was told the restaurants and hotels on Demmer were first-class, that Demmer Insula was an attractive and cultured town with much local musical activity and a world-class concert hall, and that the scenery inland was wild and beautiful. The passenger I was talking to, a man who came from the island, recommended that to fully appreciate the place I should plan to stay for at least two weeks. That was more than I wanted, but I thought I might stay and explore for two or three days. I was still travelling on impulse.

As the ship moved towards the harbour in Demmer Insula, I was approached by one of the adepts, a young woman whose name I had already learned from some of the others was Kan.

She said to me, ‘Are you intending to land?’

‘Yes, of course. The ship goes no further.’

‘Are you sure you want to? You could stay aboard and return.’

‘What are you telling me, Kan?’

‘I am asking, not telling.’

I pulled the stave from my holdall. ‘You’ll want this,’ I said. ‘How much is the charge?’

‘No charge on Demmer.’

‘I need you to do whatever is necessary about the detriment.’

‘No charge on Demmer.’

But she had taken the stave and was squinting along the blade, one eye close to the rounded end. The ship was going so slowly that its motion was almost imperceptible. I looked across at the town, prettily built in terraces around the bowl of hills stretching back from the coast. I sensed nothing unusual about it, nothing that alarmed me.