The Gradual (8 page)

Bright sunlight was shafting in through the porthole but I kept my eyes closed against the glare for some time, wanting to prolong the feeling of luxury. Also, my head was hurting – I knew I had drunk too much the evening before. Finally I climbed carefully out of the bunk and leaned towards the porthole. I rested my hands on the circular metal rim and I peered blinking into the daylight.

I was assaulted by a blaze of brilliant colours. For a moment I was so surprised that I found it difficult to register what I was seeing. Then I focused. The ship had been steered towards a shore and was sailing slowly. We were so close to land that it felt as if we were passing beneath a steep rocky wall, or cliff, thick with multi-coloured foliage. At first it was so close that I was sure that if I could somehow wrench the porthole open I would be able to reach out and take hold of some of the flowers, or let my fingers drag against the jagged rocky wall. But of course the ship could not be so close in as that, and as I peered up and to each side the perspective made sense. The ship was probably at least fifty metres from the rock face, but the escarpment was so huge and steep that it loomed above and against the ship.

I had never seen anything like it. I was dazzled by the colours.

I had grown up in a drab country. The environment of Glaund was a nation of cinder-grey stone and pale concrete buildings, black roads, pebbled beaches, dark trees that never lost their evergreen needles, steep mountains that when they did not present their bare rock faces were clad in snow. The plazas in the towns were paved with slate flagstones, the old buildings had mullioned windows that reflected in small fragments the cloudy skies.

Outside the towns there was of course the countryside, but most of the land was given over to monoculture crops, or where it was not cultivated it revealed vast areas of stone and sand scrubland. There were few open spaces in Glaund’s cities – no parks or playgrounds, no tree-lined avenues. The heritage of heavy industry was evidenced everywhere. Because of the effects of the war, because of the deadening social levelling of the war, there were few bright lights, only modest advertising placards, understated signs outside offices and shops, curtains drawn behind every window, doors that were closed all year round. Even our national flag was almost monochrome: the main ground was dark grey, and the emblem of St Sleeth, his Cross, was a deep red, surmounted by two narrow crossing lines.

When I had been at home, staring longingly across the pallid coastal waters towards beautiful Dianme, troublesome Chlam, unreliable Herrin, even then I could only view those in virtual silhouette, dark mounds bulking against the south-lit sea, hidden in the day by the dazzle of sunlight, hidden at night by the darkness. Mostly there was a haze, a dirty miasma, which drifted away from our coastline and spread sluggishly across the surface of the sea, blurring and concealing. From those islands I had gained no idea of what the Archipelago might really be like. Now I was seeing!

This island against whose flower-clad wall we were sailing – was this one that might also be seen from the mainland? How far had we sailed from grim Questiur while I drank myself to sleep, then slept? And how long had I been sleeping?

Although I fell happily into a whisky-fuelled sleep I had stirred several times in the night, once to visit the toilet, and after that I drifted between states of semi-slumber and semi-excitement until the daylight started lightening the sky beyond the porthole. I found my wristwatch – it showed the familiar time that at home I would normally get out of bed and wander down to find myself a breakfast. That was good, because I had not wanted to sleep through the day.

I washed and dressed as quickly as I could, and while I was doing so I noticed that there were two clocks, or chronometers, already mounted in the cabin. They were built into the wall next to the door. One showed the same time as my watch, but the other was more than four hours ahead of that. I imagined that this must mean we had crossed one or more time zones during the night.

Both clock faces had words inscribed on them that I could not understand. I guessed they were in island demotic. The one on the left was labelled
Mutlaq Vaqt
; the other was labelled
Kema Vaqt
.

As soon as I was dressed I left the cabin and hurried along the companionway to try to find a way out to the upper decks. I passed several other members of the orchestra as I hurried along – I did not stop to speak to them. I found a door and broke out of the interior of the ship into hot, blinding sunlight. The white-painted superstructure of the ship reflected the glare, and I protected my eyes with an arm thrown across my forehead, but already I could see what I had come outside to find.

We were passing through a waterway that was so straight, so neatly laid between the two sheer cliffs, that it could only have been artificial. The canal was just about wide enough for our ship, but there was not much spare. On the high cliffs of the canal there were a few bare areas where the blasting of the rock had left steep patches of baldness, but otherwise bushes, vines, flowers, grew in profusion. The scents from them were almost overwhelming.

Ahead I could see that the narrow cleft was coming to an end. A stretch of open sea lay beyond. Soon enough the ship came to the end of the passage and as we moved out into the open it was possible to see when I looked back that a line of mountains ran across the island we had traversed, and that the canal was a deeper extension of what had once been a valley. The mountains stretched away as far as I could see in either direction.

Other ships were hove to in the bay we were starting out across. As soon as we were clear of the entrance to the canal, the one waiting closest began turning, then headed towards it. It was a transport ship, an elongated tramp steamer of some kind, lying low in the water. Two large cranes stood on its deck. Its aft-mounted superstructure was dark and stained, and the hull was pock-marked with spreading patches of rust pushing up through the paintwork. There was an exchange of sirens between our ship and this one. A smell of coal dust drifted across to us.

I saw another man standing at the rail. I recognized him as Ganner, a cellist who had sometimes played alongside me as a session musician. I walked across to him, glad to see a familiar face.

‘We seem to have travelled a long way already,’ I said. ‘Do you happen to know where we are?’

‘You’ve slept late,’ Ganner said unexpectedly.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You missed a briefing session this morning, after breakfast. One of the ship’s officers described the route we were taking.’

‘Breakfast?’ I said. ‘What time is it now?’

He held out his arm for me to see his wristwatch. It was long past midday – my own watch was four hours slower than that. I made what I hoped was a self-effacing comment about having had too much to drink the night before, and slipped off my watch. I adjusted it so that it was showing the same time as Ganner’s.

‘There are chronometers in every cabin,’ he said. ‘The crew recommends we use those, and not bother with our own watches.’

‘I saw them,’ I said. ‘Two dials showing different times. Any idea why?’

Ganner shook his head. ‘Things are different here. Several others missed the briefing. I don’t suppose it matters much. None of the place names meant much to me, or anyone else.’

I was frustrated to hear this – I should have loved to have heard island names.

‘Can you give me some idea of what was said? Did they say what that island was called, the one we just left?’

‘He said the name of the island, but I didn’t really pay much attention. Sick? Seek?’

‘Was it the island of Serque?’ I said. I had noticed that name as a transit point on one of the documents. Two names in fact: Grande Serque and Petty Serque, intriguingly.

‘It might have been,’ said Ganner. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Just interested.’

I didn’t want to say any more – I could feel the annoyance in me cohering around a sudden idea, a sound of words, a line of music, brilliant in my mind.

Serque, Serque – I read you!

That was mine, that was not for conversation.

Ganner glanced up at the sun and wiped a hand across his shining face. ‘I’m not dressed for this climate,’ he said. ‘I’m going down to my cabin to change.’

He went away, leaving me to marvel alone at the scenery. The sea was silver and calm, the ship punching white churning foam away from us. The azure sky was unbroken by cloud and the sunlight was intense. I walked to a side rail, staring back at the bulky mountains of the island we had just traversed. It was already no longer possible to see the narrow entrance to the canal, although the place where it lay was indicated by the fold in the mountain range.

I thrilled to the constant sound of the engines, the rush of the wind, the accompanying seabirds who glided and swooped behind us, the constant but unidentifiable noises of a ship thrusting powerfully through the waves. My senses were alive: I could not resist hearing a rhythm in the deep beat of the engines, far below. The hot wind blustered my ears and the sun glossed the sea. Everything around me was trembling with sound, and the impressions flooded in.

Mutlaq Vaqt
was a phonetic rendering of a demotic phrase meaning ‘absolute time’.
Kema Vaqt
was demotic for ‘ship time’. (They appeared never to be the same.) The island we had passed through was called Serque, as I had guessed, and it was divided by the canal into two artificially created regions: Grand Serque and Petty Serque. Serque was a long island that sprawled inconveniently in the path of many preferred shipping routes, had difficult areas of shallows at its extremities, and so the canal had been constructed about a century before. Serque itself was the main island in a huge group called the Greater Serques. Apparently there was a second island group, half the world away, even more huge in extent, and paradoxically called the Lesser Serques. That group too had an eponymous island called Serque. Serque and Serque were emphatically not the same island, although they were sometimes confused for each other. They were rivals in a passive sort of way. Both had a thriving tourist trade, both were seats of learning, both had important historical figures, both were going through a programme of industrialization, both were heavily forested, both had huge mountain ranges, and both spoke a local language called Serquois, although the two languages were completely unalike, even to the use of different alphabets. People from one Serque rarely visited the other Serque. There was not thought to be any reason for this other than the immense distances involved.

I garnered this confusing information from a young woman called Jih, who worked as a publicity assistant to Ders Axxon, and who had been one of those at our pre-tour briefing who had offered to help and advise us during our travels. I found her on the second evening before dinner, and asked her to sit at my table so that I, and the three other musicians who were with me, could be given a little information. When we were seated I asked her if she knew through which part of the Archipelago the ship was presently sailing.

‘We are still in the Greater Serques,’ she said, and it was then that she attempted to explain about the confusion of the two identically named islands and their groups. When we had cleared this up, she added, ‘At the moment we are heading for an island called Wesler, and we expect to be docking there early tomorrow morning. Wesler is the place of your first scheduled concert booking.’

I remembered then, as I suppose so too did the others, that I had seen the name Wesler in our itinerary.

‘Do you recognize any of the islands we have passed?’ I said.

She looked concerned, as if my questions were challenging her role as a provider of assistance. I wasn’t trying to do that – I merely wanted to know where we were. There were no charts or maps anywhere on the ship and none of my colleagues knew anything more than I did. Most of them appeared to have missed the early-morning briefing that Ganner had told me about.

In a moment Jih said, ‘I wasn’t born in this part of the world. I come from Goorn, which is not at all like this area of the Archipelago.’

‘How is it different?’

‘Goorn is in the north, close to the arctic circle. In the Hetta group of islands?’ Her rising inflection seemed to suggest that we might know where she meant, but I shook my head. It was another fragment of information about the Archipelago, another name to add to the others, which I seized on. Goorn – it sounded uninviting. The word did not resonate. ‘Goorn has a long winter,’ Jih went on. ‘Only a few weeks of summer. The sea is frozen for nearly half the year. The island is mountainous and the northern coast has many fjords. It’s not like the islands here. I love this heat, don’t you?’

‘Yes – but I had no idea there were parts of the Archipelago where the sea froze. I thought the islands were tropical, or sub-tropical.’

‘Not all of them.’

‘What can you tell me about Wesler?’

‘I have some photos in my cabin of the main town, where you’ll be staying. It’s called Wesler Haven. I’ll bring the photos tomorrow but by then we will probably be about to disembark. I have the hotel bookings confirmed for everyone, so there should be no problem with those. The venue where you will be playing is called the Palacio Hall. Wesler lies to the south, so it’s likely to be warmer than here.’

‘Is it tropical?’ one of the others asked.

‘Not exactly – I mean, I’m not sure. It’s my first time too.’

She went on to tell us that after we had finished in Wesler we would be on another ship heading towards the west, no longer moving so directly into the south. Many of the islands in the equatorial regions were uninhabited, or undeveloped, she told us. Msr Axxon and his team knew the effect a humid climate could have on some musical instruments so we would be avoiding the hottest places.

That night, alone in my cabin and waiting for sleep, I replayed memories of the day: the scenery I had viewed from the ship’s deck, and also the general experience, novel to me, of being on a ship, living a marine life, responding to the subtle movements as we navigated our course. I had already grown to love the slow, repeated rhythms of a big ship sailing on a calm sea, the gentle rocking, the sense that the boat was, in some way I could not define, alive. And of course the islands themselves, visible on all sides, an interminable variety of shapes and sizes, the endless passing show whose sights seduced me and whose scents drifted somehow across the quiet waves towards me.