The Islanders (43 page)

Sentier

HIGH / BROTHER

S
ENTIER
is a semi-arid island in the sub-tropical region of the southern Midway Sea. It is dominated by the cone of an immense extinct volcano, whose name in island patois renders not only as H
IGH
(the island’s local name), but also as B
ROTHER
. The island is short of natural resources, and there is a constant scarcity of drinking water. Large storage cisterns can be seen all over the landscape, especially in the drier uplands. In summer the island is beset by a hot wind from the equatorial north, the R
OSOLINO
. This was once the strumpet wind of the south-eastern spice trade, ruthlessly used by mariners but never trusted, but in the age of modern shipping the Rosolino brings aridity and dust to the islands it sweeps disdainfully across.

Because of its remoteness and the liberal attitudes of the inhabitants, Sentier is favoured by the backpack generation. There are many cheap hotels and food places along the strip and around the port in Sentier City. In this transient population, the young men and women who are deserters from the war find a congenial and safe environment. Sentier has permissive attitudes towards the use of alcohol and recreational drugs, and has allowed all havenic laws to fall into disuse.

Sentier City is a city only in name: the harbour is quiet and utilitarian, with a small area set aside as a marina for visitors. Fishing goes on, but in a desultory fashion. There is little trade with other islands, although because of its rich volcanic soil Sentier wines are popular and bring in much currency.

Most conventional visitors and tourists head inland, to the small town of Cuvler. Here there are unusual ruins: Sentier was purged during the first Federation invasion, and all the then-inhabitants were either taken as hostages or liquidated. This was of course before the making of the Covenant. The troops were soon removed under treaty and the island was eventually repopulated, but much of the old flavour of the town has long gone. There was once a thriving artists’ colony in Cuvler, and the small area of the town, close to the desiccated banks of Sentier’s sole river, where the houses and studios were once occupied, is now a protected zone. It is open to visitors. There is an excellent museum and gallery which displays the best surviving examples of the work from the early days, as well as more recent work, including a large but mediocre Bathurst:
The Coming of the Revenger
. Some of the ruined buildings in the Old Town also contain fragments of artwork.

Oddly, for such a remote and in many ways primitive island, Sentier has a worldwide reputation in the sciences and in medicine, and all this is to be found in Cuvler.

It was in Cuvler that the astronomer P
ENDIK
M
UDURNU
was born, and it was he who set in motion the thirty-year project to build the world’s largest optical telescope on the lip of the crater of the mountain. Mudurnu himself lived long enough to use the main Brother reflector, and subsequently the existence of the telescope has led to the building of many more observatories on the summit of the mountain, and the installation of instruments of every kind. The presence on this island of the Brother centre, and all the various comings and goings of scientists and visitors, has underwritten the prosperity of the region for many years.

Illustrious sons of Sentier include the mime artiste Commis, murdered by unknown assailants during one of his performances, and the author and philosopher Visker Deloinne.

The island flower is the quadrifoil, which manages to thrive in spite of the arid conditions on the island, and whose pretty yellow sepals have hallucinogenic attributes after drying and curing.

Currency: Archipelagian simoleon, Aubracian talent.

SIFF

WHISTLING ONE

Although its location is known and certain, and there are several tour operators who will transport you to the site, no living person has ever seen S
IFF
. It is an island unique in the Dream Archipelago, because it is the only one completely destroyed by its inhabitants. The last traces of Siff sank beneath the waves more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago. All that remains is a huge area of rocky waste and rubble on the sea bed, which although in relatively shallow and clear water, and which it is possible for divers to explore, can never be seen above the surface.

Most visitors now view the remains of Siff through glass-bottomed boats. Single boats for up to six people may be individually hired on the neighbouring island of Gençek. Larger boats carrying up to fifty passengers set out daily from the same island.

There had always been a tradition of freelance tunnelling on Siff, because of the suitable nature of the rock and a lenient approach by the Seigniory officials (many of whom were themselves enthusiastic amateur tunnellers). Major excavations did not start, though, until the arrival on Siff of the installation artist Jordenn Yo. Yo had already made her name with various works of earth-moving art in many other parts of the Archipelago. Although there was at first a surprising amount of resistance from some of the inhabitants of Siff, Yo brought in a team of geologists who declared that many valuable minerals almost certainly lay beneath the surface, and in commercial quantities. Yo was granted a limited licence to drill exploratory deep tunnels. It did not take her long to produce samples of gold, platinum, oil shale and copper. As the assayers in Siff Town hesitated, Yo soon produced some rare earth minerals, including apatite, yttrium and fluorite. Her licence was quickly amended to allow unrestricted drilling. Because Siffians were largely ignorant of such matters, no one thought to question either where she had found the samples, or why she never brought any more to light.

Within Yo’s lifetime, Siff gained the patois name by which it was popularly known. Much of the island’s rock strata were tunnelled, with the passages contrived in such a way that a wind from any direction above a speed of about five knots would set up a harmonic note. In normal times the sound would be a pleasant background humming, like the drone from a reed pipe, but during the seasonal gales (Siff was in the temperate north Midway, where winter low-pressure areas were always on the move) the island gave off a high-pitched wailing sound that could be heard on many of the neighbouring islands.

Yo called this the music of the sea and skies, and declared her ambition was to render every island in the Dream Archipelago into a gigantic wind-chime. Every day the tune would change, she said, but it would bring harmony to the entire world. She died not long after making the grandiose claim.

It was during this period that Dryd Bathurst visited Siff. His apocalyptic masterpiece
Night of Final Wrath
was painted on Whistling One.

It is often alleged that the gigantic painting was itself a form of cipher, the images of wrath being derived from a caricature of the important politician Bathurst had travelled to Siff to cuckold. The godly wrath, in this interpretation, was no more than the fury of a man betrayed by a wife many years younger than himself. This theory has latterly been borne out. Recent forensic analysis using X-rays and other exploratory techniques have shown that the cipher theory was not far-fetched. For instance, layer analysis of the oil painting has revealed that some of the more intimate curves of Dryd Bathurst’s pretty young mistress were contrived almost undetectably into the scenes of apocalyptic collapse and destruction. DNA profiling has also established that the actual hairs plastered finely into the painted image of the godly pate were human in origin, and traceable to his mistress.

Naturally, this theory had not been formulated at the time. Dryd Bathurst left Siff in the way which was commonly associated with him: suddenly and in conditions of urgent secrecy. He was never to return. But the popular success of his enormous painting brought Siff to wider attention throughout the Archipelago. Then as now tunnelling was a popular pastime with many people, but there were critically few places where it was allowed to be carried out. Tunnellers descended eagerly on Siff from all over the Archipelago. Soon tunnels were being excavated in every part of the island.

The first major collapse occurred about a century after Bathurst’s painting became known. Siff Town, by then thoroughly undermined, had to be evacuated and within another half-century the island was entirely abandoned to the teams of tunnellers.

Although many tunnellers were to die in the years ahead, the honeycombing of the island continued to its tragic and inevitable conclusion. In its final years, Siff fell silent: even the gales and storms could no longer find a tune to strike from the broken, gaunt and crumbling crags that the little island had become.

Siff’s final collapse was witnessed by only a few. There is a poor-quality video of the last few moments, and this can be viewed in the museum on neighbouring Gençek. It makes depressing viewing. More than five hundred tunnellers died in the flooded galleries and passages during that terrible day. Today, their only memorial is under the clear, shallow seas where Siff once rose above the unforgiving waves.

Smuj

OLD RUIN / STICK FOR STIRRING / CAVE WITH ECHO

By Dant Willer,
IDT
Political Editor, writing for Travel & Vacation Supplement,
Islander Daily Times
. Although never published in the newspaper, this short essay has been available online from the
IDT
website for several years.

It began as a routine assignment for this newspaper, the sort of travel story I have been writing on and off for many years. As readers will know my by-line appears more often in the main part of the newspaper reporting politics or the economy, but all the staff here at
IDT
are given occasional travel assignments. Someone, we console ourselves as we pack our sandals and sun block, has to do these things.

The reader we have in mind is someone who might be thinking of taking a trip or a holiday. For those who are not we try to convey a reliable idea of what the destination is like. Travel journalism is not important in itself and only rarely has a wider relevance – for each reporter it can be a gentle reminder that there is more to life than trying to break a major news story.

My assignment, only the third in as many years, was to visit S
MUJ
. Why Smuj? everyone asked, including myself before I set out. Joh, the chief editor of the
T&V Supp
, said, ‘Your question provides its own answer. It’s a place no one seems ever to have heard of. There is no better reason for going there.’

So, in the spirit of seeking the hidden, the lost, the forgotten, the unknown, the undiscovered, I set out to explore Smuj. The first challenge was to find it.

As regular readers know, the
IDT
no longer publishes maps. The official reason for this is because most maps of the Archipelago are notoriously inaccurate, but our former policy was that an approximate map was better than no map at all. However, the newspaper had to revise this policy when a few years ago the
T&V Supp
inadvertently sent a group of retired church workers to a Glaund Army rest and recreation base on the island of Temmil. Perhaps that is largely anecdotal, but the lesson was learned. Instead of printing an unreliable map now we give details instead of how we travelled to the destination, and leave it to our readers to follow in our steps. This is always the hardest part of the assignment, as here in the
IDT
office we are not even allowed to use the unreliable maps printed by our rivals.

So my search for Smuj began. All I knew at the outset was that it is somewhere in the seas between Paneron and Winho, and is often said to be obscured behind the magnificent Coast of Helvard’s Passion. As I began my search on the internet – a first resort for everyone – a website assured me that Smuj was so well hidden within its own mysteries that even today the people who come from there, should they leave their enigmatic homeland to venture into the wider, mapless reaches of the Archipelago, will maintain the fiction of its inaccessibility and lament the impossibility of their ever being able to return.

It is all, I am a little sad to report, a romantic fiction. Smuj can be found. Neither immediately, quickly nor easily, but it is there to be found. All that is necessary is to forage through the small print of the ferry services in the approximate area and you will find that regular services are there. Not advertised, I should add, but certainly there.

Because I wish to encourage you to follow in my footsteps, I can save you the task of foraging. I chose to travel to Smuj on the scheduled services run by the Skerries Line, one of the smaller ferry operators in that part of the Archipelago.

The ship picked me up as the brochure said it would, and it departed and arrived on time at every port of call. There are many of these stopovers but they are greatly varied. The comfort on board for passengers was plain but of a completely acceptable standard, and the ship neither sank, went aground nor played loud music on its public address system. The cabins were air conditioned. While on board there was full, if occasionally intermittent, internet access. The shaded decks were adequate protection from the sun, and the steward service was good.

At one point in the voyage I was so lulled into a sense of contentment that I even thought, given the time and the funds, that I should like to spend the rest of my life cruising slowly through the Dream Archipelago. I loved the endless cerulean seas, the beneficent breezes, the tropical warmth, the attendant seabirds and surfacing dolphins, and of course the passing show of islands and rocky passages and glasslike calms. At night too the spectacle continued: we frequently saw the diamanté glitter of the lights in houses and towns, sometimes burning a path of bright colours across the dark sea towards our ship. I was therefore not all that pleased to disembark on Smuj, but because in reality I have neither the time nor the money to spend the rest of my life on boats, I was not sorry either.