The Islanders (46 page)

The woman, whose full name was Jordenn Yo, was the first of the two artists to arrive. On disembarkation at the port she told the Seigniory officials that she was a geologist, taking up a freelance position. That was untrue. She was also travelling under an assumed name, and produced forged papers to back up her story. She told the customs officers she would be importing certain items of unspecified machinery for a geological project. She requested an open manifest, to avoid having to go through the bureaucracy every time, but at first the officers were reluctant to grant it. However, Yo was well experienced in dealing with these situations and soon obtained what she wanted.

She found and rented an apartment in the centre of Yannet Town, one with a small building attached that she could use as a studio. Once established she began her work straight away.

Outside the Hommke area Yannet was sparsely populated. Along the coastal plains to the north there was some farming, but most of the island was covered in dense tropical forest, a deep natural resource, protected from loggers and other developers by island ordinances, and managed as a wildlife preserve. The coastline of Yannet was untamed. There was broken water at all levels of tide. There were few historical or cultural associations and because of this tourists on Yannet were scarce.

Then there was the mountain, known locally as Voulden (whose patois meaning is ‘sir’. Apart from a few low foothills Mount Voulden stood alone, an asymmetrical cone rising out of the forest at the northern end of Hommke. Trees grew on its lower slopes, but higher up it was covered in coarse grasses or was bare rock. There were no obvious paths to follow, so although the climb was steep for only part of the way it could be a challenging ascent.

The whole extent of Yannet could be viewed from the summit of Voulden, as well as a glowing panorama of other islands in the vicinity. The sea was silver and sapphire blue in the brilliant sunlight, the islands hommke green, dark and intense, fringed with white crests of breaking waves. Shadows of light clouds scudded over the choppy sea.

To this summit one day came Jordenn Yo. She had climbed without looking around her any more than she had to, determinedly saving the view for when she reached the summit, trying not to preview or glimpse it, but holding on to the paths and boulders as she scrambled up.

At first, recovering her breath from the long climb, she sheltered behind some rocks to stay out of the wind. It surprised her how cold it was on the top of the mountain. But the view exhilarated her. She gazed around at the islands. They were impossible to count – the sea was choked with many small tracts of hilly land. The light was bright, unyielding. She gulped in the view, trying to fill herself with it or the sense of it. She watched the traces of the wind on the surface of the sea, the overlapping hatch of vee-shaped rippling wakes from the ferries, the way the clouds took shape and shifted over the islands, drifting out over the sea on one side, others forming to replace them to the windward.

She took many photographs, turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, high and low, records of Yannet’s own landmass, of islands and sky and sea. Then she began to contemplate her real work with Voulden, the mountain.

She measured the wind pressure that day. During the course of a year three winds prevailed over this part of the Archipelago. There was a mild westerly wind known as the B
ENOON
, warm with rain, intermittent, most often felt in the spring, one that she could make allowances for, but not depend on. The other two winds were from the east. One of these was called the N
ARIVA
, a hot wind that circled the southern horse latitudes then crossed the Equator and swept across this part of the Archipelago. The third was known as the E
NTANNER
, a steady flow from the mountains of the northern continent, bringing cooler evenings at the end of the long island summers.

Yo tested the wind that day with the portable anemometer she had brought, noting not just the direction but also the pressure – today was an easterly wind, too cool to be the Nariva, but maybe a spur from the Entanner? She needed more familiarity with the winds before she could be sure she knew them. There was never a day anywhere in the islands that experienced a typical wind, so she would have to work with a median, perform endless calculations about force, frequency, direction, and always make those necessary allowances for the irreverent variables.

Finally, she lay down on the rocky surface of the summit, feeling herself pressing against the peak of the mountain. While the cold wind blew, lifting her inadequate clothes and chilling her, she shivered and planned, but in the end she cried a little. Already she loved Mt Voulden, loved its height, its eminence, its grey solidity. Voulden was a calm mountain of strong, stable strata, hard but safe to drill through – now she was learning the winds that made it breathe.

She returned to her studio before nightfall, exhausted by the strenuous climb and by feeling the extremes of temperature between the windblown mountain heights and the sultry plain below. Her plans for the mountain were taking shape. Within twenty days she had completed her surveys and sent out her orders, instructing that the earth-moving and rock-drilling plant should be made ready.

While waiting for the massive equipment to be shipped to Yannet she made other preparations.

Meanwhile, there was Oy.

At this time Oy was engaged in a small but exacting installation on the tumultuous shores of the island of Semell. Yo and Oy were still more than four years away from meeting on Yannet. Semell was in a distant part of the Archipelago called the Swirl, a system of more than seven hundred small islands and atolls in the southern hemisphere.

Oy’s full name was Tamarra Deer Oy, but he had become known by his surname only. A conceptual and installation artist, he had spent the years since leaving college touring the Swirl, searching for suitable islands. He experimented with his techniques and materials on every island he visited, using local aggregates to mix with resinous cements, seeking the hardest and smoothest compounds, ones that would withstand not just time and the elements but the inevitable attempts by others to destroy or damage his works.

Like his near-namesake Yo, Oy was often unwelcome in the places he visited. He had been forcibly expelled from half a dozen islands, although so far he had managed to avoid prison. Also like Yo, as his reputation spread he too was often obliged to enter islands incognito and work fast, completing as much as possible before being discovered or exposed, having to leave his work unfinished.

His first complete work, uninterrupted, was on the island of Selli, a fiercely hot tourist island with immense bays and beaches, and a legendarily exuberant nightlife. Oy arrived out of season on Selli, and soon discovered two holiday-let cottages built close together on a shallow pine-cooled slope overlooking one of the beaches. The trees helped screen him as he worked. He began on both cottages, first sealing them up with thick layers of cement on the inside, leaving the exteriors unchanged but the interiors no longer accessible. He and his artisans then set about erecting a conjoining piece, simulated walls and a roof, making the two small houses into three, or one, or none. Using carefully matched washes he painted the exterior of his installation in several coats of island whiteness.

He paid off his artisans and departed Selli before the artwork was discovered. Before he left he gave the installation a good and approving kick with the flat of his foot.

Other forays into the inhabited Swirl islands were to prove more difficult, but he managed to seal the main street of a village on the island of Thet, and converted a small church on Lertode into an aesthetically satisfying, impermeable egg-shaped dome, painted matt black.

His first shoreline piece was a stretch of rockfall at the foot of chalk cliffs on the island of Tranne. Working in the ebb tide, Oy smoothed and levelled the rocks and their pools by infilling with cement. It was an isolated, unvisited expanse of coastline. Few people ever wandered by or saw what he was doing. At first he worked alone, but the sheer size of the installation made it necessary to hire artisans from the local villages.

Within three months most of the installation was complete. The area of broken rocks had been converted to a white plain, so smooth a ball could be rolled across it, and so uniformly flat that not even the most sensitively calibrated spirit level could detect a slope.

Satisfied, Oy discharged the workers and spent a few days working alone on the final details. Two days later, as he was preparing to leave Tranne for another island, a large fall of rock from the overhanging cliff covered or destroyed everything he had done. He went to see the damage for himself, but left Tranne immediately after.

It was Oy who made the first personal contact. He had long known of Yo’s reputation, of course, but they had never met. Then one of the trustees at the Muriseay Covenant Foundation mentioned her and gave him a contact address. A few days later he messaged her:

hi yo, i’m oy, i know your stuff and i bet you know mine, we should get together and try something, how about it?

Yo did not reply at once. About six weeks later she messaged him:

I’m busy. Fuck off. Yo
.

At this time Oy was working on a large, curving staircase he had chanced to find in an apparently disused part of the back of the Metropolitan Hall, in Canner Town. He was converting it to a flight of irregular steps that could only be mounted from below, using ropes, and in a horizontal attitude. He filled in the former stairs above to make a smooth descent. It was a challenge of great intricacy, and every day he worked there he expected to be discovered by the Metro officials.

Then a second message arrived from Yo, a few days after the first:

You are anathema to me. I loathe and despise what you do. You are a NON ARTIST. I hate everything you conceive or draw or build or fill in or cover up or make smooth or correct or stand near or pass by or breathe in the locality of or EVEN FOR A MOMENT THINK ABOUT. What you do is anti-art, anti-beauty, anti-life, anti-anti. Your so-called work is an abomination to every artist who has ever lived, or whoever will live. I have nothing to ‘try’ with you, except I would like to spit on you repeatedly. Yo.

But an hour later the same day her third message arrived:

Pls send two photos of you, one of them naked and from the front and close up, but not your face. Yo.

Moments later came the fourth and last message from her:

Come and see what I am doing, Oy. I am not mad. I am on Yannet. Yo.

He sent some photographs, more than two, later that day. Yo never acknowledged them.

It took Oy the rest of the year to complete the horizontal staircase, and he left at once before he might be discovered. He travelled across the Swirl to the island of Tumo, where after a boisterous holiday he began to contemplate his next work.

The horizontal staircase was opened up by Metro officials. It became apparent they had known all along what Oy was doing. Inferring who he was they had made an unannounced and enlightened decision to allow him to finish. They mounted the staircase as a permanent installation in an exhibition of modern art that was created to occupy the rear area of the Metropolitan Hall. Although it was excoriated by the first critics who reviewed it, the staircase quickly became popular with the public and within a year people were travelling from all parts of the Archipelago to see it and to try climbing it. Oy’s financial support from the Muriseay Covenant Foundation was substantially increased.

Yo was being delayed by Seigniory officials who objected to the two huge pieces of tunnelling equipment, currently in the hold of a freighter impounded in the port. Her open manifest had no apparent influence on their objections.

While trying to resolve this she managed to get several of her smaller earth-movers and bulldozers secretly ashore on a remote part of the Hommke peninsula, by using beach-assault landing craft she hired from the Faiand base on Luice. This operation used up most of her remaining money, so there was a further delay while she applied to the Foundation on Muriseay. By the time the new grant came through, which was much less than she had hoped for, she had solved the problem of the tunnelling equipment.

To the Seigniory assay consultant, a retired gentleman who held the post as an honorary appointment, she produced several examples of valuable mineral ores, explained that Mt Voulden contained so much wealth that life on Yannet would be transformed for ever, and pointed out that for obvious reasons her work must remain secret. She contrived to leave a small nugget behind on his desk, when she left his office.

The tunnelling equipment came ashore shortly afterwards. Soon she was training two teams of artisans for the work that lay ahead. Her location for the installation had been identified for months, so the teams moved to opposite sides of the mountain without delay. Working under Yo’s detailed and strenuous instructions they prepared to chew their way mechanically through the rock towards each other.

This was for Yo the most stressful and exacting period. Every day she had to make repeated visits to each side of the mountain, measuring the orientation of each machine, checking and confirming the quality, accuracy and angle of the workings. Numerous test and access shafts had to be drilled. At first progress was infinitesimally slow – three months after she had employed the teams they were still mostly idle. They crept forward with immense caution, each making preparatory drillings, but both machines remained visible outside the mountain.