There were too many assailants, the odds against Thom were too great. He was surrounded. The two women who had inexplicably taken up his cause were pinned against him, kicked and shoved and punched as much as he was, and as hard.
Everyone was shouting, pushing and jabbing their fists. Thom had taken several painful punches to his face and head, and many more to his body. He tried to duck away, tried to fold his arms over his head, but two men shoved him hard and he fell backwards to the floor. Part of the thick rope lay on the stage under his spine, an extra source of pain. The people around him started kicking.
The two women also fell, and they sprawled on the floor beside him. There was no longer anything they could do to protect him and they were now, like him, huddled on the boards of the stage, trying vainly to protect their faces and necks with their arms. The woman with the scripture was facing him and she was intoning something – it was inaudible in the clamour of shouts, some words spoken, a kind of prayer, a hopeless appeal to those who refused to listen. The younger woman had fallen so that she was turned away from him, and as Thom’s consciousness faded he saw that people were stamping all over her in their eagerness to reach him. A booted foot came straight into his face, hard and with full body strength behind it.
15
Thom died on the stage that night, according to the Prachoit traditions of civic revenge. He was fortunate, in relative terms, in soon losing consciousness after the first violent kicks to his head, and was therefore unaware of what followed: the angry and selfish disputes about priorities, the shouting, the arguments about who should finish him off.
The kicks against his inert body became token, symbolic, ritualistic. Several of the women shouted Rullebet’s name as they took their turn. He was almost certainly dead, or on the point of death, when the coup de grâce was delivered: a messy decapitation with a knife, carried out by Gerres Huun, Rullebet’s father.
Thom died without knowing who the women were who had tried to help him – the one who tried to fend off his attackers with a spoken Word, the one who called herself Kirstenya, who had been watching and following him. They were not known to each other.
Both women were badly injured in the assault: they suffered broken limbs and ribs, cuts and severe bruising, damaged internal organs. They were unconscious when the ambulance crews arrived, but in the end they survived. After prolonged stays in hospital they recovered sufficiently to be allowed to go home. They needed long periods of convalescence and when well enough sought and were given compensation, under the regulations covering disproportionate revenge.
After the evening at the theatre these two women had no contact with each other again, both assuming the other had died during the affray. They each found ways of leaving Prachous forever, and eventually they did.
16
CLOSURE
Prachous has only one airport capable of handling inter-island or intercontinental aircraft. It is situated on the outer edge of Prachous Town and is operated by the seigniorial families, who carefully restrict its use. The island is well defended with batteries of anti-aircraft missiles, and unwelcome incoming flights get a hostile reception. Most of the large aircraft allowed to land or take off are cargo flights. The airport tithe is set at a high rate, forcing up the price of the food delicacies and electronics and other consumer goods being brought in. Passenger flights are rare, and all civil flight plans have to be negotiated in advance with the authorities. Certain categories of passenger are allowed more or less unimpeded use of the airport – these include members of the diplomatic corps, military chiefs of staff, assayers of the rare-earth minerals which are mined on Prachous, and of course all members of the seigniorial families, their deputies, staff and representatives.
All other travellers are required to use the seaports, where inter-island ferries provide regular services. The restrictions on travel are similar, but the border officials who oversee the rules at the ports are given extensive discretion about whom they will allow in or out of Prachous. This pragmatic loophole in the border controls does allow a certain amount of interchange between Prachous and the islands in the seas around it.
The Prachoit compulsion to maintain controls on movement of the population is traditional, and can be traced back through the centuries. Before the invention of air travel the seaports were much more tightly controlled and the penalties for trying to enter illegally, or to escape, were extreme. For this reason, the name Prachous means in certain patois contexts closure. To modern Prachoits, closure has become a definition of how they understand their island society and explains the attitude to strangers, the rejection of cultural influences from other islands, and the constant need for social reassurance encountered at every level.
There are many recreations open to the Prachoit population and because of the overall wealth of the island these are popular and well used. The mountain areas, in particular, contain a multitude of resorts and spas, open the year round. Sailing is enjoyed along all the coasts except the eastern one. Although Prachoit children are taught seamanship from an early age, the lagoons and tidal reaches in the east are considered too dangerous to navigate. All sailing is required to take place in river estuaries, closed lagoons or within five kilometres of the coast. Deeper water is said to contain defensive mines.
Team sports are enthusiastically followed.
Perhaps the most popular pastime of all, though, is club flying. The island is dotted with many small, privately run airfields and almost all are unregulated. At weekends and during holiday periods the skies are busy with dozens of single- and twin-engined aircraft. Traffic control is becoming a problem for the authorities, although the more experienced pilots claim that self-regulated airspace makes the most sense and has worked well on Prachous for many decades.
There are few attempts to fly out of Prachous. Fuel supplies at most airstrips are limited, and in any event all aircraft licensed to fly from Prachoit landing strips are equipped with fuel tanks of restricted size. There are exceptions to this – for example, aircraft used for agriculture or crowd-control purposes are given many freedoms.
Prachous is a secular island. Religious observation is tolerated but not encouraged. No churches, temples or other places of worship have been built in the new town of Adjacent, or in its general area. Aircraft are banned from flying over Adjacent or anywhere near it.
17
THE NURSE, THE MISSIONARY AND THE REEDLAND
I spent most of my first few months on Prachous trying to locate a close friend of mine called Tomak. We had lost contact when war broke out, when as a reservist he was commissioned and sent to the front. Before we parted, Tomak told me everything he knew which would enable me to keep in touch with him. He told me the name of his unit, the rank he had been given and the likely part of the country to which he would be posted. We both knew that as a cavalry lieutenant, in an army confronting a heavily mechanized enemy, he was likely to be kept in reserve and not be involved in front-line action, and we both welcomed the news that he had been posted to guard duty at a top-secret base, which Tomak understood was a scientific research station of some kind. I had therefore temporarily stopped worrying about him.
However, the power of the enemy was overwhelming, our country was subdued and occupied, and all the surviving commissioned officers in the armed forces were rounded up. At the time I was a civilian attached to the air force, so my position was ambiguous, but I managed to escape before anyone captured me.
I later learned that Tomak had been injured during the fighting and evacuated to a hospital somewhere on Prachous. His life was said to be in no danger but he required surgery and extensive post-operative therapy. If this was true it would mean he had fared better than many of his fellow officers. After being rounded up they had been transported en masse to a small, uninhabited island called Cahthinn, and there, it was rumoured, they had been shot. No one knew this for sure but it was a persistent rumour, given credibility by the known disappearance of so many young men.
/> Because I was not a Prachoit, the people I met almost always treated me with polite suspicion. I later found out that this was normal on the island, not just aimed at me, but at first I felt it was an unwelcoming place. Because of the way I arrived on Prachous – I had flown in and landed at a small, privately owned airstrip near the south-east coast, not realizing until later that by doing so I had broken several local laws – I always found it difficult to explain who I was or what I was doing there.
For the first few days I was lost, not just in the sense that I was unable to find my bearings, but also in trying to understand the unwritten rules, customs and expectations of the place I had arrived in. I have rarely felt so foreign, so much an outsider. At first, exhausted after my long flight, I tried to find a hotel or guest house, or anywhere I could spend the night, but no one I met seemed to understand what I meant. Hotels turned out to be almost unknown on the island, because there were so few visitors from abroad. Prachoits have instead devised an informal system of room barter, for when they travel around the island. I had no knowledge of this at all. I not only needed somewhere to stay but I was hungry and thirsty. Later I would need to rent a car or buy some maps. Their polite suspicion and complete lack of understanding made such things seem impossible to achieve.
On the first night I returned to my aircraft and slept, or tried to sleep, in the cramped cockpit. The next day, as soon as the airstrip opened, I was told by an official that my plane was going to be impounded. The plane was wheeled to a bonded hangar and I was handed a mass of paperwork. This would commence the procedure by which I might be allowed to have the aircraft returned to me. I was told to complete the first two pages immediately.
On the top line of the first page I had to write my name. This was a problem I had foreseen, because I knew my name would look and sound foreign to the people of this island. I wrote ‘Kirstenya Rosscky’, seeing no alternative. If I was asked to identify myself, all my papers, including my solo pilot’s licence, were in that name. I handed over the required basic information expecting objections, but the official accepted it without comment.
I managed to find a guest house on my second night – in reality it was a refuge or hostel for walkers – and began to learn at last the ways of this island. Money, as I understood it, did not exist. Residents of the island have to surrender tithes, while visitors like myself can either pay a tithe like everyone else, or exercise the option to take out a long-term loan, which need only be settled when leaving the island. I immediately decided on a loan, as the alternative would have been to give up my plane.
More paperwork followed but this was easier: it was the sort of form you would have to fill out when applying for a job, or opening a savings account. The loan was drawn up on the spot by a clerk who happened to live close to the hostel, and from then on I was able to charge all my expenses to a numbered account.
Those early days now seem remote to me. After I had been on Prachous for a few weeks and learned to blend in, I discovered it was an easy place to live. There were dozens of apartments or houses to choose from, food was plentiful and inexpensive, and most people were polite once they were used to me, but they were always incurious, rarely open about themselves, always closed off, never likely to invite you to their homes, these materially endowed citizens, all of them profligate consumers.
18
As soon as I had found a small apartment in which to live, and arranged for the use of a car, I set about the legal process of changing my name. It was protective colouring – I had no wish to draw attention to myself or what I was doing. I already knew the severe way the Prachous authorities dealt with people they considered to be illegal immigrants. A change to a commonplace Prachoit name was a first step as a harmless, simple disguise. I chose a name I had seen written down and heard spoken many times, one I hoped would blend in and that to me sounded attractive: Mellanya, Mellanya Ross.
I began to make a few friends, mostly people who lived in the same apartment block as me. They behaved like Prachoits – I tried to copy them. This meant we were always friendly towards each other, but it never went further than that.
All this gave me an increasingly safe base for what I wanted to do on Prachous.
The search for Tomak was still my only reason for being on the island. There were several immediate problems to tackle. For instance, if he was in hospital I had no idea which one it might be. Every town of any size had its own hospital. If he had been discharged, where was he now, and in what sort of physical condition? Then there was the immense size of the island. Getting around was clearly going to be a problem, even with the use of a car. There were trains, but these tended to follow the developed parts of the coastlines, making the vast interior inaccessible except by road or air. I discovered that some of the aero clubs would arrange short internal flights, which might be a solution. It reminded me of how much I wished I still had use of my own aircraft – so many small problems would be solved if I could fly wherever I wanted, as I was used to doing at home.
But perhaps the greatest task would be finding out how to penetrate the bland bureaucracy that functioned in every walk of life on Prachous. I realized that if Tomak, a casualty of war and an army officer, was receiving hospital treatment on this fiercely neutral island then the records would not be easy to find. Whenever I asked any neighbour or acquaintance for information or advice, I usually received the familiar Prachoit comment that it was better, always much better, not to ask questions and better still to stay put. Officials were unfailingly courteous to me, especially when I told them that Tomak was my wounded lover and I wished to find him and care for him, but at the same time they were routinely, infallibly unhelpful.
As soon as I felt settled in my new apartment I began the search for Tomak. I went first to the hospital in the town where I had chosen to live, a place on the coast called Beathurn, and then went to similar hospitals in other towns close by. I soon discovered that there was little chance of Tomak being in one of these, as they mostly dealt with accident and emergency, maternity, day surgery, and so on. All the major illnesses, injuries and traumas were transferred to one of many specialist campuses, which were situated in a number of different parts of the island.
I located the specialist burns unit at a place called the Nekkel Campus. It was a three-day drive across the island, passing through some of the wildest, most barren terrain I had ever seen. Tomak was not there at the Nekkel, never had been there, and no one on the staff would give me any further information about how I could trace him, I was not of course a blood relation, nor was I married to him. The system was closed against me.
When I had recovered from that trip I tried again, this time to a place called SATU, which I understood had a unit specializing in gunshot and other traumatic wounds. Again, travelling to SATU involved a major and difficult journey of several days, in this case skirting around a huge area of virgin forest. Once again, my search produced nothing except an awareness that Prachoit rules on privacy and confidentiality were almost impenetrable. At its highest my relationship with Tomak, in Prachoit terms, was only as a friend of the family, and this was not enough.
My long drives across the island awakened me to the picturesque and varied scenery of Prachous. Although much of the island is covered by desert, and a large part of the remainder is buried in subtropical forest, there are many areas of natural beauty: open fertile countryside, magnificent ranges of mountains, and a thousand different views of the turbulent seas and the spectacular wave formations. Even though I was on my single-minded quest to find my lover, I stopped the car many times to look at the view.
On nearly all the highways there were allocated parking places to see the best scenery. I particularly liked breaking my journey at the sites high in the coastal range of hills, where broadleaf forests provided some relief and shade from the ferocious daytime temperatures. As I drove along I began to look forward to the next stopping place, as the road climbed through and over the thickly wooded hills, sometimes
skirting beaches and bays, at other times ascending by way of dizzying viaducts and corkscrew mountain roads to the heights. From so high above the coastline the scenery was of an ocean constantly in motion, a fabulous ultramarine in colour, but flecked and broken everywhere by the white explosions of surf against the rocky barriers. I never tired of staring. My one regret was that I could not fly over it in my plane, make a flying tour of the entire coastline.
Many other people were using these viewing positions, but the sites were large and well laid out, so there was never any sense of being crowded. It was always possible to walk away from the central area and follow narrow paths or steps to different vantage points. I also discovered that most of these places had a choice of restaurants, and some of them even offered overnight stays. On my outward journeys I travelled fast along the wide main roads, concentrating on my need to find Tomak, but when I was returning without news of him, and with no clear idea of what I might try next, I deliberately dawdled, making the most of the trip.
19
It was the beginning of my slow habituation into the Prachoit way of life. It was an insidious process in which the unobtrusive ease and comfort of everyday life felt like a freeing from all responsibility. It was the way Prachoits lived, and by not resisting it I found it suited me. I settled in Beathurn, and soon was feeling safe and happy for the first time in my life.
My inner compulsion to find Tomak was lessening. I had never thought it would happen, but the daunting practical problems that had to be overcome, and the uncertainty of what I might learn, coupled with the bland congeniality of everyday life, soon had a sedative effect. I left long gaps between each excursion, and as the months went by the gaps grew longer and my resolve became weaker.
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