With my stomach full, leaning back against the cave and feeling warm for the first time in days, I try to explain Andalus’s presence once again. I do not want a companion. Not one like this anyway. I do not like getting used to having a dependant. I think again of how he came to be here. If the Axumites have started exploring again, then the Brans need to know. No one would want a resumption of the hostilities. Perhaps Bran too has started exploring. We had no plans to do so when I left but that was then. Perhaps the world has changed. Or is about to.
And then I allow myself to think about what Andalus’s presence requires. I think about going back.
3
The thought leaves a tightness in my stomach. I am like a man with a woman he loves, uncertain of how she feels, excited but too nervous to be happy. It does not surprise me that I have decided to go back almost without realising it.
I know too Andalus is an excuse, a reason I can use to explain my return. I am under no illusions. Going back will most likely mean either execution or at the very least imprisonment followed by banishment once again. Doing my duty and turning this man over will count for very little. I do not have unreasonable expectations but perhaps there will be time enough for me to tie up some loose ends, to see Tora and Abel once again, pick up some more supplies. I can leave a copy of my ten years’ work behind with the authorities so they can study it and broaden, however slightly, the pool of knowledge. They should appreciate that. I will set to the work with renewed vigour when I return. I will have made my peace and leaving Andalus there would eliminate variables. A man is happiest when nothing is in doubt.
Ten years. It could be a lifetime, it could be all too brief. Ten years. Less time than Bran was at war, less time than I knew Tora, than I was Marshal, than the time the Programme took to run its course. More time than it took us to end the war, to reduce the killing, the waste. More time than my trial, than it took to get here, than it took to say goodbye.
How many people have died in these ten years? The judge who sent me away? My assistants? Abel? Perhaps even, and the thought chills me, Tora herself. If she is not dead, it may be cruel to go back. Perhaps one day she awakes to a knocking on her door. It is me, wild-haired and exhausted after days at sea. I have come straight off the raft. ‘Tora,’
I say, though it is barely a croak and perhaps not even a word. Her eyes, blank at first, still full of sleep, suddenly come alive with recognition.
What then? A smile? Tears? Does she throw herself at me or does she step back? Does a man appear on the stairs, a little girl down the passageway? Each and every thing is possible. Perhaps I will go back and find her flat boarded up, the neighbours behind locked doors peering round closed curtains.
He has not moved. He breathes lightly and rapidly. Asleep I presume, dreaming. I watch him, his bulk rising and falling. I count the days since he arrived. Three days short of two weeks. He appears to have lost no weight at all. Perhaps it takes longer. I think back to when I arrived but it is too long ago.
I wonder how he became like this. Did they have hierarchical rationing in Axum? Did they base one’s food allowance on social rank? We would never have allowed that in Bran. The Programme was sup posed to be carried out regardless of social position. If you were productive you were in no danger. Supposition though. I cannot get beyond his silence.
I have come across men struck dumb by the horrors of war. Some go quiet, some cannot stop talking. Each, given time, will more often than not come round. Time heals all manner of wounds.
I will need a few weeks to prepare for the journey. I must smoke as much fish as possible, harvest grains and tubers. Though we could catch fish on the way, ten years ago there were vast swathes of ocean that were lifeless (I am lucky on my island) and we could be sailing for days without catching anything. I will need to make a bigger raft. There are two of us now, after all. I can build a new mast and some oars. I can spend time rowing, which should cut the journey time down. But I must bank on three weeks still. I have a compass but it is still possible to go off course for a day or two. Also, though we will be rowing and will have a better sail, the raft will be heavier and will sit lower in the water. We will need fifty litres of water. It rains all the time but I do not want to be collecting rainwater in an unstable boat. Fifteen good-sized fish, a handful of grains and a tuber a day: that will be plenty and will allow me to be unconcerned about provisions on the way. I will have other thoughts to occupy me.
I boil water and add crushed seeds and grains to make gruel, which I eat with the remaining crab claw. Again I do not offer any to Andalus.
I leave him in the cave when I go down to the beach for my morning swim.
While I swim I continue to think about the trip. The grains and tubers I can harvest a little at a time. They keep well. The fish that I smoke lasts three weeks before becoming inedible. Little is truly inedible but rotten fish is something I would rather avoid. If I take two weeks to prepare, the first fish will last a week into the voyage by which time it will long since have been eaten. A fish caught two days before I leave will last until almost the end of the voyage.
When I tell Andalus of my plans it may motivate him to work and to speak. Whether this would be out of fear or excitement I do not know.
The two peoples are prohibited from entering the other’s territory but if he has a reasonable excuse, after years of peace, it is doubtful whether he would be imprisoned. Perhaps even the prohibition has been repealed during this time. But if things have got worse, if the end of the Programme has caused tensions to rise again and supplies to dwindle, Andalus’s presence here could very well be a pretext for a resumption of hostilities. And if he refuses to speak, he will be imprisoned for certain. I imagine him standing there silent in the face of the wrath of the settlement. It will not do. I will make him aware of this. I decide to refuse him food for a while longer. That too may loosen his tongue.
I return to the cave. Andalus stares at me, watching while I pick up my axe. I can feel his eyes on me but when I look at his face I see no hostility. The only emotion I have seen is fear. For the rest he is blank.
A man with no voice and a man with no face.
I decide to tell him now of my plan to return. I sit close to him. I tilt my head to one side at first. I am still not going to tell him I know him.
‘We are going away,’ I begin. ‘We are going to go on a trip in a raft I will build. I hope you will help.’ His eyes meet mine. I stare into his pupils.
‘We are going to a place called Bran. I used to be known there. I used to be known well. Bran will decide our fate. I hope it is to be a good one.’ He drops his eyes from mine. I take his chin in my hand and lift it up. ‘Will you help?’ I ask. His mouth drops open. I think he is going to talk. He doesn’t. Instead he gets to his feet and shuffles away from me, out the cave entrance. Where he was sitting I notice something, a piece of fish. Has he been secretly catching food while I’ve been out in the forest or at the peat beds? I feel anger. I shout after him, ‘You will not plunder my island. You will not steal from me.’ I get up and go over to the entrance. He is a long way down the hill and cannot hear me. He has moved surprisingly quickly.
I am not angry for long. My anger never lasts. I am too pleased to be going back to worry about Andalus overly much. But I will stick to my plan to try to make him talk. And I won’t let him get away. He is essential to me now.
If I am to receive no help from Andalus I will need to make the most of my days. I will get up slightly earlier and forego the swim. I will alternate days of raft building with days of food collection and peat gathering. With fewer tasks in a day I can devote more time to each and accomplish more. It will be hard though and I will have little time for my survey.
It is dark today. As I set out for the forest, the clouds are so thick they shut out most of the light. It could be dusk. Though it is still dry near the cave, across the grasslands I see the rain fall in swathes, blown by the wind. Though it rarely rains heavily, today it will. It
is not a good start to my labours.
I am right. The forest is wet underfoot. The rain seems to muffle any noise made by the breeze.
The first thing to do is to build the raft. I will need at least two trees for the base. The mast and oars can be made out of a third. By mid-afternoon I have felled three trees and stripped them of most of their branches. Once these are dry they will make a large bonfire. Or they will mean I can sit in a warm and completely dry cave for a few nights.
But, unless I have miscalculated, they will not be sufficiently dry by the time I leave. They would give off too much smoke. I leave the trunks where they lie. Splitting them into planks can wait for the day after tomorrow.
In the cave I put some tubers in the fire. I am exhausted and do not go out again that day. I realise it might take me a little longer to adjust to a new, more vigorous routine. I spend the last hour of daylight making annotations. I write down the number of trees I have taken, the number remaining, the ages of the ones I have cut down. All the trees I have taken seem roughly the same age. As far as I can work out they’re within a decade of each other at around fifty years old. I have three theories for this. The island experienced a few years of warmer weather when the saplings took root and now the lack of sun has stunted their growth.
They are of a variety that only reaches sexual maturity at a great age, which would be why there are no saplings. They were sown by a previous castaway, a man armed only with seeds from some abandoned part of the world, seeds which gave birth to a barren progeny.
I have not given much thought to this – that the island was inhabited before me. Yet why not? It might rain constantly but enough light gets through for vegetation other than the trees to grow. There is peat. It is surrounded by ocean, which must once have been more bountiful than now. All in all it is not a bad place to live. I could have chosen a worse place to be a castaway. Perhaps there were people here first. The common age of the trees is a possible clue. There could be signs of previous humans all around, things that are there but that I cannot see.
I could be living in the middle of a ruined city surrounded by ghostly chatter. We see what we want to see after all. But I am not convinced.
I feel that I am the first one here, the first one to make his mark in this watery prison.
I do feel as if I am not alone though. The figures amidst the trees, heads peering over cliff tops, bodies merging into the black cliff walls.
A consequence of being alone I tell myself. And of the life I have lived.
The longer I have not been with others the more I imagine others, the more I feel I am being watched. Of course I am not alone now.
Andalus, or Andalus’s shadow, is with me. It is possible he follows me in such a way that I do not see him but I doubt it. He would not be able to hide from me, a man who has been living on this small island for a decade. He is too large to be stealthy and even if he weren’t the island is mostly flat with little tall vegetation. Unless he was creeping through the mud on his belly I would be able to see him easily.
I do not feed him in the morning. Still he says nothing. I cannot, in good conscience, starve the man. Besides, I would not be able to return without him. My plan now is to feed him once a day at irregular times.
I reason that if I can create uncertainty about whether he will or will not be fed he may be moved to question my actions. On a grander scale, this was why there was a war. Our uncertainty over whether there were enough resources for all led us to fight for our share. It led us to fight Andalus’s people and it led to the Programme, which was, after all, a way to ensure there were never wars over food, land and water ever again, a way to ensure we knew what the future held. The Programme was put in place to prevent itself ever being necessary again, a contradiction my people lived with for many years.
I will not kill him but I will provoke him. It will be for his own good for he is unlikely to get much sympathy in the settlement if he cannot explain himself. That I treat him like an animal is not lost on me. Until he communicates with me that is the way I must be with him, for he can deserve no better.
I want him to talk to me before I reveal I know who he is. It is a good tactic to keep something hidden until the last moment. I have hinted that I know him of course. I wonder if it is this that is making him silent. If he were here on his own would he be talking? Speaking to everything: the plants, the birds, the rocks? It is me that puts the hand across his mouth stopping words. He could be the one playing the game. He recognises me and is searching for my weakness, gathering his strength for an attack, an attempt to take over this island.
It is unlikely I know. He seems completely in the dark about himself, about me. Again I think about what might have caused this. Driven away by a people turned against him he is no longer able to express himself, is no longer a man.
I will come clean with him before we leave. End the games.
I am stiff from yesterday’s work. I feel it as I sit facing out to sea for seven hours. Bites are infrequent. I clutch my coat around me. My head nods. I am warm. All I can hear is the sea, the noise of the waves.
I barely move other than once or twice to check the cliffs behind me.
I let my head slip forward till my chin lies on my chest. I feel my eyes closing. Then I jerk up suddenly, forcing air into my lungs. I feel as if I have stopped breathing. It is a few moments of panic. My line has stayed still in the oily water as if I hadn’t moved. There is no room for error out here. A heart attack, a stroke and I will be left here on my own. Perhaps unable to move, waiting till the tide comes in and floats my body away. Andalus would be no help.
In the still of the late afternoon I return to the cave. Andalus is standing with his back to me in the middle of the cave. It appears he has not heard me coming. He sways slightly. I do not know if he is dancing or simply unsteady on his feet. He stumbles trying to turn around. Not dancing then. He stares at me. I break the gaze. ‘Fish,’ I say, holding out my catch. Is this what I have come to? Here stands a man with whom I once debated the future of our two settlements, the future of the known world. From a debate over the rights of men, the right to a secure future, the right to life, the duty to the lives of others; from this to a monosyllabic grunt spat out across a cave on an island no one remembers.
Andalus turns away and lies down once more. I do not feed him tonight. He lies on his back and I watch him in the gloom. He snores lightly.
The task of splitting a trunk into planks is an onerous one and requires skills I have not honed. Somehow though by the end of the day I have split two trunks into usable planks and chopped another tree down.
My initial estimates of the amount of wood I will need have proved inaccurate. I will need two more trees. I am determined to build my boat better than the one that brought me here. I was lucky on the journey. Rough weather could easily have capsized the vessel. True, we do not get many storms anymore but they are not unheard of. That was what the settlement wanted. Lacking the courage, the conviction, to condemn me to death, they hoped nature would do their task for them. They should have remembered that nature has seldom done what we want. The crime for which I was banished was one born out of circumstances requiring an intervention in nature, a speeding up of its processes to avoid overwhelming it. That at least was how the Programme was billed and was the gist of my defence. Nature can support only so much life.
But I am being unfair to my people. They are not a violent, vindictive people in spite of what they went through. Pragmatic is a word that suits them, civilized and pragmatic.
It was an unusual court case. Not strictly fair. I was allowed a defence but I was condemned months before the trial began. I knew I would not walk out of there free. The numbers against the Programme had grown too rapidly. There was anger. I asked to send emissaries to our rivals to see what had happened there but this was refused. They may have suspected treachery. I wanted to ask my accusers how they could accuse me when it was their support that enabled me to carry out my duty. I wan
ted to point at them and say, ‘You! You are in the dock too!’ I wanted to shame them, to make them know their guilt, to tell them, taking their hands, ‘See! You too have hands drenched in blood.’ But I am not a melodramatic man and it would not have helped my cause. I understand that I was sacrificed for the sake of the greater good. Burnt at the stake while the crowds bayed around me.
But there was nothing like that. It was an altogether quieter affair.
Tora, sitting in the corner, barely glanced at me but supported me by coming to the trial every day and sitting through every minute of it.
A few others came but not many. And they were mostly respectful.
One man though had to be dragged from the court. Towards the end of the trial he started coming regularly and sitting in my eye line. I could feel him staring at me. One day in the middle of proceedings he got up and started screaming at me. He used language such that I never tolerated in the offices or from my acquaintances. Deplorable behaviour. I understand he lost several family members. During this episode Tora looked up at me. I fancy I could see tears in her eyes. But I could not see clearly. Guards were standing in front of me while their colleagues hauled the protester away kicking and screaming. I looked at Tora not at him, looked at her, trying to see more clearly, peering through a curtain of burly men.
The day has gone quickly. It has been one of my good days. I have worked hard and achieved much. It is a satisfying feeling. It is dusk when I turn to go. As I do I see Andalus. He is standing behind me about ten metres off. Just standing and looking at me. I do not know how long for. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask him. ‘How long have you been there? What do you want?’ He has startled me. I do not expect answers and I do not receive them. I walk towards him and he half turns as if letting me leave a room first. It is a gesture I remember him making years ago. He was always polite, there was no faulting him on that. This time though I cannot but feel a chill as I walk past.
Wall of Days Page 5
