The Dream Archipelago

by Christopher Priest

  The priest was working again but glancing back over his shoulder in my direction. I went quickly down the steps and crawled in through the hatchway. It was a smaller opening than I had expected and I had to squeeze through the narrow wooden frame. The space behind was dark, lit by two candles. As I stood up in the confined space Seri lit a third candle.

  The hideout had apparently once been some kind of store or small cellar, because there were no windows and the hatch was the only way in or out. The ceiling was high enough for us to stand erect and although the space was narrow I could see that it extended away beyond the range of the weak candlelight. It was cool down there and the sound of the wind did not penetrate. Seri lit a fourth candle, high on a shelf running along the narrow room. The tiny cell smelled of match phosphor and candle wax and soot. There were two upended boxes on which to sit, and from somewhere Seri had found an old mat for the floor.

  ‘Do you come here alone?’ I said.

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I thought I might show you.’

  The candles cast a weak, fluttering light but as my eyes began to adjust from the bright daylight it seemed adequate. I sat down on one of the boxes.

  I had been expecting Seri to sit on the other box but she came and stood close in front of me. She seemed deliberately to be hemming me in against the wall.

  She said, ‘Do you want to do something with me, Lenden?’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘I’m fifteen. Have you done it yet?’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘This is a dead secret. Between you and me.’

  Before I realized what she was talking about Seri quickly raised the front of her skirt. With her other hand she pulled down the front of her pants. I saw a tangly black bush of hair at the junction of her legs.

  I was so surprised by the suddenness of the revelation, and recoiled so sharply, that I almost fell sideways off the box. Seri let go and the elastic in her pants snapped them back into place, but she did not release the skirt. She held it high against her chest, looking down at herself. Her pants were dark coloured and woollen. The elastic bit into the plump flesh of her belly.

  I was acutely embarrassed by what she had done, but also excited and curious.

  ‘Do that again,’ I said. ‘Let me see.’

  She stepped back, almost as if she were about to change her mind, but then she came forward again.

  ‘You do it,’ she said, thrusting her abdomen towards me. ‘You pull them down. All the way down.’

  I reached forward tentatively and took the top of her pants in my fingers. I pulled the cloth down until I could see the first growth of her hair.

  ‘Further!’ she said, knocking my hand out of the way. She pulled the pants down, front and back, so that they clung to her legs above the knees. Her triangle of hair, curling and black, stood unambiguously before me. I could not stop staring at her, feeling hot and prickly, a strange yearning in my loins.

  ‘Do you want a feel?’ Seri said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Touch me. I want you to feel.’

  ‘I’m not sure I should.’

  ‘Then let me look at you. I’ll feel you.’

  I didn’t want that, not then, shyness and fright rising in me unmanageably, so I reached out and touched her hair with my fingers. Seri moved forward, pressing herself against my fingertips.

  ‘Lower down, Lenden,’ she said. ‘Feel a bit lower down.’

  I turned my hand so that the palm was up and reached for the junction of her legs. There was less hair, a fold of skin. I snatched my hand away.

  Seri came forward even more.

  ‘Touch me again. Go right inside.’

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘Then let me touch you!’

  ‘No!’ The thought of that happening, of someone, anyone at all, touching and exploring, was inconceivable. I was still growing. Too much of all that had never been explained to me. I was ashamed of my body, of growing up.

  ‘All right,’ Seri said, sounding excited. ‘Put your finger in me. Right inside. I don’t mind.’

  She seized my wrist and brought my hand up against her. She was damp now, and when my fingers reached forward they slipped easily over the soft flaps of skin and slid into the warm recess behind. That intimacy took me beyond hesitation. I pushed forward, trying to go further in, wanting to sink my fingers, my hand, into that exciting wet hollow. But then she stepped back smartly, and pushed down her skirt with her hand.

  I said, ‘Seri—’

  ‘Ssh!’

  She bent low and listened beside the square of shadowed daylight that was the hatch. Then she straightened and hoisted up her pants with a sinuous movement of her hips.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I think there’s someone outside,’ she said. ‘I heard something fall.’

  ‘Let me touch you again,’ I said.

  ‘Not now. Not if there’s someone listening.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In a minute. We’ll have to go somewhere else. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ It was difficult to believe that this was Seri, my detested cousin!

  ‘I know somewhere safe,’ she said. ‘Outside the seminary … a short walk.’

  ‘And then I can … ?’

  ‘You can go the whole way if you like,’ she said casually, but the words had such power I almost fainted.

  She made me crawl first through the hatch and she blew out the candles. I scrambled through. As I did so, a shadow falling from above moved quickly. The priest we had seen earlier was at the top of the steps but he was now backing away rapidly. I went up the steps and saw him hurrying across to where he had dropped his hoe on the path. By the time Seri had joined me outside he was leaning over his work on the garden again, hoeing the soil with quick, nervous movements.

  He did not look up as Seri and I walked hurriedly along the gravel path, but I glanced back as we passed through the gate. He was standing upright with the hoe in his hand, staring towards us.

  ‘Seri, he was spying on us.’

  She said nothing but took my hand and led me, running, through the long wild grass outside the seminary walls.

  *

  A rental car was waiting for us outside a side street office in Seevl Town, a Seigniory pass already attached to the windscreen. I took the front passenger seat beside Serjeant Reeth. We were crammed close together by the narrow body of the old car, the two bucket seats at the front divided only by a floor-mounted parking brake. She drove slowly through the narrow streets towards the hills.

  After a long restless period I had finally fallen asleep at some point in the small hours of the morning. I had woken up at daybreak in a complex, contradictory mood. I was still giddy with the sexual desire the young woman had awakened in me, but I was also feeling embarrassed, apologetic, introspective, ashamed, fatigued. I winced inside whenever I remembered the way I had turned her down. As we drove out of Seevl Town I was coping with this stew of feelings by keeping still, forcing myself to appear calm and by saying as little as possible. Bella said she would be needing me to direct her across the island, so I sat, as once my mother had sat, with the map open on my knee.

  Bella had appeared at breakfast in the hotel dining room, crisp in her uniform, once more the policewoman. Uniforms are of course symbols of the organizations they represent, and Serjeant Reeth when dressed as a policewoman was not the same sort of person as damp-haired Bella Reeth had seemed to be, in her scanty silken robe, sitting on the low hotel chair with bare knees poking up, while I crouched in a torment of indecision beside her. That image of her, which for a few minutes had been literally within my reach, now became a vision of fantasy and impossible allure. Why I had not accepted the invitation she threw down I could no longer imagine.

  I had hoped that she would appear in the morning wearing civilian clothes an
d dress in her uniform only once breakfast was over, giving me a chance to align what had happened with the fact of spending the day ahead with her. That was not to be.

  I knew that the events of the evening before could not be pretended away by silence, or denied by her wearing her starchy uniform. While we waited on Jethra dockside for the ferry, while we sat together in the unheated saloon of the boat, while we walked through Seevl Town in search of the car rental company, the words unsaid hovered in the space between us like a physical barrier. The longer I was with her the more I became obsessed with her physical presence, haunted by my memory of her young body in the loose silk wrap and frantic about the way I had undermined everything at the end.

  I was still paralysed by my need to explain, but the years of silence I had observed had created a habit it was almost impossible to break.

  Now we drove. Sometimes, as she shifted gear in the elderly car, her hand or sleeve would brush lightly against my knee. To see if it was accidental, as it seemed to be, I moved my leg unobtrusively a little to the side and it did not happen again. Later, I allowed my leg to move back, because her touch excited me.

  Once, at a junction on the higher slopes of the moors, we went to the map for guidance. Her head bent down beside mine. I longed for her to turn her face towards me.

  Watching the sombre green of Seevl’s fells my thoughts turned by imperceptible degrees away from that intrigue to the other, the old dreads and fears: my feelings about the island and the seminary.

  My memories of the moorland road were unreliable, but the mood induced by the scenery was a familiar companion, instantly recognizable after twenty years away. To someone seeing it for the first time, as Bella was seeing it, Seevl would appear wild, barren, grossly empty, but probably lacking in undercurrents of threat. The moors and rocks were rounded by centuries of harsh winters and unrelenting gales: where the rock was exposed no plant life clung to it except in the most sheltered corners and then it was only the hardiest of mosses or the lowliest of lichens. There was a violent, uncompromising splendour to Seevl, a scenic ruggedness unknown in Faiandland. Yet the bleak scenery was to me merely a context. The moors were neutral but they contained a menace. My feelings were always influenced by awareness of that menace.

  As Bella drove us along the narrow road I was already imagining ahead, thinking about the crag-enclosed valley at the other end of the island, with its cluster of grim, limestone buildings, the lawns and the incongruous flowerbeds.

  Bright sunlight did not suit Seevl. Although on this day the sky was clouded, the sun broke through from time to time, casting for brief periods a bright unnatural radiance on the landscape. We had the car windows closed and the heater on, yet still the cold reached us. On the higher stretches, the sideways blast of wind against the car buffeted and rocked it as it lurched on the broken surface of the road. I shivered every now and then, shaking my shoulders, pretending to feel the cold more than I really did, because it was the whole island that was chilling me and I did not want Bella to realize that.

  She drove slowly and expertly, steering more cautiously along the rutted tracks than ever my father had. The car was in low gear for much of the time, the engine’s note fast and high, constantly changing. Still we said hardly anything to each other, only a few occasional remarks about which way to go. I watched for familiar landmarks – a cluster of standing stones, the village in the valley from where you could see part of Jethra’s coastal suburbs, a fall of water, the dead towers – and sometimes I could direct her from memory without referring to the map. My knowledge of the landscape was erratic: there were long sections of the road that felt new to me and I would be sure we had lost our way, but then some landmark I remembered would finally appear, surprising me.

  We stopped for a midday meal at a house in one of the little hamlets. There was planning involved: it turned out that we were expected, a meal was ready. I saw Bella sign a document, a form that would reimburse the woman for her expense and trouble.

  When we reached the narrow part of the island and travelled along the road above the southern cliffs, Bella pulled the car over to the side and stopped the engine. We were shielded from the wind by a high, rocky bank and some bushes, and the sun warmed us. We stood by the car, looking in shared silence across the glistering seascape, the huge dark mounds of the islands, the silver-clouded sky with its beams of brilliant sunlight striking down, the view that as a child I had only been able to glimpse from my parents’ moving car. They never stopped to look.

  ‘Do you know the names of any of those islands?’ I said.

  Bella had removed her cap, leaving it on the driver’s seat in the car. Wisps of hair blew lightly around her face.

  ‘I can’t identify them from here,’ she said in a moment. ‘But Torquin must be one of them. We have a base there and my brother sent me a letter while he was staying on Torquin. He said it wasn’t far from home. If Torquin’s one of them then Derril must be another, because that’s part of the Serque group of islands, isn’t it? Where the Covenant was drawn up?’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about the islands,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve just heard every fact I know.’

  ‘So you’ve never been in the Archipelago?’

  ‘Only here, with you.’

  Only Seevl, the offshore island.

  As the clouds moved and the chiaroscuro of sunlight swept slowly across the view, we could see that the islands were many different shades of green. It was impossible to discern details from such a distance, only shapes and broad areas of colour. Like Bella, I knew little about the islands I could see. I did know that most of the islands close to Jethra were part of the Serque Group, that they were primarily dependent on dairy farming and fishing, and that most of the indigenous people spoke the same language as I did. It was school knowledge, half-remembered, all but useless. I wished now, as I had done so many times in the past, that I had travelled out to the islands when I was younger, when the restrictions weren’t so severe. The war we were fighting was ultimately about the neutrality and domain of the islands in the Archipelago. Like so many people I was ignorant of not just the issues but the actual islands and seas that were the essence of the conflict and was thus ignorant of the ultimate dispute of the war.

  ‘Have you been thinking about yesterday evening?’ Bella said suddenly, leaning forward and hunching her shoulders so that she appeared to be looking down at the rocks and the surf so far below us at the base of the cliff.

  My heart lurched. I had been bracing myself to say something. I was not expecting her to bring up the subject. I kept staring at the sea, the sky, the islands.

  In the end I felt my silence was becoming more significant than any words, so I said, ‘Yes. Ever since.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about it either. Was I wrong about you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, quickly. ‘I simply wasn’t ready. I’m so sorry. I felt terrible afterwards.’

  ‘I did too. But what you wanted is probably best. You know, when you’ve only just met someone, it’s probably better—’

  ‘To hold back a little?’ I filled in gratefully.

  ‘I only want to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake.’

  Silence fell again. I was thinking, Mistake about what? Does she mean what I think she means, or does she mean something else, or am I imagining everything? Nothing was any clearer for what she had said.

  At least we had spoken about it, however evasively.

  I said finally, ‘We’ll have to stay tonight at the seminary. You know we won’t have time to get back to Seevl Town today?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘They’ll probably have guest rooms in the college.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I went to a convent school.’

  She went round to the driver’s door and climbed inside the car. We drove on. I knew it took at least another hour from here and the daylight hours were running out. Bella said nothing after our short break, concentrating on the dif
ficult drive. I stared out of the window at my side, surrendering reluctantly to my memories and to the oppressive mood of the island.

  Seri held my hand in hers, not affectionately but in the way a determined parent will hold a child’s. We leapt and ran across the rough ground, the coarse grasses whipping against our legs. It was the first time I had ever ventured outside the seminary grounds. Never until then had I realized how the stout walls acted as a bulwark against the rest of the island. Out here the wind already seemed stiffer and colder.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said, gasping because I was breathless.

  ‘Somewhere I know.’

  She released my hand and went on ahead.

  ‘Can’t we do it here?’ I said. Some of the sexual tension that had built up in her hideout had been dissipated by our sudden decision to flee and I wanted to carry on where we had left off before she changed her mind.

  ‘Out here in the open?’ she said, rounding on me. ‘I told you it was secret.’

  ‘There’s long grass,’ I said lamely. ‘No one would see.’

  ‘Come on!’

  She set off again, leaping down a shallow slope towards a stream. I held back for a moment, staring guiltily towards the seminary. I could see there was someone there, outside the walls, walking in our direction. I guessed at once that it must be the priest with the hoe, although he was too far away for me to be sure.

  I ran after Seri and jumped across the narrow stream to join her.

  ‘There’s someone following us. That priest.’

  ‘He won’t follow us where we’re going!’

  It was now obvious where Seri was leading me. The ground sloped up steeply from the stream, rising eventually to the high rocky crag ahead. Long before that eminence and a short way from us, built from the ubiquitous limestone of the island, was the dead tower.

  I looked back and saw that even if the priest were still following us we had moved temporarily out of his sight. Seri marched on, already a long way ahead of me, scrambling up the hillside through the windswept grass.

  The tower appeared to be much like the others I had seen around the island, although I had never been as close before: it was about as tall as a four-storey house, hexagonal in shape and with window frames higher up which might once have contained glass but which were now vacant squares in the stonework. There was an unpainted wooden door in the base, hanging open on its hinges, and all around in the grass were pieces of broken stone facing and fallen tiles. There had once been a roof, built in the shape of a candle-snuffer cone, but now most of it had collapsed and only two or three beams remained to declare its old shape.