The Islanders

by Christopher Priest

  ‘Come to bed and put me back to sleep.’

  * * *

  In the end Oy agreed to stay on with her. Yo remained as she was, difficult and perverse, often yelling at him for doing something wrong, sometimes abandoning him so she could work on her own, but her reliance on him did appear to be genuine. Every day they worked together on the tuning vents inside the tunnel. Oy found this interesting, the endless range of settings and combinations, harmonizing as the wind shifted direction and pressure.

  Soon the mountain was responding to the opening of the extra vents. A strong wind was no longer necessary to produce a note – Yo had installed a series of Venturi tubes that increased the local speed at which the wind stream passed through the tuners. One night they lay awake as the mountain groaned and curled its tremendous rumbling notes, fading away and recovering as the erratic Nariva swept across the face of the mountain. It was gaining a sort of ponderous, elephantine beauty.

  But much as Oy admired her ingenuity he found the endless deep droning of the bass notes uninspiring. People in the town had started complaining too, but so far no one appeared to have worked out who was behind the all-pervading sound.

  If Mt Voulden had been one of his own pieces, Oy would already have left the island. He disliked hearing comment on his work.

  One morning at dawn, after another wakeful night, he said to Yo, ‘It needs a descant.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Another tunnel, shorter, narrower, at a different angle to the wind, playing a higher harmony.’

  Yo said nothing but stared at him in silence, before she shut her eyes. Several minutes passed. He could see her eyes moving rapidly behind the closed lids. Her jaw was clamped tight and Oy could see veins in her neck, pulsing with pressure. He braced himself.

  Finally, she said, ‘Fuck you, you bastard. Fuck you, fuck you!’

  But this time her abuse did not lead to sex. She dressed in a hurry, went to the mountain alone and Oy did not see her again until the following day.

  * * *

  When she was ready she took him up the mountain, much higher than the main tunnel, to a place where she had found a long ridge on the southern face. The wind was keener and colder there and made its own harsh whistling as it scoured across the bare rocks and deep crevasses.

  ‘If I could somehow drill a new tunnel through this ridge, would you stay around and help?’

  Oy was balancing on an exposed boulder, buffeted by the freezing wind. Far below them the first tunnel was moaning, but they could barely hear it up here.

  ‘If you could somehow drill it, I would somehow fill it in.’

  ‘Then what’s the point?’

  ‘Ah – that old argument about point,’ Oy said. ‘Art has no point. It only is. We could do both. You drill a tunnel and I’ll fill it in.’

  ‘I thought I was the mad one.’

  ‘Yes and no. That’s the other old argument.’

  Yo gestured impatiently. ‘Then what the hell?’

  ‘What the hell what?’ Oy stared down at the astounding elevated view, the hommke islands, the seething sea, the white clouds and the shafts of brilliant sunlight. A squall of rain was distantly moving across from the south. Two white-painted ferries were passing in the narrow strait between two islands. ‘Some places don’t need art,’ he said. ‘Look at what’s here! How could you or I improve on that?’

  ‘Art isn’t just about pretty views. There’s no sound from the view, for one thing.’

  ‘There’s the wind. Why don’t we build a virtual tunnel? You drill it, I will fill it in. All at once. It starts here where we are now, it comes out on the other side of the ridge. You know what you will do if you drilled it, I know what I could do if I repaired it. We achieve parity. That’s what real art is. Parity! Now shall we go back down before I get frostbite?’

  ‘What about the descant? I need that now.’

  ‘There are other ways.’ He leapt down from the boulder, narrowly avoiding turning his ankle on the hard and uneven ground. ‘You’ll think of something. I’ll be back in a year or two, to see what you have come up with.’

  * * *

  But ten days later he was still restlessly there. Yo kept finding things she needed to do in the tunnel, and thinking up ways of making him work with her on them. In one sense it suited him, as he had a destination in mind, but the particular ferry he needed to catch to Salay had sailed a couple of days before. Another was not due for a while.

  Mt Voulden now played its bass song every night, in low winds and high. Yo declared herself dissatisfied with it. She wanted to keep tuning and adjusting the baffles, but the reaction against the booming music from people in the town was growing more vehement every day. They both knew it was time to leave, time to start other projects.

  Irrespective of what Yo herself might be planning, Oy was intending, no matter what, to catch the next ferry to Salay. It was due to dock in the harbour in the morning. He packed his stuff as unobtrusively as possible while Yo was showering.

  When she emerged, hair wet and with a towel plastered around her body, Mt Voulden began to drone its tuneless music. Yo abruptly turned on Oy, shouting that she knew he was about to abandon her. She accused him of betraying his own art as well as hers, of selling out, of trying to destroy what she was doing –

  It was the familiar overture. This time, knowing it was to be the last, Oy did not allow her to pull him down on the bed. He stood up to her, yelling back. It was anger in the cause of expression, not real anger, but it was verbal slaughter. He gave as good as he had ever got from her, and more. She hated that. She spat at him, so he spat back at her. She punched him, he punched her.

  Finally he allowed it to happen and they sprawled together on the bed. Her towel had been knocked aside while they fought, but now she tore off his clothes. It was aggressively passionate, lust not love, but as before it was all the action of hands and mouth. Mt Voulden roared anew. A wind-borne scale began, a slow tonic progression.

  Yo suddenly yelled, ‘In me! Do it!’

  She guided him so there was no misunderstanding what she meant, and at last he entered her. She gasped aloud, a rasping shriek beside his ear. Her fingers and nails dug into his back, her mouth pressed hotly against his neck, her legs clamped around his back and buttocks.

  The tunnel through the mountain attained the top of the scale, and the great interminable note began to grow louder. Yo climaxed with it, screaming, shrieking, the highest music of sexual pleasure.

  Oy slumped over and across her but she continued to release her noise of pent-up passion. Every breath she gave was another note, sweet and high. She was waiting for the sounds from the mountain now, listening for its cue, breathing with it, harmonizing, a tuneful descant, a melody of the air and sky, of the winds that curled through the tuning plates and fanned the vents and crossed the seas and islands. Her voice was surprisingly pure and innocent, untouched by her violent moods and mercurial nature. She was at one with the music she created, and now she sang the wind.

  Out there in the ocean of islands the winds that sifted the sand on the beaches, guided the currents and stirred the forests had their source. They arose from the doldrums, from the cooling impact of snow and the calving of bergs in the glaciers of the south, from the unpredictable high pressure systems of the temperate zones, the calm lagoons of humid air across the tropics. They followed the tides, swooped around the heights of mountains, changed the moods and hopes of the people they touched, brought rain and cleansing air, created rivers and lakes and refreshed the springs, they ruffled the seas. Nariva, Entanner and Benoon. Beyond them a score of others, trade winds and gales, hurricanes and monsoons and tempests, cooling squalls and the lightest of breezes, the warm winds of dawn, circling the globe, raising dust, making rhythms in memory, turning wind vanes and filling sails, inspiring love and revenge and dreams of adventure in people’s hearts, slamming windows and rattling doors. The winds of the Dream Archipelago blew wild and parching across barren outer cays a
nd crags, enlivened the humid towns, watered the farms, swept deep snows into the mountains of the north. Yo’s clear soprano voice tapped this source, gave it a shape and a sound, a story, a feeling of life.

  As the note from the mountain lowered in pitch, became quieter, then ceased, Yo’s singing ended. She was breathing quietly, regularly, and her eyes were closed. Oy extricated himself from her embrace, levered himself away from the bed, walked unsteadily to the open window.

  A soft breeze was moving through the town. He rested his hands on the sill, leaned forward to take the warm air. His hair was matted to his head, his chest and legs were sticky with sweat. He breathed deeply. The breeze had come in from the sea and the islands, across the land, around and through the mountain, down into the clustered streets of the Old Town. It was the middle of the night, the early hours, long before dawn, still warm from the day, anticipating the next.

  The street below the window was full of people. A crowd had appeared in the area outside Yo’s studio, spilling out along the street in both directions. More were coming from the houses and apartments close by, their faces turned up towards the distant mountain, a deep shadow against the night sky. They were listening for more of its music. A group of women were laughing together, children had come outside with their bedclothes clutched around them, lanterns flickered in the breeze, several men were going around with casks, pouring drinks.

  Behind Oy, on the bed, Yo had fallen asleep. Her face in repose was unguarded, undefended by pride and ambition, now just exuding modesty and in a way he had never seen before, kindness. She breathed steadily and calmly, her chest rising and falling in a gentle motion.

  Oy sat beside her until dawn, watching her sleep, listening to the happy crowd outside as the people slowly dispersed. The mountain was silent. As the sun came up Oy dressed, then walked down to the harbour. He did not wait for the Salay boat to come in, but caught the first ferry of the day, heading nowhere that he knew, out into the endless sprawl of lovely islands, down into the Archipelagian winds.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHRISTOPHER PRIEST IS A CONTEMPORARY NOVELIST and a leading figure in modern SF and fantasy. He was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He was selected for the original Best Of Young British Novelists in 1983. He has published thirteen novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction. His novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. In 1996 Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige, which was made into a film in 2006. Directed by Christopher Nolan, it went to No.1 US box office in its first week and received two Academy Award nominations. He has been nominated four times for the Hugo Award, and has won several awards abroad, including the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Ditmar Award (Australia), and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France). In 2001 he was awarded the Prix Utopia (France) for lifetime achievement.

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