‘The law of the island. On Trellin the manner of disposal depends on the cause of death and in this case my cousin had to be cremated. You know how he died, of course?’
Sheeld shook his head. He had not known how to ask anyone what had caused the death, nor indeed, until this moment, had he been especially interested. As Mercier must have been the same age as his uncle, in his late seventies or early eighties, Sheeld had assumed he had been suffering from some degenerative disease related to age.
‘He was bitten by an insect,’ Alanya said. ‘A thryme.’
She tossed out the information in a factual way, but the words had a profound effect on Sheeld. A faint nausea passed through him, a swimming sense of light-headedness and disgust. He felt the air around him smothering him, suddenly warmer.
‘A thryme?’ he said stupidly.
‘You must know what that is.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t think they attacked humans,’ he said, his voice sounding ineffectual. He wanted to disbelieve what she had said.
‘They don’t usually. But this one had come into the house. One of the servants discovered later that an insect screen had worked loose. We think the thryme must have got into the upholstery of the chair Corrin usually sat in. That’s where he was found, with the bite on his back. The insect had managed to penetrate his clothes. The consultant at the hospital said he’d never seen a wound like it before. Thrymes normally only attack exposed skin.’
Sheeld shuddered.
‘This is terrible!’ he said. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me! I’m terrified of those things.’
He was trying to make himself sound reasonable, practical, adult, but he could hear the tremor in his voice. The news struck at the deepest phobia in him.
‘You’d better be careful while you’re here,’ Alanya Mercier said and a smile flickered across her face. ‘They’re all over the place. There are more thryme colonies here than on most of the other islands.’
She’s deliberately tormenting me, Sheeld thought, but he said, ‘Let’s go back to the house.’
‘You won’t see any out here. They stay underground during the day and anyway a thryme will only attack if it feels cornered.’
‘I wish you hadn’t mentioned this!’
‘I thought you were interested in why it was a cremation.’ She was looking at him intently again, the bland, greenish light of the forest making her lips and eyes look dark and her face the more pale. ‘You can go back to the house if you like, but I thought you had agreed to come with me.’
‘Is that true what you said, that we won’t see any?’
‘Yes. Thrymes nest underground and they stay there until after nightfall. You almost never see one during the day. Anyway, where we are now isn’t the sort of environment they like. This forest looks like untamed jungle but in fact it’s a managed timber resource. You won’t find fallen trees with exposed roots around here and the ground under those is the thryme’s natural habitat. Stay on the path and you’ll be as safe as you would be in a town.’
She appeared to grow bored with explaining and she turned away from him and continued along the path. Sheeld followed, but now his mind was reeling and he felt his nerves jangling. She had made him feel like a small child, nervously demanding reassurance about bogeymen. But every unexplained sound or sudden movement in the forest had become a moment of potential horror for him, a suggestion of menace. He looked anxiously at the ground as he walked, watchful for anything that might be moving.
Many people, most people, had a phobia about thrymes and until this moment Sheeld had never felt that his own dread was in any way unusual or remarkable. For most of his life the phobia had anyway been academic, as the only place in the Federation you were likely to see a live thryme was in a glass case in one of the zoos. Even so, the insects held a peculiar and particular horror for him, as they did for many others. In reality Sheeld had never seen a thryme, not even in a zoo, preferring not to go near any place where they might be found.
During the long period in which he had been trying to decide whether to relocate to the islands, the prospect of moving to a place where the thryme was native had played no small part in his agonizing indecision. Finally, other considerations had overcome the phobia, made it peripheral, but he had never conquered it.
Both male and female thrymes had a stinging tail and the sting was venomous, but there was at least an antidote for that. If it was applied quickly enough the antidote would normally enable the victim to recover, albeit after a short but nasty period of illness. The sting was therefore something to be wary of, but not to fear unduly. The bite was a different matter.
It was the bite that made fear of the thyme into a rational thing: one bite from a fully grown female thryme would kill any human being, child or adult. This was because the female had a marsupial pouch inside her mandible and after her eggs had hatched she would collect the grubs and carry them in her jaw. She would then seek a host in which to place them as parasites. Although the host would normally be an animal cadaver, or a fallen fruit, or even a heap of mouldering vegetation, it could also be a living host. Usually, the host was an animal; sometimes, rarely, it was a human being.
You treated a thryme with extreme caution if you came across one, exactly as you would a venomous snake, or a hunting panther, or an angry bear. The fear was a rational one, because the harm it could do you was real and deadly. Even professional handlers, keepers at zoos, entomologists, treated the thryme with elaborate care, always wearing protective clothing, never working alone, always making certain that emergency measures were ready in case a bite was inflicted.
None of this explained the phobia, the uncontrollable dread.
Most people found the thryme loathsome in appearance, could not bear to look at one without shuddering or shrinking away. It was the most common phobia of all, hugely exceeding in number those of all the other familiar irrational fears, such as spiders, ladders, confined spaces, cats, foreigners and so on.
The thryme was a large insect: most adults of the species grew to about fifteen centimetres in length, but some achieved twice that or more. It was also a tall insect. Its cantilevered legs lifted the main thorax to about ten centimetres above the ground when the insect was running or attacking. It was coloured dark brown or black. Like all insects it was six-legged, but the legs were thick and covered with long fine hairs. The touch of even these hairs against unprotected skin was said to produce a painful rash. The thryme had vestigial wings, which, although never used for flight by the adult, were flared in attack and helped cocoon the baby insects when they first metamorphosed from the grub. The head was hard and shiny, covered in a chitinous shell, but the body was in effect one large thoracic muscle. It made the main body soft and resilient, like that of a garden slug. Because of its extreme pliancy, the thryme was supposed to be difficult to kill: even if you whacked it hard with a stick it would keep scuttling towards you. It could instantly huddle into a defensive ball, dangerous to touch because of the hairs, then quickly resume its shape and continue to charge. It moved horrifyingly quickly: at full speed a large thryme could for short distances keep up with a running man.
During Sheeld’s short stay in the Dream Archipelago he had never seen a thryme, nor had he met anyone else who had. Thrymes could be found in theory anywhere in the islands, but they were supposed to prefer the wet tropical forests of the large islands in the Aubracs and the Serques. Trellin was one of the Greater Aubracs and about seventy-five per cent of its surface was covered in rainforest.
Sheeld had selected Foort as his destination for a number of different reasons, but principal amongst them was the fact that unlike Trellin it had a dry climate, with much of its surface made up of lava rock or sand. There were known to be some thryme colonies on Foort, but his new friends on the island dismissed the insect as an unlikely threat. Occasionally, a few might be found living peaceably in a wall cavity, or in a patch of wild ground, but they were almost never seen in the towns, never came into h
ouses, rarely represented any kind of serious threat.
After a couple of nervous weeks, Sheeld had started to accept that it might actually be true and eventually he was able to put the unpleasant little creatures out of his mind.
Alanya Mercier was continuing to stride on ahead of him, but it appeared that at last the heat was getting to her. Sheeld could see a darker patch of perspiration spreading down between her shoulder blades and in the clefts of her arms. She suddenly removed her hat and with an abandoned movement tossed it aside. It skimmed unevenly through the air, until caught on a broad-leafed frond. Sheeld noticed everything she did, worrying about her behaviour.
Further along the path widened again, with a harder, rockier surface. Alanya slowed to allow him to catch her up and walk at her side. From time to time Sheeld glanced covertly at her face, wondering what was going on in her mind. In the shadowless light of the forest her face was devoid of the subtlety that the discreetly lit chapel and the veil had lent it. She had a wide mouth with generous lips and her eyes were recessed and dark. Her hair, tightly drawn back and worked into a bun, was deep brown in colour. She was not conventionally beautiful, but what she undeniably had was animal sexual magnetism with a charge greater than any Sheeld had ever known. To be this close to her was an extraordinary experience and she dominated all his awareness.
Ahead, the sky visible through the trees was brightening and the path began to slope down.
As the forest thinned they emerged on to a narrow strip of scrubland and rocks and approached the edge of the cliffs cautiously. The ground was broken and littered with loose stones and boulders, hard and barren. Sheeld’s oppressive fears about thrymes began to fade away.
From the clifftop he was confronted with an unexpectedly magnificent panorama across the sea and he stood for a few moments to stare at it. Alanya continued along the path by the edge of the cliff.
‘The house is down here!’ she called.
He was invigorated by the stiff breeze from the sea and the sensational and dizzying view from the clifftop, but Alanya was hurrying away. With some reluctance he followed her down a steep slope along the face of the cliff itself to where some steps had been fashioned out of the rock. After these the path curved with the face of the cliff, descending at a more shallow angle to a natural hollow. Here, on ground which had been partly levelled, supported on wooden piles, was a wooden cabin with broad picture windows facing the view. Behind, another lane led up a natural shallow acclivity, winding up to where it was soon lost in a burst of vegetation, another route back into the forest.
The front of the cabin had a wide balcony and on it was a long upholstered swing chair with a coloured canopy. Alanya had gone straight to it and was now rocking to and fro, with her legs raised and tucked under her body. She was watching him with a coquettish expression.
Sheeld had seen something of these cliffs from the sea, as his ferry approached Trellin Town shortly after dawn. They ran along part of the south-western coast of the island, where the inland range of mountains met the sea. They were a famous sight, much painted and photographed. There had in fact been a large painting of the cliffs in the saloon bar of the ferry Sheeld had crossed in. As a vantage point for viewing this part of the Archipelago the Trellin cliffs were unrivalled. The view was privileged, a sight not seen by many, as only a few houses were allowed along the coast and the cliffs and the territory surrounding them were the private property of a select few.
Before Sheeld was a dazzling sea- and island-scape. There were something like nine or ten large islands in view, each one rising darkly from the turquoise sea and bordered with a dazzling strip of surf and beach. In the perfect visibility of the afternoon he could see the closer islands in stark detail, even in spite of the distances they must have been from him, but the ones on the horizon were only just visible in the oceanic haze.
Sheeld was still unfamiliar with the topography and configuration of the islands, but he knew that most of the ones he could see were part of the Aubracs and that one of them, probably the large one out towards the westerly horizon, was Grande Aubrac itself. That had been his last port of call during the overnight voyage. Learning the names of the islands, even the relatively few that lay in the vicinity of Foort, was a continuing problem for Sheeld. He had expended much time trying to obtain an accurate or up-to-date map of the Archipelago, but because of the war these were almost impossible for civilians to obtain.
There were several thousand inhabited islands in the Archipelago and an incalculable number of smaller rocks, crags, islets and reefs. The Midway Sea formed a wide, continuous belt around the world, but it was not an unbroken ocean. It was said that nowhere in its extent could you sail in a straight line for more than two hours without being forced to change direction to avoid a landfall. There were so many islands in the Archipelago that from any coastal point on any one island you could see at least seven other inhabited islands, or part of either continental mass, with the naked eye.
Sheeld was one of tens of thousands of new young expatriates in the islands. Many of the émigrés were avoiding military service – for the time being, exile to the islands was still a legal alternative to the draft. Although in his country there was a law that the exile, once chosen, would be permanent – the Archipelago was designated as a cultural development zone and public revenue was attached to incoming migrants – most of the draft dodgers assumed that when the war was over there would be an amnesty.
But not all émigrés were avoiding the draft. A combination of the precarious state of neutrality and the fact there were more than two hundred democratically elected parliaments in the Archipelago, all of widely differing size, type and constituencies, made the islands into a more or less ungovernable maze of laws, juridical systems and social conventions. Anyone who could get out of the warring countries of the north and escape to the islands was effectively free to travel and live exactly as they pleased. The Dream Archipelago was therefore a haven for anyone who wanted to disappear from an old life, or take on a new identity, or simply to start again. Sheeld’s own reason was to do with women, or rather with one particular woman called Borbellia. He and Borbellia had lived together for three years, but all through that time Sheeld had been having secret affairs with two other women. Eventually, inevitably, he had been found out. In the mounting confusion and emotional fallout that had surrounded his activities he had come to believe that his only recourse was to flee. He knew that he was making excuses for his betrayals, that were he stronger in character he would have stayed and taken responsibility for his actions, but once the idea of exile and a new life had taken hold he found it impossible to resist.
Not unnaturally, the native islanders had profoundly mixed feelings about the arrival of so many immigrants from the north. There were good reasons to make the newcomers welcome: most émigrés brought money or other kinds of capital with them, in addition to the state grants that they made available. They also brought ideas and technology from the more sophisticated countries in the north. As a consequence a modern technological infrastructure was rapidly spreading through the islands. Health facilities, schools, commerce, housing, the arts, communications, all these were enjoying a thoroughgoing renascence, with apparent living standards throughout the Archipelago improving every year. But the whole island way of life was in jeopardy: languages, customs, traditions and family structures were undergoing drastic changes and there were many who resented the process of change and tried to resist it.
Exacerbating all this was the constant movement of the military through the islands, the troopships calling into ports where until a few years before fishing had been the only activity, the military flights needing landing strips, the islands made over into rest and recreation facilities for the troops, the increasing number of military camps and garrisons, the refuelling and provisioning of the armies, the recruitment of non-combatant support staff.
In spite of everything large stretches of the Archipelago were still in most senses unspoil
ed and even in those areas where there were the greatest concentrations of outsiders it was still possible to find the traditional way of island life going on as it had done for centuries.
The process of change had undoubtedly begun, though, and as certainly would continue. Resentments grew. There had been acts of sabotage at some of the military establishments, there were reports of émigrés’ houses being burnt down in their absence, social movements were emerging that were set up to protect local languages, religions and customs. Laws prejudicial to the interests of immigrants were often enacted by the smaller islands.
Much of it had so far passed Sheeld by, presumably because as an expatriate himself he was insensitive to the concerns of the native islanders, or at least would remain so at first. Foort itself was also relatively untouched by the effects of the war, although he had soon encountered a small colony of fellow expatriates in Foort Town. He had so far seen few of the other islands, but he had often heard people talking about Muriseay, the largest of all the islands. There were two huge army camps on Muriseay, one for each side, at opposite ends of the island. Because of the size of Muriseay Town, as well as its cultural and entertainment attractions, there were also more exiles there than anywhere else. Life in most of Muriseay was said now to be indistinguishable from that in many of the northern countries.
From behind Sheeld, Alanya called, ‘Come and sit beside me. If you want to look at the scenery, you can do it as well from here.’
He turned back to face her and saw that she was reclining in the shade of the canopy, as if having laid herself out across a bed. The sun was beating down on his uncovered head and it was tempting to move into the shade to be with her, if only for that reason.
But he said, ‘What are you doing, Alanya?’
‘I thought you wanted to be with me. Why else did you follow me?’
‘The wake was almost over. I was about to leave, but you made me curious. And these cliffs—’