The Gradual

  ‘Papers – where are you heading?’

  The official this time was a woman. I pulled my plastic wallet out of my holdall, opened it and laid it on the counter in front of her. Lying on the top was the itinerary the travel agency had printed for me.

  ‘I’m on an open tour ticket,’ I said, trying to explain, not wanting to wait while she slowly read the whole thing. ‘The first port of call is the island of Quy.’

  ‘Let me have your stave, Msr Sussken.’

  I handed it over. While she held it in her hand, running her fingers lightly across the wooden blade, she leaned forward to read my planned route. Then she lifted some of the pages, riffling through them.

  ‘Visa?’ she said. ‘Let me see your visa.’

  ‘I don’t have one. I thought—’

  ‘You can’t go anywhere without a visa.’

  ‘I’m travelling between islands,’ I said. ‘I’m not leaving the Archipelago.’

  ‘You’re departing from Muriseay. You need an exit visa.’

  I felt a familiar dread in me: the almost inevitable feeling of insurmountable problems whenever I travelled. I imagined having to go back into the town somehow, walking or hiring another taxi, weighed down by my heavy luggage, finding whichever government office it was that issued visas, waiting around while someone completed the paperwork … while my ship, my single cabin, my included ‘entertainments’, sailed away to Quy without me. Why hadn’t the woman at the travel agency told me about this?

  ‘This has nearly expired,’ the official said, meaning the stave. ‘Want me to check it for you?’

  ‘I thought it was still good,’ I said.

  ‘Depends when it was last checked.’

  She turned around, prodded the stave down into the scanner. The light glowed green, but this time when the stave popped back up she pressed it down a second time and punched something into a number pad. Another light glowed, this time a bright yellow. She came back to me.

  ‘You had ninety days on the chip, but you’ve used almost all of them. Only two hours left. I can top it up for you.’

  ‘Is there a charge?’ I said, expecting there was.

  ‘Not for that.’

  How could I have used up ninety days? I assumed most of those were on the first tour? How many since I had left Questiur? I was trying to remember how long, trying to calculate, wondering if the lost, or gained, time counted. The woman official returned to the scanner, pressed more keys, then gave me back my stave.

  ‘OK – that’s fully recharged now. It’s also blank at the moment. You shouldn’t risk any more travel until the gradual has been marked.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Talk to one of the adepts. There’s a gradual increment showing and you’ll need to adjust that. And don’t forget to keep the stave topped up if you’re moving around the islands without a visa.’

  ‘Adepts?’ I said.

  ‘Outside.’

  ‘So, do I need an exit—?’

  ‘Next!’ She had already closed my large plastic wallet and pushed it back to me. Another passenger was wheeling his baggage trolley across, holding up several sheets of printed papers.

  I stumbled out into the glare of hot sunshine, trying to push my trolley and return the wallet to the holdall in one move. The exit led me directly towards the canopied area. The tall young man I had noticed earlier was standing before me. He was holding out his hand. When I was close to him I realized that his youth was something of an illusion: close up he looked fairly fit, in a stringy way, but his face was wrinkled and cracked by years in the sun, and the mop of untidy dark hair only partly concealed an area of pattern baldness on the crown of his head. His eyes were glistening in the sunlight, straining against brightness.

  ‘Alesandro Sussken,’ he said, but his voice was deeply accented and it took me a moment or two to realize he had said my name. It sounded like Zoozkint. ‘Let me have your stave.’

  ‘Are you an … adept?’

  ‘Let me look at your stave. You should not travel any further without it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Ristor, Callock, Gannten, Derril, Unner, Olldus, Leyah, Cheoner. This is Muriseay, next will be Quy. I have followed your route. You must let me have your stave, Alesandro Sussken. Quy is to the east of here. Great danger awaits.’

  ‘I’m booked on the Serquian.’ I waved a hand in the direction of the large ship still waiting at the quay. ‘What do you mean by danger?’

  ‘Eastward travel always a hazard. Steep gradual.’

  ‘I thought I was travelling to the south.’

  ‘East and south.’

  He still had his hand extended so at last I passed the stave to him. At that moment the ship’s siren sounded a deep and extended blast, a signal I had grown used to on earlier voyages. It normally indicated that the ship would be sailing within the next quarter hour.

  ‘That’s my ship,’ I said. ‘I can’t afford to miss it. I have this itinerary—’

  ‘You can’t afford to be on it, Msr Sussken. Let me take scrutiny.’

  He began examining the stave – the familiar movement of lightly balancing the object between thumb and forefinger, the gentle touch of fingertips running along the wooden blade, while he closely regarded it. He took a long time, and I soon began to grow impatient. I could see other passengers in the distance, boarding the Serquian.

  ‘You have been gambling with time, Msr Sussken. Are you aware of the steep tide between here and Ristor? I can trace you no further back than that. You have accumulated seventeen days. Detriment.’

  ‘The woman in the Shelterate office said there was an increment.’

  ‘Detriment. Seventeen days.’

  ‘Do you mean I have lost seventeen days?’

  ‘Gained.’ He waved the stave in front of my face. ‘You have travelled without score. Maybe that is how you choose? Detriment is risky.’

  I said nothing, feeling a renewed sense of confusion, alarm and anxiety about being able to board my ship in time.

  He held the stave in his left hand, then reached down and behind him and pulled up the knife that dangled from his waistband. He flipped off a leather cover that was protecting the blade and the sun briefly glinted from bright metal. He raised it and brought the blade to the side of the stave, squinting intently at what he was doing. Now that the knife was close to me I could see that it was not really a knife at all, but a bladed tool like a chisel, but with a vee-shaped pointed edge. The man turned the stave in his hand, and etched a tiny line in a short spiral close to the tip.

  ‘Now – this is Ristor. One of my friends saw you there. You showed no interest. But on Ristor – this is what you should have. OK – that is about, I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes.’

  ‘Twenty minutes of what?’ I said.

  ‘Time corrected. Not much gradual tide between wherever on the mainland, and Ristor. Now – my friend Renettia. You saw her.’

  I glanced behind him, thinking that the woman would still be there, but she had moved away.

  ‘She was trying to sell me a stave.’

  ‘You walked past her on Callock. No sale there. New gradual.’

  Again he scraped lightly with the sharpened tip. This was a longer, looser spiral, further away from the end of the stave.

  ‘So that corrects how much of the detriment?’ I said, starting to glimpse what he might be doing.

  ‘This is increment. Callock is south but to west of Ristor, so time lost, not gained as detriment. Very complicated. Now you are still behind, but not for so long.’ He showed me how the spiral he had etched went in the opposite direction from the short one for Ristor. ‘OK, so after Callock it was Gannten. Beautiful painters, I think. Dryd Bathurst, you know, famous artist? You are artistic man too. You did not stay, but passed through. It was night, you did not look. You were thinking of getting to your cabin, I am certain. You passed me as always, but I understand, I understand.’

  ‘Gannten is to the eas
t?’

  ‘To the east. A great deal, but not far by ship.’

  He etched another line along the stave’s wooden blade. This was not a spiral but was straight, with intermittent gaps.

  So it went, each of the islands I had visited or transited on my journey to Muriseay was marked with an etched line on the stave. He carved the marks with intricate care, checking his work by eye and with his fingertips, brushing away the tiny splinters of the wood carved out by the knife. Muriseay itself received a deeply gouged line. He wiped down the stave with a rag, which he pulled from his pocket.

  ‘OK, now detriment is shown.’

  I glanced past him towards where the ship was still against the quay. There was some activity around it and I noticed that the plume of smoke issuing from the funnel was much thicker. ‘May I go now?’

  ‘First you must record the detriment.’

  This involved a thankfully brief return visit to the Shelterate counter. One of the officials took my stave, pressed it into the scanner, waited for the green light to shine and then handed it back to me. As I walked back outside I glanced at the wooden blade. The etched lines were still in place – I had half expected that the scan would remove them somehow.

  The man was waiting for me outside.

  ‘Now we remove the detriment,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t we already done that?’ One of the gangplanks had been rolled back from the side of the ship, although I could see two crew members in white uniforms standing by the ship’s hatch of the other one – passengers were still climbing slowly aboard.

  ‘We have displayed the detriment, it has been recorded. Now we remove it.’

  ‘I have to board,’ I said. ‘They will be closing in a few moments. I don’t want to miss my ship.’

  ‘You have already missed it, I tell you. Not as you think. As I think. It is not safe for you to travel with detriment.’

  ‘I thought we had dealt with that.’

  ‘No – we must remove it. Your ship will wait for you. No worry. Give me fifty thaler.’

  I stared at him in amazement. ‘You want money?’

  ‘Of course. That is charge for removing the detriment.’

  ‘Then I’ll live with it.’

  ‘So – you want to repeat what happened before? When you returned home with an unremoved detriment? One year eleven months?’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘It is on your stave. Fifty thaler.’

  It was a large sum of money, almost as much as I was carrying in the Muriseayan currency. It was most of what was left after I had paid the travel agent.

  ‘You say it will put everything right?’

  ‘Not everything. What’s done is done. But from the day when you arrived on Ristor – no more detriment.’

  ‘Would you do it for thirty?’

  ‘No discount. Fifty thaler is the price.’

  He stood blandly before me, his eyes moist in the heat and sunlight. Why was he not wearing dark glasses, like some of the others there with him? Preparing for the voyage I had changed most of my cash into simoleons, as the travel agent had advised, but I had kept a small wad of thalers. In case of emergencies.

  ‘Will you take simoleons?’

  ‘Thaler.’

  I handed the money over. I counted out the banknotes into his hand then he elaborately checked them, licking his thumb and forefinger. He folded and slipped the notes into the pocket of his filthy shirt. As if a signal had been sent by the closing of this transaction, the ship emitted two short blasts on its siren. I gripped the handle of my luggage trolley.

  ‘Follow me. Leave the trolley. Carry all bags yourself, or risk losing them. And keep this in one of your hands all the time.’

  He thrust the stave at me.

  41

  The man turned away from me and set off across the quay, away from the ship. He walked with his head down and his shoulders hunched. His gait was stiff. The etching tool swung at his side. I removed my luggage from the trolley, hefted my violin case across my back, then piled the holdall on my shoulders on top of it. It was uncomfortable, but it left both my hands free. I held one of the cases in one hand and used the other hand to carry the stave, clutched with the lighter of the two cases. By the time I had everything the man had reached the far side of the quay and was about to move out of sight around the corner of a building. I hurried after him with ungainly steps, the two cases banging against my knees. The sun’s radiant glare was deadly on the unshaded parts of the concrete apron. Warm air drifted listlessly under the cranes and winches that littered the place. It smelled of hot oil, rusty metal, rotted food, the salty sea.

  I followed him from the commercial section of the harbour and soon we came to a rundown area littered with grounded old boats long beyond seaworthiness, a tangled mess of torn fishing nets, many large pieces of rusty and unidentifiable equipment and a huge number of lobster pots shrouded in the remains of ancient seaweed. Here a small boat with an outboard motor was waiting at the bottom of some uneven stone steps leading down from the quay. The man had barely waited for me. As I was clambering awkwardly and unsafely down the disintegrating steps he was already pulling on the starter cord. I had to lean out from the lowest steps, swinging my stuff on to the boards. Trying not to lose my grip on the stave made everything twice as difficult. The boat was actually moving as I leapt aboard. I sat down heavily on one of the thwarts.

  He speeded up and we steered out into the main area of the port: for the first time I gained some idea of the immensity of the facility. I could see ships, masts, cranes, chimneys, flyovers, warehouses stretching away from us into the distance. We headed past the harbour arm, the small jetty that enclosed the area we had been in. I was glad to be sitting down and not trying to manage my heavy bags but as soon as we were beyond the protection of the jetty the estuary was packed with ships, large and small, many of them under way. The water was rough here and the little boat threw spray high around us. The man steered the boat skilfully, eventually turning dramatically in front of the churning bow wave of a huge trawler. Now we were heading across the wide river mouth towards the further shore.

  The water was just as choppy but I was glad of the cooling effect of the spray.

  We closed with the opposite shore, which was undeveloped scrubland. The man turned off the outboard motor before we beached and the boat started drifting with the current. He stood up and stepped past me to stand in the prow, looking from side to side, shading his eyes against the sun. He appeared to be searching for somewhere on the shore, but when I asked him he snapped at me to be quiet. We drifted along, roughly parallel to the shore. This went on for several minutes. I had become resigned to the fact that I had missed my ship, so I sat quietly, waiting for something else to occur.

  Finally, the man stepped back across the thwart where I was sitting and restarted the engine. He drove the boat ashore.

  I managed to get my heavy luggage off without his help. He was already walking away from me. I knew then that I had had enough of this treatment. Annoyed, I dropped my bags on the ground and dashed after him.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I shouted at him, tugging at his arm and swinging him around. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  He looked at me mildly. I saw there were traces of salt spray on his face and hair. His eyes were narrowed.

  ‘Be quiet, Msr Sussken.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I am removing the detriment you have created.’

  ‘Is this what I paid you for?’

  ‘Fifty thaler.’

  ‘This is hell. I can barely walk with all my baggage. I’m hot, tired, you’ve made me miss my sailing. Why are we out here?’

  ‘The luggage you are carrying is yours. Maybe you travel lighter now? The gradual is being compensated. We have tides to cross, tides to cancel. Your ship will wait. You should have used the adepts before.’

  ‘No one told me what to do.’

  ‘Not my fault.’

  ‘I don’t see ho
w this helps.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You said you could fix the problem.’

  ‘Fix is what we do.’ He glanced back towards where the boat had beached. My bags and violin case were in a heap on the ground next to where the prow had rammed into the sandy bank. I still held the stave in my hand. ‘You are about to lose your stuff,’ he continued. ‘Your choice. Leave it if you never wish to see it again. Now I have to walk back to the bags with you. It is against the gradual we crossed. I charge extra for reversals. Normally.’

  We went back towards the boat, the man a step or two ahead of me. He led me by an indirect route, crossing a sandy spur where prickly bushes snagged at my legs. I loaded myself up again, with bad grace. The cooling effect of the river air and the spray had already worn off and grit had penetrated my thin shoes. When I was holding everything the man set off once more.

  I called after him, ‘Won’t you even tell me your name?’

  ‘Why you need to know?’

  ‘I don’t know what to call you. How to address you.’

  ‘I am adept. Keep up with me.’

  Adept. I followed the adept up the long and sloping bank, having trouble getting a grip on the sandy soil. A long walk across untamed scrubland ensued, with the weight and unwieldiness of my luggage a constant and worsening problem. Low, tough plants spread stiff tendrils across the ground, making every step difficult. My whole body was aching and sweat was running down and across my face. It plastered my long robe against my back and legs. I tried several times to redistribute the load but all that I achieved was to transfer the heavier weight from one side to the other. The adept was always ahead of me but whenever I had to shift my load he did at least stand and wait. He never offered to assist.

  Finally, after what felt like an hour of painful scrambling across the uneven ground we reached a darkly metalled road where traffic was moving by at speed. To my relief the adept waved down a car and after a long discussion in island patois the driver agreed to take us back into the harbour in Muriseay City, on the far side of the estuary. I saw a couple of banknotes passed across to him. They came from the adept’s shirt pocket, the money I had paid him.