"I've got enough," I said. "My father left me some, and I've been living off it all year. Let's find a hotel."
By the time we had walked down to the village, Felicity and the others had gone off again. We wrote a note and left it under the windscreen wipers, then drove to Buxton in Gracia's car.
The following Monday I went with Gracia to Greenway Park, collected my stuff, thanked Felicity effusively for everything she had done for me, and left the house as quickly as I could. Gracia waited in the car and Felicity did not go out to see her. The atmosphere in the house remained tense all the time I was there. Resentments and accusations were suppressed. I had a sudden, eerie feeling that this would be the last time I should ever see my sister, and that she knew it too. I was unmoved by the idea, yet as we drove down the crowded motorway to London my thoughts were not of Gracia and what we were about to start, but of my ungracious and inexplicable resentment of my sister.
I had my manuscript safe in my holdall, and I resolved that as soon as I had the time in London I would read through the sections dealing with Kalia, and try to understand. As we drove along it seemed to me that all my weaknesses and failings were explained to me in the manuscript, but that in addition there were clues to a new beginning.
I had created it by the force of imagination; now I could release that imagination and channel it into a perception of my life.
Thus, it seemed to me now that I was moving from one island to another.
Beside me was Seri, behind me were Kalia and Yallow. Through them I could discover myself in the glowing landscape of the mind. I felt that at last I saw a way to free myself from the confinements of the page. There were now two realities, and each explained the other.
12
The ship was called _Mulligayn_, a name which we could trace to neither geography, personality nor reason. Registered in Tumo, she was an elderly, coal-burning steamer, given to rolling in the mildest swell. Unpainted, uncleaned and lacking at least one of her lifeboats, the _Mulligayn_ was typical of the hundreds of small passenger ships that linked the populous southern islands of the Archipelago. For fifteen days Seri and I sweltered in her airless cabins and companionways, grumbling at the crew because it was expected of us, although privately neither of us felt we had much to complain about.
Like my earlier voyage to Muriseay, this second leg of the journey was in part a discovery of myself. I found that I had already absorbed some island attitudes: an acceptance of crowding, and of general uncleanliness, and of late ships and unreliable telephones and corruptible officials.
I frequently remembered the saying I had heard from Seri, the first time we met: that I would never leave the islands. The longer I stayed in the Archipelago the more I understood it. I still had every intention of going back to Jethra, regardless of whether or not I took the Lotterie treatment, but with every day that passed I felt the rapture of islands grow within me.
Because I had lived all my life in Jethra I accepted its values as the norm. I never saw the city as prim, old-fashioned, conservative, over-legislated, cautious and inward-looking. I had simply grown up in it, and although I was aware of its faults as well as its virtues, its standards had become my own. Now that I had left, now that the happy-go-lucky outlook of many islanders was becoming something I liked, I wanted to experience more of the culture, become a small part of it.
As my perceptions changed, the thought of returning to Jethra became less and less attractive. I was enthralled by the Archipelago. On one level, travelling around the islands was undoubtedly a bore, but the constant knowledge that there was going to be another island, somewhere else to visit and explore, opened broad internal vistas in me.
During the long voyage to Collago, Seri told me about the effect the Covenant of Neutrality had had within the Archipelago. The Covenant was the invention of governments in the north, imposed on the islands from without. It enabled both warring factions to use the Archipelago as an economic, geographic and strategic buffer against the other side, distancing the war from their own territories by adventurism in the great empty continent to the south.
Once the Covenant had been signed, a sense of timelessness and apathy had descended on the Archipelago, sapping cultural energy. The islanders had always been racially and culturally distinct from the people in the north, although trading and political links went back as far as could he remembered.
But now the islands were isolated. It affected Archipelagan life on every level. Suddenly there were no new films from the north, no books, no cars, virtually no visitors, no steel or grain or fertilizer, no oil or coal, no newspapers or academics or expertise or industrial equipment. The same sanctions closed the islands' only export markets. All the dairy produce of the Torqui Group, the fishing, the timber, the minerals, the hundreds of different types of arts and crafts, no longer had the mass consumer markets of the north open to them. Obsessed with its local squabble, the northern continent closed its doors to the rest of the world, and it did so because it considered itself to _be_ the world.
The worst effects of the Covenant had been felt in the years immediately following it. Both it and the war had by now become a part of everyday life and the Archipelago was beginning to recover, both economically and socially.
Seri told me there had been a noticeable change of mood in recent years, a reaction against the north.
A kind of pan-islandic nationalism was growing in the Archipelago. There had been a renewal of religious faith, for one thing, a sweeping evangelism that was taking worship to the Orthodox cathedrals as never before in the last thousand years. In step with this there had been a secular revivaclass="underline" a dozen new universities had been built or were in the process of construction, and more were planned. Tax revenue was being put into the new industries appearing to replace the imported goods. Major discoveries of oil and coal had been made, and counter-Covenant offers of assistance or investment from the north had been pointedly turned down. Arising with this was a new emphasis on the arts and agriculture and the sciences: investment and grant money was obtainable with a minimum of bureaucratic delay. Seri said she knew of dozens of new settlements on previously uninhabited islands, each pursuing a way of life centred on their own interpretation of what cultural independence really meant. For some it was an artists' colony; for others, subsistence farming; others, an opportunity to experiment with lifestyles, educational programmes or social structures. All were united, though, by the renaissance spirit, and by a common instinct to prove to themselves, and to anyone else who cared to inquire, that the old hegemony of the north was at an end.
Seri and I intended to become two of those who would inquire. Our plan, after Collago, was to go island-hopping for a long time.
Before all this, standing in the way, was Collago. The island where living was bestowed, where life was denied. I had still not decided what to do.
We were following one of the main sea-lanes between Muriseay and Collago, and so it was inevitable that other lottery winners would he aboard.
I was unaware of the others at first, preoccupied with Seri, watching the islands, but after a couple of days it was obvious who they were.
They had formed a clique, the five of them. There were two men and three women, all of an age; I judged the youngest, one of the men, to he in his late fifties. They were invulnerable in their conviviality, eating and drinking, filling the first-class lounge with jollity, often drunk but always tiresomely polite. Once I started watching them, fascinated in a rather morbid way, I kept willing them to break out, perhaps to swing a punch at one of the stewards or eat to such excess that they would be sick in public; already, though, they were superior beings, above such veniality, humble in their imminent role of demi-gods.