The whole extent of Yannet could be viewed from the summit of Voulden, as well as a glowing panorama of other islands in the vicinity. The sea was silver and sapphire blue in the brilliant sunlight, the islands hommke green, dark and intense, fringed with white crests of breaking waves. Shadows of light clouds scudded over the choppy sea.
To this summit one day came Jordenn Yo. She had climbed without looking around her any more than she had to, determinedly saving the view for when she reached the summit, trying not to preview or glimpse it, but holding on to the paths and boulders as she scrambled up.
At first, recovering her breath from the long climb, she sheltered behind some rocks to stay out of the wind. It surprised her how cold it was on the top of the mountain. But the view exhilarated her. She gazed around at the islands. They were impossible to count — the sea was choked with many small tracts of hilly land. The light was bright, unyielding. She gulped in the view, trying to fill herself with it or the sense of it. She watched the traces of the wind on the surface of the sea, the overlapping hatch of vee-shaped rippling wakes from the ferries, the way the clouds took shape and shifted over the islands, drifting out over the sea on one side, others forming to replace them to the windward.
She took many photographs, turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, high and low, records of Yannet’s own landmass, of islands and sky and sea. Then she began to contemplate her real work with Voulden, the mountain.
She measured the wind pressure that day. During the course of a year three winds prevailed over this part of the Archipelago. There was a mild westerly wind known as the BENOON, warm with rain, intermittent, most often felt in the spring, one that she could make allowances for, but not depend on. The other two winds were from the east. One of these was called the NARIVA, a hot wind that circled the southern horse latitudes then crossed the Equator and swept across this part of the Archipelago. The third was known as the ENTANNER, a steady flow from the mountains of the northern continent, bringing cooler evenings at the end of the long island summers.
Yo tested the wind that day with the portable anemometer she had brought, noting not just the direction but also the pressure — today was an easterly wind, too cool to be the Nariva, but maybe a spur from the Entanner? She needed more familiarity with the winds before she could be sure she knew them. There was never a day anywhere in the islands that experienced a typical wind, so she would have to work with a median, perform endless calculations about force, frequency, direction, and always make those necessary allowances for the irreverent variables.
Finally, she lay down on the rocky surface of the summit, feeling herself pressing against the peak of the mountain. While the cold wind blew, lifting her inadequate clothes and chilling her, she shivered and planned, but in the end she cried a little. Already she loved Mt Voulden, loved its height, its eminence, its grey solidity. Voulden was a calm mountain of strong, stable strata, hard but safe to drill through — now she was learning the winds that made it breathe.
She returned to her studio before nightfall, exhausted by the strenuous climb and by feeling the extremes of temperature between the windblown mountain heights and the sultry plain below. Her plans for the mountain were taking shape. Within twenty days she had completed her surveys and sent out her orders, instructing that the earth-moving and rock-drilling plant should be made ready.
While waiting for the massive equipment to be shipped to Yannet she made other preparations.
Meanwhile, there was Oy.
At this time Oy was engaged in a small but exacting installation on the tumultuous shores of the island of Semell. Yo and Oy were still more than four years away from meeting on Yannet. Semell was in a distant part of the Archipelago called the Swirl, a system of more than seven hundred small islands and atolls in the southern hemisphere.
Oy’s full name was Tamarra Deer Oy, but he had become known by his surname only. A conceptual and installation artist, he had spent the years since leaving college touring the Swirl, searching for suitable islands. He experimented with his techniques and materials on every island he visited, using local aggregates to mix with resinous cements, seeking the hardest and smoothest compounds, ones that would withstand not just time and the elements but the inevitable attempts by others to destroy or damage his works.
Like his near-namesake Yo, Oy was often unwelcome in the places he visited. He had been forcibly expelled from half a dozen islands, although so far he had managed to avoid prison. Also like Yo, as his reputation spread he too was often obliged to enter islands incognito and work fast, completing as much as possible before being discovered or exposed, having to leave his work unfinished.
His first complete work, uninterrupted, was on the island of Selli, a fiercely hot tourist island with immense bays and beaches, and a legendarily exuberant nightlife. Oy arrived out of season on Selli, and soon discovered two holiday-let cottages built close together on a shallow pine-cooled slope overlooking one of the beaches. The trees helped screen him as he worked. He began on both cottages, first sealing them up with thick layers of cement on the inside, leaving the exteriors unchanged but the interiors no longer accessible. He and his artisans then set about erecting a conjoining piece, simulated walls and a roof, making the two small houses into three, or one, or none. Using carefully matched washes he painted the exterior of his installation in several coats of island whiteness.
He paid off his artisans and departed Selli before the artwork was discovered. Before he left he gave the installation a good and approving kick with the flat of his foot.
Other forays into the inhabited Swirl islands were to prove more difficult, but he managed to seal the main street of a village on the island of Thet, and converted a small church on Lertode into an aesthetically satisfying, impermeable egg-shaped dome, painted matt black.
His first shoreline piece was a stretch of rockfall at the foot of chalk cliffs on the island of Tranne. Working in the ebb tide, Oy smoothed and levelled the rocks and their pools by infilling with cement. It was an isolated, unvisited expanse of coastline. Few people ever wandered by or saw what he was doing. At first he worked alone, but the sheer size of the installation made it necessary to hire artisans from the local villages.
Within three months most of the installation was complete. The area of broken rocks had been converted to a white plain, so smooth a ball could be rolled across it, and so uniformly flat that not even the most sensitively calibrated spirit level could detect a slope.
Satisfied, Oy discharged the workers and spent a few days working alone on the final details. Two days later, as he was preparing to leave Tranne for another island, a large fall of rock from the overhanging cliff covered or destroyed everything he had done. He went to see the damage for himself, but left Tranne immediately after.
It was Oy who made the first personal contact. He had long known of Yo’s reputation, of course, but they had never met. Then one of the trustees at the Muriseay Covenant Foundation mentioned her and gave him a contact address. A few days later he messaged her:
hi yo, i’m oy, i know your stuff and i bet you know mine, we should get together and try something, how about it?
Yo did not reply at once. About six weeks later she messaged him:
I’m busy. Fuck off. Yo.
At this time Oy was working on a large, curving staircase he had chanced to find in an apparently disused part of the back of the Metropolitan Hall, in Canner Town. He was converting it to a flight of irregular steps that could only be mounted from below, using ropes, and in a horizontal attitude. He filled in the former stairs above to make a smooth descent. It was a challenge of great intricacy, and every day he worked there he expected to be discovered by the Metro officials.