Araminta Station (47 page)

“So much for that,” said Glawen. “Now I know.”

Glawen returned to the cockpit. He looked around the sky, made sure all was secure, then went below, leaving the sloop to take care of itself.

Morning brought a favoring breeze from the south. Glawen made sail, and the sloop slid nicely across the water into the northeast.

At noon on the following day he sighted Thurben Island: a roughly circular mound of sand and volcanic debris, two miles in diameter, sparsely grown over with gray-green thornbush, a few straggling thyme trees and as many gaunt semaphore dendrons. At the center rose a crag of crumbling volcanic basalt. A coral reef encircled the island, creating a lagoon two hundred yards wide. The reef was broken by a pair of passes, at the north and south ends of the island, allowing access to the lagoon. Glawen lowered the sails offshore and powered the sloop through the southern pass against the outflowing current. Two hundred feet from the beach he dropped the anchor, in water so clear it seemed to magnify details of the bottom: coral drums, seaflowers, armored molluscs. Imp-fish and falorials came to investigate boat, anchor and anchor chain, then moved away to await developments: garbage, a swimmer, or someone falling overboard.

Glawen used the boom to lift the dinghy from its cradle and lower it over the side. With many precautions he stepped down into the dinghy, carrying a coil of line, one end of which he had already tied to the stemhead of the sloop. He started the dinghy’s impeller and steered for the beach, letting the line pay out behind him.

The dinghy nosed up on the sand. Glawen jumped ashore and pulled the dinghy high and dry above the reach of the surf. He tied the line from the boat to the gnarled trunk of a thornbush, thus doubly securing the sloop against the effects of a sudden squall.

Glawen was now at leisure. He had nothing to do: no tasks, no routine, no demands whatever upon his time - which was why he had come.

He took stock of his surroundings. Behind him were thornbush, a few thyme trees, a few mock balsams, an occasional gaunt black gallows tree, and a knob of rotting basalt at the center of the island. In front of him, the lagoon, apparently so innocent and placid, where the sloop now rode at anchor. To right and to left, identical ribbons of white sand, flanked by gray-green thornbush thickets and thyme trees, with long slender leaves silver on the bottom and scarlet on the top. Cat’s-paws stirred by a puff of breeze ruffled the surface of the lagoon and sparkled in the sunlight, while the thyme trees shimmered silver and scarlet.

Glawen sat down in the sand. He listened.

Silence, except for the whisper of the water moving up and down the beach.

He lay back on the sand and dozed in the sunlight.

Time passed. A land crab pinched Glawen’s ankle. He stirred, kicked and sat up. The land crab ran away in a panic.

Glawen rose to his feet. The sloop floated placidly at anchor: Syrene had moved across the sky; nothing else had changed. For a fact, thought Glawen, there was little to do on Thurben Island, except sleep, ponder the seascape or, in a fit of energy, stroll up and down the beach.

He looked right, then left. With no evident difference in either direction, he set off to the north. Land crabs scuttled away at his approach, down the beach to the water’s edge, where they turned to watch as he passed. Blue lizards jumped up on their hind legs and with mighty kicks and strides ran to the shelter of the thornbush thickets, where they became bold and chattered angry challenges.

The shore veered away to the east, around the northern end of the island. Glawen arrived at a point opposite the north pass through the reef: a natural channel similar to the south pass, allowing the coming and going of boats into and out of the lagoon. Rounding the curve of the beach, Glawen stopped short in astonishment and shock.

Changes had occurred since his last visit. A rude dock extended into the lagoon. Near the foot of the dock, a pavilion of thatch and bamboo, in the Yip style, provided shelter from sun and rain.

For several minutes Glawen stood stock-still, studying the area. He could make out no fresh footprints in the sand; the premises would seem to be deserted.

Glawen relaxed a trifle, but still tense and wary, he approached the pavilion. Wisps of brown thatch rattled in the breeze; the interior was dry, dusty and devoid of occupation. Nonetheless, Glawen wished that he had brought a gun with him; in situations of this sort its bulk and heft would be most reassuring.

Glawen turned away from the pavilion. He looked out along the dock in perplexity. What sort of purpose could such an arrangement serve? A camp for far-ranging Yip fishermen? Glawen noticed an odd contrivance attached to the dock, thirty or forty feet from the shore: a derrick with an overhead beam, like a gallows, evidently intended to raise objects from a boat and swing them around to the dock - or back in the other direction.

Glawen walked out to the end of the dock, which sagged and creaked under his weight. He looked out through the pass, and found empty blue ocean. To right and left: the placid lagoon; shoreward, the ribbon of beach curving around the island. Below, bamboo pilings descended to the bottom; they seemed about fifteen feet long. Shades and shadows slid across the sand, refracted from wavelets moving along the surface. Glawen stared down into the water, the skin of his back tingling. He had made a chilling discovery; indeed, at first, he could not believe his eyes.

There was no mistake: on the bottom, near the end of the dock, was spread a grotesque tangle of human bones. Some were sifted over with sand; some were draped with waterweed; others sprawled uncovered, as if naked, with only the moving shadows to clothe them.

Glawen forced himself to study the bones. It was difficult to estimate the number of individuals involved. The lenslike quality of the water distorted perception; the bones nonetheless seemed small and delicate.

Glawen seemed to feel the pressure of someone’s observation. He jerked around and studied the shore. Everything appeared as before. There was no sign of living creature, though a dozen unseen eyes might be watching from behind the thornbush thickets.

His nerves were playing him tricks: so Glawen assured himself. Glawen returned to the beach. He stood a moment in contemplation of dock, derrick and pavilion. A new thought entered his mind: what if someone had watched him arrive, then, when he had departed up the beach, had gone aboard his boat and sailed away? The idea caused Glawen’s heart to bound; Thurben was not an island where he cared to be marooned, with nothing to eat but land crabs, which were indigestible, and nothing to drink but seawater.

Glawen returned down the beach at a trot, looking over his shoulder every few yards.

The sloop lay serenely to its anchor, precisely as he had left it. His spasm of near-panic drained away. He was alone on the island. Nevertheless, tranquillity had departed; the beach no longer could be considered a somnolent place on which to idle away a few days.

The time was now late afternoon. The breeze had died completely; ocean and lagoon lay calm and flat. Glawen decided to make his departure on the morning breeze. He pulled his dinghy into the water and returned to the sloop.

Syrene sank; darkness came to Thurben Island. Glawen prepared and ate his supper, then went up to the cockpit and sat two hours listening to small unidentifiable sounds from the shore.

Overhead blazed the constellations; but tonight Glawen paid them no heed; his mind was occupied with more somber speculations.

At last Glawen went below to his bunk. He lay staring into the dark, unable to control the ideas which came wandering into his mind. Finally he fell into a restless slumber, on several occasions starting up to what he imagined to be the bump and scrape of someone climbing aboard the boat.

The night, with all deliberation, went its way. Lorca and Sing rose behind the island and climbed toward the zenith. Glawen finally fell asleep, so deeply that the coming of day failed to arouse him. Finally, with Syrene almost three hours into the sky, he awoke, edgy and hollow-eyed.

Glawen consumed a breakfast of tea and porridge in the cockpit. A breeze blew from the north, fair for the voyage home whenever he chose to raise the anchor. The deep blue of the sea was accentuated by pillars and domes of bright white cumulus, lifting over the horizon to the south. The world seemed innocent and clean; the circumstances at the north end of the lagoon were so incongruous to this sunny blue and white world as to seem unreal.

Glawen decided to make another quick inspection of dock and pavilion before departure; he might conceivably discover something he had missed the day before. He stepped down into his dinghy and with the impellers at full power, scudded north up the lagoon, with clouds of darting silver falorials following below.

The dinghy arrived at the north pass. The pavilion and dock were as he found them on the day before. Easing the dinghy up to the beach, Glawen jumped ashore with the painter, which he tied to one of the bamboo pilings.

Glawen stood a moment taking stock of the surroundings. As before, he discovered only silence and desolation. He went out to the end of the dock. The surface of the lagoon was ruffled by the breeze, making the bottom difficult to see clearly, but the bones lay scattered as before.

Glawen returned to the shore and examined the pavilion. Behind a shaded open area at the front were eight compartments, furnished only with heavy floor mats. There were no cooking or sanitary facilities other than an outhouse to the rear of the pavilion.

Glawen decided that he had seen enough; he had not been hallucinating on his first visit. He returned aboard his dinghy and pushed off into the lagoon. As the boat moved away from the dock, Glawen glanced out the pass and saw, about two miles to sea, a pair of lateen sails bellying to the breeze.

The vessel’s course, by Glawen’s best determination, would bring it to the north pass.

Glawen returned at full speed down the lagoon to his sloop. Under the circumstances, lacking a weapon, he could not risk confrontation, and instant flight might be necessary. Once out to sea he would be safe. Downwind or on a reach the catamaran could catch him in any kind of a wind; in a calm or upwind, his power unit would push him smartly away from the unpowered catamaran.

Climbing aboard the sloop, Glawen slung binoculars over his shoulder and hoisted himself up the mast. Focusing the binoculars on the arriving vessel, he saw it to be a two-masted catamaran sixty or sixty-five feet long - large for a Yip fishing boat - and to Glawen’s great relief, its course would take it to the north pass. He stood in little risk of detection: against a background of thornbush and semaphore dendron the slender gray mast of the sloop would be indistinguishable.

Glawen watched until the catamaran disappeared around the curve of the island, then lowered himself to the deck. He stood looking indecisively up the lagoon. Prudence urged that he depart Thurben Island instantly. On the other hand, if he walked cautiously up the beach, keeping to the shade of the thornbush thickets, he might learn the identity of those aboard the catamaran. If he were discovered, he could retreat instantly, take himself aboard the sloop and sail away. So what would it be? Prudent withdrawal or a scouting expedition up the beach? Had he a handgun, the response would have been automatic. Lacking a weapon of any sort, save a knife from the galley, he deliberated ten seconds. “I am a Clattuc,” Glawen told himself. “Blood, nature and tradition all indicate the way I must act.”

Without further ado he tucked the galley carving knife, with a sharp six-inch blade, into his belt, took himself ashore in the dinghy and jogged up the beach, keeping close under the overhanging thickets of thornbush.

As he progressed he kept a careful eye focused ahead of him, in case someone from aboard the catamaran also should be exploring the beach. But he saw no one, which relieved him of the need to choose between uncomfortable options.

The masts of the catamaran became visible; a few hundred yards farther the dock and the vessel itself came into view. Glawen scrambled up the slope at the back of the beach, pushed through a gap in the thornbush and proceeded behind the fringe of thicket, which now provided him cover. Presently he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled carefully closer, to within fifty yards of the pavilion. Here he dropped flat and surveyed the scene through his binoculars.

Four golden-skinned Yips moved back and forth between boat and pavilion. Already they had brought ashore cushions, rugs and wicker chairs, and now set up a long table. They wore only short white kirtles and seemed very young, although black hoods concealed their heads and faces.

Sir other men, of mature years, sat in the wicker chairs. They wore loose pale gray robes and, like the Yips, black hoods which concealed their identities. They sat composed and silent: men of substance or even importance, to judge by their postures and the poise of their heads. They made no communication among themselves; each almost pointedly isolating himself from the others. Glawen was unable to divine their place of origin. None were Yips; none would seem to be Naturalists from Throy and, almost certainly, none derived from Araminta Station.

The air tingled with imminence. The six gray-robed men sat stiff and still, their hoods creating an atmosphere of eerie unreality. Glawen no longer apprehended danger; the four Yips and six hooded men were preoccupied with their own affairs. Glawen watched fascinated, his mind sheering away from speculation.

A bizarre new element augmented the situation. From the boat came a tall heavy-boned woman, broad of shoulder, massive of leg and arm, of a sort totally different from both Yips and hooded men. She wore a black mask rather than a hood, which concealed her nose and eyes, but left her heavy flat cheeks and anvil of a chin bare. The skin of these areas and along her bare arms showed oyster white in color, while a ruff of sandy hair thrust an inch above her broad scalp. The only indications of femininity were two flabby breasts and heavy hips encased in loose short trousers.

The woman strode to the end of the dock, looked around the area. She spoke a few words to the Yips; two of them ran to the boat and returned with wooden crates which they placed on the table. Lifting the lids, they brought out flasks of wine and goblets, which they filled and tendered to the six seated men. The other two brought branches from the thornbush thicket and kindled a fire.