First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (10 page)

He said this as though it were incredible. Adults find
coincidences strange. But for me, at that time, the world seemed full of every kind of possibility. I only wished there was some way of making sure they didn’t turn out to be unpleasant.

W
E WERE NEAR THE
equator now and still heading south. The air was heavy, and the frequent rains were warm. One evening just before nightfall, I was standing at the rails when I heard footsteps and turned, expecting Harry Greene.

It was Captain Stillar. He leaned on the rail beside me. He hadn’t spoken to me since the voyage began. I’d passed him often, but he never seemed to notice me. So I felt uncomfortable as we stood together looking out at the invisible line between sea and evening sky.

“See how the greyness permeates everything,” he said.

I remembered his deep voice from the Hochmagandie.

He gestured with stubby paint-stained fingers towards the grey dusk. “This must be the way a colour-blind man sees the world.” His eyes, which were blue, and which usually seemed distant and dreamy to me, now were alert.

He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again, he moved his mouth closer to my ear.

“A word of warning,” he said. “Don’t rely too much on what sailors tell you. Life on shore keeps its secrets from them by standing still.”

I didn’t understand exactly what he meant but I assumed he was talking about Harry.

“A sailor’s mark on the earth,” he said, “is as light as the imprint of a bird on sand.” He walked his stained fingers along the rail to illustrate. Then, still speaking quietly, he said: “Have you seen my paintings?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s good,” he said. He looked back towards the horizon. He sighed. “When she was dying,” he said, “nobody could tell, because the colours of the lizard on her body were still so bright.”

He turned and looked at me.

“She once told me an old saying from her island: A broken heart mended is stronger than ever before. I’d like to believe that.”

Then he walked away without another word and entered the nearby companionway.

Why he felt the need to talk to me on that occasion, I’d no idea. For the rest of the voyage, though I met him many times, he looked past me as he always had, and he never spoke to me again.

That same night, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by the bell ringing for the change of watches, and I had trouble getting back to sleep. When I did, I thought I was back in the high moorland country, though I didn’t know exactly where. It was dusk and I was lying in the hollow on top of a rock that stuck out above the surrounding countryside. I could see the ocean only a short distance away, and I could hear the waves, so I knew I wasn’t anywhere near Stroven.

Looking over the rim of the hollow, I saw them coming—a procession of black-robed beings winding down a rocky path that ran past my hiding place. I could hear a great droning sound coming from them, an incantation, or a lament.

The procession soon reached my perch, and began
dividing round it, passing on either side, then reuniting. Now I could see the marchers clearly. Their faces were half-covered by their hoods, but the black robes revealed the tilt of their breasts. Their arms were at their sides, and their nails were painted scarlet. At the back of the procession, one marcher stood out from the others. She was tall, and walked proudly, holding in front of her a long wooden staff with a silk flag on it.

My heart began to pound, half in fear, half in excitement.

“Mother! Mother!” I shouted as she passed underneath. I stood up on the edge of the rock and stretched out my arms towards her. She didn’t look up. Her footsteps rang like iron on the rocky path.

I couldn’t bear that she should be so near and not at least know that I could see her.

“Mother! Mother!” I shouted again. I made up my mind. I was going to leap down from the rock. I’d gathered myself to jump when she looked up at me. Her black hood slipped back from her face. It was the blue face of a lizard, with fringed lizard eyes. And the tiny pupils inside the multiple eyelids were glittering and cold. At the same time, a bitter wind began to blow and the flag she carried billowed out so that for a moment I could read the words that shimmered on it:
THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN.

The days passed, warm and sullen, and I hoped this voyage would never end. But one morning as I was eating breakfast alone in the mess hall, Harry slid open the door and stuck his head in.

“Andy,” he said. “Land’s been sighted. Sure now, you’ll be in your new home by nightfall.” His eyebrows were bristling, but he said this in a cheerful enough voice.

I got up and went out onto the deck. The sky was grey. Harry was looking to the south-west.

“Over there.” He pointed out over the starboard bow. “ ’Tis over there.”

At first I couldn’t see anything unusual. But after a while I could make out, away on the horizon, a smudge that was slightly greyer than the grey of the ocean and the sky.

As the morning wore on, that smudge took on more substance and became a black stain which became, in time, an island. My destination—the Island of St Jude.

“T
HE
I
SLAND OF
S
T
J
UDE
is an uninviting place with a small town whose original purpose was to be a women’s penal colony; later it became a garrison during times of war. The harbour is adequate but unprotected. The volcanic surface makes growing difficult. Hence the island’s indigenous vegetation is scanty, consisting of a few plants and trees of the tropical variety, brought there by tides and migrating birds. Mosquitoes and stinging insects are found year round. Even though the island now serves only a nominal strategic purpose, it still retains a Commissioner, a troop of soldiers, minimal justiciary, medical, educational facilities and a small agricultural laboratory. There are no motorized vehicles. The permanent colonists, many of them former soldiers and their descendants, make a living by fishing and subsistence gardening.”

That was the description I read in the mildewed edition of
Letson’s Islands and Navigable Waters
, fished out by Harry Greene from under a pile of books beneath the porthole of his cabin early in the voyage.

“Some islands are perfect for burying treasure,” he’d said when he gave me the book. “Then there are islands like St Jude that are perfect for burying things nobody wants.”

I think he’d no sooner said that than he regretted it and changed the subject quickly, hoping I hadn’t understood.

Now I could see with my own eyes the words from Letson’s book translated into this heap of rock the
Cumnock
was slowly approaching. The sun, for one of the first times in the entire voyage, broke through. The dazzling blue of the sky and the sea made the lava of the island blacker than black. From the deck of the ship, the island might have been the lid of a huge pot, with Mount St Jude jutting out like a black handle. The island was really the tip of a volcanic eruption millions of years ago, on the ocean floor miles beneath.

We sailed into a wide bay on the east coast where the only town was located—the harbour and garrison town, also called St Jude; here the
Cumnock
was to dock for two hours before continuing on its voyage. From well off shore, I could see the semicircle of battlements protecting the town from attack on its inland flank. The landscape looked as though it had been layered by a giant trowel.

Shortly after four, the
Cumnock
slowly made its way into the harbour till its bows nibbled at the pier. A crowd of islanders, perhaps a hundred, were watching our arrival, waving to the ship. Lines were cast ashore, hawsers were looped over rusted bollards, the engine was cut, the gangway clattered down.

The crew began unloading mail bags and small boxes onto large wooden wheelbarrows on the pier. Heavier crates were hoisted out of the hold by the cranes.

I stood on the deck with my suitcase, waiting for someone to tell me what to do.

There was no wind. The air was suffocating. The
Cumnock
’s engines, which had been the bass accompaniment to every minute of my day for the past few weeks, were silent. All other sounds came to the fore—the shouts of the crewmen,
the squawking of gulls, the hull squealing against the rubber fenders, the slap of the waves. And the buzz of insects. These insects were swarming around me and I waved them away. I realized that this was what the islanders on the dock were doing—not waving to us, but swatting at the mosquitoes.

I kept waiting for instructions, but none came. I couldn’t see Captain Stillar anywhere. Harry Greene was busy helping the crew with the unloading. He glanced my way several times, but I knew I’d get no help from him. He’d come to my cabin just before we docked and given me a brief handshake. “Sailors aren’t good at goodbyes,” he’d said. His voice sounded hearty but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I hope we meet again, Andy Halfnight.” Then he’d left without looking backward.

Now I stood on the deck, feeling quite helpless and utterly lonely. Mosquitoes stung me with their soft stings. At last, I lifted my suitcase and walked to the gangway and started down. The assembled islanders stared up at me. Men, women and children, they were dressed in much the same way. The women and the girls wore black dresses and black headscarves. The men and boys, their hair cut close to the skull, wore white, collarless shirts, and black trousers held up by black suspenders. I looked around, hoping for any sign of welcome. A sour smell—the smell of land—pervaded everything.

I reached the bottom of the gangway, and still no one approached or said anything. I stepped onto the pier. It was crumbled at the edges like a stale cake. When I took my hand off the railing, I staggered and almost fell. After so many weeks rolling to and fro, the immobility of the earth was unnatural. I grabbed the railing and steadied myself.

“Andrew!”

A woman came from the crowd of onlookers towards
me. She had a stocky build, and a face that seemed too long for her body, like a reflection in a trick mirror.

But I knew the face—it was so like my mother’s. And the green eyes were the same dark green.

“Andrew Halfnight!” She stood in front of me, looking me up and down. Her face was damp with sweat; a layer of mosquitoes covered the black headscarf over her brown hair. Her broad, freckled hand reached out and touched my shoulder.

“I’m Lizzie Beck. Your aunt.” Even her voice was deep, like my mother’s.

I should have felt comforted. I should have felt secure. But I wasn’t. I shrank away from her hand. The sudden awareness of how remote this island was from everything I’d ever known brought on a kind of terror. I looked back at the ship, hoping Harry Greene might be watching and might call to me to come back aboard. I would gladly have turned my back on my aunt and run up the gangway to hide myself forever in the dark recesses of the
Cumnock
. But there was no sign of Harry. The ship herself, from here on the dock, was a forbidding sight with her rust and her dented plates.

My aunt may have known what I was thinking, so she let me look at the ship. Then, after a few moments, she spoke.

“Now, come with me, Andrew,” she said. She turned and scuttled away. I didn’t know what to do except to pick up my suitcase and follow her past the crowd on the dock and onto the land, and along the street that started where the dock stopped, and seemed to run along the ocean front. That much I noticed, but not much else. The worn cobblestones of the street were reaching up and tripping my feet. The stable surface was like a trap, so unused was I to walking on something that wasn’t constantly in motion. I had to
concentrate on how I placed my feet or I would have fallen several times.

After a while I got the hang of the land’s stability and was able to look around. The street at this end consisted mostly of shabby wooden bungalows shaded by ramshackle verandahs and low, dusty palm trees. There were a number of narrow cul-de-sacs lined with similar wooden bungalows. Everything ended against the battlements that encircled the town on the landward side.

My aunt and I, escorted by millions of mosquitoes, soon reached a part of this main street where there were two buildings of a more impressive sort. They were solid, built with white polished stone I took to be marble, glistening cool, under the late-afternoon sun. The first of these buildings was an elegant mansion with pillars. On the brown apron of lawn was a sign:
COMMISSIONER’S RESIDENCE
. The other building of similar white stone, two storeys high, stood next to it. The word
ADMINISTRATION
was sculpted above its entranceway.

As we passed in front of these buildings, I saw they weren’t exactly what they seemed. The face of the marble was peeling at the corners—it wasn’t stone at all, but plywood with wallpaper glued to it.