individual, but is a family-run fiefdom.
The family has extensive business interests throughout the Archipelago. The current Monseignior owns a vast fleet of luxury yachts, and a controlling interest in two of the largest inter-island ferry services. The family owns a large arms manufacturing company in the state of Glaund, and much of the gambling organization that runs through the Archipelago is owned and run by the Monseignior’s extended family.
The artist, Dryd Bathurst, visited Orphpon when still a young man. He began a series of sketches for later development as oil paintings, but was forced to leave when his visa expired. There is something of an unsolved mystery about this, as his visa would not have been on a different basis than anyone else’s, yet he is known to have remained on Orphpon for nearly a year. When he finally completed his celebrated Orphpon Sequence, some three years later, the paintings were recognized as modern masterpieces and they now hang in the Museum d’Artistes in Derril City.
It has recently been discovered that Bathurst had been allowed to stay in the Monseignior’s Winter Residence on Orphpon, because even at his comparatively young age at the time his fame was widespread and his artistic reputation secure. It was while he was in the Residence that he drafted his sketches for the paintings that later made up the Sequence.
It is also known that Bathurst at least visited the prison in the town. The Bathurst Archive maintains that he went as a celebrated visitor who had been invited to inspect the facilities, but during our own brief internment we discovered from other inmates that there is one particular cell that for many years has been known as the Bath- House.
The identity of the tantalizingly unclad young model depicted in the two most admired Orphpon Sequence paintings is officially unknown. The Archive maintains that she was an imaginary muse for the great artist. However, one of the Monseignior’s young nieces is known to have been staying at the Residence at approximately the same time, and after Bathurst left the island she was never heard from again.
Currency: Ganntenian credit, Archipelagian simoleon, also barter on a scale fixed by the Orphpon Seigniory.
Piqay (1)
FOLLOWED PATH
PIQAY is the island of traces. A small and pretty wine-growing island, famous for its elevated views of the surrounding sea and other islands close by, Piqay is renowned throughout the Archipelago as the place no one can or will leave. In practical terms this is untrue, because there are no prohibitions on travel, and like most islands Piqay has a busy port constantly trading. Ferries depart every day for the adjacent islands. None the less there is a tradition amongst Piqayeans for staying. They are rarely encountered anywhere outside their own island.
In the minds of the superstitious, Piqay is a place of unrested spirits, of unquiet souls, caught languishing between the here and now and the great hereafter. They are the traces of life. In the minds of the rational, Piqay is a place of unresolved hopes, of unfinished work, of unbroken attention. They are the traces of the living. Both irrational and rational are trapped by their condition.
Wider understanding of this phenomenon came from the work of the Inclair Laureate for Literature, CHASTER KAMMESTON. His early novels, all set on Piqay, were at first misunderstood and neglected, because of what was taken to be the psychologically implausible behaviour of his characters.
Kammeston’s second novel,
Although this was apparently normal behaviour to the character, most readers and reviewers found it perplexing and frustrating. Kammeston published eight such novels during this early period, then disappeared from view. Nothing more by him was published and his work was soon overlooked.
It was eventually realized that Kammeston had spent his many ‘lost’ years in a sustained period of literary output. He wrote five more long novels, but refused to let anyone read them. Even his publisher was not told of their existence until the last of the five was completed.
When they finally began to appear in print Kammeston was recognized as a world-class literary artiste. Through these five major novels, which took the outer form of a long saga involving several generations of two rival Piqayean families, Kammeston expanded, analysed and above all elucidated the Piqay concept of the trail of experiences, the trace of life, the echo of oral tradition.
This trail, this spoor, was individual and collective, emanating not only from each person but from the psychic heart of the island. Kammeston described Piqay as an island with an infinitude of crisscrossing paths laid by ancestors, sustained by stories about them and memories of them. To depart from the island was to become diffuse, wraithlike, a lost soul without trace. With the illuminating example of these five great symphonic works, Kammeston’s earlier novels were correctly understood at last.
He continued to write, but what followed was of a different quality. They were not at all minor works, but books that revealed the author’s diversity, the range of his concerns. He essayed two biographies. The first was the life of the controversial painter Dryd Bathurst, from which most of the general awareness and appreciation of Bathurst originally arose. A shorter book, which Kammeston described as a chamber piece, told the story of the tragically short life of the poet Kal Kapes. He also published two volumes of poetry, wrote three plays, all of which were performed in his lifetime, and a huge amount of journalism and essays: reviews, sketches, satirical pieces, autobiographical fragments.
Kammeston depicted himself as a true son of Piqay and never left the island during his lifetime. Even the ceremony for the Inclair Laureateship was exceptionally performed in a hall on his home island.
He died less than three years after the Laureateship was bestowed, from respiratory problems following an attack of pneumonia. He was interred, not cremated, and his grave is in the local churchyard. Kammeston’s house and grounds are now open to the public. The university library in Piqay Town is the repository of his papers, letters, books and personal effects, all housed in an extension specially built for the purpose.
It was during the transfer of the Kammeston effects that one of the library assistants came across the alleged testament of Chaster Kammeston’s estranged elder brother, Wolter.
This is a controversial document, whose authenticity has been challenged several times, but it has undergone forensic tests which show that it appears to be genuine in many respects. For instance, we know that the document was almost certainly penned after Chaster Kammeston’s death because of analysis results from the paper and ink.
The claims it makes about Kammeston are what cause the doubts about its veracity. It seems unlikely that a real member of his family would have written it.
It is certainly true that Kammeston had a brother called Wolter, but it was widely believed Wolter was Chaster’s identical twin, and not an older sibling. They were rarely seen together, for reasons dealt with in the document, but the comparatively rare photographs of them revealed the doubling effect of an uncannily close physical likeness.
In any event the Kammeston family was notoriously secretive, even before Chaster Kammeston became so celebrated. Little is known about his brother.
Wolter did not stay in the family home after he reached adulthood, but moved to a small house in Piqay Town until after his brother died. It is also true that Wolter survived Chaster, because he was seen at the funeral. He was later Chaster’s literary executor, but not for long. He died within a year of Chaster, which is the period in which he must have written the testament, if indeed he did write it.
If the document is a forgery, then we are left to wonder who might have made it and the reason for it. So it
