novelist Moylita Kaine. She and her husband moved to Winho Town and rented a house in the hills overlooking the main bay while she conducted detailed research into what had happened during the two terrible periods of occupation. When she and her husband left Winho, two of the women she had met in the course of her researches travelled back with them to Muriseay, where they remained afterwards with their two families of seven children.
Three years later, Kaine published the novel that was to establish her reputation:
Hoel Vanil is now known prosaically as River Valley, and all external trace of the camp has long been removed. Two underground shelters remain. These were built by the slave labour of the Winho men, before the remainder who survived the underground workings were taken away. The shelters were used for a short period by the Faiandlanders as an ammunition store. The people of Winho Town never go anywhere near River Valley.
The island’s economy is still sustained mainly by the arrival of troopships heading north or south. As these belong to the combatant powers they are beyond the laws of the Archipelago. Winho remains in crisis, a tragic, deep-rooted problem with no foreseeable solution.
Strict shelterate laws exist, rigidly enforced. Recently, visa laws have been revised, allowing visitors to remain for a maximum of forty-eight hours only. Deserters are not allowed entry and are forcibly returned to their units if discovered.
Currency: all acceptable, including paper money paid to the troops. This is exchangeable at par with the Archipelagian simoleon.
Yannet
DARK GREEN / SIR
THE DESCANT
Two people came to the small island of YANNET — a woman and a man. They both had curious names, and the names were curiously similar, but until they went to Yannet the woman called Yo and the man called Oy had never met in person.
They were both aware of each other. Yo and Oy were artists, conceptual creators of installations that were misunderstood by the public and condemned by critics. Both artists were harassed and had their work suppressed by the authorities. Neither of them cared. They thought of themselves as art guerrillas, one step ahead of their antagonists, always moving on from one installation to the next. As people they were otherwise unalike.
Yannet stood at a sub-tropical latitude in the midst of a cluster of islands known as the LESSER SERQUES. It was politically little different from most of the other islands in the Archipelago, in that it had a feudal economy and was governed by a Seignior in name and the partially elected Seigniory in practice. There was only one main area of population: Yannet Town itself, the capital and port, situated at the southern tip of the peninsula the islanders called HOMMKE (rendered in patois as ‘dark green’). The town was a place of light industries, electronics studios and games developers. Many highly paid jobs were to be found in Yannet Town.
The woman, whose full name was Jordenn Yo, was the first of the two artists to arrive. On disembarkation at the port she told the Seigniory officials that she was a geologist, taking up a freelance position. That was untrue. She was also travelling under an assumed name, and produced forged papers to back up her story. She told the customs officers she would be importing certain items of unspecified machinery for a geological project. She requested an open manifest, to avoid having to go through the bureaucracy every time, but at first the officers were reluctant to grant it. However, Yo was well experienced in dealing with these situations and soon obtained what she wanted.
She found and rented an apartment in the centre of Yannet Town, one with a small building attached that she could use as a studio. Once established she began her work straight away.
Outside the Hommke area Yannet was sparsely populated. Along the coastal plains to the north there was some farming, but most of the island was covered in dense tropical forest, a deep natural resource, protected from loggers and other developers by island ordinances, and managed as a wildlife preserve. The coastline of Yannet was untamed. There was broken water at all levels of tide. There were few historical or cultural associations and because of this tourists on Yannet were scarce.
Then there was the mountain, known locally as Voulden (whose patois meaning is ‘sir’. Apart from a few low foothills Mount Voulden stood alone, an asymmetrical cone rising out of the forest at the northern end of Hommke. Trees grew on its lower slopes, but higher up it was covered in coarse grasses or was bare rock. There were no obvious paths to follow, so although the climb was steep for only part of the way it could be a challenging ascent.
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.
