Broken Wing: A million deaths were not enough for Cassandra! Read online

  I remember the first mango Jim presented me with, “Here, duck, try this fellow for size.” He had plonked the long, green-grey object in my hands, smiling up at my baffled expression. He had shown me a more-or-less neat way of dealing with the huge fruit; slitting it open longwise to free the massive seed within and peeling the skin off in sections. It was a surprise to see the yellow flesh, dark and creamy in appearance, to savour the strong almost citrus scent and the succulent sweetness of the firm but soft flesh. It had been an instant hit with me though I was careful not to overindulge.

  Jim had told me that there were enough to go around but fruit was something I had always been sparing with. Not that I ate all that much anyway; although I would know the reason why if a meal was late. The ledges below me facing south were warmer; the soil thicker and darker. The north-eastern ledges were wider, leading down to the lagoon, but they were more windswept and the plants growing there were hardier, wiry grey specimens that seemed able to cope with any adversity. The plants were less friendly, the birds quieter. It is on this island that I first came face to face with a parrot, a huge grey fellow with a red face and topknot, one who had adopted us as friends since he discovered that getting us to feed him was a lot simpler than finding food for himself. He had soon learnt to speak, largely with Jim and Ronald’s assistance.

  He was a thoughtful old bird, his statements often given with deliberate consideration and occasionally surprisingly apt. He was just one of many, one sort of parrot amongst many, one type of bird amongst a crowd that knew no end. He was in the habit of alighting on a person’s shoulder when that person was occupied with other thoughts, proving to be somewhat of a distraction. Who originally gave him the name ‘Byrtle’ I do not know, but he would answer to this somewhat enigmatic title with equanimity.

  The ragged unused ledges were linked by a tortuous trail that encircled the crag from the plain to the north in a counter-clockwise helix. Most of the ledges were served by this route but some of them; particularly the ones which had been occupied by the natives of yore; were surprisingly left out. They had their own network, one which had nothing in common with the corkscrew; as the stairway was known to us. It was a long and difficult trail, accounting anything up on five miles of perilous ledges, steep pathways of slippery clay and narrow, winding stairs. Often the corkscrew was fenced off with antique wooden poles; there were sections of stair made of laid wooden sleepers and half-trunk sections, other places the stair was cut into the stone of the cliffs. The trail found its way along narrow ledges exposed to the terrible north wind, up narrow ghylls and gullies, across glades and ledges so beautiful that even the call of duty was difficult to respond to when one stood there in a rapture of beauty. I found one such ledge, hedged off from even sight of the sea by rowans and elders; the middle of the ledge was dominated by a stately white oak of handsome proportions.

  The grass lies thick and lush; the midges seem not to have found the place yet. It breathes of England, serene, orderly, at peace for all its unusual setting. Behind the tree, flush against the cliff a well lies hidden beneath fern and bracken grown to a heroic mass of brown and green. The well has a stone wall made with deliberate care; the water leaks down from a crack in the wall just above the waterline. Where it goes to I am not sure but the level in the deep basin never changes. There I spend, spent, a certain amount of my leisure time, simply sitting and feeling the peace of the place. Later on I would go there to sort out my thoughts; few of the others ever went there and I was sure of a certain amount of privacy.

  Now I do not leave the castle precincts; exactly the opposite of the natives who dwelt here before my obscure tenancy began but for more-or-less the same reason. I do fear the castle but duty holds me here, one remaining duty that I dare not neglect.

  The one place that keeps my eye now is the lagoon, the wide, deep blue lake of old briny, encircled by the ragged teeth of what was once a crater, maybe the peak of a submarine volcano.

  The lagoon is an irregular circle of maybe three miles in diameter, fairly deep in places with a white-sanded floor and a profusion of fish and other marine oddments. The coral is a riot of colour, the weed and plants dancing in the sedate current of the lake. The water seems to flow in a vortex around the small island that is the lagoon’s central feature but the current is so slow that it is difficult to find the time to measure it. We occasionally walked onto the rough stones which walled off the lagoon, once taking the time to circumnavigate the wall. The tallest stones were a good handful of fathoms above the level of the wild sea beyond at high tide and at low tide even the smallest were exposed to a certain extent. There were only three places where we had to swim at the low-tide crossing; most of the time we were clambering from one jagged rock to the next. It was probably because there was so little exchange of water between the lagoon and the sea, that the lagoon was warm enough, nearly, to bathe in even in the late autumn months when we arrived here. The water was appreciably warmer than the chill of the northern Pacific, as if the lagoon denied being part of that restless expanse.

  Some of the smaller crags around the lagoon harbour the few sorts of seal to trouble themselves with this part of the ocean, there are plenty of birds nesting on the small cliffs and one of the larger lumps of rock harbours a small and disappointing cave. The lagoon wall itself is all of eighteen and a half miles long, largely featureless, a wall of obsidian made the more unappealing by the distances between each point of interest and the general ruggedness it offered in lieu of a passable trail. There were numerous expeditions along its length; I took part in only one. Roger in particular found much to occupy himself there; he had an eye for birds and porpoises and other such creatures and the lagoon wall afforded him many opportunities to satisfy his curiosity.

  There was much interest in the smaller island as well; for deep in the shade of a tiny glade in the heart of the tiny islet there is the only other intact building on the island other than the castle. The good Doctor provided us with three inflatable rafts other than the emergency survival kits on the Wrens and those of us with a seamanlike turn of mind would often beguile our free hours with a paddle around the calm waters of the lagoon, often enough having a picnic on the beach of the islet, investigating the tiny stone room to see if anything had changed from one visit to the next. Nothing ever did change other than our perception of the place. I believe it is some sort of chapel; it fits into that mould for all its tall and narrow windows have never had any glass in their smooth and slightly eroded frames. It has that peace about it; it is a stone box as featureless as any other stone structure but there is an atmosphere of tranquillity I found particularly soothing. The stones are roughly shaped and held together with mortar.

  The more ambitious swimmers amongst us would often swim from the beach to the islet, a distance of slightly less than two miles. It is also possible to wade a good part of the way if one is inclined to; I managed to get a good deal further than any of the others; but nobody was really impressed. It was as if we were on some sort of holiday, as if there was nothing but excitement to be found on the island, as if there was no serious purpose behind our presence there. The Doctor actively encouraged this lightness, requiring only that we take our time on duty a bit more seriously and that we do nothing unduly reckless in our free time. How we spent our time seemed not to bother him though he would enquire into our health and activities, laughing at any anecdotes that seemed to merit this, taking an interest in any new discovery that any of us made. Though the island was not really warm and late autumn was having its inevitable effect on all of us, it was still a joyful and exuberant time that we shared during the first period we spent on Black Crag.

  I remember the excitement of my first free time, the wonder of prowling around on the enigmatic trail, seeing the sweep of the ocean below me. In those days I was too busy and industrious to remember how far I was from home. There was simply too much to be done, too many new things to see and experience. I had the freedom that I had never before experi
enced, to do with my time exactly what I pleased. I remember prowling down the length of the flat field at the base of the crag to where a wide section had been roughly levelled; all the odd boulders removed and the strip levelled with hand-rollers. It was on that strip the Doctor told me that the Hercules transport plane had landed, disgorging the supplies and equipment in three loads over a week’s time. The crew had helped the Doctor and his small staff to heft the clumsy loads up the grim convolutions of the corkscrew, up to the castle courtyard where that trail ended.

  I understood then why the original staff of the base viewed the corkscrew as a necessary evil. Jim did his daily ten miles phlegmatically enough, up and down the trail and a few times around the landing strip; but then he was a good few years older than the rest of us and had got his daily routine organised in the light of experience. June went so far as to design a chairlift to be erected in the castle courtyard and to end on the beach, rather than face that walk; but her chairlift didn’t meet with enough enthusiasm to merit its final construction. She did discover a zigzag trail down the southern cliffs, one which crossed the corkscrew on two points but it was a lot safer and easier going.

  That discovery of hers was promptly christened the Mango Route; for that was where it ended. She told me a lot about those hectic days when the base was being set up. They had arrived, she said, in the super-stallion after a tedious flight from Hawaii. After all, there was nothing for her to do as a crew-member and there wasn’t much to see but the waves that all looked remarkably alike. As the super-stallion was too clumsy and nearly too large to fit into the Wren’s Nest, they had landed on the level plain at the foot of the crag; but not before the Doctor had made three attempts to get the craft into the cave. For all he was a very good pilot and the super-stallion’s disc was smaller than the entrance to the Nest, that feat was beyond his skill. They had unloaded the gear they had brought with them and divided into two groups; one to clear the strip the Doctor had marked out and set up the landing-flares, the other group to take the equipment up the cliff-path. The Doctor had found a higher ledge on which to park the stallion from where the castle party had set off. The boys below had set to work on the boulders; the rest had started on their first war with the corkscrew.

  “The odds were not with us.” June told me as we sat eating avocado pears and sipping honeysuckle tea, a brew which I learnt to make here, all by myself; a beverage which had become popular amongst our discerning tea-drinkers.

  “We were loaded down with delicate equipment; we slipped and performed on that damned trail. God knows how we managed to get everything into this place with no serious breakages, but we did.” The first landing of the Hercules was scheduled for noon the next day; after the equipment was in place, the whole crew had put their backs into readying the field for the large transporter; the craft’s deep drone had been heard even as the last five flares were being wired up.

  “Then the work really began.” June informed me, “The crew of the plane were dears, really, not complaining or grouching at what must have been sheer hell for them. I know it was hell for me. Three loads the Hercules brought in, over a period of seven days. We were fetching, carrying, installing and hooking up for sometimes twenty hours a day. The Doctor was always first up, always the last to quit; he was driven and we could hardly do less than he did. What it was that had bitten him I don’t know but he was definitely in a hurry to set up the base.”

  I remember feeling guilty about that; for at that time I knew precisely what was biting the Doctor. I know now that I was the only one he eventually confided in and only because I more or less confronted him with what I had deduced from my own feelings and his reactions at various times. And it was certainly a noticeable thing; for after we were installed and the base had become active, it seemed as if everything was left hanging. Whereas the base was involved in certain vital operations and the Doctor was certainly keeping himself occupied, the main thrust of his attention became passive, watchful and waiting. I do know that he spent most of his time at the console of the radio-telescope in upper control; in the roundhouse; and he spent that time alone.

  The radio-optical apparatus was installed in the north-western tower, the largest of the three. The radar and telescope dishes were mounted on the roof and there is a secondary console in the caverns adjoining the Wren’s Nest, where there is a complex array of equipment within the crag; and within lower control, the Nest watchtower. A lot of it is to do with their nuclear research; it is largely meaningless to me beyond the obvious fact that they used some sort of radioactive material to generate the rays that caused what Jim pompously, even facetiously, referred to as ‘The unilinear acceleration effect.’ He knew perfectly well that I had a limited grasp of nuclear physics; and it pleased him to tease me.

  I tried to take that in his spirit, once resorting to asking him to explain the port-list effect on a supersonic chopper which was autogyring. “Ah, pet, you’ve got me there.” He told me cheerfully, before sending me off to get him some more tea and scones.

  The keep of the castle itself is in four upper levels and three levels of cellars. The rooms of the keep are sparsely furnished for the most part, but our sleeping chambers the Doctor had taken the trouble to equip properly, no doubt realising the soothing effect a definite and comfortable home base would have on us. The kitchens are large, gloomy rooms that seldom see sunlight. The old gas-burners march alongside induction, convection and microwave cookers that the Doctor had brought along. The kettle, a large silver urn on the old oak table in the largest room, was the closest we came to having something holy in the castle. Both June and I were surprised at the ability and willingness of some of the men to do a spot of cooking every now and then; neither of us were too impressed with their general lack of interest in scullery duties, though the Doctor often insisted that they lend us a hand every now and then. June occasionally mentioned to me her surprise at the actual condition of the castle when first she had entered it, as if it had not stood neglected for more than eighty years.

  Granted that the windows and doors were closed, just as the last European explorer had left them; but the state of the castle was not one of neglect. When it was that the Master had first vanished is not known beyond the vague lore of the ledge-dwellers, who stubbornly maintained that he had not vanished at all, only that he had locked himself into the lower levels of the keep, maybe in the cellars, for reasons that the natives were not prepared to look into. Certainly there was no trace that the European explorers from as far back as the mid-eighteenth century had been able to find. Who, or what, the Master was nobody could say for certain, even though one or two parties had looked into the matter in some depth, living in the castle for periods of more than a year at a time.

  The island, lost in the desolate northern Pacific and being too small and cold for most people’s purposes, elicited very little interest in most circles for all the peculiar enigmas posed by it. Its unusual topography, its rude and brutal former inhabitants, even its castle of almost gothic architecture; all this made remarkably little impact on the world as a whole.

  Even the larger atlases make no reference to it and the conscientious Admiralty references and maps simply record it as the tiniest pinprick a few hundred miles west of the date line that certainly hasn’t been shifted to take the island into account. The island is off both sea and air routes over the Pacific and nobody has the time to turn the eyes of the numerous satellites onto that hard-to-see grain of black sand.

  This apparently suited the Doctor’s purposes; the island was just about the most remote place on the face of the planet, the one place where he could get on with whatever he had planned to do without interruptions. He had made himself a comfortable Nest on the Black Crag, he had surrounded himself with loyal colleagues and talented pilots, had brought with him every toy that a nuclear physicist of his persuasion could have desired and had found in the enigmatic Master of the Crag a mystery to occupy his mind when he felt like a break from his labours. But
even then he was obviously not content.

  There was something on his mind that the comfort of the castle on the crag could not settle, an unanswered question to plague him. The disappearance of the ledge-dwellers was another, more obscure matter. They had interacted with the rest of the world over a period of one-hundred and fifty-or-so years, their behaviour varying between postures of outright, bloody-aggression to surly compliance, depending on factors that their visitors had never satisfactorily understood. At times trade and industry, according to the reports, was nearly brisk, the exotic tropical fruit finding markets as far afield as the western coast of the United States and Hawaii. The Japanese occasionally sent traders in search of other products the ledge-dwellers didn’t mind parting with; cargoes of copra, coconuts, cocoa beans and the scented woods of certain trees found on the lower ledges. As well as that, there was fresh water and other supplies that the earlier mariners found to be a helpful addition to their stores of pickled pork and ship’s biscuits.

  Sometimes the ledge dwellers were helpful, most of the time they were not, causing the traders to be somewhat firmer in their actions than all parties felt was necessary. Who it was that first noted that the traditional ambush with which the ledge-dwellers greeted their visitors was lacking and the natives indeed were nowhere to be found, is not recorded. However shortly after the middle of the twentieth century there is no further reference to them.