So, I fill my time this way. And it is a good use of my time. When I am gone I will leave a record for future generations, if there are any. It may be a small thing on a small island in a forgotten part of the world but I will leave a legacy, I will leave a history of this place.
There is something else I marked on my map. Somewhere else I visit.
About three years into my time here and for the next two-and-a-half years, every day at dusk I would take a stone about three times the size of my fist and place it in an area of the grasslands where little that is edible grows. The day after I’d place one next to it. After a row of thirty I’d start another. Thirty-one rows, the last with just seventeen stones in it. Each day for nine hundred and seventeen days.
And now each day I go back. It does not look like many. It looks almost insignificant, my stone field. Each day I stand and watch the stones splashed with rain. They reflect the clouds. In the dusk, with my head bowed, eyes half closed, each stone becomes alive, becomes a spirit. They swim around me, swallow me, pull me down into the grey water.
A story I have heard tells of a black smoke covering the earth.
People were born in it, breathed it, died in it. It went on for so long people forgot why it was there, if they ever knew in the first place.
Many lived underground, became smaller, nourished by roots and a foul soil. Slowly they started coming out. Some died trapped between the dark air and the suffocating earth. I pictured them with their legs held in soil, their arms lifted to the sky. Others woke and in the grey light the earth began to move. But it is just a story.
I imagine, standing here, the shapes around me, that this is what it must have been like for them. The half light, the not being able to breathe.
This place is on the very edge of the territories called Bran. Some where to the east lies Axum, its only rival and the only other settlement the world knows.
There are rumours, legends of something and somewhere else.
There are measurements for space and time we didn’t determine, there are words for things that no one has experienced, there are things we believe to be true but cannot prove. I write that I lead a monk’s life.
The world does not know monks, yet I know the word and I know, or believe I know it describes a man who lives ascetically. We have plastic, have the word for plastic but do not produce it or know how to produce it. We know the north and south are uninhabitable but cannot remember how they got that way. The story of the smoke.
Scraps of knowledge, scraps of collective memories. There are stories of a time with many more of us, a time of plenty. But they were over long before our story starts and long before I can remember. My role in Bran meant that I have seen more, that I have seen things very few of my people would believe. An enormous ship half buried in a desert. Ruined buildings at the bottom of a lake. All these clues to our past we could not read for fear of what they might mean, for fear of what they might mean we used to be. I have seen so much that hints of a past greater than our present. But we were never ready for the past. The present was struggle enough.
On the way here, a week’s sail into the trip, the sea became like glass. I looked over the edge of the raft and could see metres down.
I spent ages peering over, seeing nothing, just water. And then dark shapes appeared. I drifted across them. Some reached upwards and I could see ruins, outlines of buildings, the spaces between them. I drifted over a column that came almost to the surface. On the top of the column was a statue of a man. I reached into the water up to my shoulder, straining to touch him. He wore a hat. He had the bearing of a military man. His face was expressionless, his visage stone. My fingertips brushed the top of his head and he was gone. The ocean swallowed him. Once more, and ever more, undisturbed, unseen. I drifted onwards.
I have been left alone here. No one ventures far north or south.
Bran is to the west, Axum to the east. The borders of the two settlements, themselves islands, though much larger than this one, are not patrolled. We did not have the resources and probably do not now either and when I left there had been no intrusions into our region for years. The two factions left each other alone. We left each other to get on with it. For a time there were ambassadors sent to each other’s regions to ensure the Programme was being carried out in accordance with the terms of the peace agreement.
Gradually though, as it became apparent how well the Programme was working, how good it was for both groups, there was no need to monitor each other.
That was a long time ago. As I sit here fishing, the rain falling softly on my waterproof cover, I feel it may as well not have happened at all.
The rain on the plastic is a sound that is comforting. I am warm, I have food, I have found a way to live.
I picture myself here as if from a distance: a man crouched on a wet rock, under a yellow tarpaulin, a fishing rod reaching out into the sea.
Behind him the sand, the crumbling cliffs, grasslands and an immense expanse of grey sky. I’m standing on the cliff, looking down at me, looking out at the ocean, and this is what I see.
There is a tug on the line and I am back, flying over the edge of the cliff.
The fish is a strong one. It will be all I need for two days. I reel it in, take a rock and hit it on the head. I gut it there and then, placing my knife just below its jaw and slicing down with a single movement.
I have done this many times before. The innards I pull out with my fingers and fling to a lone seagull perched on a rock. I wash the cavity in the sea and place the fish in my bag.
As I stand up and turn towards the path leading up the cliff, something catches my eye. I see it disappear behind the ridge. For a few seconds I am startled and think I have seen a head. It doesn’t last long. I realise I am not sure what I saw, whether I saw anything in fact. There have been other times like this. I’ve seen things. They’re becoming more frequent. But it must have been grass blowing in the wind, a gull, or simply an old man’s fading eyesight. I set off up the path to the cave.
At night I think back to the creature on the ridge. It changes at night. It always does. The head becomes a face, a face with bones visible through holes in the skin and drawn teeth.
I do not sleep and wait for dawn. It is one of those mornings when it is lighter than usual. Each day is a shade of grey. It can range from near white to almost black. I have not seen the sun for ten years but every now and then I can see a flame-white disc through the clouds. Today is one of those days. I swim, I eat, I pull on my coat and head off to gather fuel.
The coat, spare clothes, a knife, a length of rope, waterproofs, fishing line and hooks, a tarpaulin used for a sail, water containers, biscuits, some twine, a spare set of boots, a spade, an axe, my writing materials, a compass and an old chart of the ocean. This is what they allowed me. This is what I brought to the island and what I have with me now, some of it repaired several times.
I had to replace the handle of my axe a few months after I arrived.
The original broke while I was chopping down a tree. It didn’t splinter.
It snapped clean in two. My hand, carried through with the movement of my arm, scraped against the broken shaft. It cut deep into the tops of my fingers. I held them up to the light and for a second could see bone before the blood came. I bled profusely and watched as it dripped into the earth. There was nothing I could do. A needle and thread were not on my list of provisions. I was surprised at how much it bled. The dark forest closed in, I smelled the damp pine needles, the fresh wood, heard my own quickened breathing, the silence, felt the warmth of the blood on my skin. There was nothing I could do to stop myself bleeding to death, nothing I could do to live. But it was a cut across the fingers and no one has ever died from that. I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and wound it round my hand.