Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors by Original (pdf) (no david read aloud txt) 📕

my pains: I was on a large island. I could not have crossed it in months but from a treetop on a

high hill, a mountain almost, I could make out a distant coastline. I

sailed half round this place, Palmland, and went on again, due

west, along its shore.

‘Then a bad blow sprang up and the longboat nearly foundered.

I was done for this time. Water gone and food. I lay there, helpless

as a baby, wallowing westward. I don’t remember being picked up.

I lost track of the days of the new year that I had notched on a

board. My luck still held; I was found. They found me and knew

me for some kind of a fellow creature. I came to a far, far distant

shore, a third continent, the edge of another landmass . . . who

knows? I woke up in the country of the Gnai.’

So there it was, one of the longest tales he ever told, something

over a year out of his life. He brought us Gline’s ocean, uncharted,

narrowed down to the scanning vision of one man in a ship’s longboat, I walked with Rayner in the garden and we saw the old man burning off a little heap of dried grass by the tall palms. He used

the smoke from his bonfire as a screen; we saw him, then he was

gone, quick as a ferret.

He worked in the garden but he never pottered like other old

men. Hilo Hill was quick and deft; he was very shy; he never came

to the front of the house. M orning and evening he sat in his

enclosure behind the trellis and sang his songs.

The ballad o f H ilo H ill

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I had nothing to offer Jup Star at the Songfabrik but a few of

these tunes, harsh and delicate as a gecko chirping. I turned to with

all I had and launched into a ballad. A salty number. Bold and

simple. Tune: ‘Rolling Home’.

‘When the Seahawk broke and foundered

On the verge of seas unknown,

One bold sailor bore on westward:

Hilo Hill sailed on alone.’

Then a catchy phrase for the chorus: ‘Sailing on . . . ’ or ‘Far

beyond . . . ’

‘Far beyond, Far beyond,

Far beyond the sight of land,

Sailing westward to the sunrise . . . ’

Tcha . . . where’s a rhyme? Sand, strand or a mermaid waving

her lily-white hand. It all rang false as a cracked bell. The old man

was vague; he could not be led back to speak of ‘Palmland’; he

juggled days and years. The beginning of his journey was a mystery

now. There was nothing to link Hilo Hill’s tale with what was really

known of Gline’s expedition. How had he come to sail off alone,

westward, in the longboat? Many of his shipmates were lost in the

wreck of the Seahawk, others, including Gline himself, died of

injury or privation on a grey strip of beach in the distant reaches of

the Red Ocean, hard by Cape Gline.

I read the ballads, burrowed into the old reports and interviews

at the Songfabrik and at City Hall. I wondered if the Dator of

Rhom ary had some records gathering dust that no one else had

seen. A single direct question, a few names from this time would

make the old man tremble and fall silent for days. He was often

afraid: vengeance was pursuing him. More particularly he was

afraid of an avenging female.

‘W here’s she? Still about? Not a word. Hilo’s dead, you can say.

Blown away . . . forgotten. . . ’

I asked Cap Raam.

‘Who is it, Captain? Who is this woman he is afraid of?’

‘You must hold your tongue, Cat Kells,’ he replied. ‘These are

dark waters.’

‘Who is it?’

‘The ranking officer after the wreck was the second mate, Vera

Swift.’

I knew the name, who didn’t? She had done wonders. This

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Cherry Wilder

sturdy sailor woman, ‘Tall and fine with hair of flame,’ as the ballad-

maker would have it, patched up the Rover, Gline’s supply cutter.

She came off the death beach and through