The Gradual by Christopher Priest Read Free Book Online

condone it, and if I should ever run into Msr Ante in person I would tell him what I thought of what he had done, but that was unlikely and I had other things to worry about.
    Then the record itself arrived. Alynna had to travel to Glaund City that day for another recording session, so I waited until she was out of the house before putting the disc on the turntable.
    The reality of what this man Ante had done was greater than I had thought, or even feared. Every single track on his record contained, at the minimum, a reference to something of mine: a particular harmonic progression, a brief snatch of melody, a way of introducing a key change. But more than that, one track was virtually a note-for-note transcription of one of my
Wind Songs
. Another took the tiny cadenza of my flute concerto, a delicate, flowing piece, a mere eight bars in length, and made it into a six-minute sonic assault of screeching guitar and a maddening, thudding drum beat. I could even detect the silences of
Breath
in one of the songs.
    The main track, the title track,
Pilota Marret
, was not translated on the album sleeve. The man who had written to me had translated it as
The Lost Aviator
, which for a time I accepted. I was soon obsessed with trying to work out what this Ante person had been thinking, what clue that title might contain or perhaps reveal. I went to the Central Library in Glaund and found a tourist guide to the island demotic. The demotic did have a written form, and it obeyed rules of grammar, declension, syntax and so on, but because of the immense size of the Dream Archipelago, and the literally innumerable island patois, there were dozens, hundreds, of dialects. Island demotic was, in effect, best understood as an oral form, but with no one around me who spoke it, all I had to go on were the rules set out in the book.
    It turned out that ‘The Lost Aviator’ could be regarded as an adequate translation of the demotic spoken in a group of islands called the Torquil Group, which happened to be the islands closest to the Glaund coastline. Presumably the man who had written me the letter thought the Torquil version of the demotic would be accurate enough. In fact, Ante’s home island, Temmil, was on the other side of the world from the Torquils. I had no idea where. It was located in a sub-tropical island system known in demotic as the Ruller Islands – in the local patois ‘temmil’ meant ‘choker of air’, and ‘ruller’ meant ‘drifting flower scent’.
    I was getting lost in all this and feeling increasingly obsessive about what had been done to my music, but I was eventually able to rough out a translation of the album title as
Sea Images.
I believed this was as close to
Tidal Symbols
as made no difference, and with this detective work completed I suddenly felt deflated and worn out, the excitement of pursuit leaving me. I also felt as someone might whose home had been burgled, the contents ransacked, all the best possessions stolen and removed.
    There was nothing I could do, at least that I could think of doing. Of course I thought of trying to start a legal action for copyright infringement, but the difficulties of that – my ignorance of the law in the islands, the time it would take, and so on – not to mention the expense of hiring lawyers, made it impractical. I knew I had been wasting too much time. I grew tired of staring at the photographs of the band members on the front cover of the sleeve: four dishevelled young men posing with dissolute, even rebellious expressions, too thin in their bodies, dressed untidily. Their facial images had been mangled by the sleeve designer, who for some reason had rendered their photographs in median threshold: stark monochromatic faces, deep shadows and bleached highlights, making them skull-like, lacking in all detail. The photographs could literally be of anyone.
    They were young men half a world away, so removed from me musically and artistically that there could not be