L'Archipel noir (The Black Archipelago)
Esther Rochon
(Excerpt: p. 70-76)
The Citadel was becoming depopulated. Sutherland, who stayed there, found himself busier than before. For several days, he went back and forth between the port and the Citadel, carting up in a wheelbarrow what had been stored near the wharf when the spring boat had come. Later he worked in the vegetable gardens. In the evening, in the big hall, now three quarters empty, he was becoming friendlier with those who had remained. That is how he learned that the elderly lady with whom he had often played dice that winter was Anar Vranengal's mother, who had come from the island of Vrend a few years before. In a language that he understood better and better, she spoke to him of the island, now abandoned, of the house she had occupied in a little village where one day the inhabitants had decided to leave for Vrénalik. Her husband had taken up the trade of fishing again, while she herself preferred to spend the year at the Citadel. She worked often in the gardens with Sutherland, who didn't dare tell her that, for one night, he had been her daughter's lover. She seemed to have guessed it, though, and spoke to him candidly about Anar Vranengal's lovers that she knew of.
The first had been Strénid, the man who had taken Sutherland to the Citadel the day he arrived in Frulken. Their stormy relationship had come to a rather brutal end about a decade before, when they were both twenty years old.
"Since then," Anar Vranengal's mother had concluded, "my daughter has learned a lot."
"In what sense?"
"She makes better choices," she had said with a smile.
While flattered by this remark, Sutherland was not sure about its accuracy. He would often see Strénid, who had come back to the Citadel for the arrival of the spring boat. He sometimes worked beside him, while Strénid's dog accompanied them, a huge bitch with black hair. Strénid had important duties in Frulken. He distributed jobs, made decisions that affected the community, and those who replaced him when he went away advised him when he returned. Before him, there had been a woman, Oumral, who administered Frulken and the Archipelago in general. She had died a few years before, having long ago chosen and trained Strénid to succeed her. She was also the one who had given him his name, which harked back to one of the most famous chiefs of Vrénalik. With his illustrious predecessor, the contemporary Strénid shared a keen intelligence and a violent, almost cruel, temperament. He did not, however, possess his presence, nor his extreme ambition, which had been in part responsible for the ruin of the country. He would never have dared to create, then subjugate, a Dreamer, since he knew, like everyone in the Archipelago, that he was here to atone for the follies of the ancestors.
Although grateful to Strénid for his help when he came to Frulken, Sutherland felt little attraction to this nervous, humourless man, whose incessant activity contrasted with the slow nonchalance of the people of Frulken. They seemed to consider Strénid a necessary evil: he was respected because he performed duties that no one else wanted. His fits of anger, his unpredictable departures were excused; the discipline he imposed was accepted, and it differed very little from what Oumral had established. Habits and traditions governed the Archipelago more than Strénid himself did, and he was no doubt aware of and responsible for this state of affairs. In the eyes of most people, there was no individual or collective future. Strénid, by the nature of his role, was compelled more than the others to face that future, to anticipate with eyes wide open the forms the decline and the despair would take. That was for him the heaviest load in the exercise of power, and when his rage in the face of the situation could no longer be contained, he would leave for the forest to massacre animals under the pretext of taking their fur.
Killing, though, made him feel ashamed. He would have preferred not to. He reassured himself by telling himself that the skins he brought back had a market value, and were used to satisfy real needs of the people of Vrénalik. However, he knew that this activity was not vital, and besides it was dangerous: there were times when he had gotten lost, and he owed his life to his faithful, devoted dog, which was always able to find the way to the nearest dwellings. So he killed neither out of necessity nor for pleasure, but to assuage his anger. When he could not bear the Citadel any longer, he would go into the forest; when he could not take the forest anymore, he returned to Frulken. Tied as he was to his tasks, he had the impression of being the only one with detailed knowledge of the extent of the disasters: how many children died young each year, how many houses were abandoned. Consequently he decreased the quantities of goods he had brought in from the South. There, he knew, the Archipelago had a bad reputation. It had been until now quite easy to keep away those who would have liked to exploit its few forests, to fish commercially along its coast, or prospect its potential mineral resources. On the other hand, Strénid considered that it would be harmful to close off the country too much from outside influences; that is why, unlike those who had come before him, he had permitted radios, flashlights, and all kinds of magazines and books to come into the country. However, few people read, and the radios most often picked up nothing but static; the flashlights, on the other hand, were a huge success.
Strénid wondered sometimes how his people would meet their end: extinction pure and simple or else swamped by a flood of foreigners who would suddenly land and settle. They might transform, who knows, the Citadel into a museum and the harbour warehouses into picturesque hotels, pushing out the former population, depriving it of all rights. Strénid sometimes broached this subject with Sutherland, who agreed with him that there was no way to avert such a disaster.
"So," concluded Sutherland smiling, "you will take up arms and you will die gloriously."
Strénid didn't smile. Unable to accept the situation of his country with serenity, and unable to forget it, haunted even in his sleep by this dying land for which he felt responsible. He sometimes envied those who could really dream, like the wizard Ivendra and Anar Vranengal. In that long-ago time when he was her lover, when Oumral was still alive to govern, and he could without a second thought give himself to the spell of love, it had seemed to him that he had begun to understand that shifting, irrational, elusive style with which the wizards of Vrénalik considered the world. The affair had ended in circumstances he preferred to forget. Now, this lack of rigour seemed to him like a weakness. Ivendra's searching for - to what purpose exactly? - a very hypothetical statue of Haztlén expressed in his eyes nothing but a dangerous refusal to face reality. Ivendra, in fact, was without doubt the only inhabitant of the Archipelago who knew the country as well as, if not better than, Strénid, but the conversations between the two men never remained for long at the level of the mere exchange of information, since their points of view were so divergent. For many years, moreover, they had avoided speaking to one another, and Anar Vranengal acted as their go-between.
For Strénid, this new arrival, Sutherland, was only a stranger like so many others. He had noticed how he seemed to be attracted by wizards. What could be more natural? They amused him during his stay. He was himself unsettled by Sutherland. He had questioned him at length about the South, about Ougris and about Ister-Inga. He couldn't explain his lack of curiosity about his native city, his lack of interest for studies or for the trades he had practised, his lack of fondness for his mother, his sister, or for Chann Iskiad.
If it had been hatred, he would have understood; but so much indifference astonished him. Similarly he was surprised by the calm and the peace that Sutherland seemed to have discovered in Frulken; for him, the Archipelago was a prison, where the bloody madness of the hunts alternated with administering a country that was hurtling towards death.
"You should leave," Sutherland told him one day.
"You know I can't!"
Sutherland had started laughing scornfully, totally incredulous. Such a reaction hadn't irritated Strénid; on the contrary, it helped him contemplate for the first time the possibility of leaving. But he didn't dwell on it. In a way, the perpetual nightmare of his life was fascinating, it was difficult to free himself from it...© 1999 Éditions Alire & Esther Rochon
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