Spontoon Island
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Extracts from a Diary
by Amelia Bourne-Phipps
-edited by Simon Barber-
23 December, 1936 to 24 December, 1936

23rd December, 1936

A rest day! We woke up with Mrs. Hoele’toemi announcing breakfast and an unusual visitor to the village, Mrs. Oelabe our Matron who had come to check us over on the physical side. I recall Miss Devinski briefing us before we went, and indeed if we have come to any harm Songmark need to know. This may not be an official Songmark trip, but I expect the school benefited substantially in whatever moral credit it builds up with the Althing.

    We were given a clean bill of health, at least physically; Saimmi will be coming over to debrief us on how the rest of it went. Still, Mrs. Oelabe did say we were to rest for a few days before doing anything too demanding. I was not planning on running up Mount Kiribatori anyway!
 
    After our trip, a quiet morning helping around the Hoele’toemi household was a welcome return to normality. Even Molly seemed unusually quiet. I suppose after our trip to Cranium Island where she has horrified to find something immune to artillery, being able to reaffirm her faith in such things must mean a lot to her. Like the Germans in 1916, “Tank Terror” only lasted as long as there was no way to fight back; “Spirit terror” for Molly might now be just realising one needs the right defences. It must be hard for her, not actually believing in things she now knows are extremely real.

(Later)
    Just spending the day in the longhouse with the kittens crawling over us was a wonderful thing. Saimmi turned up after luncheon, and congratulated us on our success. Pity about the book, but the fragment was what we had been sent to retrieve and we managed that. We were awarded the equivalent to the keys to the city – all of us have full permission to visit anywhere we liked at any time, Sacred Island aside. My dorm have been unofficially doing so for awhile, but for Saffina it is a major reward; she is the first Songmark second-year to earn that privilege. Saimmi took an hour examining us for signs of the sort of damage that our dear Matron could not have spotted – she seemed rather concerned with Molly and Maria, but passed us all as fit. Saffina handed over the bag of ancient bone dust she had recovered; Saimmi took it reverently and assured us she would see to it the remains of the Priestesses were returned to Sacred Island.

    We asked her about our further training; she smiled and proclaimed we had a holiday till New Year. Running up against such a Fragment, even though we did not touch it ourselves, is a severe strain. Doing what she and Oharu did is a once in a lifetime effort, she tells us. This is rather a worrying thing to hear, considering the two greatest Priestesses in the area have used their ration up dealing with the two lesser fragments. That still leaves the main piece deep under Crater Lake to deal with, by someone. Considering Kansas Smith’s group still has the Cranium Island fragment, we can assume they will be back for the rest. We will not have years to prepare to deal with this, I expect. Only the fact that they (presumably) do not know how to handle a live Fragment keeps the sky above Crater Lake free of deep-sea divers parachuting in.

    After we had thanked Saimmi and said farewell, there was at last time to relax. First I wrote off to Judge Poynter, hoping to meet him and discuss the Allworthy problem. I still wear that gold wire hidden in my fur next to my tail-root as a lasting souvenir of that trip, as Miss Devinski ordered. I am awfully glad that is the only little souvenir I took back with me, at least that lasted. Had things been otherwise, by now I would be visibly changed by the encounter and probably no longer a Songmark student. Our Tutors nearly threw me out as it was.

Jirry and Marti came in from the boats in the afternoon, both very glad to see we were unharmed. I hope Adele and Madeleine are as well off – not that they are likely to have any sort of romantic encounters on Krupmark at the best of times. Saffina grinned and departed for the village woman’s longhouse, leaving Helen and me with the Hoele’toemi brothers. We may not be Tailfast but neither of them seem to mind, having heard the basics of what we achieved. Being native Spontoonies they have a strong sense of duty where the doings of their ancestors are concerned – even though technically speaking they are not the direct descendents of the Spontoonies who got the Great Ritual so disastrously wrong. Very few got away.

There was a rapid meeting with the rest of us; Molly and Maria were returning to Casino Island for the day to catch up on things, while Saffina is happy to stay on Haio Beach. From what Saimmi says, when word filters (discreetly) around of our success on Krupmark, the Spontoonies are liable to be very grateful. If I interpreted correctly her hint, we might be in line for Citizenship regardless of being married into the Hoele’toemi clan. Molly could certainly use some stability. Lars is a native Spontoonie just as much as Jirry and could make her a Citizen the same way, though she has never talked about getting married.

    Having said farewell, the rain started to come down again and we all retired to the guest longhouse. I used to think of it of Helen and I chaperoning each other. Certainly, things turn out far more respectably (at least from the Polynesian point of view) than when Molly and I end up in such situations with Lars. It really is rather odd. One way I reassure myself that being Mrs. Amelia Hoele’toemi should have only pleasant surprises, and the other – well, it is at least expected for a Spontoonie girl to have visited several cabins on the Ark before making her final choice. Polynesian males on average seem to like the idea that they are chosen as husbands in light of experience rather than luck and blind faith.


24th December, 1936

A bright day! The local post is very efficient, even considering there are no two settlements on Spontoon as such more than an hour apart by water-taxi and bicycle. Judge Poynter is free to see me this afternoon, and I used the village telephone to confirm with his housekeeper that I could at last meet him. Mrs. Hoele’toemi recalls he has been on Spontoon longer than her, and she was born here! He must be the last of the original Government officials still working, having served loyally and with very little reward all these years. Certainly, I know his street on Meeting Island, and there are no mansions there.

    Helen insisted I stop by at Herr Rassberg’s shop first for some rather specific purchases. Honestly, she does take a pessimistic view of things sometimes. But some things are not worth arguing over, and I complied (rather shocking the good shopkeeper) before heading out alone on a water-taxi. I took care to wear a respectable “Euro” outfit rather than my grass skirt or the Adventuring kit that is still drying out from the wash; though the skirt is rather longer than the tennis wear I wore on Krupmark, the overall design is much the same. Good impressions are important; Judge Poynter is offering to look at my case for free and indeed I can hardly afford a regular lawyer – not without tapping the Allworthy funds, which of course I cannot do without making a claim on them – the very thing I am trying to avoid!

    Meeting Island is very quiet this time of year, with most of the diplomatic and trade staff connected with tourist season taking their annual long leave or working part-time. Maria has told me about the Festival of Nations three weeks ago, which caused a temporary flurry of activity as the Spontoonies came to munch popcorn and watch the exponents of the various governments expound their points of view. All that has died down now, and many of the official buildings looked half deserted.
 
    Judge Poynter lives in one of the stone houses from around the turn of the century; apart from warehouses and churches there were few really solid buildings on the islands before then until the first hotels were built. Like Mildendo and Krupmark today, the Plantation era architects mostly built in corrugated iron and timber. His housekeeper, a staid looking chipmunk, let me in and escorted me in to wait in the Judge’s study.

    Although the street outside is Spontoonie, the study was definitely Victorian English, everything rather worn and bleached around the windows by tropical sunshine but clean, of obviously high quality and scrupulously kept in good repair. Actually that was also my first impression of Judge Poynter, who arrived about a minute later as I was surveying the veritable gasogene that had probably provided fifty years of aerated soda water. The shelves were piled up high with books and legal documents dating back decades, starting with hand-written annals of the “Courts of Oyer and Terminer” which even I know has had another name since the turn of the  century. Possibly with Spontoon never having been a proper Colony, its administration had to beg for whatever obsolete cast-off supplies it could get.

    Judge Poynter is a canine of the gundog type, with long and neatly brushed ears and head-fur, and a very well groomed tail. He was dressed in one of the few suits of tweed I have seen on Spontoon; unlike the furniture they were not Plantation era but only a few years old to judge by the style. Possibly the Empire Stores catalogue gets out to these islands, though I have not seen a copy. He was very pleased to see me at last, and invited me to sit down and discuss the matter with him.

    I must say, he turned out to be a very nice old gentleman. Well, I have met older ones who still hunted and fished all day long, and look set to see their century if they keep up the healthy exercise. All the books say you should trust your lawyer with everything if you want him to win your case; I told him the whole story of my second Krupmark trip from the day Lady Susan recruited me as a pilot. Well, perhaps not absolutely everything. But I did show him the gold wire ring around my tail and tell him about Lady Susan’s gift of a sack, a brick and a large bucket for my kittens that I would be opening on Christmas Day had I followed the instructions. I could see that one shocked him, though he had been the one to read out the charges and serve the warrant on Lord Leon and Lady Susan and hand them over to the authorities in New Penzance. According to the books, nobility are traditionally hung with a silk rope rather than a hempen one.
 
    It seems there really is nothing our Tutors do not know. Judge Poynter looked at me sympathetically and informed me he had heard from Miss Devinski who had passed him certain other evidence. I did not tell them I was coming here! But he has a copy of that pledge Leon wrote that I signed the last page of – though when I saw it, it was the only page and my signature ended up appended to something I would certainly not have agreed to. He says it is a very sad case, but as the law stands, unless I can actually prove there was only one page when I signed it, being deceived will not help matters. On paper it really does look like a reasonable contract, exactly the sort of thing that a former Gentleman might think of if he was repenting of some of his crimes in his later years – but the galling thing is, we shall never really know. If Lord Leon had not committed such horrors before first arriving on Krupmark I might be able to blame the Fragment rather than him for some of them.

    I spent most of the afternoon there, refreshed by the first proper tea and biscuits in ages, and managed to pick up something of the good judge’s career. He really has been on Spontoon since the Plantation days, having served under all administrations and been involved with the treaties at the end of the Gunboat Wars. It has brought him little profit, and indeed he mentioned that the house comes with the job as if he was a gamekeeper on some country estate back home. One hopes it also comes with the pension. Evidently he never married; the only photographs on the walls are faded formal portraits from fifty years ago, looking as if they were taken back in England. The Spontoon climate is not kind to celluloid and photographic emulsion. Judging by his age and the others in the pictures, he might well be the only one of them left.

    I took my leave at four, with the Judge promising to look hard in his collection for precedents. That is the difference between a properly matured legal system and some of the others; just as we do not need a Constitution in British law, we do not have a rigidly established legal code. Nothing is legal or illegal in principle; there has to be a specific law making it so, and the interpretations of that are what makes a legal career such a test of skill and memory. Everything depends on precedence and what some other wise judges decided was appropriate perhaps a century ago – which explains why judges never retire as long as they are healthy enough to go on serving.

    Jasbir has told me of various anti-Imperial rebels in her homeland who specialise in murdering good and selfless officials, as they present a real moral threat to breakaway movements. Rebels want the Colonial powers to be cruel and haughty, not devoted to the public good of wherever they are appointed to serve. Colonial officers really do serve, as well as rule. She has also hinted what happened to the captured assassins at her Father’s court; it would not do at the Old Bailey to hand out death sentences involving tiger ants, but it is an internal matter of a loyal Native State and I doubt our government in Delhi or London was too concerned that they were following age-old traditions.

    Back to South Island, realising it is now Christmas Eve! Two years ago it was me and Helen here exploring the island and its “waterworks project”, a year ago Maria and I were being chased across Vostok by Bolshevik forces. This holiday has definitely sneaked up on us, what with the Aleutians trip and heading straight off afterwards to prepare for Krupmark. A little relaxation would be nice. But whenever I tell myself I have time to relax, it invariably starts another adventure. We have not heard from Mr. Sapohatan for awhile, which is worrying in a way. Like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes – the longer between events, the bigger they are when they arrive.



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