Spontoon Island
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Extracts from a Diary
by Amelia Bourne-Phipps
-edited by Simon Barber-
  23 May, 1937



Sunday May 23rd, 1937

A busy day indeed for everyone. As soon as the Songmark gates were open I was off to Mahanish’s to see how Lucy and Emily had passed the night, on the way my ears pressed flat looking at the sand dunes on the Eastern coast. If Miss Devinski had only loaned the sisters tents and even a can apiece of the surplus Rain Island “Sea Pie” last week things would be so different. It is ironic that the market boom in seaweed for the military ration program is the very thing that brought about the Penningtons’ exposure, just as it looked set to make them wealthy. There is a certain greedy business-fur in Dutch Harbour who I would like to have words with one day, or probably let Molly do the talking with the aid of her toolkit. The trouble is, legally he is in the right and has City Hall behind him.

    Happily both remaining girls were still safe and having breakfast, though somewhat bemused by the menus. It is hard to imagine what this must be like for them; a month ago they were being waited on by Aleutian sea-otter servants in their family mansion as they had done all their lives and their grandparents before them with very little to worry them except a distant concern over whether they could send off for suitably pedigreed grey fox gentlemen to marry. I hardly like to think of what will have happened to Blanche and Cindy already; their species is also classed as attractively exotic on Kuo Han and are liable to appeal to very different species of “gentlemen”.
 
    Fortunately Lucy and Emily are young and resilient, and we have given them a certain amount of hope. They have started to look around and realise the people around them are enjoying themselves on holiday – they had vaguely heard of bathing beaches and Casinos from their old Governess, who had denounced them as wicked (which was her opinion of most things, as I gather) and they were asking about them. Emily was quite amazed at all the different species here; outside of books they had never met anyone who was not a fox or sea-otter except for us, never having left their island before this month.

    I am not sure what would be best for them while we are away; staying at Mahanish’s indefinitely would hardly do as pilots and Adventurers wandering through have a not always undeserved reputation of taking advantage of vulnerable girls. Originally I had thought of asking Mrs. Hoele’toemi to look after them but the shock of living in a Spontoonie longhouse might be rather too much. The Songmark girls are all far too busy to be more than the most limited guides and chaperones, and certainly they need looking after. If this was off-season I would think of getting a Spontoonie lady Guide to show them around full time, but they are rather busy with the tour-boat crowd. At least I had a good breakfast while thinking (Mahanish’s do a basic ham and eggs type cuisine that is wonderful compared with the Songmark menu) before deciding to ask Harold for assistance again. He has time to spend these days, has official standing and if anyone can smooth the Penningtons’ status with the local authorities, he can. In the worst case, he can write letters of introduction for Lucy and Emily to take with them to England where he still keeps in distant touch with his extended family.

    Back to Songmark, where my dorm have been busy! Molly has been out making the telephone wires ring with cryptic messages to furs who Harold would probably not approve of. Still, we are “advancing on two fronts” on both legitimate and criminal areas and need all the help and information we can get. She is meeting Lars this afternoon at the Temple of Continual Reward and hopefully enlisting his help. We had best start from a known base on Krupmark, and he can at least get us there. His old quadruplane Pemberton-Billings “Zeppelin terrifier” has been retired and now his enterprise has a six-seater floatplane, she says. Business must be looking up.

    (Later) Things are starting to take some kind of shape. I took the Pennington girls over to Meeting Island again and Harold gladly agreed to help them. He has been investigating the problem, and is not too happy at my proposed plan although he admits it stands the only chance of working that he can see. I have slightly mentioned my training with Saimmi, and after his years here he has seen much of the abilities of the local Priestesses. He would be happier if I was fully qualified as a Songmark Graduate and a Priestess first, though. If folk in Kou Han find out who I am as Lady Allworthy, there is likely to be a “bidding frenzy” like a shark attack. Many Oriental furs still have sore feelings against Euros from the Boxer Rebellion days and even back as far as the Opium Wars * and would not exactly be buying me as treasured favourite of the harem.
 
    Harold’s law library is probably the best equipped in the Pacific, as indeed he was instrumental in organising the Spontoonie criminal code after the Gunboat Wars. What he left out of the slim volume used here was the thousand years of case law and Precedent that makes Law such a life-long career back in Britain. Effectively, laws stay on the books forever unless specifically repealed (a very troublesome procedure that other lawyers tend to fight on principle) which means there are some curious survivals that are still lurking out there like a loose Great War vintage mine still bobbing along on the currents.
 
Britain was the first European Empire to abolish slavery, but the centuries of laws dealing with such are still on the books by default though nobody can see any application for them. If there were ancient traffic laws relating to furs levitating they would stay on the books despite no spiritualists or fakirs ever being proved to really do that – and the same is true relating to slaves, of which we have none but they would be covered in law if we did. Harold has been reading some early medieval laws which say no “chattel or bondsman” may be part of the King’s Cabinet as long as they have any outside owner, and says in principle it still applies to the House of Lords. Certainly something to think about. Just fifty years ago a hopeless-looking law case in the Channel Islands was won by the defendant claiming redress to a thousand-years dead Norman overlord (“Haro, Haro, hear my plea” was the phrase his very well-read lawyer dug up, after which the plaintiff had to pronounce the Lord’s Prayer in medieval French) so strange things do happen.

    Harold says he can find some trustworthy local furs to educate Emily and Lucy in modern living and keep them safe; his housekeeper is one he says he can ask, and he knows dozens of furs on Spontoon and elsewhere who owe him favours. That is one thing off my mind, at least. He was particularly unhappy with my having to leave Songmark for the rescue mission, but acknowledges the matter is urgent and there are no official forces who have jurisdiction. I am sure Mr. Sapohatan has qualified furs who could do far better, but two stateless vixens are really not his business and whatever happened to them is legal under applicable laws.

    A definitely useful visit. I took an affectionate leave of Harold, feeling rather odd and somehow wondering if we would ever meet again. Considering how badly I predicted the future about having escaped Saimmi’s visions of troubles on the way, I can hardly put much faith in that sort of feeling. Still, it was rather unnerving. I wish I had met Harold a year earlier; a very fine and gallant gentleman.

    Saimmi had to be my next stop, and meeting up with Helen and Saffina we headed across to South Island rather later than usual. Whether our Tutors had told her or by her own resources, she knew what had delayed us. Leaving the Penningtons with Mrs. H, we went out to the shrine at the edge of the jungle to talk things over.

    Unlike Miss Devinski, Saimmi did not try to dissuade me from the rescue attempt. Warrior Priestesses are expected to help the innocent, and indeed the four Penningtons qualified on that like nobody I have ever met. Saimmi says she has seen a darkness in Kuo Han that some visitors have carried a trace of back to Spontoon, a specific spiritual “scent” as potent as if they had trodden in aniseed oil. She says there are priestesses of darkness as well as light, and they are as likely to develop new abilities and powers as anyone else, and have no hesitation to putting them to use if it is profitable. What was done to Henrietta is very much a case in point as it would have taken far more than physical means to mentally destroy a Songmark girl; if we are not the most resilient crowd around I hardly know who is.

    It was rather like one of those films of the Great War, where troops arrive in the front line carrying their basic rifles and only there get issued with the weapons one does not generally go on public parade with – Mills bombs, trench knives and satchel charges for close-up messy work. Saimmi taught us some rituals she had been waiting for the right occasion to introduce, having hoped we would not need to use them. Just as with a fighting engineer’s bunker-smashing satchel charge stuffed with five pounds of unstable tetryl, there is rather a risk of getting caught in one’s own blast. Furthermore there is no way to test them without using them to the full, and that would be a desperate situation indeed. One either fires the detonator or not, there is no half-way setting.

    By the time Saimmi finished with us it was late afternoon. We kneeled for her to give us her blessing, and received it in full. She has looked in her fires and seen many paths ending in darkness, and a few that do not – but one does not start on the path to becoming a Warrior Priestess hoping for a quiet, comfortable life with a retirement pension at the end of it.
 
    Jirry, Marti and the rest of the family were there and with Saimmi’s blessing Helen and I retired to the jungle to pay a proper farewell to the brothers – “a soldier’s farewell” indeed. Certainly I hope Jirry had a memorable afternoon, as I certainly did myself. Then it was back to Eastern Island dropping the Penningtons off at Mahanish’s, and putting plans together with Molly and Maria.

    At six sharp I was externally cleaned, groomed and in my best Songmark uniform and blazer, knocking at Miss Devinski’s office door. Miss Cardroy, Miss Windlesham and Miss Wildford were there, somewhat squeezed in behind her and looking grim. I had a hard hour being quizzed as to what I intended doing and how. Nobody can know exactly what I will have to do, but I answered their questions as to how I would handle various extreme hazards.
 
    At the end of it Miss Devinski turned to her fellow tutors who all nodded in turn – evidently they had been debating my case and were ready for a yes or no decision. She asked me formally if I was going to go ahead with my plan, which I assented.
 
    I was somewhat braced for it, but it was rather a blow when she said she had nothing more to teach me, and my Songmark education was over. She held out no hope of my surviving the mission let alone succeeding with it – but said I was to return “with my shield or on it.” No Songmark graduate or third-year had ever been captured as I was planning to be and I quite agree that none ever should be, so that as of that moment I am not a Songmark student. They would be saying as much to anyone who went with me.

   Oh dear.

   (Later) I am writing this sitting on the rather hard bed in our dorm for probably the last time. It is surprising what I will miss – the prospect of another month falling asleep flat-out exhausted after gate guard or our exercises was not too appealing two nights ago, but it is now when it is too late. Helen and the rest have rallied round and we are making thorough plans regardless. At least I am not being frog-marched to the airstrip with my return ticket to England in my pocket and my steamer trunk sent on after me. In fact, the Tutors have not exactly told me to leave at all, which is strange. Perhaps they hope a night’s sleep will persuade me of the impossibility of the rescue mission and their decision will not be final till I start on it.

    Tomorrow we start making arrangements. One way or another – farewell to Songmark!


*Editor’s note: in the mid-19th Century the British Empire was run as a theocracy; despite the missionary claims, Trade was God. The whole world was opening up for Free Trade with the annoying exception of China. “The Middle Kingdom already has everything it could ever want”, they would say “foreign barbarians go peddle your wares elsewhere.” Of course, this was not going to sit too well with grimly determined merchants with warehouses full of steam engines and cotton looms. It is not recorded whether any of them actually said “You won’t trade with us? Right. We’ll see about that. Trade this, Celestials!” - but they found some articles of trade to push through the borders regardless. Hence the Opium Wars.


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