As you saw, as well as mountains the island contained an ample undulating plain, assiduously farmed by the inhabitants of the little hill towns scattered across it. Each had its splendid church and its square planted with trees for shade. The lines of round or square towers that clustered on the margins of the towns looked from a distance like fortifications but were actually disused windmills; built not to forfend a flow of blood but to obtain a flow of water, of which the plains were usually short. When a well ran dry, the farmers built new towers to support the spinning wheel of sails, leaving the old ones standing. Only the towns very near the coast were actually fortified; all through the island’s history there had been danger from pirates. Here and there on the plain were steep hills, each topped with a sanctuary, and in the south there was a second range of heights, which would have counted as mountains in another country, but here were reduced to hills by comparison with the precipitate, spectacularly towering range of mountains in the north, on which the snow shrank into ragged patches but never vanished, even at the height of summer.
The coastline was alternately rugged and incurved by shallow, sandy coves, and the only large, safe harbourage was in the south, where Ciudad, the principal town, had a fortified and defended anchorage. Elsewhere the coastline was resorted to only by fishermen, a cheaper defence than walls being merely to build settlements a little inland and out of sight from the sea. On the shore itself the fishermen sometimes built themselves little shelters, though more often they simply pulled their boats up the beaches to the margins of the pine woods and slept, if they were not going home, in makeshift tents of spars and sails. Fish were plentiful and, except for the storms at either equinox, the waters were usually calm, so the fishermen were somnolent fellows, plying their trade in leisurely fashion. The islanders had a passion for fish, and whatever was caught could be sold.
On one of a thousand fine days, Miguel and Lazaro sat under the pine trees, mending nets. It was very early in the morning, and the light shone levelly below the branches. Later there would be shade. Later it would be welcome. The nets were dyed with indigo, in a forlorn hope of catching the colours of the ultramarine and turquoise waters beyond the line of soft surf breaking on the sands. The men sat cross-legged, heads bent over the work, raising the shuttles of cord to pull the knots tight. Now and then they straightened and looked vacantly out to sea for a moment. Nothing was to be seen except the iridescence of the morning light on the silken expanse of water.
And then there was something to be seen. Something floating, far out. Lazaro frowned into the rising sun, and was dazzled. A drifting lobster-float, no doubt. What else could it be? Then, when he looked up again, a time-span later, for the sun had risen enough to enlighten rather than obliterate sight, it was much nearer, and moving. He pointed and spoke to Miguel. They got up and walked to the water’s edge, watching. Soon they could discern clearly what they were seeing – a swimmer, slowly and wearily struggling from the far horizon towards the golden shore. He seemed to be failing as they watched; he seemed to be drifting offshore again. They ran to the little white-painted boat that bobbed in the shallows beside a rocky jetty and rowed out to bring him in.
He had been in the water a long time. His skin was swollen, softened, pallid and wrinkled like the hands of their womenfolk on wash days. His lips were cracked. He was naked, except for a sodden loincloth. Tumbled into the bottom of the boat he lay, eyes closed, face upwards, for a while. Then he groaned and rolled over and tried drinking the brackish slops in the bilge. They grounded the boat and carried the half-dead stranger up the beach. They laid him in the shade of the sailcloth tent and stared at him. He was a splendidly built man of middle age, bronzed-skinned and dark-haired, fully bearded. He reached for the water-flagon, but they withheld it. Instead Lazaro dipped a sponge and held it to his lips, letting him suck and sip a little at a time. Miguel brought the oil jar – olive oil was plentiful on the island, and they would have cooked their fishes in it at supper time – and rubbed oil into the waterlogged skin of the man’s feet and hands. Then they pulled a sail over him and left him to sleep; his eyes were closed already in the utmost weariness.
They rowed far out – not as far as he had been when Lazaro first saw him, yet as far as they ever went, bundling the pile of nets over the back of the boat and rowing gently to trail it in the deep behind them. The bobbing floats and the weedy line of the floating edge of the nets broke the sparkling surface, and below the fish were gathered, in unfailing plenty. It was so ordinary a day, the unchanging and endlessly recurrent aspects of rocky headland and swirling waters and soaring birds so completely like yesterday and tomorrow, that they thought they must have dreamed the swimmer. They scanned the shores behind them for any sign of a wreck and the horizon for any sign of a ship, but not a scrap of explanation for the swimmer could be found. Not even a drifting spar.
Nevertheless, they had not dreamed him; when they returned in the afternoon for the invariable siesta, he was still asleep where they had left him under the trees. At their approach, the swimmer woke. He tried to sit and failed, groaning. Lazaro offered him the water flask, saying, ‘You can drink now.’
‘He won’t understand a word,’ said Miguel. But the swimmer understood enough to take the flagon and drink deeply. Lazaro offered bread, and Miguel rubbed on more oil. Then at last the stranger spoke. He said, with a musical and marked accent, but perfectly intelligibly, ‘I will reward you.’ It was so unexpected, and so preposterous in the mouth of a nearly naked man lying helpless and wholly destitute, that the fishermen laughed. They roasted fish on a little driftwood fire and shared the bread and olives three ways.
‘You shall have gold and rubies,’ he said, and they laughed again.
At six the swimmer could still hardly stand unaided, let alone walk. They put him on the donkey, sitting him awkwardly on the fish panniers, but they had to unburden the beast first of the huge pile of green that usually topped its load, for it carried its own fodder home each evening. That evening Miguel hoisted the bundle of grasses onto his own shoulders for the trudge to the village. It was a small village – a church dedicated to St Anne, a little square, a few narrow streets of plain houses, gardens behind them, orange trees in every nook and cranny. At dusk the shopkeepers opened their doors and shutters again, the simple tavern was ready to serve the habitual customers, a scatter of lanterns at doorways lit the square. Throwing off the lassitude of the afternoon heat, the people woke up and took a turn in the open air, strolling and chattering under the stars. Every day was the same, except that now and then a wedding or a funeral party brought a little joy, a little change. The appearance of the rescued swimmer was a sensation.
The sensation was increased when Lazaro helped him from the donkey, and he at once collapsed. The two fishermen stood over his supine body, telling their story volubly to the rapidly gathering crowd. His plight, especially since he was handsome, touched hearts at once. In caring for him the fishermen had a superior claim, and since Miguel had a noisy brood of children, while Lazaro lived with his widowed mother, it was to Lazaro’s house that the swimmer was carried. But Lazaro’s mother could not possibly be allowed sole possession of such a treasure – the women of the village crowded into her little room and drove out the men.
A great coming and going followed. Every nearby kettle was raided for hot water, and ewers were carried at a run down the street. The women from nearby houses fetched clothes for him. Hardship made them thrifty, and most families had old clothes laid by, neatly mended and laundered. An hour later he was washed, oiled, and decently clad in humble clothes. He emerged to be led to the tavern with uncertain steps by a crowd of triumphant women and girls, every one of whom knew more about the stranger than their menfolk by the width of a loincloth; unfavourable comparisons would be made for many years.
While he ate, ravenously, sitting at a table outside the tavern door, half the population of the village looked on, and he was surrounded by the buzz of voices like a lily in flower by the hum of bees. ‘See how hungry he is!’ the women told each other. ‘Poor soul, poor soul, however long was he in the water?’
The men, meanwhile, were discussing the question of where he could have come from. On one thing they were agreed: he could not, as the farmers were suggesting, simply have swum round the jutting head land from a nearby cove, because the ferocity of the currents would have prevented it. He would have been swept straight out to sea.
‘Well then – so he was – and you saw him swimming back again. Why not?’
The fishermen shook their heads. They knew what they had seen – a man swimming from the most distant horizon, making directly for land.
And now the stranger had finished eating. He could be questioned.
‘What is your name?’
‘Palinor.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘A country very far from here. Aclar.’
‘Where?’
‘You have never heard of it?’
‘Never. What were you doing in the sea?’
‘Swimming. Hoping for landfall.’
‘But why were you in the sea?’
The stranger shrugged and spread his hands in a deploring gesture. ‘I fell in,’ he said, and laughed. Laughter filled the square.
‘Hard luck, friend!’ said the tavern-keeper.
‘Could have been worse, after all,’ said Palinor, smiling. ‘There was no land in view. I was lucky in the direction I chose.’
‘And there isn’t enough luck in the world for all of us, at the best of times,’ said the tavern-keeper. ‘We’ll celebrate for you. I’ll fill a glass for everyone free tonight.’
The tavern-keeper became the hero of the hour. By and by Palinor said to Miguel, ‘I am going to have trouble getting home, I fear. I shall need to find a money-lender, and passage on a ship . . .’
‘We will take you to the citadel in the morning,’ said Miguel. ‘Perhaps the prefect will help you.’ Help with moneylenders and passage on ships was beyond the competence of anyone in the village, he well knew.
That night when the stranger was asleep in Lazaro’s bed and Lazaro was lying on a bale of straw borrowed from the donkey, on the floor beside his mother’s bed – all three sleeping in the only room of the house – Lazaro said softly to his mother, ‘He offered us gold. He without so much as a shirt on his body!’
His mother said, ‘I hope you accepted, son. Did you notice his hands?’
‘Hands?’ said Lazaro. He turned his head. The stranger’s hand lay on the rough blanket of the best bed, barely visible in the dark room, though moonlight fingered through the shutters of the window that looked towards the garden.
‘Not a callous on them, and the nails cut neatly and unbroken,’ the woman said. ‘They are not working hands. They might belong to a prince . . .’
Each of the four corners of the island had a citadel; a fortified acropolis, dating from the period of danger from pirates. In this north-easterly region the citadel was small – a simple ring of battlemented walls, containing an ancient church and the prefect’s house, and commanding a view over the furrows of the earthred, earth-gold roof tiles of the town to the surrounding plains and distant mountains. It was an hour on foot from the village.
The prefect was not impressed. He saw standing before him a man in working clothes, with no shoes on his feet and an attitude he at once sensed to be insufficiently respectful, asking for money. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Are you an islander? If you are a native here, you should remember the punishment for an able-bodied beggar.’
‘I am not an islander of this island.’
‘Do you have permission to be at large here? You need a warrant for any journey outside the port at Ciudad.’
‘I did not disembark at Ciudad; I swam ashore to save my life.’
‘Nobody is allowed to land here. You should have come through Ciudad, and applied for a warrant.’
Palinor regarded the prefect coolly. He said, ‘I had not the strength to swim round the perimeter of your island looking for the usual port of disembarkation. Since I have never been to Ciudad, I have no warrant to travel out of it. Do I need a warrant to go there now?’
‘Foreigners need warrants to move about the island, in any circumstances.’
‘Then I apply for one. To whom do I apply?’
‘I can give you a temporary one, if your answers are satisfactory,’ said the prefect grudgingly. ‘Name?’ He reached for a sheet of paper, and took up his pen.
‘Palinor.’
‘Port of origin?’
‘Aclar.’
‘Where?’
‘Aclar.’
The prefect had never heard of it, but was unwilling to show ignorance. He was, truth to tell, unnerved by the unusual experience of dealing with an applicant who looked him straight in the eye.
‘You are a citizen of that country?’
For the first time the man hesitated. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Answer yes or no,’ said the prefect.
‘Yes.’
‘Religion?’
‘None.’
The prefect stared. ‘You can be Christian, Saracen or Jew,’ he said.
‘I am none of those,’ said Palinor.
‘What are you then?’
‘You won’t get a warrant, as yourself. For a Christian it is a mere formality; for Saracens and Jews there are quotas, I believe.’
‘I am not going to state a false allegiance for the sake of a form,’ said Palinor. ‘You must write none, and we shall see.’
The prefect finished writing. ‘This will take some time,’ he said.
‘You will find me with the fishermen who rescued me,’ said Palinor, ‘I shall spend the time learning to mend nets.’
‘You will spend the time in the lock-up here,’ said the prefect. ‘I’m not having you roaming loose.’
The stranger blenched slightly. ‘That is not reasonable,’ he said. ‘I have committed no crime, and you have no reason to suppose that I will. It would be an outrage to deprive me of liberty.’
‘A man of no religion might do anything,’ said the prefect. ‘What is to restrain him? But while you are in my province you won’t get the chance.’
He clicked his fingers, and his servants hustled Palinor away.