Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“Almost,” he said. “Very close, aiji-ma.”

15

Nand’ paidhi,” the Bu-javid operator said. “I can’t establish the connection. One fears—there is some reason beyond a failure of equipment.”

“Thank you, nadi. One believes the same.” He set the receiver back in the cradle and heard distantly in the house the noise of steps on the stone floors of the foyer. Their household was gathering for their departure, unaware of the phone call he couldn’t resist attempting and which he foreknew wouldn’t get through, no more than the rest had.

Baji-naji, chance and fortune, the devils in the design: symbolically they existed somewhere in every atevi building as they did in every design for action. The random numbers of creativity, serendipity or destruction lurked within the rigid system of numbers, and once a design gave them leeway to work, the building tumbled down, a situation acquired additional possibilities, or the world tumbled into a new order of things.

He couldn’t raise the island, let alone get a call through to Toby or his mother’s house.

And that was no equipment failure. That was politics keepinghim from making that call, and like a fool he’d hung up on Toby in their last conversation. Toby had been able to call him, but he couldn’t get past the blockade in the other direction.

Or Toby couldn’t reach him, either.

He’d resorted to sleeping pills since the conversation with the dowager, medications from the island, carefully hoarded since the repair to his shoulder. There’d been, after his brief talk with Ilisidi, a flurry of phone calling and rescheduling legislative meetings, which consumed an entire day.

But, good part of the operation, Jase grew more cheerful—as if the promise he’d been able to keep had gotten him past the depression and the despair. Jase was going to the ocean. He would see the sea. They’d talked last night of fishing, not from Geigi’s port but from a more protected, governmentally owned site on the reserve across the same bay.

“Maybe we’ll have a chance at the yellowtail,” he’d said to Jase, although he was by no means certain the run of those fish would carry within the bay. Among the myriad other things he did keep up with, marine fish weren’t within his field. Toby would have known.

But he couldn’t ask the first question he’d had in years that Toby would have delighted in answering.

So with the appropriate baggage, just as a second dawn was breaking, they were gathering in the foyer for the promised trip—Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini.

And himself with Jase.

“The baggage has gone, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “The car is waiting.”

Subway car, that was. His security was in a good mood: it lifted his spirits—shifted the world back into perspective. It was an emergency at home, yes; but, dammit, Toby could handle it—Toby was in the city, Toby was at their mother’s apartment. Toby could deal with their mother and Toby didn’t have to call him up and rage at him, when it was the first damn time Tobyhad showed up to handle one of their mother’s crises, be it the divorce from their father, be it the lawsuit over the sale of the mountain cabin, be it aunt Gloria’s husband’s funeral, be it—God knew what. Thistime Toby was on duty and Toby could take care of their mother and the two of them could do the talking they should have done when Toby’d married to get away from the family and run off to live on the north shore having kids and making money hand over fist. Toby was the one she’d held up to him as the model son—well-married, stable, somebody to go visit.

Mother’d held Toby and Toby’s familial situation up to him as the way heought to be, but she’d damned sure phoned the University every time there was a crisis to get Brenacross town. That was understandable, since it was in the same city; but even after he’d gone into the field and the strait had separated them, she’d not phoned the north shore for Toby to disturb his family, come home, and hire a lawyer for her. No, Toby’d had a familyto consider, so she’d phoned the mainland and wanted Bren-dearto drop the governmental crisis and come home and fix things, which sometimes he could and sometimes he hadn’t been able to. For a string of years every time he’d come home on vacation she’d had a crisis specifically designed to get him involved the second he stepped off the plane, to the point where he’d begun to think of marriage to Barb as an insulation.

It had gotten so his nerves were strung tight every time he knew his mother needed something, because needhad gotten to be the relationship between them, and he’d already puzzled out that fact.

It had gotten to be the relationship between him and Barb, too, starting with hisincreasing need for her to meet that plane and shield him from his inability to say no. Someday he’d have married her so he’d have a wife to take precedence over what his mother needed. He’d puzzled that out, too.

Grim thought. Sobering thought. He could get aggravatedwith Barb, but the fact was that his cheerfulness once he’d arranged for Barb to meet the plane, the alternative being his mother arriving with a list of grievances and plans for his time, told him maybe—just maybe—his relationship to Barb breaking down in crisis wasn’t just a case of Barb rushing to Paul Saarinson’s soft life. Barb, being a healthy individual, had perhaps realized she wasn’t up to being a support for a man who got off the plane every few months needingto be reassured and needingto be made happy and not to have troubles poured into his ears during his vacation.

The paidhi’s home life and the paidhi’s love life were neither one damn good and never had been, was the truth. The I-need-youbusiness was no way for any two adults to have a relationship, not mother-son, not man-wife.

Not even brothers.

And it was about time their mother learned to call on Toby, because Toby was the one of her two sons she was going to have in reach; and it was about time Toby learned to define that relationship in a way he could live with. That was the plain truth. And they were all going to have to get used to it. She couldn’t get Bren-dear home again.

Maybe duty to his family said he should resign his professional life, come home and live with it and do all those familial, loyal things, including suffer through a marital relationship that wouldn’t work and a relationship with his mother that wasn’t going to improve, and maybe it would improve his moral character to do that.

But it wasn’t his job. It wasn’t what other, equally important individuals relied on him doing for reasons a lot more important to the world than his personal problems. And he rather thought, as much trouble as it might make for the family, he should tip Toby off to the need-youbusiness and the fact he was entitled to put his foot down and define his relationship with mama otherwise—early—before it ate Toby alive.

“Bren-ji?” Jago asked as he took his place in the elevator car.

“Tired,” he said. “Tired, Jago-ji.” He managed a cheerful face. “Time for a week on leave.”

Banichi pressed the button. The elevator carried them down, down to the cavernous tile and concrete of the restricted subway station beneath the Bu-javid.

It was a short walk to the subway car, in a larger space than Jase had been in since he’d come into the Bu-javid by this same route.

“All right?” he asked Jase, seeing that little hesitation, that intake of breath.

“Fine,” Jase said, and walked steadily beside him, Banichi and Jago in front, Tano and Algini behind, down past the train engine to the two cars which were waiting with the requisite House Guard and a Guild pair from the aiji’s staff—Bren’s eye picked them out.

“Nadi?” Banichi took up his post just inside, and they boarded, Tano and Algini going to the baggage car with junior security, Banichi and Jago staying with them.

“Rear seat’s the most comfortable,” he said to Jase—he recalled saying that the day he’d escorted Jase tothe hill, in the same car, on his way to the confinement in which Jase had lived. They took their seats. Jago, on pocket com, standing by the door, talked to someone, probably intermediate to the Bu-javid station that governed use of the tracks, clearing their departure.

The door shut and the car got underway.

Jase sat with nervous anticipation evident as the shuttered private subway car rumbled and thumped along its course down the hill and across a city Jase had never seen except from the windows of the Bu-javid and once from the air.

“Nervous, nadi?”

“No, nadi.” Jase was quick to say so. And sat, hands on knees, braced against the slightest movement of the car.

But a lot of strangeness, Bren could only guess, was surely impacting Jase’s senses right now, from the shaking of the car, the smells, the noise.

Evidently some of them were alarming sensations from a spaceman’s point of view, as were large open spaces: the echoes disoriented him, maybe. Maybe just the size did. Bren had no idea, but to reassure Jase he adopted an easy pose, legs extended, ankles crossed, and kept talk to a minimum while Jase’s eyes darted frantically to every different rattle of the wheels on the switching-points, the least change in sound as they exited the tunnel and went in open air.

“We’re on the surface again,” Bren explained. “We’ve been in a tunnel.”

Jase didn’t look reassured. And probably Jase knew he was overreacting, even suspected he looked foolish in his anxiety, but they had one more rule in effect, and Jase had agreed to it as Jase had agreed to every other condition: no matter what, Jase wasn’t to speak anything but Ragi on this trip. If the car wrecked, he’d made the point with Jase, screamin Ragi. He might not be able to hold to it throughout, but if that was the ideal, maybe, Bren thought, it would encourage Jase to shift his thoughts into the language totally, the way Jase had existed while he was gone on the tour. If it didn’t do everything he’d hoped, in terms of forcing Jase into Ragi, it might at least force Jase back into that mindset so that he had a chance of arguing with him.

Meanwhile the car thumped and rumbled its way toward the airport.

A happy family, on its way to the beach, Bren thought, surveying his complement of catatonic, well-dressed roommate and heavily armed security in black leather and silver studs, themselves in high spirits and having a good time.

“We were duea vacation,” Banichi remarked cheerfully. They were not quite so vacation-bound that he or any of his fellow Guild members took advantage of the stocked breakfast juice bar in the aiji’s own, red velvet-appointed subway car, but Banichi did sit down at his ease, stretch out his huge body and heave a sigh. And doubtless it wasfar better than a rooftop in the peninsula. “We’re due rain, of course, but it’s spring—what can one hope?”

“It should still be fine,” Jago said from her vantage by the door, one hand loosely on a hanging strap. “The sea, the sand—”

“The cold fogs.”

“Nadiin,” Bren said, and roused himself to the same level of enthusiasm as his security, “we are safe, we are away, lord Tatiseigi is visiting his ownapartment tonight, we are notthere, and I believe they have gotten the illicit television downstairs.”

“The Guard is guarding it, nand’ paidhi,” Banichi said, “with its usual zeal, of course.”

There were grins. Probably Jase didn’t follow the joke. But security was in a high good mood and the car rocked and thundered on, swayed around the turn that meant the airport station was coming up. Junior security, who had their baggage under close watch, would get it all aboard the vans.

The subway train stopped, security rose to take routine positions as the doors opened and security went out first.

Bren collected Jase, left the details to his staff, and sure enough the vans were waiting, with Bu-javid security in charge from beginning to end, in this very highly securitied spur of the regular public subway.

“Careful,” he said, fearing Jase’s balance problems, but Jase made a clean step out of the car and onto the concrete.

Jase had no difficulty there, and none in boarding the waiting van. He flung himself into the seat, however, as if relieved to sit down; his face was a little pale, his eye-blinks grown rapid as they did when he was fighting problems in perspective. Bren sat down more slowly beside him, with Banichi and Jago immediately after while others were loading the luggage into the second van under Tano’s supervision.

The van whisked them to the waiting plane and braked right by the ladder. Immediately, the second van was with them, bringing the luggage, which was not alone their clothes, but the clutter of weaponry and electronics that went with the paidhi wherever he and his security went.

It was Tabini’s jet. And it was needful now, Banichi out first and Jago next, and Bren third, for Jase to climb down from the van into the noise of the jet engines, and walk, on a flat surface and under a sky with a few gray-bottomed clouds, from the roofed van to the ladder and up the ladder into the plane. Jase made the step, didn’t look up (which he’d said especially bothered him), and crossed to the ladder, shaking off Jago’s offered hand.

“Wait,” Bren said to Banichi and Jago, because the metal ladder shook when that pair climbed it with their usual energy, and he didn’t figure that would help Jase at all, whose knuckles were white on the rail as he climbed doggedly toward the boarding platform, his eyes on the steps, never on his surroundings.

Jase went inside, to be met by the co-pilot. Bren went up next and Jago and Banichi followed him; Tano and Algini stayed below to stand watch over the luggage-loading.

The computer, alone of their luggage, went in the cabin with them; Jago had it, and tucked it into a storage area, while outside the luggage-loading went so fast that the hatch thumped down while Jase was settling into his seat in the table-chair grouping and while Bren was saying hello to the pilot and co-pilot.

“One hopes for a quieter flight, nand’ paidhi,” the pilot said.

He’d actually forgottenabout the boy from Dur during the last twenty hours, during which they’d accomplished the logistics and arrangements, and during which uncle Tatiseigi had lodged in Ilisidi’s hospitality.

They were away and clear. The boy from Dur had his ribboned card which might save him from parental wrath, the apartment was still intact after the state reception, and the television was out of the pantry, entertaining the House Guard for the duration of uncle Tatiseigi’s stay, which should about equal their days on the western shore near Saduri.

“I anticipate a quiet flight and a quiet ten days, nadi,” Bren said to the pilot and co-pilot, “and I hope you and your associate have ample time for a little fishing yourselves. I’ve expressed the wish the staff could lodge you at some place that would allow it for however long you have at leisure.”

“Nand’ paidhi, they have done so, and we thank you, nand’ Jase as well.” This with a nod toward the seating where Jase had belted in.

“Nadi,” Bren said in ending the conversation, and went back to sit beside Jase. He didfeel better now that things were underway. His blood was moving faster with their stirring about, and the slight headache was diminishing: possibly the sleeping pill had worn off.

“It’s excellent weather for flying. A smooth flight, nadi. Sun shining. Calm air.”

“Yes,” Jase said. It was a word. It was a response. Then: “Too close to the planet,” Jase muttered, then grinned; and Bren obligingly laughed, in the understanding both that it was an uneasy joke and that Jase had, finally, just been able to get a few words assembled into an almost-sentence of Ragi this morning. After twenty-odd hours of intermittent wordless moments and frustration, losing all confidence in his ability to speak the Ragi language, Jase was showing signs of pulling out of it—phase two of his mental break, a tendency to suspect all his word choices and to blow his grammar—which, coupled with fears of insulting the atevi staff, wasn’t improving his confidence. But it was textbook psychological reaction. Jase had been vastly embarrassed, humiliated, terrified of very real diplomatic consequences at the same moment he was put on national television—at his worst moment of personal crisis. It wasn’t just the illusion of helplessness language students went through, it had been real helplessness, and real danger, and thank God, Bren thought, they’d had the dowager there, and an understanding security, and Damiri. Also thank God, Tatiseigi was no fool.

And meanwhile Jase, being around staff who’d forgive him his mistakes, was trying again, understanding again, and regaining a little shaky confidence in himself.

“ Please belt in, nadiin,” the co-pilot said over the intercom. The engines roared into action.

And as the plane began to taxi toward the runway, with security taking their seats and belting in around them, Jase’s knuckles were white on the armrests.

Couldn’t fault that reaction. He’d explained to Jase andYolanda the physics by which planes stayed in the air during their initial flight to Shejidan, but there was so much new then and since that he wasn’t sure how much had stayed with him. They’d come from a rough landing on the Taiben preserve, an overnight at Taiben only sufficient to catch their breaths, then a rail trip ending in a hasty boarding of the aiji’s plane to fly them all to the international airport at Shejidan.

After they’d landed at Shejidan, there’d been no hesitation: the aiji’s guards had packed Yolanda and Deana Hanks both onto a second, atevi-piloted commercial plane bound for Mospheira, and hastened him and Jase onto the van and then into the subway station on a fast trip to the Bu-javid, to enter the aiji’s very careful security arrangements, all to assure—in a world seething with change and disturbance at that moment—that nothing befell the two paidhiin.

It hadn’t afforded Jase much time to learn about the world. And Jase had been disoriented and more focused on the fact that he and Yolanda weren’t going to find communication free or easy. Possibly they hadn’t known it would be that way.

Possibly Deana Hanks, sitting near them on the plane, saying that he’d be a prisoner in Shejidan and that they’d deceive him, had set Jase up for far too much suspicion. He’d toldJase that Deana was a liar. But Jase might not have believed him that day.

And as he explained the full extent of what Deana had done and why, Jase’s comment had been, Neither one of us will have it easy, either, will we?

Half a year ago.

Just about half a year ago. Yolanda had gone away in a van along with Deana, bound for a plane nearby; Jase had gone with him and Banichi and Jago in another one, bound for the subway, and that had been it, last contact, except the phone calls.

Jase had been so scared in those first days, so very scared—of the staff, of security, of the devices that guarded the doorway. Of the simple fact they found it necessary to lock the doors of the apartment.

Of the simpler fact of thunder crashing above the roof. He remembered.

The plane rushed down the runway, lifted, and a moment later Jase was trying to improve the plane’s angle by leaning as it banked for the west.

Bren kept himself deadpan and didn’t say a word about what was probably an instinctive reaction. One would think a man from weightless space would have overcome such tendencies. But Jase said his ship made itself gravity the same way the station did, so Bren supposed Jase wasn’t used to being without it.

The plane retracted the trailing edge flaps. Jase was still white-knuckled and had looked askance thus far at every noise of the hydraulics working, from the wheels coming up to the slats coming back. This was the man who’d boarded a capsule and let a crew shove him into space in free fall toward a parachute drop into the planetary atmosphere.

On the other hand… Jase said very little about that trip down. Jase had waked now and again with nightmares, startling the staff, and he had once remarked that the parachute drop had perturbed him. He hoped the trip back into space once they had the ship, Jase had said to him very early on, would be a good deal more like the airplane ride to Shejidan.

“You know,” he remarked to Jase, who, after ten minutes at least and almost up to cruising altitude, hadn’t let go the seat arm, “planes don’t often fall out of the sky. They tend to stay up. Airfoil. Remember?”

Jase took several deep breaths. “I’m fine,” he said, in the manner of someone who’d just survived hell. “I’m fine.”

Jase stared straight ahead. There was a lovely view of clouds out the window, but he didn’t look, evidently not trusting the plane would stay level without his encouragement. Jase didn’t look at him, either, and didn’t seem inclined to think about anything but the plane.

Well, there was work he could do while Jase was helping the pilot.

He could unpack the computer. Or he could sit and worry about the situation on Mospheira with the State Department and its windows.

Or the situation in the capital, where shockwaves of the peninsular affair and Tatiseigi’s apparent realignment were still ringing through the court and lords marginally aligned with Direiso were reconsidering their positions—disturbing thought, to have a continent-spanning war going on, and thus far the casualties amounting to one man, a lightbulb, a piece of glassware, and Badissuni of the Hagrani in the hospital for a stomach condition—so that one wondered wasit stress that had sent him there, or had Jago been near his drink?

The ship and probably the man beside him were completely unaware of the struggle except insofar as Jase had had to deal with Tatiseigi.

Well, the island wouldbecome aware of it. With the illegal radio traffic going on, bet that Deana Hanks would become aware of it.

If she could translate assassinationwithout mistaking it for pregnant calendar.

Banichi and Jago were meanwhile taking great care to have him apprised of what was going on, after, presumably, some shaking at high levels had gone on in the Messengers’ Guild. The information delivered with their supper last evening had been an intercepted radio message on the north coast, up by Wiigin, where they were notgoing, a message which—laughably under less grim circumstances—purported to be between atevi, when clearly only one side was atevi even by the timbre of the voice, let alone the vocabulary and syntax errors.

The fluent side of the transmission had discussed at great length the situation with the assassination of lord Saigimi. It had claimed lord Tatiseigi had made the television interview under extreme threat and it claimed that only fear that the Atageini would be taken over by the aiji had weakened Tatiseigi’s former—the message called it– strong stand for traditional values.

He knew why Tabini hadlet that radio traffic, ostensibly between small aircraft flying near the Association-Mospheiran boundary and a tower controller on the atevi mainland, go on without protest: it was deliberate provocation on someone’s part on the mainland to be doing what they were doing, bold as brass on the airwaves. That they continued had nothing to do with rights of expression as they defined free speech on Mospheira. By the Treaty no Mospheiran had the right to use a radio to communicate across the strait. By allowing those radio messages to continue, Tabini was simply, in human parlance, giving the perpetrators enough rope to hang themselves and draw in others before he cracked down, definitely on Direiso, possibly on the perpetrators of the messages, and diplomatically on Hanks.

But the area where that was going on was (he had checked) well north of the area where they were going.

And, while he would be involved in the crisis those messages were bound to engender when the crackdown came, it wasn’t his problem now. His job right now was simply making sure that Jase got his chance to relax and reach some sort of internal peace with the land and the people. He had great faith that a little exposure to problems more basic and more natural than living pent up in the pressured Bu-javid environment would help Jase immensely. And he, himself—

He needed to rest. He finally admitted that. He’d reached the stage when there just wasn’t any more reserve. No more nerves, no more sense, no more flexibility of wit.

He’d had his last real leave—oh, much too long ago.

He’d stood on a ski slope, on Mt. Allen Thomas, in the very heart of the island, getting sunburn on his nose, coated in snow from a header. (He’d gotten a little slower, a little more cautious in his breakneck skiing.)

But, oh, the view from up there was glorious, when the sun turned the snow gold and the evergreens black in the evenings.

When the mists came up off the blue shadows and the wind whispered across the frozen surface in the morning—then he was alive.

It would have terrified Jase.

Ah, well, he said to himself, and propped one ankle on the other and asked junior security for a fruit juice.

“Would you care for one, Jasi-ji?”

“Yes, nadi, please,” Jase said.

Definitely better.

The fruit juice arrived. “Pretty clouds,” Bren remarked, and Jase looked and agreed with relative calm that they were that.

Vacation would do them all good, he said to himself.

Because… he had a sip of fruit juice and stared at the empty seat across from him, the one Jago usually occupied… he was definitely reaching the fracture point himself, and seeing conspiracy under every porcelain lily petal.

Conspiracy that linked the various shattered major pieces of the last several days, from whatever had necessitated the assassination of Saigimi, to whatever Hanks had pursued, to Direiso, to a couple of radio operators up by Wiigin, and even to the paint flung at his mother’s apartment building.

He just wished he hadn’t hung up on Toby. Their mother’s surgery was this week. And he wouldn’t hear. He just wouldn’t hear. He’d resigned himself to that.

Hard on the relatives, the job he’d taken, the job Jase had volunteered for, never having been out of the reach of family and familiarity in his life.

He sipped his fruit juice. Jase eventually remembered to drink his.

The plane took a turn toward the west. Jase braced himself and looked at the window as if he expected to see something.

“It’s all right.”

Jase took a deep breath. “Can you see the water as we come in, nadi?”

“We’re starting descent. You should be able to see it. You should have a good view.”

He didn’t know why Jase had taken the ocean as his ambition. He was only glad that Jase had taken something that easy for his goal, something hecould deliver.

He got up briefly and spoke to Banichi.

On the paidhi’s request and the local tower’s willingness, the plane made a very unusual approach, swinging low and slow over the water’s edge, then flew out over the sea and the large resort island of Onondisi, which sat in the bay, affording the ship-paidhi a view. Bren stood up to see, with his hand on a safety-grip, mindful of island pilots, standing and looking over Jase’s shoulder at a pleasant rock-centered island with bluffs to the north and sandy beach to the south, where the resorts clustered.

“Melted water,” Jase said in a tone of awe. “All that melted water.”

Now and again Jase could utterly surprise him.

“Melted it is.”

“Is it warm?”

“About the temperature of a cold water tap.” He reached past Jase to point at the hotels that clustered among trees on the heights of the island. “Vacation places. Hotels. You stay there and go down to the beaches.”

“Ordinary people go there?” Jase asked.

“And lords, nadi. And whoever wants to. The ordinary consideration is security, for the lords, so usually the high lords stay on the south shore of the bay. A lot of private beaches over there, but not as fine as these.”

“Other people, they don’t have to worry?”

“No.—Except if they’ve made somebody very, very angry. And even then they know whether they have to worry.”

“Are they scared with this assassination going on?”

“The Guild won’t touch a common man without a Filing of Intent. Even then the Guild has to be convinced there’s a strong and real grievance, so,” he said, with an eye to all the tiny figures on the beaches, wading the surf, “unless someone’s done something really outrageous enough to get a Filing approved—they’re safe, down there.”

“But not lords?”

“Lords have Guild in their households,” Jago said, standing close. “And the Guild doesn’t necessarily have to approve a greater lord moving against a lesser if right can be demonstrated later.”

“And a lesser against a greater?” Jase asked.

“It must approve that. And with common folk, it must. And often,” Jago said as an afterthought, “we mediate between common folk. Many times, a feud among folk like that doesn’t draw blood. We see many, many situations that common folk think extraordinary. We can bring perspective to a matter.”

One suspected (Tano had hinted as much, and he’d observed it on the daily news) a commoner-feud usually went quite slowly indeed if the Guild suspected mediation would result. Sometimes, the paidhi strongly suspected, the Guild did absolutely nothing for a few months, expecting its phone to ring with an offer to the opposing side, once the targeted party grew anxious.

Jago didn’t volunteer such information, however; and the plane swept on over water, this time with the view of Mospheira a distant blue haze past the rolling hills.

“That’s the island, nadi. Theisland. Mospheira.”

The wing tipped up, hiding it, as they were obliged to veer off along the invisible boundary.

“I didn’t see it,” Jase said.

“It’s just hazy out there. It wasthe haze.”

“I didn’t see it, all the same.” Jase sounded disappointed.

“Well, I’ll point it out to you when we’re on the ground. I’m sure we’ll be able to see it.—The hills closer to us, that was the height of Mogari-nai.”

Behind them now lay the rocky coastal bluffs that photographers loved, along with those of Elijiri which were near Geigi’s estate, further inland. Mogari-nai was set, one understood, on the aiji’s land, well back from the scenic areas, in a zone dedicated once to firing cannon balls intended to fall on hostile wooden ships approaching the port at Saduri Township.