A Dream of Wessex Read Online Free PDF Page B

the harbour towards the south, where Maiden Castle stood on its promontory overlooking the bay. To Mander he appeared to be about forty years old, dark-haired and lean; his bearing was relaxed and athletic, not at all that of the bookish historian Mander had imagined from what little he had heard about the man. Unlike the tourists, Harkman was unencumbered with luggage, but had with him just a small bag which was slung casually across his shoulders.
    ‘He’s not as young as I thought,’ Cro said, eventually. ‘The photo on file must be an old one.’
    ‘Which photo?’ Mander said, but Cro made no answer.
    The girl from Maiden Castle was watching Harkman too. She was standing quite close to him, making no effort to disguise her interest. When he turned to walk along the quay towards the town he passed her and they glanced at each other momentarily.
    She moved away to where the dock labourers were unloading crates of beer from the hold of the ship, and sat down on a stone bollard, staring out into the bay.
    As Harkman passed the two Commission men he seemed to recognize them as colleagues, for he nodded to them briefly, but made no move to introduce himself.
    Cro and Mander waited on the quay for a few minutes, by which time Harkman had vanished into the crowd in Marine Boulevard. On the minaret of the mosque that had been built for the visitors, the muezzin was calling the devout to prayer.
     

four
     
    David Harkman breakfasted alone in the refectory of the Commission hostel. He assumed that the other people he saw were also employees of the Commission, but he made no attempt to introduce himself, and instead suffered their curious stares with an indifference affected out of self-defence. Friends in London had warned him of the protocol of the Regional Commissions, and that there would be a well-established order of precedence by which he would be introduced to his new colleagues. He had no intention of upsetting the balance of territorial claims within the office; his years at the Bureau of English Culture had made him wise in the ways of civil servants.
    He cut short his uneasiness, and the curiosity of the others, by finishing his breakfast quickly, and with noncommittal nods to all in sight he left the hostel building and went for an exploratory stroll around the town.
    It was a relief to be in Dorchester at last, after two years of waiting for the appointment to come through. Sometimes he had thought that Wessex Island was a part of the world as unreachable from London as the Presidential Palace in Riyadh. It wasn’t that his security-rating was less than impeccable; he had, after all, been given the temporary posting to Baltimore in the Western Emirate States, and had advised the Cultural Attache in Rome for one very unexpected week a few years ago. Much more likely was the inevitable grinding slowness of the Party administrative machine.
    Not that Wessex was a place to which Party employees were freely transferred. With its mosques and casinos, and the thousands of idle-rich tourists from all over the States, Wessex Island was an area of some ideological embarrassment to the Party theorists.
    Dorchester itself was the focus of this embarrassment for not only was it the nearest large town to the English mainland, but it was also the place to which most of the tourists came.
    Only the fact that Wessex was physically distinct from the mainland made it acceptable to the Party; so long as travel was restricted in England, and permits to visit the international tourist zones of the island were granted only to foreign nationals and selected Party workers, the local inhabitants couldn’t very well proclaim the evils of capitalism to the English populace at large. Or so the Party sophistry went; Harkman, like most people with a gram of intelligence or information, realized that the flood of Emirate dollars was a major contribution to the Westminster budget.
    It was actually a concern for, and an interest in, the local