Sand schooner

 “Ahoy there, the land!” came a cry from somewhere beyond the columns and I started.  I had expected that I would be alone in this place, whether it was Iglé or somewhere pretending to be like it.  Behind me there was nothing, just the red sands of the Sonora desert and the stone columns rising up and marking the edge of the city.

“You!  Yes, you!  Ahoy there!”  The voice sounded slightly hectoring and reminded me of a shopkeeper I had known in Paris who bemoaned her lack of repeat custom while refusing to hear that her attitude was miasmic to an extreme.  I looked around to both sides now and still there was nothing in sight.  Then an odd-shaped sail appeared above a low wall and a sand-schooner hove into view.

The ship was medium length, at least compared with those ships I knew to ply the sands of the desert, and was ivory-coloured all over save for the name which was written in teal along one-side: the Ivy Mariner.  Portholes indicated a single below-deck and the bridge was two-storied in the tradition of the University schooners that gathered seismic data and geological artefacts.  The lower-bridge level would house the instrumentation for study and the upper-level was where the steering and speed of the ship was managed.  A tall woman was standing outside the upper-level of the bridge and leaning on a railing.  When she noticed that I’d seen her she stood upright and waved an arm dramatically as though concerned that I might look away again.

“Ahoy!”

“Hello,” I called back, wondering how well my voice might carry in the dry afternoon air.  “Can I help you?”

“Are you lost?” she shouted back, and uncertain if she could hear me or not, I shook my head carefully and meaningfully.  “I think you are,” she shouted.  “Wait there, I’ll send out a man.”

I shivered despite the heat of the day.  Sending out a man meant this was a private vessel and not a University ship.  The Academics were a well-meaning bunch in my experience, and friendly to a fault, but they would always put you aside in favour of their latest obsession or idea.  The private vessels however were owned by the wealthy of Sonora desert.  They had been granted a number of freedoms and permissions under successive governments, all discretely paid for naturally, until someone had realised that the desert was essentially a self-governing fiefdom that was only a short step away from not having to pay taxes.  The court cases arising from that are still making their way through the Sonora courts, hindered at every step by the fact that all Sonora law enforcement and judiciary are connected, one way or another, to the wealthy who view the desert as their playground.  At the very least, if I were to ‘accidentally’ die out here I could be certain that no-one would investigate my death.

Looking around though my options were limited: I could wait for this man and find out what the lady of the schooner wanted, or I could venture deeper into a city that was trying to fill me with memories that were not my own.  I balked at one, and then the other, feeling as though I had no options at all but to wait for fate to overtake me.

I decided, too late as it turned out, that the city was the lesser evil and turned and walked briskly down what might once have been a street intending to take the first turning that would hide me from the ship and then find a broken house or shop to hide in.  I doubted that anyone would search too assiduously for me: a stranger without water in the desert wouldn’t last long.  They might wait for me to leave and then try and accost me, but once night fell I was sure I could sneak past the ship and try and find my way back.  Though I was as ill-dressed for the cold of the desert at night as I was for the heat of the desert during the day.

I had misjudged the athleticism and interest of the man sent to find me though, and I had barely turned the corner and started looking at rotted brick and crumbling stone, considering which shadows might be deep enough to hide in, when the sounds of light, running footsteps made me tense and a hand landed firmly on my shoulder.

“Wrong way,” said a voice that wasn’t quite friendly.  It was deep, slightly growly, and I wondered for a moment if the man were artificially deepening his voice, perhaps to disguise it.  The fingers on my shoulders gripped tightly, but not enough to hurt.  I doubted I could pull free without prising his fingers loose though.

“I wasn’t intending to wait for you,” I said.  “I have business here in the city.”

“In Iglé?  You need permission to visit.”

“I have permission,” I said without thinking.

“Then you just need to show Madam Friest.  Come on.”

The voice still wasn’t quite friendly and I found myself trapped in my lie: clearly I couldn’t claim she’d already seen my permission, and now when we returned this fellow would tell her about it and I would have to admit that I didn’t have any.  I controlled my anger and regret and turned to face my captor.

In ve Iglé

 I walked towards the sound of the water noticing that the sand beneath my feet seemed firmer in this direction; after maybe only twenty seconds the sand became sparser and I could see red rock beneath.  The water turned out to be a small spring, leaping from a crack in the rock  and puddling in a shallow pool before running along a channel the width of two fingers and disappearing into the ground some distance away.  The water was cold and refreshing and once again I found myself regretting that I’d set out so ill-prepared; this would have been an excellent place to refill a water bottle from.

As I looked around, splashing a palmful of water onto my face I saw stones piled up here and there in what might have been roughly rectangular shapes, and wider paths past them that might have been streets.  I rubbed my eyes with more water, and then splashed some onto my shirt, figuring that it being damp might help with the heat, and looked around again.

The buildings seemed intact all of a sudden; I could see a squat red block with an empty doorway and a mustard-yellow awning shading it.  Two windows loomed blackly above, the shadows inside impossible to penetrate from where I was standing.  A wooden frame held trays of what looked like watermelons, though I had no idea where you’d grow watermelons in a desert.  Alongside the building ran a street, paved for the most part but with gaps in the surface where I could imagine someone slipping and twisting an ankle.  Some kind of wiry yellow-green grass grew up against the side of the building, little tufts of it sprouting here and there.  It looked like it was probably torn up when it was noticed.  Overhead the sun shone but it seemed weaker, or least less hot, and I noticed that I wasn’t sweating any more.

I rubbed my head and looked down at the spring, which wasn’t there.  Without thinking I knelt and patted the ground, unable to conceive that the water could just vanish, and instead, as I touched the cool liquid, the water reappeared and the building and the street faded away instead.

A mirage?  It seemed too unlike anything out here for that; too much detail, and the sun’s strength changing wasn’t something a mirage could do.  I pondered, letting the water run over my hand, and then, gradually, the memory of my one-time mentor and no-longer friend Isabella Bonfontaine, came to me.

Iglay is a strange place, she was saying.  I could remember her standing in the courtyard of a bar in Covent Garden, a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other.  It tries to fill you with its memories.  You can’t stand there for any length of time without being made to remember something that never happened to you.  Someone in the chairs, hunched over and trying not to listen turned to face her at that point, and shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’  That’s my point, Isabella had said, sloshing her drink out of its glass as she waved it around.  It just keeps on, pressuring you, trying to force you to leave by never shutting up about its past.

Why was I remembering her?  Was this place like Iglay, a city overfull with memories, looking to pass some off to vistors and passers-by, to take the pressure off itself.  I considered it odd that there should be two cities with the same problem though.

And then my mind started working; I’m going to blame the heat and the sun for me not seeing it sooner, and thank the water for its cooling.  What I had transliterated as Inveigle wasn’t… it was, in fact, in ve Iglé.  In, despite the impossibility of seeing it as anything other than the English word for me, wasn’t even a preposition; it was… a number, I thought after nearly thirty seconds struggling to recall it.  I couldn’t remember which one though.  Ve, however, was a preposition, but it also escaped me.  And Iglé was also spelled Iglay and Iggely if you believed some of the medieval manuscripts.  Number, preposition, Iglay.  I had no idea what that could mean.

Inveigle

 I left the Hotel Borealis around noon; the receptionist was the same on who’d checked me in the previous day and she looked tired, as though she’d been on shift continuously since I’d arrived.  She lifted her eyes from whatever she was looking at behind the long, steel counter just long enough to identify me and sneer, and then her attention returned to whatever it was that was more interesting.  I considered wishing her a pleasant day and decided against it.  I do not like raising my voice unless there is no other choice and she was far enough away from me that I would have needed to shout.

The heat from the desert hit me like a wall.  I hadn’t noticed the air-conditioning in the hotel once I’d adjusted to its internal temperature, but now outside again the difference was apparent.  The heat was dry but breathing felt difficult at first: I found myself gasping as though the air were somehow thinner instead of just drier, and it only gradually subsided.  I kept walking while I adjusted though and soon stepped out of the shade of the hotel’s colonnade and into the full midday blast of heat and light.  It was less of a shock than leaving the hotel had been, but it was still another shock; enough that I reconsidered leaving the hotel at all.  But the city in the pillars that I had seen last night under the borealis would be treacherous at any time, and at night I’d be hard pressed to see what was coming.

I should, I realised belatedly, have taken water with me.  Instead I strode manfully across red sand that crunched underfoot like cinders and headed north-west with the bravado of an idiot.  After half an hour the city was still nowhere in sight and I was sweating copiously; sweat ran down either side of my nose, behind my ears and down the back of my neck, wicked from my scalp by my hair.  My clothes were soaked through; small patches of sweat had grown and merged and now my shirt clung unpleasantly to my skin and my shorts felt heavy and clammy.  Thirst was increasing; my throat was dry despite my sweat and I found myself licking my upper lip frequently, trying to pick up the salty sweat before it evaporate.  The sun beat down overhead, a constant reminder that what I was doing was foolish, and each footstep trudged a little further away from coolness, water, and civilisation.

Two hours and some handful of minutes had passed by the time I struggled into the shadow of a tall stone column and while the temperature difference wasn’t that great it was enough to afford me temporary relief.  The stone was wind- and weather-worn but still towered above me.  Shading my eyes from the afternoon sun and staring up until my neck hurt I estimated that the column was eight, perhaps nine metres tall, and if the city was three thousand years old then it must have been over ten metres when it was constructed.  The stone was rough to the touch and warm and if anything had ever been carved into it it had eroded away long since.  Beyond it were hints of stone paving beneath shifting red sand and, a little further along still, were two stone lumps that might have been animals once.

There was no sign of any water, though I was probably still outside the old city limits.  Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that whatever water had once flowed here might have dried up as the millenia passed and I estimated that I might make it back to the hotel without collapsing but only if I stayed here less than an hour.  And probably less if I couldn’t find shade to stay in.

A sensible man would have turned back at that point and remade his plans to come back another day.  I, however, wiped my forehead and licked my fingers to try and conserve some water, however futile the gesture, and stepped back out into the furnace of the desert afternoon and continued into the city.

Even up close I couldn’t make out what animals or objects the next two stone lumps might once have been, but carved beneath the left-most one, in letters now only shallowly incised, were runes that I slowly translated to read Inveigle.  A name, or an instruction?  As I pondered my ears registered a regular tapping sound, something both familiar and confusing.  It took nearly thirty seconds before I finally identified as the sound of water dripping.

Breakfast before dawn

“We stop serving breakfast at dawn,” said the receptionist primly.  She looked like my sister, if my sister braided her hair and had glasses; the same shaped face, the same snub nose; even the same slightly-whiny voice.  Her outfit: an entirely respectable two-piece suit over a white blouse with a little brass (or bronze, I couldn’t quite make it out) brooch pinned to the lapel on the left was the kind of thing my sister would have put on.

“Dawn seems kind of early,” I said.  I was checking-in to the Hotel Borealis for seven nights and had been looking forward to a week of rest; lazy days sitting on the terraces that overlooked the red sands of the Sonora Desert, quiet evenings in the bars of the hotel, and maybe a night or two at the casino.  Having to wake up before dawn just for breakfast didn’t fit with my agenda.

“Ok boomer,” she said.  “This is your room key — it’s electronic.  Place it against the plate on the door and wait for the beep.  There’s a light that will flash green…” I stopped listening.  I knew how hotel keys worked and my booking was for a suite with the mini-bar prepaid so there really wasn’t much she could say that interested me.  I wondered if I’d be able to make a decent Old Fashioned from the mini-bar or if I’d have to call down to room service.  “…in the event of a fire.” She finished and half-smiled at me.

“Thanks,” I said.  She looked slightly surprised and I wondered if she’d slipped some more ‘ok boomer’ like comments into her little spiel.  “What was the room number again?”

“413,” she said, pointing at the little white card containing my room keycard and a slip of paper bearing the wifi password.  Where the number should have been written was empty space, which she realised at the same time as I did.  “Let me write that down for you, in case of memory loss,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said again, with less sincerity.

The suite was three rooms: a bathroom with an actual bidet — something I assumed had gone the way of the dinosaurs by now — and a Japanese toilet with more functions than my smartphone; a bedroom with the expected kingsize bed that could sleep at least three people plus their dogs; and a sitting room that was slightly overcrowded with overstuffed furniture.  The armchairs bulged and the couch positively lounged and sitting on any of them was like sitting down on a cloud; after a moment you’d forgotten you were sitting at all and felt like you were just being somehow supported in the air by fluffiness.  Getting up proved trickier and I resorted to just rolling off the couch onto the floor and navigating my way up from a solid surface.  All of these faced the huge, plate-glass picture window that looked out on to the Sonora Desert.

Behind the couch, facing away from the window, was a desk and stiff-backed chair.  I considered moving the chair around to the other side of the desk so that I could see out of the window from there too, but it seemed like too much effort.  I wasn’t intending to spend all that much time at a desk anyway.

The borealis woke me at 2am.  I had drawn the curtains across the window before going to bed, and they were floor-length, heavy, weighted curtains of a thick brown material that drank in the light and suffocated it until the room was pitch black.  The noise — the strobing hum that seemed to sweep across the room, bounce off the walls and arc back again, throbbing against the bed, was the culprit.  I sat up, unable to see anything and feeling disoriented, wondering where on earth I was.  Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel, though that didn’t explain the noise, and I fumbled for the bed-side light-switch.

Instead of the lights I found the switch for opening and closing the curtains and, with a stately whoosh, they drew apart letting greenish-yellow light flicker in from the sitting room.  Thoroughly confused now, I got out of bed and went to the door, convinced that the room lighting had come on anyway but was somehow faulty, and was greeted in the doorway by the borealis in full, glorious performance through the plate-glass window.

It’s not June, I murmured to myself.  The hotel’s brochures were quite definite on the borealis only being visible in June.  I expected that the hotel staff had any number of disgruntled idiot customers at other times of the year who did little more than reveal their illiteracy to the receptionist (and probably escalated it to the manager; what else would an idiot do when proven wrong?) regarding the borealis.  And yet… here I was, being inconvenienced by something I’d deliberately intended to avoid.

The shimmer of the light across the sky was mesmerising though, and the Sonora Desert below it responded; glittering and shining, reflecting back the light from the electromagnetic interactions above and creating odd illusions: a monstrous creature here seemed to stalk westwards towards the columns of an ancient city; then it collapsed into the ripples of a vast ocean on which sailed boats with strange-shaped sails.  Despite myself I moved towards the couch and sat down, transfixed by the display.

At 5:30 the borealis ended and darkness settled back over the cold sands.  The stars twinkled slowly back into view as my night-vision restored, and my stomach rumbled.  With a sigh I reached for the phone.

“Room service?  Yes, I’d like to order breakfast please….”