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.