The Fata Morgana

by Leo A. Frankowski

  After more than three weeks of convalescing, my nurse permitted me to go outside, at least up to our own roof. We went up a long spiral staircase, which, in my still weakened condition, was enough to force me to stop and sit down twice. I was a long way from being the healthy student who worked his way through college teaching Karate.

  She led me finally through a small trapdoor in the ceiling and suddenly we were in the middle of a field of vegetables! Within a dozen yards of us, our household's gardeners were working diligently at their tasks, and seemingly oblivious to our entrance onto their domain.

  When I had first met Roxanna's gardeners, I had assumed that their task was to tend the decorative gardens that I supposed our medieval castle was surrounded with. Now I learned that the roof of the incredibly spacious mansion was a carefully tended garden from which the household got all of its food, barring fish, dairy products, and the very occasional rabbit or chicken.

  Looking about, I soon realized that these gardens were contiguous with those of our neighbors. Indeed, with increasing wonderment, I saw that every bit of horizontal land within sight was carefully used for growing crops. The terrain resembled pictures I had seen of the rice paddies of Bali, or of the sculpted mountain slopes in Peru. The difference was that the vertical surfaces here were covered with large windows and open doorways, which suggested that behind them there were hundreds or thousands of rooms like the one I slept in.

  It soon became apparent to me that the mansion that I had been living in was not a building at all! I had been staying in a spacious cave, entirely below ground. My best guess was that originally, the mountainous countryside had been terraced to provide farmland, at what horrendous cost in labor I could barely imagine. Then the spaces below the fields had been laboriously hollowed out into huge apartments, work areas, and public spaces to free up even more land for farming.

  Furthermore, as best I could see, all of this incredible amount of work must have been done by hand, for I saw not one single machine more complicated than a hammer, and even those more often than not were made of bone or wood or clay.

  Farm animals were rare, and I can remember seeing only one ox-drawn plow during my first two months on the island. Even stranger, despite all these obvious indications of fabulous human industriousness, I don't recall ever seeing anyone working overly hard. Oh, people were generally busy at one thing or another, but you never saw anyone breaking his back, either.

  After a half hour in the sun, we went back down for more language lessons. I had to get some questions answered!

  TEN

  About the time that I was able to move about without undue pain, I was able to make simple sentences such that, with the aid of many gesticulations, I could begin to get some of my questions across. Again I asked about where in the heck were we. This time, Roxanna had an answer.

  "The day before yesterday, I asked this question of a wizard for you," she said, and then rattled off some sort of a description where we were so many hours and minutes east and so many minutes north. It had to be longitude and latitude in some manner of coordinate system, but I could make neither heads nor tails of it.

  I asked how the sun could rise and set in the same place, as it had persisted in doing, but I got no answer because Roxanna could not grasp what I was asking about. No amount of gesticulating or bad Westronese could get through to her. Giving up, I asked why this island was hidden, why my people didn't know it was here.

  "Why are your people ignorant? What a strange question! How can I answer such a thing? You know them better than I. All I can say is that the islands have been in existence forever, I suppose, and people have been living here for more than four thousand years. They certainly haven't been hidden from me. How could one hide an island?" she asked.

  How indeed? Fighting down my inclination to shout slowly when people don't understand me, I asked about Adam. I was given to understand that he was alive, but still too injured to move about. After I promised not to tire the guy out, Roxanna agreed to lead me to him the next afternoon.

  "The forty days is over now, and thus it is permitted," she said, though I wasn't able to understand what she meant by that. Some sort of quarantine?

  Despite the fact that he was sweating while running a middling fever, one of the gardeners was immediately sent with a note written by Roxanna requesting permission for a call on Adam's mansion. There was nothing like a telephone available.

  Before we could do any visiting out in public, there was the matter of clothing. My shipboard wear on The Brick Royal normally consisted of a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, and while I had a single wash-and-wear suit with me, it had been damaged in the wreck.

  Locally, except for the ladies' low necklines, dress was pretty puritanical. I had yet to see a Westronese ankle. I had been going around the house (or rather the cave) in the local equivalent of a bathrobe, sort of a belted pullover tunic that reached the ground, or maybe it was a caftan without the sleeves. Comfortable, I soon got to preferring it over the pants and shirt that I had worn all my life. But this, I was told, would be most improper to wear in public.

  Roxanna and the maid, Felicia, soon had me up on a stool and were measuring me in more places than I had been aware of having places to measure. They went away for a few hours and came back with their arms full of stuff. There were three other people (from the store, I suppose) similarly laden behind them. All of it was brightly colored and richly encrusted with embroidery. They put some of it out on the bed, and it soon was obvious that I was to be dressed in the male equivalent of the ladies' outfits. It was sort of Elizabethan, with tights, low boots, and ridiculous, puffy shorts. There was a tight jacket, a short cape, and a hat with a feather in it. All the getup needed was a sword, but when I tried to ask Roxanna about one, she hadn't the faintest idea what I was talking about.

  "A big kitchen knife? To wear?" she said.

  The other thing about the heap of clothes they brought was that, while it all looked fabulously expensive, it was all used. There was not a new item in the pile. I asked about this, and was told that, of course, there hadn't been time to make anything especially for me. I would have to make do for a while, until the seamstress that Roxanna had hired could start work on my private wardrobe. It seems that off-the-shelf clothes were unheard of.

  The next morning, decked out to play in a Shakespearian comedy, Roxanna and I set out for Adam's place, in a section called Tintzin. To get there we would have to walk the length of Lyonnesse, some four miles or so. The maid was told to come along with us, I suppose as a chaperone.

  Leaving the apartment, we went through a hallway with three right-angled turns. My guess was that it was to control sound. It ended with a nicely embroidered curtain, past which we were in a public roadway, or hallway. There was no door, and therefore no lock on the door. In fact, there weren't any locks anywhere on the island that I could see.

  Maybe there wasn't enough wood or metal to put a locked door wherever I was used to one, but then I suppose that the total community here was so small that everyone knew everyone else. If anybody was ever caught stealing, I imagine that he'd never hear the end of it from his maiden aunts and his great- granduncles.

  The way to Adam's place was entirely underground, through tunnels that were used as streets. I was told that farmland was entirely too valuable to waste on outdoor roads, and anyway, who would want to travel in the rain? The only light was by the occasional small glassless window, more often set in the roof than in a wall. My eyes adjusted, and it wasn't too dark.

  There were many other people about, and every single one of them seemed to have the flu. I asked Roxanna about it.

  "It is something that we must endure, my lord."

  "To be sick, yes, must survive. But why, please, everybody one time?" With my still limited Westronese, it was the closest I could come to expressing my question properly.

  "Because you and your friend have just brought us this plague, my lord. We can only hope that this is the worst tha
t you have gifted us with."

  I expressed astonishment at the thought that I was responsible for so much sickness.

  "But it is quite true. We know that you did not deliberately infect us, so we do not hold you morally responsible. Yet this illness was unknown to us until four weeks ago. Your friend has assured us that it will soon pass, and that it is not deadly, for which we give thanks to God. In the past, other visitors gifted us with things much worse. The last, more than fifty years agone, gave us the curse of measles, and many died."

  Again I was astounded, first at the thought that they had willingly risked so much to rescue us, and secondly that measles had proved so deadly to them. I thanked her as humbly as I could for the rescue, and said that if measles was deadly, then maybe the flu was, too.

  "We are all in the hands of God, my lord."

  I realized that if I'd had something really deadly, she would have been among the first to die. I said as much to her.

  "Better that than to be the last, my lord. I have kept myself in a constant State of Grace since your arrival. It is all that anyone can do."

  Such stoicism was beyond me. I began to wonder if I was a moral weakling, and to shut off such dangerous thoughts I began noticing the people around me again. Most of them were carrying loads of one thing or another, since mechanized transport was non-existent. There wasn't even any animal power in use that I could see. Aside from the flu, people seemed healthy, well fed, and reasonably well dressed, though few wore quite as much embroidery as Roxanna and I did.

  Despite the fact that I had directly injured everyone here, people often tipped their hats to us, as though I was the local squire. I asked Roxanna about it.

  "Of course, they all know me, and everyone has heard of you," she said. "They are only being polite to those they respect."

  "I am most respected one here?" I said in my bad Westronese.

  "You are very respected. Great wealth is always respected, as is great learning. But you are not the most respected, of course. You are not the duke, or the archbishop, or the warlock," she said, using simple words and sentences, as one would do with a child.

  I had earlier gathered that the social structure hereabouts matched the clothing and technological level, so the priest and nobility made some sense. At least it made as much sense as anything else did in this strange little fairyland.

  The "warlock" business bothered me, though. We had gone over it very carefully when I had learned the word (which was one of the very few that was pronounced the same in both Westronese and English). Warlock meant warlock, the same in both languages. They had magic here, or at least they believed they did. Even more curious was her insistence that I had magic, a great deal of it, apparently. When I assured her that I had no such thing, she became quiet for a while, and then said that the question was for wiser heads than hers.

  I stepped aside to let a man with a huge bundle go by, and in the process scraped my knuckles on the wall of the tunnel. These walls, like those of the mansion, were plastered and painted, but the spot I had managed to hit had been chipped bare. The rock underneath was very sharp, like new, rough sandpaper. I lost a bit of skin, and it bled.

  As Roxanna was bandaging my hand with my pocket handkerchief, I looked carefully at the living stone that was exposed. It was porous, bubbly, like brown plastic foam. Foamed glass? Was the whole place an artifact? But how could that jibe with the low level of technology that I saw everywhere around me?

  We passed into a market section that had bigger skylights and was better lit than elsewhere. There was a great deal of buying and selling going on, but the goods on sale were all low tech. Farther on we walked through a food market that had a lot in common with things I'd seen in peasant markets in South America. Live animals, dead fish, and crude wooden scales. They were using corn husks for packaging. Utopia, this wasn't.

  It was a two-hour walk getting to Adam's place in Tintzin. I asked Roxanna about why we were put so far apart, and she said that there were only two suitable positions available. This made no sense at all to me, but we suddenly had to walk in single file to get past a particularly busy stall, and the topic of conversation was forgotten for the time being.

  ELEVEN

  Adam was living in a mansion that was much like the one I was using, except that it might have been bigger than mine. At least, he had seven servants to my six. He was propped up in bed, with his left leg and right arm in heavy plaster casts. Two attractive, well-dressed ladies attended him. They looked like they might be sisters, or possibly a mother and daughter.

  Introductions were made. The ladies were Maria and Agnes Pelitier. I was about to ask about their relationship when Adam started talking to me in English.

  "So you finally got your Errol Flynn outfit together. Only, it needs a sword, boss."

  It was pleasant to hear someone speaking and to understand them without having to go through the mental struggle of translating it. Adam's Hamtramck accent was still there, but he had toned it way down. I had the feeling that he was no longer interested in playing the fool or the clown.

  "I tried to get a rapier, but nobody here ever heard of one."

  "At least you got the beard. 'Course here, everybody's got one. The guys, anyway. No razors."

  "I noticed. Look, are they treating you okay?"

  He put his good arm around the older of the two women, who smiled at the attention she received.

  "Does it look like durance vile, boss?" Then he switched to Westronese and said, "Why don't you girls go someplace and talk nice to this other lady. Me and my friend got a lot of catching up to do."

  His Westronese was far better than mine, but I swear that he was somehow able to speak it with that damned Hamtramck accent. The ladies left, leaving the maid behind in case we should want anything.

  I sat down on a spindly, straight-backed chair and said, "Adam, just what in the hell happened?"

  "What happened was that you are damn lucky to be alive. The real world is not like in the detective stories, you know. It takes a serious skull concussion to put a man out cold, and you was knocked out twice in one day. That's enough to kill most guys.

  "You remember coming to help me bail? Well, you started down just after the ladder got carried away by all that junk that was floating around belowdecks. The water was sloshing back and forth a lot, and you managed to catch it right in the middle of a trough. You hit the lower deck when there was only about two feet of water down there to break your fall. You was out cold, but you was still breathing. I managed to get you propped up so your head stayed out of the water, but then I had to get back to the pumps, you know?

  "Before I got there, we hit something big. The bow of the boat stayed up high, so I figured we was stuck on that island that couldn't be there. I got us both out the front hatch, since the back ones was both under water.

  "There we was, propped way high up on some kind of a rocky beach. A lot of people was running towards us, and they looked friendly. I put you down and broke out that rope ladder to help them get aboard. About then, another big wave hit the boat in the rump, and I went straight off the end of the nose, like two stories down to the rocks and stuff down below. That's when I got busted up.

  "Well, they took me and you into a cave, somebody's house by the look of it, and this old girl has six of them hold me down while they set my leg without any anesthetics! It hurt like hell, and to make it worse, they couldn't understand that in the boat, not a hundred feet away, there was a medical kit with morphine, Novocain, and all kinds of wonderful things in it! And when they got finished with my leg, they started it all up again, this time on my arm!

  "When they was finally done, they left me alone for a bit, and I got a look out a window. They must of had three hundred people lined up, getting everything out of the boat and into some kind of warehouse. I felt better about that, since even if they was maybe robbing us, well, if it went to the bottom, it'd be gone forever, but as long as it was safe, we might get it back, some of it anyhow. I
shouldn't have worried, though, since now that I can talk to them real good, they tell me that all of our stuff is safe and waiting for us. What's more, if we want to sell, they're real eager to buy."

  I said, "I'm surprised that you were worrying about our property when our lives had just been saved."

  "Hey, being broke in a strange country where you don't even speak the language is something to be scared about! You should of heard the stories my grandfather used to tell about how he got to America. Anyway, I had everything I owned on that boat. My coin collection, f'rinstance."

  "I never knew that you collected coins."

  "I never much told anybody about it, but, see, my grandfather went broke a second time during the Depression when his bank folded. Since then, us Kulczyinskis keep our savings in gold. That coin collection is mostly uncirculated Krugerrands. About forty-six pounds of them. That and I got a few hundred pounds of old-style silver quarters."

  "Shit on a shingle! I was paying you too much!"

  "Nah, I could of got paid the same money anywhere. But, see, some of that gold was dad's, and a lot of it I got back when gold was thirty-five bucks an ounce. Shoulda sold it all when it hit eight hundred, but that's life, and anyway, I woulda had to pay taxes on it."

  "I'm glad your fortune is safe, Adam. But what happened after they patched you up?"

  "Well, your back was still bleeding a bit here and there, and the older women was fixing you up, still without anesthetics, but at least you was still out cold.

  "Then these three guys in long capes come up riding on horses, waving their arms and yelling at each other. Everybody that wasn't working bows real low to them, but the three guys ignore the crowd and keep on arguing among themselves. This goes on for the longest time, and everybody sort of got tired, or maybe embarrassed about bowing to somebody who didn't seem to notice them, so one by one they stood back up and tried to look busy.