“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 that 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.