Joseph Lewis: Omar the Immortal

It was still early in the afternoon, but Omar headed back to his hotel to shed his extra woolly layers and sit with his old Rus map. With a bit of hotel stationery and a cheap blue pen, he began his translation. After supper in the bar downstairs he considered another smoke in the alley behind the hotel, but then he thought better of it and returned to his room for an early night.

After all, tomorrow is a big day.

Omar arrived in the hangar entrance just as the morning sun was about to break above the eastern ridges of the Atlas Mountains. Dressed in all of his heavy new clothes and his blue-tinted glasses, he strode toward the Frost Finch prepared to offer whatever assistance the crew required. But Captain Ngozi merely waved him into the cabin, directed him to sit in the back, and told him not to touch anything. And so he sat and waited.

From his seat, he could see the outline of the steam engine housed behind him and the shape of the flight controls in the cockpit in front of him. Along the walls to either side and lashed to the bars and shelves overhead he saw countless packages wrapped in leather and canvas, bound in twine, or covered in wooden panels. The equipment and provisions crowded in the space in teetering piles and bulbous lumps, making it more like a wildman’s cave than a civilized room.

Over the next half hour, the engineer Morayo and the two southern scholars arrived, inspected the trunks and sacks carefully stowed inside the Finch ’s cabin, and the two men sat down beside Omar with only the briefest of greetings between yawns. The cartographer Kosoko regarded him with an unpleasant frown, but kept whatever he was thinking to himself.

Morayo came back and held out a folded brown paper in her hand, on which rested a small pile of gnarled brown and white roots. She grinned at Omar. “All right landlubber, time for your medicine.”

Garai grabbed a root and popped it into his mouth. Kosoko selected one carefully and sat back with the morsel still in his hand. Omar peered at the offering. “What is it?”

“Ginger. It helps with motion sickness.”

“Oh. Thank you.” He took one of the roots and glanced at Garai, who nodded confidently between chews, so Omar put the ginger in his mouth and began chewing.

Suddenly there was a flurry of activity outside as the ground crew cranked the huge doors of the hangar open. Riuza settled into the pilot’s seat and the engine rumbled to life. Morayo sealed the cabin hatch and took her seat beside the captain. Through the small armored windows, Omar could see the Finch ’s propellers whirling just outside the gondola, their monotonous droning echoing inside the hangar.

The airship shuddered and glided forward, slowly moving out into the morning light. Omar sat patiently with his hands on his lap. He turned to Kosoko and said, “So how many times exactly have you done this?”

The cartographer pressed his lips tightly together, narrowed his eyes in a pained expression, and shook his head.

Garai, the naturalist, leaned forward and raised his voice above the noise of the engine to say, “You’ll have to excuse him. He gets more than a little motion sick, every time. It’s so bad he won’t even be able to put the ginger in his mouth for a while. But he’ll be able to talk in half an hour or so.”

“I see. And what should we do in the mean time while we’re en route?”

“Do?” The professor leaned back in his seat wedged between a small water reservoir and a cargo net full of salted fish wrapped in brown paper. “Take a nap. There’s nothing to do until we reach the glacier.”

“And how long will that take?” Omar asked.

“About two days, depending on the weather.”

The Frost Finch rose gently into the cool morning air and Omar gripped his seat as the floor vibrated and shuddered beneath him. Through the small window on his right, he saw the edge of the hangar shrinking until it fell out of sight, and then the entire city contracted into a collection of toy houses and toy shops and even toy boats on a brightly painted sea. In a matter of seconds the entire world had fallen out from under him and all he could see were surreal replicas in miniature. Roofs, walls, roads, and trees lost all meaning to him from the sky, and people vanished entirely.

I wonder if this is how God sees us. As ants. Or not at all.

Omar glanced at the professor.

Two days to the glacier. In two days, I’ll be beyond the northern edge of all civilization. At last!

From the port city of Tingis they crossed the Strait of Tarifa in half an hour and began the first leg of their journey across the Espani sky to the Pyrenees Mountains. The engines droned, the little professor snored, and the tall cartographer breathed through his open mouth looking somewhat greener than he had on the ground. The ginger root remained tightly gripped in his white-knuckled hand, but eventually he managed to place a small sliver of it in the corner of his mouth.

For two days, Omar sat in the back of the cabin. He made small talk with his fellow passengers, and occasionally he stood up to pace the narrow floor and to look out the other windows, and even to peer into the cockpit at the arcane assortment of levers and dials and gauges around the pilot and the engineer’s console. But there was never more than two minutes’ diversion anywhere in the cramped and crowded cabin. So he sat in his seat and closed his eyes and rested his hand on the pommel of his seireiken, and for hour after hour he listened to the sweet voices of Numidian songstresses, Hellan poets, and Persian courtesans who had all lived and died centuries ago.

When the cartographer was looking less likely to vomit, Omar offered him a look at the old Rus map. Kosoko took it grudgingly and then passed the rest of the afternoon comparing it to his own hand-drawn maps from their earlier expeditions. Omar watched the man’s face for some reaction, some sign to confirm that the Rus map was accurate, but the cartographer merely looked grave and thoughtful and returned the leather map without comment when he was finished.

Omar offered to cook when he guessed the lunch hour to be upon them, but he was casually dismissed by Morayo, who said they wouldn’t be cooking in the air and he would have to wait for their first landing for a warm meal. So they ate dried meat and fruit and seeds, and drank lukewarm water that tasted of copper from an overhead reservoir.

Late in the afternoon of the first day, Omar had the professor show him how to use the small metal toilet in the corner, a facility with no illusion of privacy that did however provide a terrifically cold shock to one’s bare bottom. Omar tried not to think about where the waste might fall. Nor did he look forward to witnessing either of his female companions use the device. When Morayo headed back to the round seat, Omar quickly headed forward to linger by the cockpit until she was done. Garai chuckled at him when he returned.

The nights were worse than the days. There was still nothing to do and no comfort in which to rest, but in the darkness the world outside faded into a ghost landscape of moonlight on shapeless white snowfields. The vast wilderness of Espana stretched on and on below them, a featureless winter world punctuated by the rare stone cities that huddled like gray mountains in the day and glowed like colonies of fireflies in the night. Kosoko began to describe what they were seeing below, naming cities and landmarks, especially the famous Espani cathedrals, but the man soon grew queasy and fell silent again. He chewed his ginger sparingly.

It was late during the second night, as Omar leaned shivering against a canvas sack of apples trying to sleep, when lightning flashed across the cockpit windows. A moment later a deep growling thunder rolled through the cabin, and then the soft patter of rain began to fall on the great padded gas envelope of the airship above them.