The Myst Reader (24 page)

Tarkuk shook his head slowly, but Atrus would not let him lapse back into his fear. Gripping his shoulders now, he shook him hard.

“Come on! I command you! Now row!”

Coming to himself, Tarkuk met Atrus’s eyes and bowed his head. “As my Master commands.”

Tarkuk stood unsteadily, then, raising his voice, barked orders at his son. At first Birili seemed reluctant, as if he had already consigned himself, body and soul, to the deep. Then, like a sleepwalker waking, he took up his oar and sat.

“Here,” Atrus said, sitting beside him. “Let me help.”

He had sculled his father’s boat often enough in the past to know how to row, and he knew they would get nowhere unless they all pulled together.

“Come on!” he called, encouraging them now. “Row if you want to live!”

They heaved and heaved, fighting the current, struggling to turn the boat back toward the island. For a while it seemed that the current was too strong and that all their efforts were about to end in vain, but then, suddenly, they began to pull away.

Sinews straining, they hauled their way, inch by inch across the dark surface of the water, that massive wall of whiteness receding slowly at their back, until, breathless from the effort, they relaxed, staring back the way they had come.

Atrus stretched his neck and looked up, straight into the sky. He ached. Every muscle in his body ached, yet he felt a great surge of triumph.

“Well done!” he said, looking about him and laughing. But Tarkuk and his son were looking down, silent—strangely, eerily silent.

“What is it?” he asked after a moment, touching the old man’s arm. At the touch, Tarkuk jerked away.

Atrus blinked. What was going on here? What had he missed? He had made a mistake, true, but they had survived, hadn’t they? Why, he had forced them to survive! He had made them row when they had given up.

He reached out, shaking the old man by the arm. “What is it? Answer me! I have to know!”

Tarkuk glanced at him, then dropped his eyes again. “We have cheated the Whiteness.”

“Cheated …?”
Atrus laughed, astonished. “What do you mean?”

But the old man would say no more. Slowly Birili got to his feet and, adjusting the sail, turned the boat back toward the island.

In silence they sailed back.

As they climbed from the boat and mounted the steps, Atrus made to speak to Tarkuk again, but the old man seemed reluctant even to acknowledge him now.

Atrus shook his head, perplexed. What had happened out there? Just what exactly had he missed?

He didn’t know. But he would. He would make it his business to find out, before his father returned.

ATRUS HURRIED ACROSS THE BRIDGE, CONSCIOUS
of the gathering clouds overhead, then ran up the slope toward his father’s tent.

Surprised by his sudden entrance, Koena got up hurriedly, making a little bowing motion, still uncertain quite how to behave toward Gehn’s son. “Young Master? Is everything all right?”

The girl was sitting on the ground nearby, staring up at Atrus.

“No,” Atrus answered, walking past Koena and sitting in his father’s chair.

“Master?” Koena came across and stood before him. “Are there more cracks?”

“No. But there is something I want an explanation for.”

“Master?”

Atrus hesitated, then. “Something happened.”

“Something?”

“Yes, when I was out on the boat. The old man said something about cheating the Whiteness.”

Koena gasped. “You have been out there.”

“Out
where?
” Atrus said, knowing where he meant, but wanting to hear it from his lips.

“To the Mist Wall.”

Atrus nodded. “We sailed the dark current. And then we rowed back.”

Koena’s mouth had fallen open. “No,” he said quietly.

“What is it?” Atrus asked. “What am I missing? What don’t I understand?”

Koena hesitated, his eyes pleading with Atrus now.

“Tell me,” Atrus insisted, “or I shall have my father wring it from you!”

The man sighed, then answered him, speaking reluctantly. “The Whiteness … it was our Master. Before your father came.”

He fell silent. There was the rumble of distant thunder.

Atrus, too, was silent for a time, taking in this new piece of information, then he looked to Koena again. “And my father knows nothing of this?”

“Nothing.”

“The old man and his son … what will happen to them?”

Koena looked down. It was clear he did not want to say another word, but Atrus needed to know.

“Please. You have to tell me. It’s very important.”

The man shrugged, then: “They will die. Just as surely as if you had left them out there.”

Atrus shook his head. Now that he understood it he felt a kind of dull anger at the superstitious nonsense that could dream up such a thing. He stood, his anger giving him strength, making him see clearly what he had to do.

“Listen,” he said, assuming the manner of his father. “Go and fetch the villagers. Tell them to gather outside my father’s hut. It is time I talked to them.”

THE SKY WAS DARKENING AS ATRUS MOUNTED
the steps of the meeting hut and turned to face the waiting crowd. A light rain fell. Everyone was there; every last man, woman, and child on the island, Tarkuk and Birili excepted. Atrus swallowed nervously, then, raising his hands the way he’d seen his father do, began to speak, trying to make his voice—not so powerful or deep as his father’s—boom in the same sonorous way.

“This afternoon we went out to the Mist Wall. We sailed the dark current and came back …”

There was a strong murmur of discontent at that. People looked to each other, deeply troubled.

“I have heard talk that we have somehow
cheated
the Whiteness, and it is for that reason that I have summoned you here.”

He paused, looking about him, hoping that what he was about to say next would not prove too difficult for his father.

“I understand your fears,” he went on, “but I am proof that the Power of the Whiteness is waning. For did I not sail to the Mist Wall and return? Did the Whiteness take me? No. Nor shall it. In fact, when my father, the Lord Gehn, returns, he and I shall go out beyond the Mist Wall.”

There was a gasp at that—a great gasp of disbelief and shock.

“It cannot be done,” Koena said, speaking for all gathered there.

“You disbelieve?” Atrus asked, stepping down and confronting his father’s man.

Koena fell silent, his head bowed. Overhead there was the faintest rumble of thunder. Great clouds had gathered, throwing the bowl of hills into an intense shadow.

Atrus glanced up at the ominous sky, then spoke again. “All will be well,” he said.

There was a great thunderclap. Lightning leapt between the clouds overhead, discharging itself in a vivid blue-white bolt on the crest of the hill facing them. Atrus stared at its afterimage in wonder, then looked about him, seeing how everyone else had fallen to the ground in terror.

“It’s nothing,” Atrus said, lifting his voice above the now-persistent grumble. “Only a thunderstorm!!”

There was a second, blinding flash and one of the trees on the far side of the lake was struck, blossoming in a great sheet of sudden flame.

“The Whiteness is angry,” someone cried from just below him. “See how it searches for you!”

Atrus turned, angry now, knowing he must squash this at once. “Nonsense!” he cried. “It’s only the storm!”

But no one was listening. The islanders were pulling at their hair and wailing, as if something horrible was about to descend among them.

Then, as a third lightning bolt ionized the air, sending its tendrils of static hissing through the rainfilled darkness as it sought the earth, Atrus saw, in the brilliant flash, the figure of his father, striding down the path between the huts, heading for the bridge.

A
TRUS STOOD, HEAD BOWED BEFORE HIS
father in his tent as the rain hammered down on the canvas overhead. The terrified islanders had fled back to their huts while the storm raged, but Gehn was in no mood to placate or reassure them. Right now he was sitting forward in his chair, glaring at his son, his hands gripping the edge of his desk tightly.

“There was trouble, you say. What brought that on?”

“I wanted to see the Mist Wall. I sailed out to it.”

“And you found the dark current?”

Atrus looked up, surprised that his father knew of that. He nodded, then proceeded to tell his father all that had transpired in his absence. When he’d finished, Gehn stared at him thoughtfully, then, loosening his grip, sat back.

“It is unfortunate, but it seems that the experiment here has failed. This world is unstable.”

“In what way?”

“The island is on a kind of pedestal. A massive pedestal of rock reaching up from the ocean floor. Surrounding it there is an ocean—a deep, intensely cold ocean.”

Atrus frowned. “But the water here is warm. And there’s fresh water in the lake.”

“That comes up from the crust, far below the surface. There is geothermal warming. That same warming creates the Mist Wall. It is where the hot water from below meets and reacts with the cold oceanic currents.” Gehn nodded thoughtfully. “As you can imagine, this really is an island, in every possible sense. It is as cut off as a community can be and yet survive.”

“But now it’s going wrong.”

“Precisely. Slowly but surely, this Age is deteriorating. I cannot make out why, but it is. I have tried my utmost to find solutions, yet without a radical rewriting of this Age, I fear it is fated to deteriorate still further.”

“And the cracks, father? What causes those?”

Gehn shook his head.

“It must be some fault in the underlying structure. Perhaps the same fault that made the two tiny islands subside.”

“Can you fix it?”

Gehn looked to him. “No doubt I could, but I am inclined to leave it. After all, it is only a tiny crack. If it gets any worse, I shall reconsider. Right now, however, we have other problems, like this business with the so-called Whiteness. Let us deal with that first, and then consider other matters.”

GEHN CROUCHED BESIDE THE CRACK IN THE MEADOW
as the rain fell, his eyes narrowed.

He had spent hours back in D’ni, finding the right words in the ancient book, but for some quite incomprehensible reason they had made no difference.

Gehn stood, combing his fingers back through his rain-slicked hair, then kicked a lump of earth into the crack, the frustration he felt at that moment making him want to hit out at something. The problem was a simple one—he knew that instinctively. It had something to do with the underlying structures, but precisely what it was he didn’t know. Yes, and that was the worst of it, for whenever he thought, finally, that he understood it, something would come along to prove him wrong—to show him that, far from having grasped the solid principles beneath it all, he was as far from understanding it as he had ever been.