The Atlantis Origins

by S. A. Beck

  Jaxon’s mind whirled as she was introduced to them all. The women hugged and kissed her like a long-lost sister. The men shook her hand and raised their palms in the air, grinning. She’d never seen this gesture before, but she liked it. It seemed so positive. A few shy children gathered around her, gazing up at her with their crystal-blue eyes.

  With Salif translating, she learned a dozen names and answered countless questions. Dimitri greeted a man in Arabic, and they sat down and started an animated conversation. Vivian and Dr. Yamazaki sat in a corner a bit apart from the crowd. The Atlanteans were friendly and hospitable to them, but Jaxon remained the center of attention. Everyone wanted to meet the Atlantean from America.

  As always in North Africa, the guests were treated to tea, eaten while holding a sugar cube between the teeth. Jaxon was beginning to like that style of tea but wondered what it would do to her teeth in the long run.

  “So where is the griot? This is his home, right?” Jaxon asked after they finished their tea.

  “Daouda Ndiaye is in the back room,” Salif replied quietly. “He does not want to meet the outsiders.”

  “I see.”

  “Shall we go visit him? He speaks English better than I do. He is a very educated man. I think it would be best if only you go and your friends stay here.”

  Jaxon moved over to Vivian and Dr. Yamazaki and told them this.

  “All right, but if you feel uncomfortable, just come back out, all right?” Vivian said.

  “Okay. Don’t worry. I think everything is fine—it’s just that they are a bit suspicious of strangers.”

  “I can’t blame them, but be careful,” Dr. Yamazaki said.

  Salif led her through a door and down a short hallway to a small room. An old Atlantean man with a flowing white beard sat on a cushion on the floor, reading from a yellowed old manuscript. Like the front room, there was no furniture here, only cushions to sit on the floor. One wall was taken up with a long bookshelf stuffed with books. Most were bound in leather and looked as old as the ones Jaxon had seen in the manuscript museum in Oualata.

  The old man looked up from his book and fixed his bright-blue eyes on her.

  “Greetings, Jaxon. Moustafa told me you would come.”

  Jaxon’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Moustafa? The healer from Marrakech?”

  “Yes, he hoped you would have a safe journey. This is not a safe part of the world to travel, especially if you are a foreigner, or one of us.”

  “Did he send word with a caravan trader or something?” Jaxon asked.

  Daouda let out a rich baritone laugh. “No, he called me on his mobile phone! Please sit.”

  The old man indicated a couple of cushions set in front of him, and Jaxon and Salif sat down.

  “I can see why Moustafa was worried about me. It was a hard trip,” Jaxon said. “One of my friends died helping me get here, and another one nearly died.”

  Daouda grimaced and shook his head. “The world is just as sinful as when our civilization fell. Was it one of our people who died?”

  “No, an American who wanted to help me.”

  “God willing, he is in a better place now.”

  Jaxon nodded. “He is.”

  It was strange, but ever since seeing Edward in her vision, she had known he was dead, and yet she didn’t mourn him in the way she had with Brett. She knew the hacker had found peace. She felt sad, but more for the fact that he hadn’t gotten happiness when he was alive and that she hadn’t gotten to know him better.

  If only she could convince everyone else Edward was really gone. Grunt was at the airport right now, making arrangements to fly back to Marrakech to search for him.

  “I was wrong to worry about your friends, Jaxon. It seems they are some of the few outsiders who can be trusted. But you must understand that outsiders can do harm to us without even meaning to.”

  “Moustafa said the same thing.”

  “He told me you came here looking to learn about our people. Because you were given up, you don’t know much.”

  “I know hardly anything.”

  “Well, you know our people are persecuted, mistrusted, and sometimes feared. It has always been this way, and your father and mother probably had to give you up for your own safety. But there are safer places for us. Timbuktu is one of them. It has been for centuries.”

  “Why here?”

  “It is remote, and it is tolerant. The Islam here is a relaxed Islam, celebrating the joy found in the Koran rather than the hatred some religious leaders twist it into.”

  Jaxon thought of the women going into the mosque in their bright colors and uncovered faces and nodded. The griot went on.

  “Only once has Timbuktu fallen to the radicals. It happened a couple of years ago when those barbarians who call themselves pure came out of the desert. They tried to burn the books, but we snuck them away when we fled to the south. We couldn’t take the shrines and monuments, and sadly, they did destroy some of those.”

  “Did any of our people get killed?”

  “No, we knew they would hunt us down, so we fled with our learning and our treasures and only came back when it was safe. This is home to the biggest community of our people that I have ever heard of. We have a place here. Timbuktu and the land around it were rich in gold. There were mines all around the countryside. You can still find villages that make their living off mining today, although the mines don’t produce as much as they used to. This gold made Timbuktu rich and attracted trade from all over western Africa, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the jungles far to the south. It is a good location. You see, this is as far east and north as you can sail on the river. It gets too shallow after this. So boats came up the river to meet here and trade with caravans coming across the desert. In this way, the heart of Africa could trade with the Mediterranean and Europe.”

  “Our people were part of that?”

  “Oh yes, we often acted as traders. We would trade in everything—gold, salt, crafts, but never slaves. That is one thing we would not do, because we remembered how we had sinned and how we must live pure lives from now on. We became great merchants but left the slave trade to those with no conscience. We didn’t trade for the profit so much as it was a good way to meet with our scattered communities. Not only did we bring goods to trade but news from distant relatives and gossip about our rulers. We also traded in learning, using our gold to buy books from all over in order to build the libraries of Timbuktu. If you can get permission to see the books in the manuscript museum, you will find many wonders. The private libraries still run by some families have even greater treasures.”

  “Sounds like we were pretty important,” Jaxon said, feeling proud of her heritage.

  “The rulers of Timbuktu and other kingdoms valued the People of the Sea at that time. They valued us for our learning and for helping to make their kingdoms prosperous. Our fame spread. Do you know the tale of Mansamusa? Do they teach that in the schools in America?”

  “Um, no,” Jaxon said, embarrassed. At school, they hardly taught anything about Africa.

  The griot looked annoyed and shook his head before continuing.

  “The stories tell of a great king from Timbuktu named Mansamusa, which in our language means ‘King of Kings.’ As you can see, it was actually his title, what his subjects and foreigners called him. His real name was Kankamusa, which means ‘King of Kansa.’ Kansa was the name of his mother. We honor our women here. He ruled the great Malian Empire, which stretched from Senegal to the west to Niger in the east. It had more land than Western Europe and lasted for more than four hundred years. Kankamusa was one of the greatest kings.

  “Kankamusa was a Muslim, like all the rulers of Timbuktu, and one year, long ago, he decided to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, where all Muslims should go at least one time in their lives. So, in the year 1324, he set out with a great caravan of sixteen thousand people, carrying thirteen tons of gold. When he reached Cairo, he stayed for some time, praying at the mosqu
es and visiting the famous Al Azhar University. They teach you of this place in America, yes?”

  “Um, no.”

  The storyteller grimaced. “It is good you come to me. You young Americans do not seem to get much of an education. Al Azhar is the oldest university in the world. It was founded more than a thousand years ago and is still an important university today. Are you certain your teachers did not speak of this?”

  “We didn’t really study Africa,” Jaxon said, blushing.

  The griot shook his head. “It is good you have met me. Well, Mansamusa traded many books from here for books from the university. It was the greatest center of learning in Africa at that time, and so the books were valuable. The stories say that he spent so much gold on books that the gold market in Cairo crashed. There was so much gold in the city that it was worth less than copper!”

  The griot laughed and slapped his knee.

  Jaxon grinned. “That’s funny. There’s so much I need to learn about this place, but I had a couple of questions about Mauritania.”

  Daouda cocked his head. “You passed through Mauritania? I thought you flew here.”

  “We had to keep out of sight. There are some people hunting me, bad people who want to use our abilities for their own power.”

  “I could tell you many stories like that.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m another one. When I was in Oualata, I met a keeper of old manuscripts.”

  “Abdullah al-Idrissi, the museum director?”

  “Yes! You know him?”

  “He’s not one of our people, but we respect all men of learning. It is the same with that Russian, Dimitri.”

  “Abdullah al-Idrissi told me that the People of the Sea were being rounded up in Mauritania.”

  “Yes, you are very fortunate to have made it through. The government has been taking them away. We don’t know where or why. We have many Mauritanian refugees here in Timbuktu. One is living in my house.”

  Jaxon shifted in her seat. Now came her more personal question.

  “He showed me some old books that were pretty interesting. He also told me a story about a secret well.”

  “The well of pure water? The one that has water from before the flood?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “He must have told you that this was the water from when the world was without sin, when we had a great civilization on the island of Atlantis.”

  “Yeah, and then we got to fighting one another.”

  “Pride. We became proud of our power and hungered for more. That was our downfall. The world was flooded with dead water. Only a few of the wells of pure water remain, or so it is said. Nobody knows where they are.”

  Jaxon tensed. She felt an urge to tell the griot about her discovery, but something held her back. Some gut reaction, the same as the one that had drawn her to the well in the first place, told her that it wouldn’t be safe to tell Daouda. She sensed that it wasn’t the griot she had to worry about but somebody else.

  “What if someone found one of them?” Jaxon asked.

  “That will happen someday. There is an old prophecy, dating back to when we first came to this land after the fall of our civilization, that an Atlantean who had been cut off from her people would come and find the water and save our people from persecution. She would bring much trouble with her but in the end lead our people, and the whole world, to a new era of hope and progress.”

  Jaxon’s skin prickled as she stared at the storyteller. Was he saying what she thought he was saying? No, it didn’t make sense. She was just a messed-up kid from Child Protective Services who had no place in the world.

  Wait, no—that was what she had always thought about herself. That might have been what she was a year ago, but her life had completely changed.

  Edward’s last words came back to her.

  “I haven’t been lonely since I joined the Atlantis Allegiance. I finally got a family. It can be your family too.

  “Make this mean something.”

  Jaxon sat up a bit straighter. “Could you tell me more about this prophecy?”

  “There is not much else to tell. Only that she would come in a time of great darkness. At first, all she would do is bring more trouble, and people would hate her for it. In the end, though, she would become a bringer of light. The story had a sad ending, though.”

  Jaxon’s heart turned cold.

  “She dies?”

  “No. But the story says that most of the people she will help will never know she has helped them and will never be grateful for what she did. She will not be hailed as a heroine and will have to be content with the knowledge that she did right, even if she doesn’t get all she wants.”

  “But it’s just an old story, right?”

  The griot looked annoyed. “What do you mean by that? Old stories are the best stories, the ones that have the most truth. Stories that have no truth in them are soon forgotten. Only when a story becomes old do you know its true value, and this is one of the oldest stories of our people.”

  “Thank you for all you’ve told me. I think I should get back to my friends now. You’ve given me some things to think about.”

  Actually, you’ve given me a lot to think about, she said to herself. And this has all been too much. I need some alone time to absorb all this.

  She still had the feeling that she shouldn’t reveal the fact that she had found the well. After what Daouda had told her, she felt even less willing to talk about it. She needed to puzzle through everything he had said.

  “You must be tired after your long journey,” Daouda said. “We have much time to speak later. You can come to my home anytime, and your friends are welcome too. Have Dimitri show you the manuscripts. He is one to be trusted. And stay in Timbuktu as long as you want. You could even settle here. Many people from Atlantis have.”

  Jaxon smiled. Stay here? She knew she’d be made welcome, but that was a question for another day. She had too much to think about already.

  She said good-bye to Daouda and went back to the front room, where the other Atlanteans entertained her and her friends for the next couple of hours. There was a constant movement of people in and out of the house as more people from the community came to meet her, and she had trouble getting away. Jaxon would look back on that day as one of the happiest in her life. By the time she finally said good-bye in the late evening, she was exhausted but content. She’d found her place.

  The question of the well and the prophecy still troubled her, though, and she knew she had some tough times ahead.

  A couple of the Atlantean women offered to escort her back to the hotel. One young girl, up well past her bedtime, whined and pleaded until she was allowed to come too. She held Jaxon’s hand the whole way. Dimitri volunteered to come as well and offered to show Jaxon, Vivian, and Yamazaki around the manuscript library the next day.

  As they walked back to the hotel, Jaxon was half asleep. She had fallen silent, content in the warm feeling of community for the first time in her life. The moon had risen high in the sky, turning the adobe walls of Timbuktu the color of silver. The honking cars and motorcycles that had filled the streets in the daytime had disappeared, and all was quiet. Jaxon looked up at the moon and smiled. She’d finally found a place where she belonged.

  As Jaxon, her friends, and the Atlanteans walked down the street, laughing and talking, Isadore watched from the entrance to a nearby alley. She had disguised herself with a headscarf and large sunglasses, plus a loose robe that hid the weapons she carried underneath. She was careful to keep out of sight as much as possible. Vivian had a sharp eye and a suspicious nature, which was the only reason she had managed to live this long. It was the same way with Grunt. Isadore would have to get rid of them.

  But of more immediate interest was that young Russian Jaxon walked with. She’d heard that he’d been seen with some other Russians, whom her informant had told her “looked like soldiers.” She’d bet her last dollar they were the same men who’d broken into he
r room last night. Dimitri had been here a while, though, and the other Russians were new arrivals. Dimitri must be the local agent, who’d called in some backup when the KGB learned that Jaxon and her friends were headed here.

  So her suspicion had been correct. The Russians were after the secret of the Atlantean powers too. And then there was that roundup of Atlanteans in Mauritania she’d heard about. Nobody seemed to know who was behind that.

  This was turning out to be a lot bigger than some teenage girl searching for her roots. Big powers were at work, and they were focused right here in Timbuktu.

  Isadore watched Jaxon, who looked so happy and optimistic, nothing like the sullen kid who had shared her home for a brief time.

  “Smile while you can, Jaxon. You’re in a lot more danger than you think you are.”

  Isadore Grant slipped into the crowd and followed Jaxon from a safe distance. She’d play it cool for the time being, waiting for a chance to grab her and do away with her friends and any Russian who got in her way.

  Isadore was patient. It was good to be patient in this kind of work. She knew her chance would come.

  It always did, and she’d be ready.

  Continue the series with The Atlantis Guard, the most explosive book yet in The Atlantis Saga! Agent Isadore has competition. The Russians also want the Atlantis Allegiance. They seem to be searching for something more than the Atlantis gene that her boss had already injected into ordinary humans—to great success.

  Jaxon has secrets to protect, but a set of loose lips in the Atlantis Allegiance lands the team in a life-and-death gunfight in Timbuktu. More trouble comes their way in the form of twin assassins that even General Corbin and Agent Isadore fear. Read an excerpt of book 6 at the end of this book!

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  About the Author

  S.A. Beck lives in sunny California. When she’s not surfing, knitting or daydreaming in a hammock, she’s writing novels.