Katran studied the lenses a moment longer, then handed them back. “Is he marked?”
Carel shook his head. “There’s nothing on his neck.”
Unconscious of the gesture, she put her hand to her own neck, her fingers tracing the boxlike symbol imprinted in the flesh.
“Then maybe…”
Both cousins looked to her, waiting for her to go on, but she merely shook her head.
Erlar smiled, then looked back at the pot he was stiring. “He was talking in his sleep earlier…”
“Talking?” Katran stared at her cousin, her deeply green eyes intent.
“He was murmuring something about flowers.”
Her narrow mouth opened, the lips barely parting, then she turned her head, anxiously looking across to where the stranger lay on his back on the wooden bed.
There was a faint groan, a movement of the body. Katran half stood, then sat again. Carel, beside the body, reached down and, dipping the flannel in the bucket by his side, wrung it out, then began to wipe the stranger’s brow, as he’d done now many times. Yet even as he did, the youth’s hand came up and firmly held his wrist.
Carel swallowed nervously as the young man opened his eyes.
There was surprise in those pale yet clearly human eyes; fear and curiosity.
“Where am I?”
Carel made no attempt to free his hand. “You are on Riven. In the village.”
“Riven?”
“Yes, Riven,” Carel repeated, that one word sounding strange among the heavily accented D’ni words. “We found you in the pool. You were in a bad way. The water had got inside you.”
The young man’s eyes opened wide, suddenly remembering. “The pool…”
“Are you hungry?”
“Hungry?” The stranger nodded. “Famished!”
“Good…” Carel looked to his younger brother and gave a nod. At the signal, Erlar poured soup into a large wooden vessel and, after sprinkling a measure of dark powder into it, carried it across.
“Here,” Erlar said, holding it out, as Carel helped the young man sit up, placing two pillows behind his back, between him and the wooden headboard.
“Thank you,” the stranger said, taking the bowl. After sniffing it, he began to spoon it into his mouth, slowly at first, then with an appetite that made the brothers look to each other and smile.
“Would you like some more?” Erlar asked, taking the empty bowl back from him.
“Please.”
They watched, astonished, as he ate a second bowl and then a third. Then, drowsy once more, he effort, it seemed, too much for him, he slept again.
And all the while Katran sat there in the corner, her green eyes watching.
§
Atrus woke with a start, as if he’d fallen in his sleep, conscious of the unfamiliar yet not unpleasant smell of the shadowed place in which he found himself.
Turning onto his side, he stretched, then lay still, hearing voices from outside. He remembered now: the two young men who’d sat there while he ate, smiling kindly at him. He smiled himself at the thought. What had they called this place? Riven, that was it. Gehn’s Fifth Age.
He yawned, then lay still again, staring at the far wall. It was a simple mud and daub hut, not so dissimilar from those on the Thirty-seventh Age, but bigger, and with a finish to the walls that spoke of a high level of technical skill. And they had stoves, too—cast metal stoves on which they cooked. That spoke of complexities to this Age that Age Thirty-seven did not have. They would have to have a supply of metal, yes, and the skills to use it.
His eyes went to the stove, noting its simple, unadorned shape, so unlike all of the D’ni artifacts he was used to. Such simplicity appealed to him.
Idly, his eyes traveled upward, searching the shadows of the ceiling, curious to see what kind of structure this was, what materials they used here. So much of this, as ever, had not been in the descriptive book. Only the building blocks were there in Gehn’s Age Five book: the basic elements from which the complexities of such cultures developed. That thought fascinated him. It made him think of subtle ways he himself might have influenced the mix, what factors he personally would have built into the equation of this Age.
His eyes traveled down from the shadows, noting the simple squarecut window, the undecorated plainness of the whitewashed wall, then stopped, surprised to find the eyes of a young woman staring back at him.
Green eyes. Startlingly green eyes.
For a moment he simply stared, his lips slightly parted, taking in the strange, almost delicate beauty of her face; then, realizing what he was doing, he averted his eyes, suddenly, acutely embarrassed.
How long has she been there? he wondered. How long has she been watching me?
He heard her soft footsteps on the bare earth floor.
“You almost died,” she said. “what were you doing in the pool?”
Atrus turned to find her kneeling beside the bed, her face almost on a level with his own. He found that strangley disconcerting, as if she were some kind of threat to him. Unlike the young men who had nursed him, her face was tense, almost ill-humored.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
She blinked, then looked away, allowing Atrus the chance to study her. The others had been tanned, and so was she, but he noticed that the skin of her lower arms was strangely “banded”—pale and tanned—as if she had at some point placed strips of cloth about them to create that pattern. She was wearing a simple dark green dress. There were tiny white feathers braided into her hair and about her neck was a wide, embroidered choker, but his gaze kept returning to her eyes, which were deep and mysterious, so deep and dark…
“Where did you come from?” she asked, her face still turned from his.
“Another place,” he said, thinking that it could do no harm, but he could see that his answer didn’t satisfy her. There was a flash of irritation in her eyes.
Atrus sensed as much, as she stood and turned away from him. He risked a tiny glance. There was something tense about the way she stood there, he head slightly tilted forward, her hands up to her mouth.
She turned back, focusing those dark eyes on him once again. “What’s your name?”
“Atrus. What’s yours?”
“Katran.”
He nodded. “Catherine. That’s…”
“Ka-tran,” she said again, placing the emphasis on the final syllable. “I dreamed of you.”
“You dreamed…?”
Then, without another word, she turned and quickly left the hut, leaving the door wide open, the sunlight spilling in in a wide bar of gold that climbed the far wall.
Atrus lifted his head, staring at the doorway, wondering what all that had been about, then, swallowing, his throat strangely dry, he let his head fall back.
18
~~~~~~~~~~
Atrus sat cross-legged beside the shallow bowl, his eyes closed, his fist clenched tightly, counting.
“Atrus?”
He turned, looking up at her. “Yes, Catherine?”
There was a slight flicker of annoyance in her face at the mispronumciation of her name, but she had given up trying to correct him. “What are you doing?”
At the count of sixty he relaxed his hand, letting the fingers unfold. As he did, a small bubble of water, its surface fluid and feflective like a drop of mercury, floated up out of his palm.
Atrus looked to her. She had a slightly quizzical look on her face.
“Water shouldn’t do that when it gets warm.”
“No? Then what should water do?”
Atrus shrugged. “Well, it shouldn’t float and it shouldn’t give me a stomache ache.”
She laughed, then quickly grew serious again.
Atrus stared at her, surprised. It was the first time she had laughed since he had met her, and the change it made to her face was quite remarkable.
“I’ll get you some of the powder.”
“Powder?”
Catherine ga
ve a single nod. For a moment she simply stared, as if trying to fathom something about him, then, without even the slightest movement, she seemed to shrug and look away.
Her eyes were still on him, but she was no longer there. Not looking out at him, anyway. It was as if, briefly, she had gone into a trance.
Atrus reached out and picked up the brass cooking pot he had been examining earlier, pleased by its symmetry, by the way the double pans—top and bottom linked by four strong brass spindles—like all the cooking implements in Age Five, were designed to cope with water which, when heated, rose into the air. Everything here had special “catchment lids” and spouts with tiny valves which did not open unless you tilted the thing a certain way.
He looked to Catherine again, and saw she was still distracted.
“What are you thinking?”
She turned to face him. “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. You have those pale eyes and wear those strange eye instruments. What have you to do with Lord Gehn?”
“I am Atrus, his son.”
There was a brief look of triumph in her eyes. Then, as if she suddenly saw what it meant, she took a step backward. “So what do you want?”
He paused as he considered the question—sweeping away the cloud of Gehn and all he’d witnessed over the last few years.
What do I want?
“I want to go home,” he said softly.
“Home?”
“To the cleft.”
“The cleft?”
“It’s where I was born,” he said. “Where I grew up. It was just a crack, a hole in the earth surrounded by desert,” he added, thinking of what Gehn had said of it, “yet it was like…well, like paradise.”
“And your father lived there with you?”
Atrus shook his head, looking away has he answered her. “No. I didn’t know my father. Not until I was fourteen. I grew up with my grandmother, Anna. She fed me, clothed me, taught me. She gave me everything.”
Catherine stared at him intensely.
“And then your father came?”
Atrus nodded. Standing, he brushed himself down, then looked past her down the grassy slope. The village was in the crater behind him, just the other side of the slope—literally in the crater, the mud and daub huts fixed into the crater wall using great wooden stakes, like the rooms in the cleft had been.
He smiled, remembering. The first time he had seen it had almost been his last. Feigning sleep, he had let the elder of the two brothers, Carel, leave the hut, then had slipped out of bed, intending to go outside and look around. It had only been his natural caution that had stopped him falling into the bay fifty feet below.
It also explained why the sounds changed in the evening. He had thought that the sea came in to a beach close by the hut; he had not understood that it actually came in beneath the hut, let in through a tunnel inlet to the left of the cliffside village.
He turned, looking about him. To the left, no more than half a mile distant, lay the forest, its strange, golden-leaved trees dominating the view there, their massive branches flattened, as if under enormous pressure from the sky.
Directly south, on a raised promontory, was the copse in which the temple stood, while over to the right, clearly visible from wherever one stood on the island, was the tree.
Catherine stepped up beside him, her eyes on him all the while, almost as if she knew him. Her tone was different now…Steady.
“I had a dream of you.”
He turned to face her, recalling the first time she had said it to him, in the hut. “A dream?”
“Yes,” she said, slowly walking down the slope away from him, her green dress flowing about her, her bare feet seeming almost to float upon the grass. “I dreamed of a dead man floating in the pool, and now you’re here!”
§
“Well?” Gehn asked, sitting down in front of the young woman. “Has anything…unusual been happening?”
Katran looked up from the copybook and met her Master’s gaze, her own eyes innocent. “Nothing unusual.”
“Good,” he said, turning away, sucking deeply on his pipe. “Shall we pick up where we left off?”
The lesson went well, but then they always did. Katran was a good student—his best—and he never had to tell her anything more than once. Some of the other Guild members were good at copying, but none of them, with the exception of Katran, had begun to grasp the true meaning of the symbols they were copying. She, by contrast, had understood at once. And now, after only two years’ tuition, she was almost fluent. Almost, he thought, thinking of all the key words he had kept from her; certain garo-hertee words, without which it would be impossible to write. But soon he would begin to give her those keys. One by one. If she was good.
He had formulated his plan long before he had imprisoned Atrus. Furious with his son, but determined to fulfill his dream of a great D’ni resurgence, he had found himself wondering if it were not possible to go about things in a different manner. He still needed Atrus—there was no doubt of that, for such talent should not be squandered—yet it seemed impossible to work with him.
But did it have to be Atrus at his side? Wouldn’t another do just as well? Someone not quite as talented, perhaps—yet certainly more docile than his son? Someone he could control much easier than Atrus?
At once he had thought of Katran.
Gehn smiled and turned to face her, setting his pipe down on the desk. “There’s something I have to tell you, Katran. Something important.”
“Master?” She stared back at him, intent yet obedient, her eyes the eyes of the perfect acolyte, the perfect servant.
“I want you to prepare yourself. There is to be a wedding, you understand? Thirty days from now. I will give instructions to the other Build members as to the ceremony, but you must make special preparations.”
“You are to take a bride, Master?”
“Yes, Katran,” he said, looking at her fondly now. “You are to be my wife. You will sit at my right hand and rule a thousand worlds with me.”
“But Master,” she said, bowing her head, “I am not deserving of this honor.”
Gehn laughed softly, pleased by her humility. “Maybe not. But I have chosen you, Katran, and you will prepare yourself. Thirty days, you have. Thirty days…and then the ceremony will take place.”
§
Atrus had been looking for Catherine all over the main island, surprised that on one knew where she had gone. Then, suddenly, she was there again, standing among the trees at the edge of the forest.
He almost called to her, almost shouted out her name, yet something about the way she was standing there—distracted—made him stop and then double back into the wood, coming out behind her, one of the massive spongy boles hiding him from her sight.
In the mottled shade of the massive branches, he slender figure seemed unreal—a thing of earth and grass, the green of her cloak, the raven black of her hair blending with the surrounding shadows.
Even from where he was standing, Atrus could see that something had disturbed her. Her eyes, which were normally so bright and inquisitive, were now deep in thought, while her hands were clasped tightly in front of her.
What is it? he asked silently, feeling a natural sympathy for her.
Slowly, his feet carefully finding their way over the thick leaf cover between the trees, he moved toward her, until he stood less than a dozen feet away.
“Catherine?”
She did not turn, merely looked up.
“Catherine…are you all right?”
She nodded.
“Shall I walk you back to the village?”
“All right,” she said quietly, turning and walking beside him as they moved out from beneath the great overhand of branches into the sloping meadow.
§
Atrus found his linking book where he’d left it in the cliff face and linked back.
The chamber was as he’d left it, the Age Five book open on the desk, the ink pots and pen undisturbed.
Returning to the desk, Atrus settled in the chair, then drew the book toward him and began to read it, more carefully this time, seeing how each phrase, each small description, contributed to the totality of what he’d seen.
Now that he had been there, he understood just how good it really was. The Fifth Age of Gehn was quite remarkable. Yet there were clear flaws in the way the book had been put together, particularly in the structure of the writing. Elegant passages lay side by side on the page, each uniquely beautiful, yet disturbingly unrelated to each other. It was the trademark of his father’s style. The boldness of Gehn’s eclecticism—his drawing from such disparate sources—was indeed astonishing, close to brilliant.
Had Gehn built his Ages from structural principles, they might have been different, for it was possible that in so doing he might have reconciled the gaps. As it was, his method was piecemeal and the flaws that resulted quickly compounded into a complex network of interrelated faults—faults that could not be tackled by simple solutions.
Atrus turned the final page, nodding to himself as he read the last few entries—seeing there his father’s crude attempts to make small changes to the Age Five world, to stabilize its inherent faults.
“All wrong,” he said quietly, wishing he could just score out those final entries, but, remembering what had happened on the Thirty-seventh Age, fearing to do so. No, if he was to make changes, he would do so only with great care and after long and patient deliberation. One could not meddle with an Age. At least, not with an Age as complex as Gehn’s Fifth Age.
Riven, he thought. She called it Riven. And as he looked up, it was to find Catherine standing there, looking down at him, a large blue book clutched to her chest.
19
~~~~~~~~~~
Atrus stood there, staring at Catherine, stunned by her sudden appearance.
She quickly looked around her, then set the book down on the table. “I followed you,” she said, before he could speak. “Saw where you hid your Linking Book.”
The Myst Reader Page 22