Man from Atlantis

by Patrick Duffy

  On another stand were small things Mark recognized. Things he had worn as a baby or items he had found and given to his father as gifts. Each one lay with great care and respect in its special place, and Mark knew each had held a special place in his father’s heart. The small star shaped barnacle was treated with the same reverence as the two gold coins he had discovered on a trip to the ruins with Roi-Den. He found the presence of his father everywhere and he expected to see him around the corner and welcome him home. But he knew that was not to be.

  He stepped farther into the chamber and walked to the dais. The white cloth of the sleeping garment seemed to float above rather than rest upon the carved coral table. The over layers of the body tapered to the sleeves and ended at the large folded cuffs at each side. Looking down as it resting there, he proudly remembered how grand his father had been. A true king. Not just by his muscular frame and handsome features but also by the grandness of his heart, his compassion, and humanity. How could, he wondered, such a positive force be stricken from the inside and die? If he had been in the city, even with his limited abilities, maybe he could have detected the problem and the king would be alive. Still the king should have felt his own illness. Mark had always had the ability to detect the condition of everything within himself; the only explanation was that his father had known there was a problem but had chosen to keep it a secret from the queen and the city. But that theory did not hold up after all he had learned from To-Bay and the king’s concern for everyone in the Dome. Mark realized all knowledge had its limitations and, if the puzzle was never answered, the future always lay in wait with its surprises. What this unfortunate piece of the past had done was put the future in motion. He knew he must create what good he could from it.

  It was some time before he could bring himself to touch the fabric, but he found it comforted him to rest his hand on it. He sat on the bench at its side and gazed at the very thing he would put on the next day to continue the royal line as king of the city. He lifted the sleeve in his fingers and watched the light dance off the silk-like threads. Then, like a small voice from a distance or the way one perceives the light through their lids before waking, something on the sleeve above the cuff called his attention. In the light, it looked as if it could be a shadow or a gathering in the threads, but he knew it was not. He turned fully to the dais, picked up the sleeve, and held it to the light. A spot. Barely visible to the eye. But when he turned the fabric it was definitely a spot!

  Why a simple spot, one that could not normally be noticed, would grab his attention so fully and seem so important he did not know. But it did! He very carefully reached his hand inside the cuff and inverted the entire sleeve. There, plainly visible and about ten inches up from the top of the cuff, was the spot. Much darker on the inside. The instant he touched it, he knew exactly what it was. Blood! His mind was racing. Blood! The king’s blood! So many things said it could not be so. Blood would not have escaped his father’s body. It could not! The skin would have closed before. He had lain with the queen that night. He had kissed her in the middle of the night. In the morning, he was dead. Where had the wound come from? More than at any time in his life, Mark focused his mind. He now had to think inside everything that had happened to him since fighting with the two men by the pool several days ago. So far, it was just information, but these events and, perhaps more that he did not know yet, had a sequence. Everything started to form a path he now followed, but the destination was still unknown. He must not let the calm welcome of the city mask the danger it posed for him.

  Mark left the king’s chamber a short while later. The door closed to its solid form as he passed through, and he knew the light in the room behind him was dimming as he stepped away. As he approached the door to his room, he could hear his friend from the other side of the house.

  “Ja-Lil, Ja-Lil.”

  Mark continued on and turned as he heard the footsteps round the corner.

  “Ja-L…” Roi-Den stopped motionless in the doorway, his mouth half open with half of Mark’s name still in it. “You are old.”

  “Der,” Mark completed the word, and saved his friend from embarrassment. “Older? Yes, I am older.”

  “I knew the effects of staying on the surface and mother had said it had affected you, but…”

  “Roi-Den, it is like the waves on the surface. Underneath nothing has changed. You and I are still the same.”

  “Ha! We were never the same!” Roi-Den crossed the room in two jumps, grabbed Mark, and swung him around laughing. “You were always bigger and stronger. And you could swim faster. Just like your father.”

  Mention of the king stopped Roi-Den, and he released Mark.

  “I am sorry you were not here when your father’s life ended, my friend.”

  “Thank you, but soon we will unite through the Nari-Tanta and all will go on as before. As for you, welcome back from your first tour.”

  “My second!” The young man’s exuberance made Mark smile as he watched his energy carry him in a circle around the room. “I volunteered for this second one right away. I thought maybe I would come upon a sign of you in the southern waters. Ja-Lil, the ocean is so beautiful in the deep waters! Have you seen it there?”

  “Yes, I have been to the southernmost depths with my father.” Mark had to speak quickly to respond before his friend went on.

  “I want to go next to follow the warm river to the north, all the way to see the ice there! Father went there with the king on their very first tour.” Roi-Den seemed to conceive of a plan in mid-sentence. “We could do that! We could go together.”

  Now the plan, as he was designing it, hit a small obstacle. “Could you do that now, Ja-Lil? I mean now that you will be king, could you leave the city and take a tour? Who would be…”

  “Roi-Den, I have no idea what will be from one moment to the next right now.” For the first time with Roi-Den, Mark started to feel more than the superficial effects of age. He felt the weight of each decision. He had to envision the consequences of every action he would take from now on. The pyramid of responsibility in the city ended with him. This was like the shared responsibility with Elizabeth when he was at the lab or working with his friends on land. It had seemed natural for him there, but now he knew it was more than just the time he had been away that separated him from this good young friend. “We will have to wait and see.”

  “Of course.” His cousin took but a second to find the next perfect plan. “Let us go now! Not for a tour, of course, but just out.” It was full speed ahead. “We could just leave the city now and take the day and go to all the places we used to explore when you were young! I mean we…when we were young.”

  “Roi-Den, we will have time, much time. But I have already made a plan to go out today.”

  “I will go with you.”

  “I am going with Tei-La. And if you would like, please come with us.”

  “Roi-Den.” The sound of a third voice stopped their conversation. Tei-La was standing at the door, and neither of them had heard her enter nor knew how long she had been there. “I will have little enough time alone with Ja-Lil when he becomes king so I am going to claim this day for just the two of us.”

  Mark was only slightly surprised when he viewed the two of them as an outsider. She embraced his friend warmly as she spoke, and as they separated and held each other by the hand, she said, “Welcome again to the city. I am glad you are back safely.”

  Roi-Den planted an energetic kiss on her cheek and backed out of the room, raising his hand in a wave to the two of them. “I have to report to my father about my tour anyway. Have fun with each other. I mean enjoy your… uh… bye.” Then he was gone.

  Mark stepped closer, and she reached for his face and pulled it to her lips. He loved the fresh smell of her skin and the soft aroma of her hair. His arms reached around her thin waist, and he felt the firmness of her body along his. His mind could not stay
on his feelings for her and was constantly shifting to tomorrow and to his father. He knew the water would clear his thoughts, and he wanted to be out there. He wanted to be out there with her.

  They walked across the city to the gowning room holding hands. A few of the citizens followed them with their gaze, smiling a little. His return to the city comforted them. They knew he would now be there for them and that nothing had changed between him and the queen to be.

  They entered the room, just as two young men of the city were leaving on their tour. Mark did not now know where they were assigned. That responsibility was Man-Den’s since the king had died and, starting tomorrow, it would be his. In fact, all decisions concerning the city and its people would fall to him. From tomorrow into the future, whatever definition that future would take. The two men nodded at Mark and touched their right thumbs to their foreheads before turning, placing both hands on the wall of the room, and then passing through and into the sea. They would be gone for several months, covering assigned areas of the seas and oceans before returning and logging in their observations for the convergence.

  Tei-La crossed to the wall of gowns that hung over the bench and pulled off her garment and hung it with the others. She was strong. The definition of her muscles told him she had not slackened in her schedule of swimming and working with the others. Even when they were younger, it was she who would almost drag Mark to this room, and then out when he would have rather stayed in the Dome. Her legs, arms, and back were well formed, and through the light swimming garment, Mark could tell her stomach and chest were hard. Hanging his own garment next to hers, he stepped to the wall and, with outstretched arms, they passed to the outside.

  He had missed that feeling. The weightlessness of the water, the comforting pressure it exerted on him, and the real feeling of drawing in strength with each lungful of liquid. They both held there just outside the wall. They were only a few feet away from it, but already it was vague in its outline and transparent in substance. It was very dark, and they left the lit inner Dome. Their eyes adjusted instantly, and they could see the beauty of the open sea. Tei-La slowly circled Mark, her hair flowing like dark ribbons behind her. The suit she wore moved in the water like the delicate fins of the lionfish. It trailed behind her, while in front it outlined the curves of her breasts and hips and highlighted the muscles of her stomach.

  She swam a complete lazy circle and faced him once again.

  “Where shall we go?” What was so beautiful in her voice when she spoke in the Dome or on the surface was made even more so when her mind spoke directly to Mark’s.

  “Ja-Lil,” she smiled, “you look like you’re in a trance. Where would you like to travel?”

  “It is good that you can only listen to my words and not my thoughts.” Now he was smiling too. “I think I could make the color come to your face and you would swim away without me.”

  “Never, my love. Losing you once was enough.” She now started to swim backwards away from him. “Come, let’s go to the ruins where you asked me to wed.”

  With a languid rotation, she turned and slowly made her way towards the low mountain range to the north. Mark came along side her, and together they made the climb up the foothills and closer to the surface.

  Soon the plants became lusher with access to the sunlight. They crossed onto a plateau after a few hours and soon were at the entrance to the kelp forest. At first, they stayed at the level of the sand and rocks at the bottom. The bases of the kelp trees were bare there, and the beauty of the giant tritons, Spanish dancers, and hundreds of other types of sea life were highlighted by the faint shafts of light that penetrated from above. Weaving their way through the forest, they would constantly stop to watch when a butterfly or spotted eagle ray rose from the sand at their approach. As with most life in the sea, these creatures would detect no threat from the couple and settle to the bottom again under a fine covering of sand. In many cases, these rays or the moonfish and eels would turn and come to them, and for minutes they would swim together touching and exchanging information.

  Mark had always had a heightened sense of communication with most creatures of the sea. All the citizens lived easily with the life in the open water, but Mark noticed early on that all the beings in the ocean reacted to him and his father differently. They would come to him if he made his wishes known. On many occasions, as a boy, he would impress Tei-La by having one of them take a trinket or even just a sea flower to her and place it in her lap. On trips or tours with his father, he had seen the same reaction but to a greater degree with the king. Perhaps that too was in the blood. All these things, he had never given thought to before.

  “Look, Ja-Lil, there is the road.” Tei-La had stopped at the thinning edge of the forest and was pointing up to the side of a small rise. The tracks were still there as he remembered. They seemed to start from nowhere. The ruts, made by who knew what, were deep in the surface of the hill; they started at the jagged edge of the rock cliff and had been formed ages ago by an earthquake of great magnitude. Far below, he could see the faint outline of the road extending for a few yards then disappearing under the sand and debris.

  They swam over the chasm and met the tracks at the edge. Following them, they knew of the approaching ruins by the series of carved stones that sat to the side of the road at regular intervals. The carvings on them were still discernible, although the lettering and symbols were strange and unreadable. They came to a halt when they were at the outer gate that lay in rubble some two hundred yards from the city. Tei-La swam next to Mark and stopped with her arm around his waist.

  “It’s so beautiful. It is still my favorite place in all the sea.”

  He felt it too. From here, they could see what it once was. It sat on the small hill well situated, he thought, for beauty and defense. It had a command of the sea in all directions. The details in the buildings and walls that remained standing spoke of people who were artists and master craftsmen. The sea life that had taken residence over the centuries only served to heighten the old ghost’s beauty.

  Together they moved down the main roadway and into the center of the city. The large well and fountain in the square was now the meeting place of baler shells and hermit crabs, and the coral mounds seemed to fit naturally in the beds around it. Mantis shrimp and other small creatures of the sand darted away as they came to the low carved base of the well.

  They sat and looked out at the submerged countryside over the tops of partial walls and through windows open to everything.

  “You can feel them, can you not?” Ja-Lil asked. She was so much like him in her heart that he knew what her answer would be.

  “Yes.” She sat there as though she were listening to the sounds of a town full of life. “Yes, I can. The children are here in the streets, playing in the fountain. There,” she said, pointing to the listing side of the building, “a mother calls to them from the upper window. The men are arriving from the fields with their tools for a cool drink, and their women will bring them food. It makes me sad to think that it was all here, so full, so alive. Then so quickly it was gone.”

  “They built all this to be enjoyed and to protect them. Their only danger came from the earth itself. Their gift is still here and perhaps then so are they.”

  “Did your father tell you anything of this place?”

  “Only that its end came long before Poi-Den moved the city here.”

  “I hope,” Tei-La rose off the stone slab, pulling Mark up after her, “that our children and our children’s children come here often. To where the great king of the city, their father, asked the queen to marry him!”

  Mark watched her as she floated in the mild current. The feeling in his chest was almost as if his heart was expanding. So many reasons he loved her. Her compassion for the past and her determination for the present and the future were only a part. He swam a small arc to admire her from several angles. Her eyes followed his rout
e and, just before her widening smile told him she was about to ask what he was thinking, he grabbed her hand.

  “Come.” He led her off to search through the familiar sections of the ruins.

  At the rearmost edge of the city, they looked over the crumbling outer wall to a gently sloping hill that stretched out to the south beyond vision. The once deep-water channels were almost filled in with sand but still visible.

  All traces of the crops that had occupied the fields had long since vanished. Only the stone walls that separated one field from another remained. The rays that filtered down from the surface were deepening in their angle. The color, which increased its yellow tint, seemed to gild the edges of the plants and creatures that inhabited the slope.

  “Soon the sun will be gone, and I have much to do tomorrow.” Mark turned off in the direction of the Domed city. “Let us return.”

  Tei-La had just lifted up off the pile of large fallen blocks and was about to join him when a sudden increase in the activity of the sea creatures on the hill caused her to stop.

  “Wait! What is that?”

  Mark stopped and followed her pointing finger to the crest of the southernmost part of the slope. What looked to be a large shadow loomed just above the horizon and seemed to grow as they watched. Suddenly, it more than doubled in size and in another moment, Mark recognized the blurred outline of two whales. The closest he knew to be a black right whale. Now with the return of so much of his memory, it seemed a little strange for him to put names on all these lives that he had always shared the water with. Over the years, people of the city learned the general title used on the surface for many of the creatures. They had come to call some dolphins, squid, jellyfish, or plankton. Most had learned to identify urchins, sponges, stars, and giant floating kelp. He had now, however, spent years with his friends at the lab on the surface, learning the official names they had given to thousands of fish, plants, and mammals.