The Time of the Titans

Chapter 21: The Captain's Cap

Ferdinand left me in the library and floated away in his black cloak towards the corridor that led to the hall. The two boys lying on two sofas and reading books seemed not to pay any attention on me.

"Hello", I greeted them politely anyway. "I'm Mikael."

One of them didn't raise his eyes from the book. The other one glanced at me with his bright eyes as if he wondered what I wanted. "Everyone here knows who you are", he said, and returned to his book.

They didn't seem particularly sociable, so I wandered through the library, sunken in my thoughts, eyeing on the rows of books. I stopped at one book, which I somehow felt was calling me from the row, and I picked it in my hand. There were small black-and-white pictures among the text. Tove Jansson, The Magician's Hat. The covers did not appear the same as I recalled, so this had to be a different edition – but otherwise it was the same book that Helena had kept on her bedside table in our university town.

While I was still in Lemuria, thinking about Helena had brought me only warm, pleasant sensations. They were still there. However, they were now accompanied by something else, more complicated. I could not explain it. Perhaps it was related to Mary and the fact that she was missing, somewhere out there, maybe a prisoner of red monkeys. Or perhaps it was related to my dreams. It might be best if I waited until the feeling would explain itself. Everything that had been in my past life now seemed to be immensely far away, in a realm of dreams. Even what had been in Atlantis seemed to be getting wrapped in the mist of oblivion.

Still absorbed in thoughts, I ended up behind the stairs that led to the upper floors, and there I found a door that I, somehow pre-consciously, knew would be there. I cast a secret glance back to the library where there was no movement. The back of a sofa hid the closer-by boy from my sight and the corner of the bookshelves the other. In my subconscious, I still didn't feel entirely free, but I reminded myself I would never be, if I kept apologizing for my existence.

Therefore, I opened the door, which was unlocked, and suddenly I was out in the garden. The weather was still pleasant. Sun was shining somewhere beyond the foliage of the large trees. I set up walking a path that meandered around the large trunks of trees as if to respect them. Dried leaves and pieces of bark rattled under the sandals I had got instead of the shoes that had been taken from me. It occurred to me that if I wanted to leave the Base and continue my long journey, I would need to get back my own shoes. Now I resembled an Orthodox monk in my brown gown and beard.

I passed apple and orange trees, which looked like they had surely been planted here earlier than three years ago. The boys were not the first inhabitants of the Base, but who had been? Had the Grand Master and the White Lady originally come from Atlantis, or had they always been here? Who had they been anyway? A part of an earlier experiment, run here by the titans and later abandoned? Like I remembered from my own dreams and like Ferdinand had told, the White Lady had been involved in the uprising, but Max, on the other hand, had told that the Grand Master had been on the island when they arrived. He'd said they'd found him here all alone.

Why the Grand Master and the White Lady had left the island and abandoned the underage boys to survive on their own here? Had something happened? Had something changed?

The forest was green and pleasant. Sometimes there was flapping of wings high up in the trees when invisible birds were scared by the walker down under, fleeing or changing tree. Screwing my eyes, I looked up to the sun-spotted canopy, and assumed they were pigeons.

I arrived at the stone wall, which apparently run around the entire perimeter of the Base. Building it had taken a long time, too, and judging from the moss and the tufts of grass sticking out of its holes, it had been in place for much longer than three years. I followed the wall until I came to a place where a small treehouse had been built in a thick-trunked tree. The tree could have been an oak or a maple except that it was neither – I did not recognize the species.