TERRA HEXA
(Wela, 2004 (Swedish only)) - a novel by A.R.Yngve - Sample Chapters of the unpublished English version
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PART ONE:
The Great Journey
Chapter 1
Five years passed, and during that time Henna spent three years living as a student in Northtown. Now, in the year 233, her seventeenth birthday was about to take place...
"Just look at her," said Mick, peeking from behind a corner, as he watched Henna from a distance. She walked into the main auditorium of Northtown University. Mick smiled, and said, "She's living in a world of formulas and microscopes. So lost in science, she's barely aware that she's become a woman. So tall, so sleek, so pure. What a waste of dark-skinned beauty, that she never learned to sing and play - like me!"
His shorter foster-brother Rydel tapped him on the shoulder. This didn't scare Mick, because he knew that Rydel had followed him there.
Rydel muttered, "Mick, I don't like it when you talk that way about Henna. She's a good student and my friend."
Mick turned his head and grinned back at his shorter brother - they were so different from each other, and they knew it.
"I bet you'd like to kiss her, little brother - but you don't have much experience in that, right?" said Mick.
Rydel blushed, but he said nothing, and Mick had won - again. He was used to winning their arguments. Mick returned to watching Henna, and saw her slink in through the main entrance with the last of her classmates. Most of them were older than she - for Henna really was a very bright student, who lay ahead of everyone else her own age.
"Let's go hear that lecture with her," Mick said suddenly. "I keep hearing there's a lot of debates going on at the university now, and Henna's involved."
Rydel sneered.
"All they do is talk, talk," he said. "Talk is boring, that's why I chose to become an express rider and not a student like you."
"Henna's there..." Mick teased him, and immediately he strode away toward the entrance. With a grunt, Rydel walked after him - but he dragged his feet, so as not to show Mick how much he wanted to see Henna again.
Mick Azternaut had long brown hair which he used to wear tied back in a ponytail. He was seventeen and also a student, though he had gotten far behind with his studies. Mick's main interest in life was his guitar, which he carried on his back at all times. Whenever other students went out or had a party, Mick was called upon to entertain them with his song and music.
Rydel Azternaut was an apprentice in the Northtown stables for express riders, also called the Riding Academy. Once Rydel and his fellow apprentices had graduated, they would become responsible for carrying mail packages and letters all across the country - a highly respected profession.
Rydel cared much for his old training pony, and spent very little time reading or studying anything that didn't concern horse-keeping. He had short red hair, was strong for his age, but not tall at all. He wore his red, checkered express-rider jacket every day, and was proud of it. The years spent in the saddle had affected his way of walking - sometimes Mick teased him for it. Even so, they were brothers and stuck together, living in the same student quarters of Northtown.
***
The two brothers entered the main auditorium, a large brick hall with seats for over two hundred students. The hall was already packed with people, so Mick and Rydel had to find a seat on one of the large windowsills.
"There she is!" said Mick and waved, even though he knew Henna couldn't spot him through the crowd. "Hello-o! Henna!"
"No, Mick!" whispered Rydel, afraid to let Henna see him. "The teacher is here to start the lecture."
The teacher, a bearded, large man in a long green coat, marched in and all the students stood up in their seats. He waved at them to sit down, took his place at the speaker's podium, and gave the large audience a good, long look.
In a loud, a little dry voice, the teacher said, "Good morning. I can see that we have some police officers here today, who also want to listen to my lecture..."
He gestured toward the far corner of the hall, opposite the window where Mick and Rydel were sitting, and the two hundred students all looked that way. In the corner stood no less than five sweaty-faced policemen in black leather uniforms, gloves, and boots. Each of the men was holding a club. The students became very quiet.
"Now don't be afraid," the teacher said to them, loudly enough for even the policemen to hear, "that our police friends won't hear me speak. I shall in fact be louder than usual, and say every thing I intended to say! It's a bit warm in here, with all these people... so I suggest you take off your leather uniforms, if you happen to be wearing any."
All the two hundred students laughed at his joke - while the faces of the five silent policemen went deep red and white with anger. The teacher waited for the laughter to die down before he went on. Everyone including Henna, Mick, and Rydel listened closely.
"Today's subject is geography. As I told you during my last lecture, there's a long-standing debate going on here in Northtown right now, about the nature of our world. How old is it? Was mankind created here? What lies beyond the known parts of Terra Hexa? And so on. Even the government has taken an interest in this question, as our police visitors can testify."
Everyone in the room, even the police, listened.
***
"In the last few years," the teacher explained, "the university has sent secret expeditions toward the unknown lands in the south - in order to learn what lies beyond the haze that not even our largest telescopes can see through. Only one of these expeditions has returned, the last one, and that was just weeks ago. Those who returned are now recovering in a secret location.
"You see, something out there drove the expedition mad. The members of the expedition haven't been able to tell us exactly what happened to them. They could only write down fragments of what they went through, and now I shall reveal these fragments to you…"
Mick and Rydel leaned forward to hear better; Henna was so curious, her mouth hung open without her noticing it. The teacher looked quite grave. He pulled down a very large, rolled-up map of Terra Hexa from the ceiling. Everyone recognized it; it was the common school-map of the known world. The map showed Northtown in the very middle, with its one hundred thousand citizens, and Central Lake next to it. Square in the center of Northtown on the map was a red point, named NORTH POLE.
From Central Lake, several winding rivers wormed their way outward in all directions, past several smaller towns and lakes, until they reached the uninhabited wilderness - which stretched out for several hundred kilometers in every direction. The territory beyond that was named THE OUTLANDS, where all rivers ended. The Outlands lay in a wide circle around the wilderness. The ETERNAL MISTS covered the edges of the Outlands. As the map continued outward, it turned blank - there was nothing there, or rather the map was incomplete.
The blank space surrounding the Outlands was named with one big word: UNKNOWN.
The teacher took a brief pause and allowed for the students to take notes. Then he picked up a piece of coal from his pocket, and did something that surprised them. He reached up with his arm, and drew a long, black smudge line right across the map. The line went from the North Pole, over Central Lake, out alongside a wide river, and then continued into the Outlands.
"This line roughly shows the path which the last expedition took - mark my words, I'm not giving away which river they chose. They sailed almost one thousand kilometers southward, then used pack-mules to get across the foothills and mountains of the Outlands.
"We know that they crossed this wide, desolate area, which they gave a name: 'The Mad Desert.'"
The teacher drew an "X" on the map, right where the black line ended: in the white space between OUTLANDS and UNKNOWN.
He pointed at the "X", and exclaimed loudly, "Here! In the eternal mists of the Outlands, the expedition went lost. They could no longer tell which way they were going. The weather became strange. Snowstorms and warm rains after one another, changing every few minutes. The survivors told us that in the eternal mists they grew more and more confused. Even before the explorers entered the mists, they had been suffering attacks of nausea and disorientation.
"The temperature here dropped to almost fifty degrees below zero, but could suddenly rise to twenty degrees plus for several minutes, then back to fifty below. The air itself became very difficult to breathe; at several occasions, members of the group fainted. They also experienced brief, but vivid hallucinations.
"Eventually, the explorers were overcome with terror and turned back - but the strange weather had erased their tracks and the thick, never-ending mist made it impossible to see the sun - so they spent several days trying to find their way back to the wilderness. By that time, their food and water were running out, their mules were lost and only three members of the expedition made it the way back to the river, here."
He pointed at a position along the route.
"But that far south, even if they had set sails, the river current was far too strong to be safely conquered. So they were forced to abandon their boat and continue back north on foot. After having followed the track of the river, spending many days in the wilderness, the three were found by backwoods hunters and taken to Northtown. The third survivor died during that final part of the journey. And toward the end he went completely mad, babbling about strange lights and ghost-images he had seen in the eternal mists."
***
The teacher was quiet for a minute. Then he added, "This last expedition was not, however, a complete failure. In the eternal mists, the expedition found something that proves there is an undiscovered land beyond the horizon: this!"
He held up small box with a glass lid, and Henna had to squint hard to see anything at all in it. She could only make out a small tree-branch, or rather a twig, with a shriveled blackened lump at one end.
"This piece of a twig was found in the cold mists south of the Outlands where nothing grows, not even grass. Our botanists have examined the twig and the dried fruit on it. Nothing like grows anywhere in the known territories. So the winds must have carried this twig northward, from some unknown region south of the Outlands - a new, fertile territory, waiting to be discovered by our next expedition!"
The two hundred students gasped and began to talk among each other. The policemen seemed upset and clutched their clubs harder, but they remained standing in the back of the room.
Suddenly, an older student stood up and shouted angrily to the teacher, "Liar! That twig is a fake! There is nothing beyond the Outlands!! Terra Hexa is a flat disc, not a sphere!"
Another student immediately stood up and yelled back at him, "You're wrong! The world is a sphere!"
"Disc!"
"Sphere!"
"DISC!"
"SPHERE!"
Before the two quarreling students could start a fight, the others grabbed them and held them back; they feared the police would move in and make arrests. And indeed, the police were preparing to strike.
The teacher exclaimed, "Quiet! Be calm!" and managed to settle the students down enough to get heard. "As you can all hear, the argument over the shape of the world has not ended because of this one tiny twig. Therefore, the university shall finance a new expedition as soon as possible, with better equipment to be prepared for what they will face out there. One of the survivors of the last expedition is to lead the new one - his name is Ingo Maaterschiff."
Henna gasped a "What?" and stood bolt upright in pure amazement. Not only had the last expedition been secret to her - no one had told her that Uncle Ingo was in it.
The teacher said, "This time, the expedition is not going to be a secret. The university is also going to accept volunteers from outside the faculty."
Without thinking, Henna raised her arm and shouted, "I volunteer!"
The other students stared at her in shock and surprise for a second - then a few of them started to laugh. Rydel saw how Henna began to look embarrassed, and could not stand watching her be humiliated.
He rushed closer to the speaker's podium, raised his arm and called out, "Me too!"
The laughter ended. Henna turned and stared at Rydel, and their eyes met. Both of them smiled, and Rydel could feel his heart make a little jump in his chest.
Then, to the surprise of both Rydel and Henna, Mick lifted his guitar up above his head and shouted, "And you can count me in too!"
The other students began to cheer and applaud the three volunteers. The teacher wrote down their names on a list, and ended the lecture. The police squad remained standing, as the students moved out of the hall.
***
As the three young volunteers came out on the steps outside the building, a crowd gathered around them. Henna was too shy in a crowd to say anything, and Rydel was too shy in the presence of Henna to say very much.
But Mick loved the attention and puffed himself up for the crowd.
"You'll see," he told the students loudly, "when we return from the new territory, you'll see that the world isn't flat - except in the flat heads of some idiots!"
Several students laughed and tossed paper into the air.
"But it's so dangerous," said one female student, looking at Mick with worshipful eyes. "You're the bravest boy I ever met."
Mick made a grin wide enough to show all his teeth, and replied with fake modesty, "Henna here, she's the bravest girl I know... and I'm the bravest man! We must celebrate our new expedition, this dusk - at the old tavern! Who's coming with me, I mean with us?"
Several students promised to join the celebration, but Henna began hesitate and tried to slink away from the crowd. In spite of being a bright student, tall and beautiful, her old shyness was still controlling her. Mick and Rydel both stepped in her way.
"Come along, Henna," Mick begged her. "You started this... and besides, we have a surprise for you. Please come to the old student tavern at dusk."
She tried to look away from Mick and Rydel's beckoning faces, but she couldn't.
"I don't know, Rydel," she said. "I really should be sleeping and reading instead."
"You spend all your time doing that," Mick remarked. "Just for once, come and see how much I... we like you. Okay?"
She looked down at her long skirt, then raised her chin and gave them a shy smile.
"Okay, I'll be there."
"Eight o'clock sharp. And don't bring any books with you, this is no reading-session!" Mick shouted after her.
When Henna had gone, Rydel shook Mick's hand.
"Thanks for standing by me, brother," said Rydel. "But I don't expect you to really come along on this expedition... you were joking when you volunteered, didn't you?"
"What, and let you have Henna all for yourself? I have to come along, to protect you from her!" Mick teased him. They began to throw paper at each other, and Rydel chased him off the courtyard - both of them laughing like children.
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