The Time of the Titans

Chapter 6: The School on Waves

In my dream, the white priestess stood in a beam of bright sunlight under the golden domes of the Temple of Stendar. Her attractive voice fulminated upon the worshipping faces of numerous teenage boys. Dressed in an elegant silky white dress and cloak, the priestess was standing on an ornamented pedestal. She was gorgeous to look at, however fearsome some of the words she was thundering in trombone tone. Her young disciples were scattered around – some kneeling, others standing defiantly behind their mistress, as if to guard her. The boys were all dressed in loose-fitting white shirts and tighter dark trousers, like school uniforms. The entire setting had an air of a painting – even her graceful hand was raised in a somewhat affected pose. In the dream, I did not understand the alien language she spoke. Yet I somehow knew the words were of immense importance, and scary too.

Then came the horrible cracking sounds of the rupture. Glass scattered, girls screamed, and the hands of the boys reached for me to pull me to cover. I resisted my well-meaning helpers as I tried to rush for the rescue of the shining lady. She was now singing, in a noble but fervent frenzy. People running for their lives covered her from my view, and her voice was drowned in the rumble of canvases and curtains falling down from the dome, and in the howling sound that was quickly rising somewhere outside. Smoke and chaos burst in through the collapsing roof. The tentacles of the machines resembling crabs or spiders started reaching here and there, as their fiery red eyes cut stripes of light in the dusty air. We knew our world was collapsing and everything would be lost.

*   *   *

I woke from the dreadful dream sweaty and shocked, as the scene was not from my own memories. I had recognized the place. It was the central sanctuary of Atlantis, where I had so far visited only once – during the sightseeing tour they had arranged for me and the other recent arrivals soon after I had come to the City on Waves. During the tour everything had seemed most serene and peaceful. In the Temple of Stendar, there had been no signs of the apocalyptic events of my nightmare. No bellowing lady – just an angelic choir of little girls and boys, praising the forces of balance between the sea and sun. May the winds be gentle, and may the storms pass by without causing too much hardship and damage to the floating paradise.

Yet the Temple of my dream had not collapsed by storm wind. Something had burst in – mechanical machines that stretched their crustacean limbs and beamed from their glowing red eyes.

I pushed the nightmare out of my mind. I was in my quarters and it was morning. Another beautiful dawn in this benign world that greeted me with the rays of sun shining upon me through my sea-view windows. In my early days in Atlantis, I often woke early, staring for long times at the empty sea before I showered, dressed up, and walked to the school to teach. I was yet to experience even the first of my storms on the Sinean Sea.

The school was close to my quarters and I had learned in my first evenings already that all the teachers were accommodated in the same house. That made it easy for us to call on each other, go for walks in the city, and sit together in one of our apartments or in the social rooms that were shared by the lodgers. The support staff working on the infrastructure, such as the cheerful engineers Benson and Singh, were also within quick reach. Benson fixed my connection to the encyclopaedia I had learned to use while in Lemuria.

Before and between classes, the teachers gathered in the airy and ultramodern space of the senior common room. The head teacher Ms Primrose had a separate office along with a manatee-looking Hemul named Mabula, who usually glared at us grimly through the window of their gravity-conditioned cell. Hemul Mabula was to be approached with caution since their role here was that of a supervisor, who reported on us teachers directly to Hemul Fellula. Like all titans, they were psychic.