Read an Excerpt
THE BOOK OF MINAB
By Betty T. Kyler
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Betty T. Kyler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-1684-6
Chapter One
Dr. Keets checked over the equipment and the other supplies as they were loaded onto the plane. It was to be a two-week expedition to the North Pole. They would land in northern Canada. From there, they would head 'true north' to the pole. Breena Keets had begged her father for months to allow her to go. She had worked hard during the last few semesters of school and with her private tutoring and extra studies she would be entering university this fall to major in social psychology. Her father was proud of her. She was only three weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday but she had matured beyond her years. She had every part of her life planned out. She would major in psychology and minor in geology. Her minor would be easy sailing. Her father and brother were both geologists and sociologist. Dr. Keets was a professor at the university Breena would be attending. Breena lived geology every day of her life. She knew about societies in deepest, darkest Africa that others never even heard of. Her knowledge of the history of various civilizations was better than that of her own genealogy. She had studied earthquakes and had been to the mountains of Turkey and India. She had even been to Kilimanjaro. Breena loved the different characteristics in the human race. They were as varied as fish in the sea.
Breena's family consisted of her father, Alexander Keets, her mother Karen, who was full-time homemaker, Jonathan, who was her older brother and her father's colleague, and herself. Although Breena's IQ was higher than most people her age, she enjoyed the same activities others did in school. She was a track star and could play the piano very well. To look at her you would think she was just another dizzy teenage cheerleader. She had blond hair like everyone else in her family but she inherited her distinct pale blue eyes solely from her father. Her frame was deceiving. It looked delicate but Breena was strong for her size and had endurance that wouldn't quit.
"Breena, did you pack extra underwear?" Her mother was always worried she'd forget something.
Breena mouthed that she took the underwear she ordered from the sexy catalogue her brother used when he bought things for his wife. Her father laughed. She had a wonderful relationship with her father. They talked for hours about everything, like friends instead of daughter and father. She didn't get along well with her mother though. She was a stay at home mom, at Dr. Keets request, but Breena thought she was way too passive and missed out on the real thrills of life. Breena thought it was exciting to barter in the streets of Hong Kong and to debate women's issues with men from Asia. To her, her mother was dutiful and unrealistic. Breena's plan was that after she had earned her master's degree in social psychology and had gone into research, she would then marry. Maybe by the time she was thirty, she would take a year off and have a child. Until then, she would take men for what they were - good associates, information sources, and great surfing buddies.
"Alex, I really don't feel good about Breena going this time. Maybe you should reconsider. You know she hates the cold."
Breena groaned. Her mother was going to ruin everything. Breena had spent too many hours changing her father's mind so she could go. He wanted her to take the extra studies needed to get a head start on the fall's university semester. Her mother wanted her to visit her grandparents in Montana. The last thing Breena wanted was to be on some remote farm feeding cows and chickens.
"She'll be fine, Karen. Breena is a hardy little trooper. She's been to Kilimanjaro. This will be a picnic. We're spending most of the time in the airplane."
Breena's mom hugged and kissed everyone, then cried as they stepped into the plane. Breena gave her a casual wave and turned her attentions to her father who was sitting beside her.
"Thank you so much for not giving into Mom's worries. I thought maybe next year we could go to China." Breena liked to watch the ground as the plane took off.
"Why China?"
"I was doing some research and found out there is a small culture in north-east China where the women are great matriarchs. I could do a thesis on them."
Dr. Keets nodded. He'd do just about anything to make his daughter happy.
They landed in Edmonton, Alberta, refueled and headed on to the Queen Elizabeth Islands. Once they landed at a refueling station there, they readied themselves for the final leg of their journey. It was summer and they were truly heading for the land of the midnight sun. It would stay light all twenty-four hours of the day for six months, and then the opposite would be true, because of the angle of the earth towards the sun. Breena wondered what it would be like if they lived in a land that had sun, or darkness, for six months of the year, like that. Her goal in life was to search the world for some place with a completely different culture, one that books could be written about and modern society could not touch. Her father told her one did not exist anymore and even if it did, she could never survive in it. One word, he would joke, against the abilities of women compared to men and they would have a war on their hands. He would tell Breena she was a man's dream of a woman's-libber. She was for equality yet there was nothing she loved more than men. Breena would giggle and agree. After all, she would say, what would the world be without men?
Dr. Keets' expedition to the pole wasn't a new thing or even a big deal. It had all been mapped out before, but Dr. Keets' childhood hero was Robert E. Peary, who was the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. Dr. Keets had won a bet with Max Jared, who owned an Arctic supply company. He won the privilege of flying to the pole.
As they approached the position where their compasses would go haywire, because of the magnetic forces, they switched to the use of their altimeter to help them fly at a correct altitude and then they headed for true north.
Max Jared kept moving back and forth from the cockpit to his seat beside Dr. Keets. He seemed agitated and worried. A terrible storm had just suddenly appeared. It was the likes of one, Jared had never seen before. All the instruments on the control panel were going crazy and the turbulence was tossing the little plane about as if it was on a trampoline. Max Jared finally took his seat and told everyone to buckle up their seat belts. They were going to attempt an emergency landing. The storm was getting worse and they had no idea where they were. Breena was now sitting beside her brother, and he held her hand tight.
"Don't worry little sister. It'll be all right." Jonathan told her but Breena was unusually calm.
"I know Jon. I'm not worried. We can handle anything together." Breena looked out the window and saw nothing but white.
The storm continued and the little plane was bouncing around so much Breena began to feel nauseated. She closed her eyes. Jonathan suddenly yelled for Breena to look out the window and when she opened her eyes, she saw bits of green through the thick clouds.
"What's that? Why is it green?" She asked but before anyone could answer, she heard a loud crash and the plane began to spin. Untied Items were thrown in every direction. Breena was hit in the head by a small camera bag. She heard her father cry out her name and she felt she was on the worst roller-costar ride of her life. Suddenly everything stopped and her mind went blank, or her mind went blank and everything stopped.
As Breena opened her eyes, she could see daylight through the gaping holes in the fuselage. There was no sense of panic within her nor was there any form of sadness at the sight that surrounded her, as if she was observing through someone else's eyes. In the seat beside her was her brother. He looked to be asleep but the whiteness of his skin and the almost dried blood on his shirt and in his hair, told her otherwise. In the other seats in front of her were the bodies of her father and Max Jared. They too, were abnormally still. Breena unfastened her seat belt and moved towards them. Mr. Jared's eyes were open, in a stare that was empty. He too, had blood on his forehead that had dripped down to his shirt. Her father was sitting in the seat closest to the window, or where the window had once been. It, along with her father's arm, was now gone. Breena couldn't see anyone in the pilot's seat even through the wide hole in the door that once separated the passengers from the pilot. Slowly, Breena moved along towards the exit door that was at the front near the cockpit. The door was still intact but there were two large cavities on either side of it. Still, Breena moved the latch that opened the door of the airplane. It seemed to be stuck and took an effort on her part just to open it enough to squeeze through and escape the fuselage.
Once outside and on the grass, Breena knelt down and examined her own injuries. She had a few bruises and scratches, nothing else. It seemed unfair to her that she would survive and everyone else that remained in the metal body of the plane was silent. Except the pilot, she thought, for he must have exited far before the plane had found its permanent resting spot. Breena stood on wobbly legs to return to the fuselage but everything turned dark once more and she fell to the ground.
This time, when Breena woke, she found herself lying on a cot, inside a room with large brick walls. There was a table, two wooden chairs; and a couple of old trunks in the opposite corner. The window had thick curtains that were pulled apart barely covering the wooden shutters that were half opened. There was no glass in the windows and a warm breeze made the curtains flutter. Breena looked around and she tried to sit up but a stabbing pain in her head forced her back onto the pillow again. The door was tall and made of thick wood. There was a latch instead of a door handle and Breena wondered if she was dreaming all this. Again the darkness came.
Someone was lifting her head and putting a cup of water to her lips. Breena took a sip and blinked a few times to clear her sight. There was a woman beside her. The woman was in her mid-thirties with dark brown hair and tanned colored skin. She was dressed in pale colors and Breena tried to recognize the style but it was foreign to her sense of fashion. The woman had on a long shapeless yellow dress with a robe or long thin flowing jacket over top. She wore no hat but a long colorful scarf hung on her shoulders and down her back as if it had fallen from her head.
"Thank you." Breena said, but the woman gave no reply. "The plane crashed. Did you see my brother and father? They were with me. Are they hurt?"
Again, there was no reply. The woman stood and left the room quickly. Breena slowly sat up and rested on her elbow. Another woman came into the room, similar in dress but with colors of green and white, with a long blue scarf covering her head. She was younger, maybe a little younger than Breena. She had dark brown hair and soft brown eyes. She sat at the bottom of the cot. "English?" Her accent was unfamiliar.
Breena nodded. "My father was in the plane. Is he all right?"
The woman looked as if she was struggling for words. "Men all dead."
Breena covered her face with her hands and collapsed back down onto the cot. She had not remembered anything about the crash until then. She cried for a long time and the woman patted her back and said the word 'sadness' over and over again. It took days for Breena to compose herself enough to carry on a conversation.
Finally, some days later, when one of the women brought her food, she had stopped mourning. The sadness was still there but Breena knew she would have to survive on her own. It was time to work at getting back home. Breena pushed thoughts of her father to the back of her mind. With a forced smile, she looked up at the woman.
"Where am I? It was cold. We were in the Arctic and became lost in a storm and now it's summer. Where is this place?"
"Moatsha. This, city of Moatsha. You from land of cold?" The woman said in broken English.
"No, we were on an expedition to the Arctic. I'm from the United States."
The woman nodded. "Like the others."
"There are others? Can I talk to them?"
The woman shook her head. "They all dead, now. They appear in field after a storm, like you, over the years."
"Where is Moatsha? Is that in Russia or on the northern tip of Canada?"
"Moatsha is much east of Chelm."
Breena rubbed her forehead. This was not helping. How could she get back to the States with directions like that? "Where is that in comparison to the United States?"
"I do not know where United States is."
This was crazy. "How do you know English then?"
"Other man, who comes on machine like yours, teaches it to my family."
"Did he die too?"
"Yes. He was in the legion that protected this city before Arbmoat captured it. We are servants of Arbmoat's house now."
"Maybe if I saw a map of this land then I could tell how far from civilization I am, or better yet, do you have a telephone book?"
"I do not understand the word, telephone."
Breena made a gesture that looked like she was talking on the phone but the woman shrugged her shoulders. Breena looked around. There were no pug-ins for electricity nor were there any phone jacks. Wherever this place was, they were certainly behind the times. The woman brought Breena a map and it showed a landscape that she had never seen before. Being the daughter of Alexander Keets, their house was full of maps, and geography books. She had traveled the world and knew of places and people only seen in magazines. She was a bright intelligent young woman, about to enter university way ahead of her peers, but she had never seen a map like this one. There were no visible landmarks that she could recognize. This map resembled the ancient maps of a time before they discovered the earth was round. There was only one large body of land that encompassed their world. The north and south poles were shaded in with no names or markers and the language was nothing she could distinguish as being a derivative of another language. It had vague similarities to Greek or Hebrew in sound but not in writing. After hours of trying to talk to the woman, Breena began to realize this was not just a situation of her being temporally lost but one of her never being found.
In a week, she would be seventeen and her mother had a wonderful party planned for her. Marty Wellington was going to be there. He was her Dad's brightest first-year student at the university. He had expressed a desire to meet her and she thought he was extremely good looking. Now there would be no party and she may never see her mother again. Breena started to cry at the memory of her father.
Later, the woman brought Breena something to eat. It was some kind of cheese and bread and meat. It tasted like the moose meat her father brought home from his hunting trips. There was a vegetable that looked like a very large radish but tasted more like carrots. The woman encouraged Breena to eat. She smiled and announced, "I am Jaymin. It means 'given to help.' What are you called?"
Breena smiled. "I'm called Breena. It doesn't mean anything. My mother got it from a romance novel and it went well with my family name. She's a writer, in spare time, but she's never published anything. I want to thank you for rescuing me. I imagine if I was left out at the crash site, I might have died."
"My father would like to see you. He said another stray dog would not be trouble and he will see you are skinny and do not eat much, but you must be careful and do not break the laws. The others did not keep the laws and they are all dead now."
"Were they killed because they did not keep the laws?"
"Maybe they were but not by us. Many opportunities were given to them to live the laws and to understand them. Sometimes the law punishes them."
"Well, I will try and keep all the laws. It can't be that hard."
"It is not hard at all. Do all females have hair of sunshine where you come from?"
Breena had not realized how different she looked compared to the young woman beside her. "No. Some have red hair and some have different shades of brown and then there are some who have black hair."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE BOOK OF MINAB by Betty T. Kyler Copyright © 2011 by Betty T. Kyler. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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