The Voyage: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Jason Fry

  But first he needed that stone. And he needed it relatively quickly—the sun was high in the sky. At home, the days had seemed to crawl while he wasn’t doing much. Now it felt like the sun was racing toward the opposite horizon the moment it rose, leaving Stax with too much to do and not enough time in which to do it.

  Stax thought of when he’d been small and his grandmother had walked him through puzzles like this, asking what steps he needed to take and in what order he needed to take them. He supposed she’d never imagined that her grandson might have to draw on those lessons in a situation like this, lost and marooned far from home.

  Or maybe she had. She’d been a formidable woman, with stories he’d found equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Hadn’t she escaped from a nest of creepers—maneuvering them, in fact, so that when they blew themselves up they barely hurt her, but blasted a hole into a cavern that proved rich in iron ore? Hadn’t she escaped a near-fatal fall by tunneling her way back to the surface in total darkness, with a pickaxe worn down to a mere nub?

  Stax wasn’t nearly as brave or resourceful as his grandmother had been. But maybe, he mused, she might be proud of what he’d accomplished. He had survived a night battling the drowned, after all, and turned a shattered tower into a reasonably safe refuge. And now, if he just kept calm, he could get himself home.

  He clambered back onto the keel, careful not to knock either the compass or the kelp into the water, and started hunting for planks that were particularly straight and strong. He found a few and wrenched them free, checking that they were free of soft spots. Then he gathered the kelp, stuffed the compass into his pocket, and made the by now familiar swim back to the beach and his tower. Taking the straightest board and stoutest stick he could find, he hunkered down over the crafting table and got to work.

  Stax wasn’t sure it was quite right to call what he’d made a pickaxe—it was more of a prybar made out of wood. But it would have to do. And, to his relief, it did. By midafternoon he had assembled eight stone blocks into a furnace, and filled it with sticks gathered from the desert.

  He used his torch to light the sticks, put kelp in the furnace’s top slot, and waited impatiently as the kelp leaves shrank and changed from green to a dark gray color. Stax was so hungry that he burned his fingers snatching the first piece of kelp out of the furnace and had to juggle it for a couple of minutes while it cooled.

  He bit into the kelp and made a face. It was as bad as he remembered: salty and chewy and thoroughly nasty. But it was also what he desperately needed. By the time the sun sank below the horizon, Stax had eaten six pieces and dried another dozen or so for tomorrow.

  Something groaned outside the door, close enough to make Stax jump. With night having fallen, the drowned had returned.

  “I know it’s delicious, but get your own dried kelp!” Stax yelled, shocking even himself.

  He heard footsteps squishing away from the door and began to laugh, a low chuckle that turned into a helpless stream of giggles. Stax lay on his lumpy bed, one hand pressed over his mouth, but he couldn’t stop the laughter.

  I think I’m losing my mind.

  Maybe so. But at least he wasn’t going to starve to death.

  No, I’m not. And tomorrow? Tomorrow I’m building a boat.

  Stax puts his father’s lessons to work * A reluctant decision and several promises * The science of making weapons on a beach * A brief aside about the nature of storytelling * A melancholy nighttime chorus

  The next morning, as he started building his boat on the beach, Stax found his thoughts drifting back to his family.

  Stax’s grandmother had always preferred to travel by land, disdaining boats as both dangerous and a waste of time. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear her complaining about them in particular and ocean travel in general: “What’s the use? All that time traveling through something you can’t mine! I’ll go by foot and by the time I get where I’m going I’ll have found two more places where we can pull a fortune out of the ground. Three, if nobody hurries me.”

  But Stax’s father had loved boats and been comfortable in them—more comfortable, probably, than he’d been underground with a pickaxe in his hand. He’d been the one who’d taught Stax how to make a boat by carefully overlapping planks. He’d made several boats that way, to escape trouble far from home, and wanted to make sure his son had the same skills.

  Stax had never imagined having to make use of that knowledge, but now he was heartily glad he’d listened to his father’s long-ago lessons. Over the better part of the day the boat took shape, though Stax had to spend an annoying amount of time getting the planks to fit just right.

  But finally the boat was finished. Stax walked around it, inspecting it with a critical eye; it wouldn’t do to have put in all that work only to have the thing sink a minute after he put it in the water.

  Or, far worse, an hour or a day after he put it in the water.

  “That is one awful-looking watercraft,” Stax said when his inspection was complete. He’d started to talk to himself more and more during the last couple of days, and only wished there were a cat or two to pay no attention to what he said.

  The boat was indeed terrible-looking. His father had made trim, elegant boats out of birch or oak, and sometimes returned from a long voyage in a new boat made from some dark, exotic wood harvested from trees that didn’t grow near the Stonecutter estate. Stax’s boat was a mess, made from different woods of varied colors, most of it bleached by the sun, tinged green by water, or both. If Stax was being honest, the boat was spotty and blotchy and vaguely diseased-looking. The oars he’d made weren’t any more attractive: one was a sickly yellow-green, while the other was vaguely misshapen.

  “So what?” Stax asked himself. “If this boat gets me home, I’ll hang it from the ceiling of the new trophy room.”

  Home. What Stax wanted to do—desperately wanted to do—was get into the boat right now and start the journey back to the place he missed so badly. The idea of spending another night on this miserable shore, trapped between a hostile sea and a bleak desert, seemed unbearable.

  But he knew that wasn’t a good idea. He was tired, and the journey home would be difficult and dangerous. It made much more sense to begin at dawn, when he’d be rested and stronger and able to go ashore in daylight if something went wrong.

  Stax knew that, but it was still difficult to accept. With a sigh, he turned away from the water and sat down on a rock, pulling a chunk of dried kelp out of his pocket. He took a salty bite and chewed mechanically, grimacing at the taste.

  “If I get home,” he said, his words muffled, “I am never, ever, ever eating this nasty stuff again.”

  Stax finished his unpleasant meal and stood morosely on the shore, kicking pebbles into the water. He decided to spend the rest of his daylight hours making a sword out of wood; it wouldn’t be much use in a serious fight, but it would be better than fighting with his bare fists again. And he could use it if he was lucky enough to encounter animals somewhere on the way home—a wild cow, perhaps, or a pig or a chicken.

  The thought of chicken—to say nothing of beef or pork—made his mouth water, and he spent some time daydreaming about food. Just a few days ago, a juicy steak or a plump pork chop had been a regular meal, as had a loaf of fresh bread or a potato. Now those foods seemed like the kinds of things a king might eat, in a fancy hall surrounded by servants.

  Stax made himself a promise that if he ever got to eat like that again he wouldn’t take it for granted. He’d appreciate each and every bite of each and every meal. Then he finished making his sword, shaping and sanding the edge until it was as sharp as one could make a piece of wood salvaged from the keel of a wrecked ship.

  The sun was just touching the horizon now. To his surprise, Stax wished it were later, even though that meant the drowned would be prowling around his patched-together tower. The sooner n
ight came, the sooner it would be morning, when he could finally depart.

  Stax made some experimental thrusts and sweeps with his new wooden sword, liking the way it felt in his hand. Then he gave his boat a pat and retreated into the tower, shutting the door behind him.

  Not long after the sun went down he heard the drowned tramping around on the beach, moaning wetly. But the sound had become familiar, and had lost much of its terror. If those mindless unfortunates were going to bash down his door, they would have done it already. With luck, this was the last night he would ever hear those awful noises.

  Now, here’s a funny thing about storytelling. You can see for yourself that there’s a lot more of this story left to go before we’re done, so you already know that Stax isn’t going to simply sail home and have everything turn out okay. But even though you know this, heroes have no idea how much is yet to come in their story. Stax had done everything he could to prepare for his journey, and he really was confident that it would go well. So let’s leave him there, in his bed, happier than he’d been in several days. He went to sleep with a smile on his face, despite being surrounded by a chorus of gurgling moans made by hungry things that wanted to eat him.

  Fatherly advice, imperfectly recalled * A camp on another lonesome shore * The library of dreams * Alone on the Sea of Sorrows * A light in the darkness

  Stax woke at dawn and lay in bed for a moment, blinking up at the patched ceiling above him. His stomach rumbled, and he frowned at the thought that he had nothing to put in it except more dried kelp.

  Then his brain shook off sleep and he remembered what today meant—that his boat was outside, waiting for him to get in and begin the long journey home—and he almost jumped out of bed, excited to get moving.

  Stax had his hand on the door, then stopped. He had to take things slowly, making sure he had everything he needed before setting out across the sea. It would be very bad to discover he’d forgotten something and have to row back. Besides, the sun wasn’t high enough to have driven the night’s monsters into hiding or set them afire. And if it would be very bad to forget something, it would be far worse to blunder into the soggy embrace of one of the drowned.

  Stax ate a piece of kelp, grimacing at the salty taste, and packed the rest away. He disassembled his bed. He checked that his wooden sword was sharp. He examined the compass he’d found and pushed it deep down into his pocket. And only then, with the sun a little higher in the sky, did he peek out of the tower’s makeshift door.

  He didn’t see the boat he’d built yesterday, and for a moment fear gripped his heart and squeezed. But then he remembered that he’d dragged it to the other side of the tower, and found it right where he’d left it.

  Stax gathered planks and stone, well aware that he’d need to find shelter on the way home, and forced himself to take another look inside the gloomy tower to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. But no, he had everything. He was ready.

  He dragged the boat down the beach into the shallows at the shore. It bobbed up and down in the water, showing no sign of leaks.

  “Well, all right then,” Stax said. “Off we go, I suppose.”

  He clambered into the boat, set the compass face up in front of him, and took a last look at the gray spike of the broken tower that had been his refuge, and the sandy hill beyond it.

  “Farewell, horrible place,” Stax said. “Nothing personal, but I am never, ever going to see you again.”

  He began to row, putting his back into it. The boat moved smoothly through the water, and Stax allowed himself a smile. Apparently he was better at building watercraft than he’d thought. Within minutes the stone tower had shrunk to a small dark line against the pale hills behind him.

  Stax frowned at the compass, with its red needle pointing behind him, in the opposite direction of his strokes. Once again he found himself wishing he’d remembered his father’s explanation and what he’d done to navigate. But Stax remembered the last stage of his journey as the raiders’ prisoner, and this was definitely the direction the boats had come from.

  He decided he’d worry about figuring out how to use the compass later. For now, the sun was overhead, the weather was clear, and his job was to row.

  And row Stax did. Steadily and patiently, as the sun reached its zenith above him and then began to descend, until he was rowing into a smear of orange light at the horizon. He rowed as the sun beat down on him, and his shoulders ached, and his hands began to cramp. He rowed so long that he figured even Miggs would have been impressed, and maybe even grunted approvingly at him.

  Thinking of Miggs made Stax angry, but that turned out to be a good thing, and the better part of an hour went by as he fantasized about tracking Miggs down and making him beg for forgiveness. Beg for forgiveness and then tell Stax where to find Fouge Tempro.

  To Stax’s left, the shore had turned gray and stony, rising to a line of bluffs. That was good; he remembered passing those same bluffs on the last day before the raiders abandoned him, except they’d been on his right then. He was going in the correct direction, even if that direction was the opposite of where the compass needle was pointing.

  He passed the ships wrecked off the rocky shore, their wooden ribs protruding above the waves like the skeletons of great sea creatures, and the ruined fortresses and buildings on the bluff above the sea. The sight of those ruins frightened him less than when he’d spotted them from Miggs’s boat; now, in fact, Stax scanned them as he passed, hoping to find a safe place to spend the night.

  With the sun low in the sky, Stax chose a battered stone building on the shore, tucked below the bluffs—perhaps a storehouse that had been attached to some long-gone dock. He maneuvered his boat carefully to the shore and stumbled out of it, his hands cramped and his eyes stinging with salt. The horizon kept going up and down, as if he were still out on the water and not on dry land.

  Stax could easily have collapsed into the sand and slept right there, but he forced himself to pull the boat up onto the beach and perform some hasty repairs on the abandoned storehouse; its door had rotted away, and there were holes in the roof. Stax filled in the gaps, an effort that required nearly half his remaining planks of wood, set up his bed, mattress now even stiffer with salt, and fell onto it, groaning at the pain in his hands. He was asleep almost instantly, and lay there without dreaming or even moving until he was awakened by shafts of light passing through the slats in the door he’d built.

  Stax got out of bed and walked along the beach, which was little more than a rocky shore beneath brooding cliffs, wincing at the stiffness in his back and arms. After so many hours gripping the oars, his hands felt like they wanted to curl up into claws, and all he wanted to do was rest.

  “Not here, though,” Stax told himself. This beach was even more bleak and uninviting than the one he’d called home for the last several days. “You can rest all you want back home.”

  The thought cheered him up a little, and he broke down his bed and sat on the shore next to his boat, eating dried kelp and thinking about his cats. He tried to tell himself that they were all right; Emerald, Lapis, and Coal were clever animals, if a bit spoiled and lazy, and surely an hour of fire and chaos hadn’t made them forget how to be cats. Maybe they were snoozing in the morning sun atop chunks of the house’s foundation, wondering when Stax was going to return and feed them.

  It was a nice idea, one he tried to keep in his mind as he shoved the boat down the beach and took up the oars again.

  The day was cooler than yesterday, with lines of clouds scudding across the sky, driven by a steady wind.

  But despite the cool weather, Stax was far more tired than he’d been the previous morning. The journey from his house to the lonely shore of his exile had been a long one, and that had been in a boat rowed by a veteran raider. And there was the question of whether he’d be able to find his way home, once he reached waters he didn’t remember. He’
d hoped the compass needle would be pointing in a different direction by now, but it remained fixed in the opposite direction from where he was going.

  Stax rowed for hours, until the bluffs became islands and he spotted bits of land to the north as well as to the south. That was another good sign; he remembered coming this way. But he also remembered that if he stayed on course, he would soon enter what Kivak had called the Sea of Sorrows, where there was no land to be seen in any direction.

  Stax stopped rowing and the boat glided to a halt, bobbing gently. The only sound was the faint whistle of the wind. The compass gleamed in the sun, its needle pointed in the same direction as when Stax left the tower.

  He wanted to get home desperately, and over the last two days, he’d made a lot of progress toward that goal. But he knew the most dangerous part of the journey lay ahead. And it wouldn’t do to plunge into the Sea of Sorrows with night coming and no idea where he might rest.

  Stax turned his boat toward a low, rocky island to the south of him, one of the line he’d followed from the bluffs. He dragged the boat up the beach and dug into the side of a hill, hacking out a space just large enough for his bed, then blocking it off with cobblestones and planks to form a rough-hewn, rude little cabin. It was a couple of hours before sunset, so he explored the island, gnawing on dried kelp for dinner. He found nothing of any interest—a few stunted, long-dead trees and more rocks than any human being could count in a lifetime.

  That night, Stax had a strange dream. He was in a great library, a soaring hall built out of rare woods, all of them gleaming and polished, lit by flickering torches. The library’s shelves seemed to stretch for hundreds of blocks in every direction, filled with everything from heavy tomes bound in leather to rolled-up scrolls. The librarians were a strange folk: squat, gray bipeds with featureless white eyes, clad in rich, heavy robes that came in a rainbow of colors. If you spoke any louder than a whisper, they would turn and wave a bony finger at you disapprovingly.