Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  He was no closer to understanding the murder of Jonah. His old friend was as much an enigma in death as he had been in life. Every path led only to more questions and greater danger, and the truth seemed less and less important to all the other players in the strange, treacherous game.

  He dropped onto his cell cot, surrendering at first not to sleep but to a storm mingling memories and nightmarish images. Jonah and Nelly performing a violin duet before an audience of exiles fifteen years before. The boy Dax lying dead, his body strangely punctured with shotgun shells that had not been fired but driven into his body like stakes. Buchanan and Hadrian covered with sawdust as they labored years earlier, making up songs to the rhythm of the saw blade. The exile camps in the coming winter, bodies stacked like cords of firewood because the survivors were too weak to dig in the frozen ground.

  Jonah had fought bitterly against the expulsion orders, but when Buchanan had prevailed by holding a public referendum, he’d felt it his duty to escort the first caravan of exiles leaving the colony. The fate of the burnt ones had been sealed when one of the silos of precious grain had been found empty, its precious contents secretly consumed by those unable to earn their sustenance. Buchanan had prophesized the colony’s doom if a third of its population could not support themselves. By the time the final vote was taken, thefts of food and blankets were becoming rampant. Worst still, deformed, mutated babies had begun to be born.

  Jonah and Hadrian had sat most of the night before the exodus making plans with Nelly for the new community of exiles. As the caravan left the city Jonah fiddled a jaunty tune and Hadrian carried a crippled boy on his shoulder, encouraging the other children to skip along with the music. After the first five miles the police escort had decided the two Council members were slowing the column and forced them to return to Carthage. Jonah and Hadrian had tried to travel every few weeks to the new camps, helping to build tent platforms, carrying in potbellied stoves on packhorses. After the first month a cemetery had been started. After the second, twenty graves had already been dug and they had been treated like unwelcome intruders. On their next visit they had awakened to find all their horses butchered for meat. They had focused then on helping two old friends secretly flee from Carthage into the mountains before they were swept up in the second wave of expulsions, and vowed to organize new relief for the camps by the next spring. But by then the censorship debates had overtaken Carthage.

  JONAH HAD FOUND Hadrian in his office, hurriedly packing books before the newly formed book audit committee had arrived to examine his shelves.

  “I won’t last as head of the school, will I?” Hadrian had asked as his old friend dropped into a chair and picked up a volume of twentieth-century history. The committee would send it for recycling if they found it.

  Jonah shrugged. “You still have many supporters,” he said wearily.

  “I’m not sure anymore if we are the spark of civilization. Maybe we are just the dying ember.”

  His friend did not seem to have the energy to protest. They had spent most of the day arguing with the rest of the Council over the censorship measures. The proponents had been passionate, and unwavering. A woman had testified that she had found her teenage daughter crying after reading an account of the last century, telling her mother no matter how hard she tried, how hard her own children tried, they would never have a world as good as that she read about. The testimony had become repetitive, reduced to a few poignant sound bites. You can’t teach a little modern history without teaching all of it. Teaching about modern civilization was like describing a doomed airline flight—perfectly wonderful until the landing when the plane crashed and all on board died. Revealing modern history to your children was like telling them they had a genetic disease.

  A woman had asked those present when was the last time they had volunteered something about the end of the old world to their children. It was true. Even without a law no one had such conversations. The ending was indeed like a disease no one wanted to spread.

  Jonah had hidden the book inside his shirt before replying. “We have to move forward, Hadrian. Maybe it isn’t so important. Just imagine we landed from a different planet and our young don’t even understand astronomy. It doesn’t make them less precious, or our survival less important.”

  “You should have been governor all these years, Jonah,” Hadrian said.

  “No. It was better for the colony that I work on my projects. You were the one.” Even as he spoke the words the scientist grimaced, as if wishing he could take them back. They both knew the reason Hadrian wasn’t governor was his paralyzing bouts of depression. There had been long spans during the early years when his grip on reality had been frail indeed. More than once Jonah had discovered him in conversation with his dead children. “We’ll find a way, Hadrian,” Jonah said, “a way that lets us show our faces again.”

  He hadn’t thought much of it then, but those words had eventually echoed in Hadrian’s mind and stayed with him all the years since. Jonah hadn’t been talking about the censorship, he had been talking about the exiles, about his festering guilt, about how he and Hadrian couldn’t pretend to be saving civilization if they couldn’t save the exiles first.

  IT WAS TWO or three hours after midnight when a key rattled in the lock and the door swung open. Sergeant Waller threw him a policeman’s tunic and a wool cap as he groggily sat up. “Put them on,” she ordered. “And not a word, damn you, or I will leave you here to rot.”

  Outside it was a raw, windy night. One of the cold northern storms, early for the season, was moving in across the inland sea, the air filling with wind-whipped leaves and occasional snowflakes. Waller led him to a rack of bicycles reserved for government business. Hadrian selected one and followed her, the tires hissing on wet cobblestones, leaves churning up into his face. The only sign of human activity was a dimly lit bakery where loaves were filling the ovens.

  After a mile the sergeant halted. She dismounted and let her bike drop to the ground. They had arrived at the old warehouse at the edge of the woods. As Hadrian followed her up the same stairs he had mounted the day before, she paused as if to collect herself, then pushed the door open.

  “It seemed too important to be left alone,” she declared in a taut voice. “The home of two men who have died.”

  “Who have been murdered,” Hadrian corrected.

  “I came back,” she said slowly. “I thought there must be something we missed.”

  Hadrian saw the legs first, extending from the bottom of the makeshift sofa. “Mother of God!” he gasped as he saw the blood-soaked chest, the face rigid with a questioning expression. It was the place of three dead men.

  “Jansen was always pestering me for more interesting assignments. I brought him here, swore him to secrecy, said to keep watch until I returned, and to detain anyone who arrived. He was excited, said it felt like real police work for a change.”

  Hadrian recognized the corpse now as the officer he had tricked the day before. He bent over the body. It had two gaping wounds in his chest, centered over the heart. “You need to get Emily,” he said. “Quietly. Now.”

  “First you and I move that bed again,” the sergeant said.

  “The chamber will be empty,” Hadrian said, pointing to the low table beside the sofa. The whiskey bottle he’d opened earlier was there, now half-empty.

  When they pushed the bed away even the padlock, a precious commodity, was gone. The only thing remaining inside the low chamber was the cap of the whiskey bottle. Waller, looking as though she were about to weep, turned and silently left.

  Hadrian wandered through the apartment again. The only changes since his first visit were subtle. The carved deer that had belonged to the dead scout was gone, as were the boxes of spices. Traces of powder were on the kitchen table, beside a knife. The remains of three cigarettes were in an ashtray, the cheap, farm-made variety favored by laborers. He sat across from the murdered policeman, holding the whiskey bottle in his hand and gazing apologetic
ally at him. The unspoken question on Jansen’s face seemed directed at Hadrian.

  He remembered Jansen now. There had been a terrified teenage boy with the Norwegian birdwatchers who had descended out of the mountains. This was not the life, or the death, the blond boy had expected when he had packed his binoculars in Oslo all those years ago.

  Hadrian lifted the bottle to his mouth, but stopped, gazing at the amber liquor, then lowered it. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” Hadrian whispered to the dead man. “Nothing personal.” He rose, drained the bottle into the sink, then unbuttoned his borrowed tunic. As he bent over Jansen he paused, noticing now the white patches on the dead man’s fingertips. He leaned closer. Powder, like that on the kitchen table. Looking into the questioning face one last time, he draped the tunic over the policeman’s head, then opened the window. A stench of death was rising in the room.

  A cool anger had settled over Emily’s face by the time she reached the apartment with Sergeant Waller. She did not take well to an unexplained summons, doubly so if, as Hadrian expected, she was on one of her rare off-duty nights. She seemed about to erupt with anger at him.

  “My God, Hadrian!” She began, then dropped to her knees by the body. “What have you done?”

  “Hadrian,” Waller interjected, “was in a cell when this happened. Officer Jansen was here on assignment.”

  Emily cast a worried glance at the sergeant, then pulled off the covering tunic.

  “I don’t believe,” Hadrian said to her back, “that Carthage has ever before lost an officer in the line of duty.”

  Emily bent low over Jansen’s eyes, studied his hands, then opened his shirt. She muttered a low curse as she saw the wounds. “What exactly were those duties?”

  Jori Waller stared at the dead man’s face. “Confidential.”

  “This is the apartment where Reese lived,” Hadrian stated.

  Emily looked up with a worried glance, then lifted the hand with the traces of powder. “He’ll have to be brought to the hospital. The governor will have to be told first. There will need to be some sort of announcement.” She rubbed a little of the powder on her own finger and touched it to her tongue, wincing as if it were bitter.

  “He was stabbed by smugglers,” Sergeant Waller hastened to say. “Who no doubt are deep in hiding by now.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Sergeant,” Hadrian corrected her. “Those aren’t stab wounds. Officer Jansen was shot.”

  Waller went very still. “Ridiculous. People don’t have guns.”

  Emily extracted a pair of long forceps from her leather medical bag and probed the topmost wound, pushing into the red, still-oozing tissue. A moment later she pulled out a small, bloody bullet, extending it toward them. The sergeant leapt to the open window and vomited over the sill.

  PEOPLE DON’T HAVE guns. The words echoed in his mind as he watched the thin silver fingers reach out over the water, the first hint of dawn. There had been a strange anguish in the sergeant’s voice, but when she had turned back from the window, looking at Hadrian and Emily, condemnation was in her eyes. Not only guns and bullets had crossed over from their old world, now also there was murder.

  The words Hadrian had spoken to Jonah days earlier came back, like bile on his tongue. Nothing he had done in all the years of the colony mattered. The time between ends of the world just kept getting shorter.

  He was not sure why he’d come to the clearing where he had been attacked, had known only he needed to leave the apartment before more police arrived. For long painful moments he considered ways to provoke Buchanan into exiling him immediately so he could leave the colony and its woes behind. But he could not turn his back on Nelly. He had taken slim comfort in the fact that the two had been locked in their cell at the time of the murder. But then just as she was leaving the apartment Emily had turned to reassure the sergeant.

  “There are patrols out already, Jori. Word came to the hospital to watch for them, in case they sought medical attention. They won’t get far.”

  “I’m sorry?” Waller had replied.

  “The exiles you were holding. Their cell was found empty. Lieutenant Kenton has ordered all police on duty to be armed, and all paths leading toward the camps to be blocked.”

  Hadrian had stared at her in confusion. He had been in the adjacent cell and had heard no forcing of the door. Had they escaped while he slept? “They didn’t kill Jansen, Emily,” he had insisted.

  She was silent a long time. “I went to see them yesterday,” she finally replied. Hadrian reminded himself that once Nelly and Emily had been good friends. “She’s changed. She has a new fierceness, a deep anger. Her husband died of malnutrition as much as anything else. The exiles have been backed into a corner and have nowhere to go,” the doctor warned. “I’m sorry, Hadrian. But don’t be misled by who they were twenty years ago. She is capable of anything now. The time for the camps is running out and she knows it.”

  Nelly had indeed changed. But perhaps, Hadrian told himself as he watched the dawn’s rays touch the water, it was only the ones who hadn’t changed who couldn’t be trusted. What is the truth you wish to find? Jonah had asked him more than once when he had found Hadrian in one of his despairing moods. Now the better question was, why did he want the truth? For Buchanan? For Nelly? For the colony that had turned its back on him?

  He settled onto a log worn smooth from use as a seat and watched the world come to life as the sun edged its way over the rim of the planet. A huge raft of geese rose from the cove below to continue its migration. A solitary trawler left the fishery and steamed toward deep water. In the distance a chorus of cows lowed as they waited to be milked.

  Sitting there, Hadrian considered again how the smugglers had signaled from the clearing in front of him, and glanced back at the path that ran from the hill to the apartment. A signal from the ridge could be seen by a boat far out on the water, far enough to be invisible to those in town. A lantern might call in a waiting ship to unload in the cove below, out of sight of town, then the cargo could be carried over the ridge down the path. But why go to the trouble? Waller had confirmed that the smugglers were not shy about taking their goods to the fishery docks. It was as if there was another layer of smuggling within the smuggling ring, a crime within a crime.

  He closed his eyes as fatigue overtook him. When he stirred a few minutes later, a small figure in a red shirt sat cross-legged in the grass ten feet away, at the very edge of the cliff, facing the water. At first he could not understand why the boy would seek him out, then realized he wasn’t there because of Hadrian. The cliff provided a unique unobstructed view of town and sea, a sweeping perspective of many miles.

  “I didn’t mean to take your seat, Dax,” he said.

  The boy shrugged without turning. Hadrian realized the boy must have seen him already and had chosen to stay. He rose and sat beside him on the grass.

  “The old professor and I,” Dax said after a moment, “we would come up here. He told me the names of birds and trees and stars, said you could never unlock the mystery of anything unless you knew its name. He told me the names of some of the mountains on the moon. Sometimes when it was full we would howl at it like wolves. Once I asked him why and he said because we were alive and needed the world to know it.” He pointed to another, smaller group of white birds beginning to move in the water for takeoff. “Snow geese, getting fat for their migration. When they finally move they will fly thousands of miles, Professor Beck said. He said they see things that no man in Carthage ever will,” Dax added in an awed whisper.

  After a moment Hadrian gestured over the water. “They used to be called the Great Lakes. There were five of them. This was one of the smaller ones.”

  The boy cast him an uncertain look. “I don’t see how,” he said in an earnest tone. “If that were true there wouldn’t be any room left for the land.”

  Neither spoke for several minutes.

  “Men come here at night sometimes, Dax. Just before dawn. With a sign
al lantern. Did Jonah know about them?”

  The boy slowly nodded. “He knew most everything.”

  “You told him?”

  “He saw them in his telescope.”

  Dax pointed to an osprey diving for a fish. They watched it carry the breakfast back to its nest.

  Jonah knew about the smugglers. Did it mean he knew about the arsenal secretly being assembled in Carthage? Hadrian reminded himself that Jonah had started referring to the exiles as rebels. “There was a killing in town, Dax,” he finally said. “A policeman. They will be furious. Stay away from Kenton.”

  “Kenton don’t know as much as he thinks,” the boy shot back, then grew more contemplative. “A policeman?”

  “At a smugglers’ roost.”

  “There’ll be a price to pay for that,” he rejoined. Not for the first time Dax sounded wise beyond his years.

  “What is it, Dax, what is the name of that thing that hangs over us?”

  When his companion hesitated, Hadrian saw the worry on his face. “I think it’s an old world name,” the boy said heavily.

  His words tore at Hadrian’s heart.

  “Then tell me this, what was it you were doing for Jonah?”

  “Some days his legs were bad.”

  Hadrian looked over the water, watching a small, fast flight of terns. “You mean you were his runner. Carrying messages in town, like you do for the jackals.” The boy, he realized, was the perfect secret messenger. He certainly knew every alley and shortcut in town, as well as many hiding places, and townspeople were accustomed to seeing the orphan boy turning up unexpectedly, alighting nowhere for long.

  “With him it was different. He wanted to pay me but I said there was no need. Learning from him was different than learning in school.”

  “Running to where?”

  “Wherever. The hospital. People with books. The tin smith and glass maker, that one made him things by blowing in a tube,” he added, as if to impress Hadrian. “Sometimes he would have me meet him with the reply at the Norger bakery, because he knew how much I like the maple sugar pastries.”