Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  “I remember going to that workshop. It had that terrible smell. There was nothing like that at the compound. They ignored me at first when they took me, just kept me tied and gagged while they readied this shipment. The kegs have smaller kegs inside, wrapped tight in deerskin and sealed with wax. There were other smells, like spices. And that strong stuff they use in paint.”

  “Turpentine.”

  Hadrian bent and stared at the kegs at long time. Whatever was inside was Kinzler’s brainchild. Kinzler, the camps’ answer to Jonah. He stood and braced himself against the bulkhead, filled with new foreboding. If they didn’t contain gunpowder, they contained something just as dangerous. Somehow Jonah had understood and would have known how to deal with whatever alchemy Kinzler was wielding. Jonah would have been a threat to Kinzler.

  Waller settled below the hatch, where she watched the sky. “Have you been there?” she asked. “In the north.”

  “No, Sergeant, I haven’t.”

  She cast an annoyed glance at him. “My name is Jori. Not Sergeant. Not Waller.”

  “No,” he offered again, feeling an unfamiliar awkwardness. “No, Jori. I haven’t been there.” As far as Carthage was concerned, there was no there in the north, no real settlement, no community, no one, and no place that mattered to the colony.

  “The reports all say it’s just a few hardscrabble farms and fishermen living hand to mouth.”

  “The reports,” Hadrian reminded her, “all come from the fishery.”

  Jori looked as if she had bitten something sour. “What happened?” she asked toward the sky. “All these years life goes slow and steady in Carthage. Then suddenly I don’t recognize the world I live in. Every day it gets . . .” She searched for a word.

  “Bigger,” Hadrian suggested after a moment.

  She sighed. “Bigger,” she agreed. “I asked about that afternoon before Jonah died,” she added after a moment. “No one saw Kenton. He wasn’t at the prison. He probably just went to the races at the fair like half the other officers on duty.”

  Hadrian replied with an absent nod. He had realized others could have seen Hastings’s body. Two young girls had definitely seen it. He bent and retrieved a small brown husk from the floor of the hold, then saw another, and another.

  “Grain?” Jori asked as he dropped the husk into her palm. “The farmers don’t use boats.”

  The little husks sent a chill up Hadrian’s spine. “They’re moving grain,” he said. “You saw grain moving into the port at night. The millers were smuggling.”

  “No,” the sergeant protested, “the governor explained I was wrong.” But she could not argue against the proof in front of her. “God no, not our grain.” It was the lifeblood of the colony and, as such, strictly controlled, stored only in five huge government silos at the edge of town. “They couldn’t. The millers’ guild watches over the harvesting and processing. The police guard the silos.”

  “This boat smuggles goods to Carthage, then brings grain back,” he observed, though he had no idea of where it could be going. Those exiles he’d seen in the camps surely were not benefiting from it.

  “Near that harbor,” Jori ventured in a worried voice. “I was studying the settlement from the hill above before I was captured. I saw an island with tall windowless cabins, by a small dock. Like square silos.” She picked up another of the husks. “I don’t understand. The smuggled ammunition. These secret kegs. Now the grain. What does it mean?”

  Hadrian had no answer.

  Half an hour later the hatch was pulled back and a bucket was lowered containing a jug of water and four apples. Hadrian ate in a brooding silence, trying to make sense of his discoveries. As they were finishing their meager meal a familiar figure dropped through the opening. Hadrian sprang up to catch the boy, then saw that Dax was hanging by his hands from the hatch frame.

  “Ain’t it prime!” exclaimed the boy, swinging himself back and forth. “The wind and the water and millions of fish all around! I saw the back of a sturgeon at the surface, as long as a hay wagon!”

  Hadrian grabbed the boy and pulled him down. “You turned her over to them, Dax. She’s a police sergeant.”

  Dax eyed Jori a moment then shook his head. “Not outside Carthage, that’s what they said. Outside Carthage she’s just some nosey hag.”

  “It’s Carthage you have to worry about, if you ever mean to go back. She didn’t tell anyone there about your connection to the jackals.”

  “You can’t know that,” Dax shot back. “You were in the camps before she came.” He eyed the sergeant suspiciously.

  “I know she wouldn’t do that,” Hadrian insisted. “Not yet. And she was with me at the apartment where that policeman was killed.” Then he added, “If Kenton finds out you’re connected with the jackals, he’ll probably pull your old mill down.”

  Dax’s face darkened but he said nothing.

  “How many?” Hadrian asked. “How many messages for Jonah did you carry to Nelly?”

  “Once a month,” came the hesitant reply. “Four letters, once a month, for Miss Nelly. She would give me things. Little carved animals. One of those knives with a turtle shell handle they make in the camps.”

  Four letters. Jonah had composed one journal page a week, Hadrian reminded himself. Four a month. As if he had been reporting to Nelly what he recorded in his chronicle. “Did you ever read any?”

  “Never in life! The professor trusted me to keep them secret. Miss Nelly kept them secret too, locked in a box.”

  “Did anyone else see them?”

  The boy frowned. “That Shenker. Lieutenant Shenker, he makes the others call him in that compound of theirs. Once he blocked my path. When I tried to get out of the way he hit me. I told him I was a jackal when he took my letter, but he only laughed. He read it over again and again, as if he had trouble understanding. When he gave it back, he said there was no need to tell Nelly he had seen it.”

  Hadrian hesitated as Dax reached for the water jug. “Who did you tell about Jonah meeting you at the saw pit, Dax?”

  “No one,” the boy said insistently.

  “I was there. Someone had brought in a chair and tools. They were expecting Jonah. They were going to torture him and kill him there. Jonah was going there because of you, because of the book he was reading to you. They were going to be waiting.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “No. Something happened that made them act sooner. But if Jonah hadn’t died at the library, he would have died two days later. They would have tied him to that chair. They were going to burn him, to break his bones, to cut into him. Who did you tell, Dax?”

  The boy’s face darkened but he spoke no more, just took the apple cores and empty jug, dropping them into the bucket before grabbing the rope and whistling for it to be hauled up. As Hadrian watched Dax rise through the hatch, he wondered at the many boys who lived inside him. He was the orphan, struggling for years to stay alive on his own. He was the smuggler, the messenger for criminals. He was also the boy who listened, enthralled, to Jonah reading Treasure Island and wanted to learn about the stars. He was the jackal who ran with ghosts. And, Hadrian reminded himself, on arriving at the camps the boy had not gone straight to Kinzler but rather sat with the children like an older brother, then distributed secret letters to exile families.

  IT WAS LATE afternoon when the Anna began to slow, buffeted by a chill autumn wind that quickly subsided as they entered a small bay. Hadrian and Jori had been released from the hold an hour earlier, arriving on deck as a man in soot-stained coveralls berated two teenage boys who had collapsed, clearly exhausted, by a pile of wood at the stern.

  “Goddamned lubbers!” the man roared. “You’ll be fish bait when I’m through with you!” As the youths spun about, Hadrian saw the fear on their faces. They were wan, thin boys, sons of New Jerusalem being sent north. Being sent to serve those of the north, he realized as the man—clearly the engineer, in charge of the engine below—violently threw a log at the nearest
boy. It hit the boy in the chest, knocking him backward. As tears welled in the boy’s eyes the engineer laughed, then turned to Hadrian and Jori. “Wood,” he commanded, gesturing to the pile of fuel. “Down to the engine. Now.”

  They worked in silence, grateful at least for the fresh air. After his third trip Hadrian stole a quick glance at the boiler, confirming that it bore the numeral one on a brass nameplate that read CARTHAGE WORLD INDUSTRIES, one of Jonah’s little jokes. The old scientist had fussed over the construction of the engine, finally deciding it was overdesigned and using a simpler version on subsequent boats. But Jonah had always been fond of the Anna, named for his long-lost daughter, and the vessel, a prisoner herself in a way, somehow felt like an old friend to Hadrian. Building her ten years earlier had been a labor of love, an important benchmark in the development of the colony’s economy. The day of her launching had been declared a festival day, and Hadrian had arranged for wide-eyed schoolchildren to take rides on her across the bay.

  As he climbed onto the deck for another load of wood, a boathook flashed out and grabbed his ankle. He stumbled painfully against the rail, then a boot on his back slammed him facedown onto the deck. Rolling over, he froze.

  “Wade!” Hadrian cried. It was impossible. He was in prison.

  The bearded man glanced at the wheelhouse, where Hadrian saw the wheel tied to a peg, then tossed the hook from hand to hand. He leaned so close Hadrian could smell his sour breath. “Ate any good books lately?” he asked with a guffaw. As Hadrian desperately looked about for a club, a length of rope, anything to use as a weapon, the boat lurched against a wave. Wade spat a curse, then tossed the hook into the wheelhouse and leapt to the helm.

  The rest of the crew seemed to warm to Hadrian as he worked beside them and made no effort to return he and Waller to the hold when the engineer declared their work done. By the time they entered the harbor, one of the men, a giant with long black hair plaited in a tail at the back, joined Hadrian at the rail to explain the strange little community they approached. The big man, a First Blood who introduced himself as Sebastian, pointed to the long two-story stone structure that dominated the village.

  “Long before the ending,” he said, “this was a convent. St. Gabriel. Famous for making lace. When it shut down it was bought by a farmer. There were four such buildings, the nuns’ cells on the top and working rooms underneath. It was already a century old even then, and he converted one to his home and the others to chicken barns. When the big blasts came, they were all from the north, from the cities along the shore. The buildings were parallel, identical stone structures. The other three shielded the last, so that when it was over just this one stood. When my family came out of the cave we hid in, there was nothing left, so we went to the lake and worked the fish along the shore to survive. Weeks later we came upon this, the only intact building anywhere, with three huge piles of cut stone ready to be used. A couple of weeks later others showed up, a band of men in grey clothes. We agreed to share the place.”

  “We always thought people up here were living in tents and crude lean-tos.” Hadrian said with an uneasy glance back at the wheelhouse. Wade was distracted with the docking of the boat. When asked, Jori had confirmed there had been no other report of escapes from the prison. Wade was meant to be serving a month for stabbing a man.

  “Some of my people still do, by choice. Some, like my brother Nathaniel, are making their way in the exile camps. Most of the salvage teams are from my tribe. My youngest brother left on one months ago and we haven’t seen him since.”

  An ache grew in Hadrian’s heart as he gazed at the old convent building. The two-hundred-foot-long structure was the most elegant building he had seen in twenty-five years. Nearly fifty people lived in apartments in the old chicken house, Sebastian explained, with another three hundred in the sturdy stone houses constructed about the landscape on either side of the large structure. Their roofs used the same jumble of materials as in Carthage’s early dwellings, split logs, pine bark, metal sheets, even thatch—but the walls were of the same precisely cut grey stone. Yet something was jarring about their lines, something incongruous.

  Sebastian saw the way he cocked his head toward them. “We didn’t know how to make good mortar or even how to lay stone until a few years ago,” he explained. “We call them the crooked houses.” The thick walls, though made of perfectly squared stones, bulged and twisted.

  Hadrian looked back at Wade, speaking with the engineer now, then scanned the handful of rough-looking men and women at the waterfront, busying themselves with ropes for the berthing. There seemed to be no armed escort waiting for them. Jori looked almost wistfully at the hold where they’d been kept, as if ready to make the return trip. Suddenly a young girl ran out of a nearby shed and up the gangplank. Sebastian bent over as she whispered in his ear.

  “You’re with me,” the tall First Blood said. As he pressed his hand tightly around Hadrian’s wrist, two men moved up the gangway. Hadrian heard Jori’s cry of alarm and turned to see the engineer grab her as she tried to flee. One of the approaching men laughed. It was Scanlon, whose finger Jori had shot off. Without speaking, and with no warning, he raised his good hand and slapped her so hard she dropped to the deck. She was unconscious as they dragged her off the ship.

  CHAPTER Eight

  HADRIAN, TOO, WAS a prisoner, he realized as Sebastian guided him beyond the waterfront. He was being allowed to wander among the crooked houses of St. Gabriel but it soon became clear he would not be allowed to stray beyond the reach of Sebastian’s long, powerful arms. The First Blood, however, was an affable enough watchdog, letting Hadrian choose their course along the perimeter of the settlement, not hesitating to answer his questions, though shoving him forward whenever he hesitated to look back at the building where they had taken Jori.

  As they walked Hadrian contrasted the image of the northern community he was seeing with that conjured up by the Carthage fishermen. The sparse population of the myth lived in primitive conditions and their home did not even have a name. They were just the northerners, and the term was always spoken in a tone of pity.

  The real settlement was far more interesting, and far more unsettling, than its fabled counterpart. The town of crooked houses was flourishing, many of its inhabitants attired better than the average citizen of Carthage. As they rounded a corner and came into the central square, Hadrian’s heart leapt. A market was underway, with vendors selling from tables arrayed along the edge of the square. Their wares comprised a rich assortment of salvage.

  “The destruction here must not have been as severe as in the south,” Hadrian ventured, noting now nervous glances being cast toward Sebastian. He had almost forgotten that where he stood once had been a different country from his own. Canada had always tried to remain on the sidelines of international disputes.

  “Not much difference,” Sebastian replied. “All the government efforts at peace for all those years just meant forty-eight hours’ delay before the destruction came. But last year we found a corridor of warehouses four days’ ride to the west, where half the buildings still stood. I was in the hunting party that discovered them. At first they looked like just more hills but when we got closer we saw they were structures covered with vines and brush rooted in their roof cracks. Our pack trains have been slowly emptying them.”

  Hadrian’s eyes widened as he took in the breadth of goods. Soaps and cosmetics in original wrappers. Stacks of apparel, including T-shirts and ball caps emblazoned with the emblems of extinct teams. Board games. Toy trucks. Dolls in their original boxes. Comic books, their colors still vibrant. As he watched, a woman purchased a table lamp refitted to take candles, tendering three copper coins. Carthage dollars. She gestured for another woman, much more shabbily dressed, to carry her purchase. He realized more men and women in the crowd were carrying heavy loads, all wearing drab grey or brown clothes, all with their eyes lowered.

  “Servants?” he asked.

  “Indentured. Those who can�
��t make it, those with no one to provide for them can sign on for five years to serve a household in exchange for room and board. It’s how they survive.”

  Hadrian studied the averted eyes, the empty gazes on several of those who wore the drab clothes. “They don’t look too happy about it.”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Sometimes troublemakers get assigned to indenture. Cheaper than a jail.”

  They roamed now past small shops and then beyond another row of crooked houses, eventually arriving at a knoll overlooking the settlement. Hadrian surveyed the landscape, realizing that each new piece of the puzzle made the whole harder to grasp. “Where are your farms, your food?”

  “Some grains are grown on farms near here,” the First Blood explained. “The rest we hunt or buy.”

  “Fish from Carthage.”

  “More than fish,” Sebastian said, then he frowned. Hadrian sensed he was worried about revealing too much. “Most of the land beyond here was agricultural, for two hundred miles. Half our people had starved to death by the time we found them.” He grinned at Hadrian’s confusion, then relented. “Cattle and sheep gone feral, meat on the hoof. Huge herds now, in the thousands. Keeping long stretches of the old pastures grazed down.”

  “I thought hunter-gatherers were supposed to have a more handto-mouth existence,” Hadrian said, looking back at the town. By many measures it was a prospering community but as he watched more of the servants he noted their looks of melancholy, if not outright suffering. They weren’t servants, they were slaves.

  “With all those who died of starvation in the early years no one begrudges a full belly now.”

  Changing the subject, Hadrian asked offhandedly, “Who teaches the children?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Why?”

  “In my experience only two things are of real importance in life—who teaches the children and what they teach them.”

  “The mothers have a group, do the best they can. My own mother runs a school for the tribal children but she insists it be away, in the deep woods. We have artisans,” the First Blood added, “wood carvers, pot makers, a couple of painters.”