A hand reached out from over the black man’s shoulder, searching for him. It took all Hadrian’s strength to reach up and squeeze it. “You gave us such a fright,” the blind woman said. Helen bent and pulled the heavy pelts over Hadrian as his head rolled back in exhaustion.
In the night, Jori was sitting on a stool beside him, watching him.
“Why?” Hadrian asked. “You could have left me to die in the storm and gone back to Carthage.”
The question seemed to bring anger to the sergeant’s eyes. “I didn’t do it for the self-loathing bastard I know, I did it for the man who long ago brought baby raccoons to my classroom and read Longfellow to us.” She roughly pushed his hand back into the blankets as he reached out to touch her arm.
The next day he was able to sit up, even reach the table where Helen was ladling out bowls of hot pumpkin soup.
“Sergeant Waller says people are trying to kill you.” Morgan shook his head, looking grave.
Hadrian gazed around the snug subterranean home the couple had made more than twenty years earlier. When Helen had started going blind, they had been marked for expulsion from Carthage, but he and Jonah had hidden them, then helped them escape into the steep eastern mountains.
The smell of Helen’s bread in the oven almost made him weep.
“Perhaps I could just live here a few years,” he said with a melancholy grin. It was the most remarkable habitat he had ever known, two adjoining caves cleverly closed off from the outside with stones and mortar to blend with the cliff face, with access to gardens and stables on the ridge above them through shafts and stairs cleverly utilizing a network of sinkholes. He looked down at Jori’s sleeping form by the fireplace. “Has she been farther in?” he asked.
Helen gave a knowing smile. “No one stays unless Aphrodite approves,” she reminded him.
Morgan extended one arm to steady Hadrian, then picked up a candle and led him down a tunnel into a musky chamber at the rear. The caves had been empty during the summer Morgan had found them. By the time their proprietor had shown up for hibernation, the two humans had settled in and were not inclined to move.
Hadrian did not approach the ragged old she-bear, who watched him groggily as he knelt several feet away. Aphrodite, on a thick bed of cedar boughs, was preparing for her six-month sleep. The standoff when the bear had first returned to her cave had been stressful, but Helen and Morgan had resolutely claimed the outer cave and eventually Aphrodite had decided there was room to coexist. Since then, the three had become faithful companions.
“She recognized you,” Morgan explained, “even came over and licked you when she woke up that first day. Jori almost lost her wits but eventually she let the old girl smell her.”
Once Jonah had commented to Hadrian that visiting their old friends Morgan and his sightless wife was like walking into a fairy tale. “Exactly!” Morgan had exclaimed when Hadrian repeated the words. “Which gives me hope for all else.”
“You need to get her back,” Hadrian said, still looking at the bear. “Jori could find a way to be safe, once she’s with the police again.”
“No,” came Helen’s thin voice. Hadrian turned to see her at the chamber entrance. “She’s not ready. She is terribly disconnected.”
“Disconnected?” Hadrian asked.
“We speak sometimes. Everything she’s been through—in both Carthage and the north—has shattered her view of the world. She’s lost her anchor.”
“Anchors are luxuries we’ve learned to live without.”
“Don’t talk foolishness, Hadrian Boone. And don’t speak so harshly of that wonderful girl. She practically died saving your life. She wouldn’t take care of herself until she knew you would recover. You damned fool, you are becoming her anchor.”
As Morgan turned and left the chamber with his wife, Hadrian lingered. The weary old bear opened an eye and stared in reproof at him.
THE NEXT DAY as Jori slept Hadrian joined Morgan in the chores on top of the ridge. As soon as they left the cavern behind, he asked his friend about the message from Jonah left by Dax at the trailhead.
“I was hoping for some news from one of you,” Morgan said, “but that was not so much a message as a shopping list. Plants. Hard-to-find herbs.”
“Plants for what?”
“No idea. Jonah was always experimenting. I spent most of the week looking for them but I was glad to do it, after all you and he had done for us.” Morgan handed Hadrian a narrow spade and pointed to a row of onions.
Hadrian remembered a lively barnyard, with goats, roosters, and hens in pens along the rough palisade wall that kept predators out. As they pried onions from the frost-heaved ground, Hadrian paused to study the empty pens. “You’ve reduced your livestock,” he observed.
“As a gentleman farmer,” Morgan grinned, “Helen always said I was more of a gentleman than a farmer. I can reach the outermost farms in an hour. They are always ready to trade produce for pelts or fresh game.”
Now there were no roosters and only two old milk goats. “Helen always loved those cocks,” he recalled.
“Too loud,” Morgan muttered.
He lowered his bucket of onions. “You mean you’re back to hiding your life here?”
“Life moves on. Things change everywhere. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Hadrian stepped closer and put a foot on the shovel Morgan was using. “What happened?”
“Nothing. We are survivors. The roosters made a grand stew. The other goats are enjoying their freedom in the high peaks.”
“What happened?” Hadrian repeated.
Morgan looked out toward distant clouds. “It was over six months ago. I was hunting, tracking a big stag for a couple hours, getting closer to the settlements than I usually like to go, when I heard a terrible screaming. I ran to help but when I saw the men I dropped behind a stump and pulled out my binoculars. Six of them, plus the poor soul they had tied to a log. They were slicing him like he was side of beef, using a huge knife cut down from a sword.” Morgan paused, clearly unsettled by the memory.
“The Dutchman? You saw them kill the Dutchman?”
“You forget how many years we’ve been gone, Hadrian. I don’t know many faces, or names, from the colony. It was the one with the big farm off to the south who raised racehorses.”
“The Dutchman they called him. Van Wyck.”
“Van Wyck,” Morgan repeated. “He didn’t die well. For a moment I was ready to charge them but there was no saving him by then. And those bastards would have done the same to me if they caught me watching.”
“Were there others being tortured? Or just Van Wyck?”
“As I watched they brought up two men, well-dressed townsmen, with their hands tied. They forced those two to watch. I didn’t dare move for fear of being seen.”
“Did you see the martens come?”
Morgan looked at him in surprise.
“I was there last month when they found the body. I saw the signs of martens.”
The memory clearly chilled Morgan. “The piranhas of the forest.”
Hadrian looked back around the barnyard. “But that was many miles from here.”
“We’re only ten miles from his farm. Van Wyck’s farm. Even closer to the trail taken by the riders.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They started staging out of his farm after that day. Like salvage patrols. Every week now.”
“Salvage parties have been riding out of Carthage for years.”
“Not like these. And salvage patrols go out with empty packhorses. These horses always carry heavy loads. They’re tough, heartlesslooking bastards, some of the same men who killed that Dutchman. If they caught wind of Helen and me, we wouldn’t last five minutes. They’d take everything.” One of the rooms in the burrowed labyrinth was Morgan’s secret vault, his personal warehouse of salvage, mostly nineteenth-century mechanical devices. They would be nearly priceless in the salvage markets.
“Helen knows
?”
“She seldom goes beyond the gardens now. No need for her to know what I saw. She believes the goats escaped and the roosters were taking too much of our hard-won grain.”
“You know the land as well as any salvage rider. Where are they going?” Morgan himself had led several salvage expeditions out of Carthage in the early years and still did his own searching for his personal collection.
“The area’s stripped bare for a hundred miles to the south. I followed their trail once for a few hours. They circled to the west, far enough south to avoid the exile camps. And they never return this way. They start in Carthage, to get supplies, then they must take a circuit that comes back up to the lake to the west, to minimize their being seen. Like they fear having their secret work discovered.”
“I want to see them, Morgan,” Hadrian told him.
“Leave them be, Hadrian. You’re in no shape to deal with men like that. You need two or three weeks more rest at least. Helen’s been smiling like a schoolgirl because she thinks she has the two of you for the winter.”
“Just a look.”
“You’re the one who gave up on saving worlds,” Morgan pointed out. His tone was suddenly sharp. “Gave up on everything else as far as I can tell.”
His words brought a long, troubled silence.
“There is one thing I never gave up on,” Hadrian said at last. “Jonah. In life or death. I intend to find his killer if I have to die doing so.”
They gathered the rest of the harvest without speaking. Before they slipped down the ladder that led into the caves, Morgan stopped Hadrian with a hand on his shoulder. “Just don’t forget that Jonah never gave up on you.”
“What are you saying?”
“The only thing worse than dying in pursuit of his killer would be using his murder as an excuse to die.”
AS HADRIAN GAINED strength, Jori lost it. His recovery had released something inside her, Helen insisted, had allowed her to surrender to the fatigue that had wracked her body while she kept vigil over him. For reasons he could not fathom, Helen had taken the sergeant into the bedroom, tossing out extra fur blankets for Morgan to sleep by Hadrian at the hearth. She stayed beside Jori for hours, wiping her fevered brow, feeding her thin broth while speaking her healing words.
Hadrian lost himself in Morgan’s collection of books, sitting by the fire for hours at a time as winter storms swept over the mountains, soaking up histories of ancient empires. When he wasn’t reading, he was playing chess and cribbage with his friend or helping him recondition his old machines. As they set the board for a new chess game one afternoon, Morgan pressed him for further details of Hadrian’s discoveries since Jonah’s murder.
“It doesn’t matter how many shotguns they have,” his friend observed as he raised a pawn. “They are so far outnumbered they could never take Carthage by force. It’s a sham, a red herring. Like that robbery.”
“Robbery?”
“A spice and herb shop was held up by two men with shotguns. They took all the spice, all the money. The owner is in the hospital with a wound on his arm.” His friend rose and retrieved a newspaper dated nearly three weeks earlier. “A farmer gave this to me when I was trading for some of his honey.”
Hadrian scanned the article. Its tone was alarmist, speaking of firearms being used in crime for the first time ever, calling for the police to be armed now.
“They wrecked the shop with clubs, fired their guns only once, at the front window,” Morgan explained. “The owner got hurt because he ran in front of his window trying to save it. The editors want the police turning the city upside down for an armed criminal gang. Hell, those masked men were on the way out of Carthage five minutes after the crime.”
“Masked?”
Morgan turned the paper around so he could read it and pointed to it. “A witness’s account. They wore masks over the top of their heads, covering everything from the nose up. The witness said at first he thought they were actors going to a rehearsal of some new drama.”
Hadrian frowned. “It is theater. A well thought-out script penned by a man named Sauger. He understands all the elements of drama. Build from one crisis to the next. Throw in some distracting characters. Keep up the tension so no one has time to anticipate the plot. What Buchanan doesn’t realize is that they know what he’ll do at every step. He manipulates the newspaper, but Sauger manipulates him.” He looked up at his old friend. “They had plenty of ammunition but didn’t use it. If the guns are just props in their play, why go to all the trouble of smuggling in so much ammunition?”
“If it’s a play, maybe the ammunition is a prop too.”
Hadrian’s expression changed from uncertainty to worry as he recalled how he had seen no gunpowder in the shop where the shells were produced.
“If I wanted the police to spend their time looking for an arsenal while I was actually up to something else,” Morgan observed, “I just might want to make a public display of that arsenal. Hell, half the force would be too scared to look if they think the criminals are the ones who stole all their shotguns. I suspect the people who conceived this drama like surprise endings.”
Hadrian rose and stepped to a small pile of clothes, the ones he had been wearing on the Anna, now folded on a shelf. Helen had stacked all his belongings along the wall. Pencil stubs. His knife. Pen nibs. Under his bandana, now neatly washed and folded, was the shell he had taken in St. Gabriel, its waxed paper casing worn but still stiff. He handed it to Morgan, who balanced it on his palm, then pressed at its sides before producing a long blade and prying up one of the flaps compressed on the top.
Hadrian’s heart skipped a beat as his friend tapped the opened shell over his palm. The powder that poured out was white. It glowed ominously in the firelight. They stared at it in silence.
“If this is as powerful as you say,” Morgan said, “it’s a whole lot more effective than bullets at subduing a population. Not only does anyone who uses it become your slave, they pay you for the privilege.”
Hadrian rubbed some of the powder between his fingers. Jansen’s fingers had been coated with such powder. He had assumed the policeman had been investigating the smuggled spices before he died.
“There must be easier ways to transport it,” Hadrian said at last. “Why go to the trouble of making the shells?”
Morgan carefully pressed the top flap back into place and set the shell on the table. “You say this Sauger likes to play with people. He needs the fisherman to do his bidding. They’re renegades and ruffians, who despise the government. Smuggling weapons to use against the authorities would appeal to them. Smuggling in drugs that paralyze their children, there’s nothing of Robin Hood in that. And what better way to keep the police at bay than feeding the rumors that they will face a barrage of shotguns if they try anything.”
Hadrian desperately wanted his friend to be wrong. But he knew in his heart that Morgan had stumbled onto the truth about the shotgun shells and Kinzler’s mysterious shipments. “Why couldn’t I see it?” he asked in a bitter tone.
“Because part of you wants a rebellion against Buchanan to succeed.”
The words scorched a place deep inside Hadrian. Not simply because he knew they were true, but because they meant he too had become a pawn in the conspiracy.
THE FIVE RIDERS appeared an hour after dawn, three leading heavyladen packhorses and two with rifles slung across their backs, looking like guards. Hadrian, terrified he’d be spotted in his hiding place on the ridge above, cautiously raised Morgan’s binoculars. The pair with the guns were large, dark-skinned men who had the feral look of St. Gabriel. He studied them, watching the biggest man, the one in the lead, as he turned in the saddle. It was Sebastian, his escort at St. Gabriel.
He stared in the direction of the party long after they’d disappeared into the forest. At every step there wound up being no answers, only more questions. The secret parties were carrying supplies somewhere, had been doing so for months, with men from St. Gabriel freely moving
in and out of Carthage. He thought of his conversations with Sauger, who had seemed to know everything about Carthage, even about the circles of government. And when Buchanan had sent a secret scout to the south, he had been murdered before he even left town.
THE EVENING WAS cold, the air thin and clear. In the distance the lake was shimmering with every color of the spectrum. Hadrian watched from his high rock perch, mesmerized as streaks of sunset combined with a budding aurora to reflect off the newly formed ice.
“You’re not staying, are you?” The voice came unexpectedly from the shadows of the trail below, from the short path that led to the cave. Jori didn’t wait for an answer. “Helen will be so disappointed.”
It was the first time she had ventured out since surrendering to Helen’s care. It explained why their hostess had decided to prepare what promised to be a veritable banquet.
“She says to be ready to eat in a quarter hour.”
“Come see the sunset,” he said awkwardly, and gazed into the shadows a long time before realizing she had gone. “I’m leaving before dawn,” he declared toward the empty path. “If I tell them they would only argue and ask why, how I will stay alive. It would spoil our dinner.”
But the police sergeant was not at dinner. At the table was a woman Hadrian had not met before. She wore a bright blue dress tied with a yellow sash, her long russet hair hanging loose to her shoulders. There was a golden chain around her neck, and she was wearing elegant shoes made in a different world. They sat across from each other, Jori shy about looking at him. For a moment, as she passed a bowl of potatoes, her face in the candlelight had the glow of the shimmering ice. He found himself blushing for staring at her, then remembered the little tin Sauger had given her. She had applied Angel Polish to her face.
As the venison pie was served, Morgan produced a bottle of elderberry wine, bartered from a farmer, and the atmosphere softened, punctuated by laughter as Morgan spoke of being treed by a bull moose and other misadventures in the forest. When they finished eating, Morgan asked Jori and Hadrian to move the table along the wall. Disappearing for an instant, he returned carrying a large polished wooden box. He carefully set his treasure on the table, then opened the lid, producing a winding handle that he inserted into a hole in the side and turned. A moment later the box burst into music. Jori gave a gasp of joy and ran to the device, round-eyed.
Ashes of the Earth Page 22
