Across The Lake

by Doug Kelly

  Kudzu covered the landscape in the warm southern part of the continent, wrapping the once proud trees like a burial shroud. Because the thicket of the marsh and the tangled grass of the plains impeded travel, merchants and warriors used the ancient American roads for commerce and war. Incrementally and with eternal patience, as nature was so inclined to behave, the trees of the valleys invaded and marched up the hills and in many places a juvenile forest hid the plains altogether.

  Many ancient cities along the coasts were partially or fully submerged, and these were dangerous places to explore. Along the Mississippi River and its delta, swampland covered most of what had been dry land, and after it had violently meandered, the raging waters created a massive new lake near the Gulf. The succession of colossal earthquakes had buckled the terrain and shifted the course of many flooded rivers and streams. The mighty Mississippi was no exception. After the New Madrid fault had released its fury, a massive fissure opened across the river’s path, diverting it to a new course, down the altered landscape to the gulf. The swift, powerful water filled a low-lying basin and created a new larger lake by merging with an existing one, Lake Pontchartrain. It kept the same name, but its immense dimensions were anything but similar.

  A great many changes occurred with people, too. Everything fell quickly into savagery after the few remaining intelligent and resourceful people of the cities all died or turned into perpetual scavengers, struggling to survive. After the impact event, people lusted after water, food, and shelter. The dense populations inhabiting the cities were the most affected. The cataclysm spared no one; rich and poor starved alike. The supply of food suddenly stopped, causing great famine, and people left the cities for sustenance and water, disappearing into the fog of history and dying in unmarked graves.

  After the cull, the descendants of those who had survived became ignorant and illiterate. The reason why so many arts and sciences were lost was that most of those who survived became slaves to hunger, so illiteracy and lack of knowledge were the least of their concerns. The foundations of education and shared intelligence collapsed because they could not hand down knowledge that they did not possess. The desire for knowledge was only a dim and flickering light in a dark tunnel. The few and scattered people who remained had enough to do just to stay alive. Therefore, it subsequently happened that many of the marvelous things that their ancestors had accomplished, and the secrets of their science and technology, were remembered only in legend, and existed only in the stories handed down throughout the generations.

  Initially, those who survived the violent cataclysm existed by using the abandoned grain in farm silos for sustenance, along with what they could scavenge from the crops left neglected in the fields. However, as they ate scavenged provisions in the warehouses, and because what they could not eat immediately quickly spoiled, they hunted previously domesticated animals, which were not quite entirely tame because they were becoming feral. As these animal’s numbers decreased and they became increasingly difficult to hunt, industrious people went to work again, tilling the ground and clearing away small portions of the earth, encumbered already with shrubs, thick grass, and saplings. Some grew grain, while some became hill people, and others slipped away into the swamps. Therefore, after some time, people settled in places far apart from each other and built villages. These initial segregations of human population were the seeds that germinated into the future divisions of human habitations and culture.

  As the populace increased, wars and animosities sprang up to divide them, and violent conflict flourished. They isolated themselves into distinct populations and these groups became strangers to each other. The remnants divided into four different groups and various geographic ethnicities resulted from this segregation. The divisions included the cannibals who inhabited the swamplands, the nomads who were continually roaming criminals, the tribes of hill people who came down to wander the plains and graze their animals and who lived in hilltop forests during certain seasons, and the clansmen who transitorily consolidated under rivaling warlords and who lived behind stockades.

  —— —— ——

  In less than a day, the cataclysmic events that followed the impact had killed most of the human population. For years beyond that tragic aftermath of human suffering, people continued to die in droves. Those who survived struggled against formidable obstacles such as hunger, disease, and the murderous conflicts that accompany scarce vital resources, but the will to live was strong. Humans had crawled from under the rubble of toppled civilizations and had begun the long, multi-generational trek back to organized society and humanity. Over time, the earth began to heal, survivors banded together, communities arose, and life continued. Earth had survived and so had the ancient stories of the Americans that were passed down from parent to child. Of the Americans, only fables of their existence and the ruins of their cities remained. The ancient ones had disappeared, but their myths survived from generation to generation. This is merely one story of survival and revenge that took place in what remained of Louisiana.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Morning always came too early for Aton Matin, the clan leader’s only son. Now that it was the beginning of spring, mornings continued to arrive earlier every day, and even though the dawn’s early light radiated into his bedroom through the poorly fitting shutters, he continued to sleep soundly. The shutters that covered the windows on his family’s home were strong and thick enough to withstand the impact of metal-tipped arrows. Normally open during the daytime to allow in fresh air and light, these stout wooden shutters covered his windows during the night, and had done the best they could to keep the early morning clatter of life behind his clan’s protective stockade from waking him. In the morning, they blocked most of the sun’s radiance as it broke above the horizon. When closed, they revealed the imperfections of crude construction that allowed for gaps, which had increased with the age of his family’s home, allowing the golden rays of morning sunlight into his room along with an assortment of obnoxious noises that increased dramatically directly after daybreak.

  It was in the villages and towns that clustered around the nearby lake that clansmen spent their lives and built their society. Clansmen populated many communities, but quite often, no other settlement was within a day's journey. The largest were mere villages, and these communities were where wars and territorial conflicts, which had caused so much suffering, came to fruition. Over time, they had divided into numerous territories and dominions, which had the effect of increasing the conflicts among the clansmen. Because of that, there were separate provinces and territories in seemingly continual states of war, thrown into combat at the whim of warlords who had control of their region’s clans. Not content with the bloodshed they caused, those tyrants drafted the young and old alike into military service, and used mercenary soldiers to assist them in their greedy conquests. Evidently, human conflict is perpetual.

  On the windowsill was an inkstand, which Aton had recently used. The quill was still lying beside it with a sheet of parchment partly covered with his philosophical writings and crude sketches of inventions. The dark ink contrasted against the cream-colored parchment and did not bleed into it, leaving defined lettering that was barely perceptible to the touch of a finger across the script. Beneath the window on the bare wooden floor was an open chest that contained several similar parchments and books, and he had taken the sheet on the windowsill from it. This chest, although small, was heavy and strong. Aton had carved it from a solid block of cypress using an adze and chisel. He had adorned the exterior of the chest with intricate carvings. The lid, which he had tilted against the wall, had no hinges. He had also carved the wooden cover from cypress, two fingers thick, and had designed it to fit on the chest like a mortise and tenon joint, which allowed him to raise it completely off the crate. The most precious of the treasures in the wood chest were a few small sheets of paper; each delicately rolled and fastened with a ribbon. They were letters from Esina Regalyon, the woman he loved, the daugh
ter of his clan’s warlord, Olar Regalyon. A few small tools and a variety of relics from the Americans completed the wooden box’s contents.

  Besides the parchments, which were near the top, there were several books, tattered from use and slightly decayed, which had been preserved more by accident than by care from the ruins of ancient cities. All were textbooks that the Americans had used for instructing students in various subjects, and most people today would have cast them aside with contempt, which explained the high rate of illiteracy and ignorance, but Aton relished all the books he could find and studied any subject with intense curiosity. Aton, for the past two decades, had educated himself in a world where formal teaching was a rarity.

  The defining characteristic of the privileged class was that they could read and write. When the Americans fled the ruins of their great cities, all that remained was destitute survivors, but among them were a few who possessed an education and an intellectual capacity to learn. At first, there was no order; but after a generation or more, some societal structure grew and clans chose men with education and intellect as their leaders. They had no actual power, but the common folk, who had no formal education and an inferior intellectual capability, sought their knowledge and advice.

  Those few surviving people who had sharp minds taught their children to read and write, hoping that it might preserve some part of their ancestral wisdom. They wrote down what they knew, saved those manuscripts with care, and gave them to their children. Some of the manuscripts remained, and those seeking knowledge considered them treasures. A few of those privileged children, after growing to adulthood, assumed greater responsibility and higher authority as they forgot the past, and the equality of all humans was lost in antiquity. The small, enclosed farms of their fathers had enlarged to estates, the estates became towns, and by subsequent incremental increases, the ruling class rose to the top of the social strata. Because they intermarried only among themselves, they perpetuated a perceived distinctiveness and felt entitled to privilege.

  The privileged class meticulously conveyed to all their legitimate offspring the art of reading and writing, and thoroughly confined those skills to them alone. It was true that they did not use it except on rare occasions and only when necessity demanded, but they retained the knowledge. Undeniably, if the upper class found a person of privilege who was not able to read and write, the ruling family would degrade them at once. Only the ruling class permitted themselves to acquire that knowledge. If any others attempted to do so, they were enslaved and punished. Since reading was the foundation of knowledge, those in power denied that skill to the masses because the ignorant were easier to control.

  Most books that Aton had obtained had lain exposed for years in decaying houses while rain and mildew had spotted and stained their pages. The covers had rotted away over countless ages. He created their new covers by using a broad sheet of pliable leather with wide margins, far overlapping the edges. Many of the old books’ pages were gone, and others torn by careless handling. Fire had scorched some of the books. After pondering over these volumes, Aton had reconstructed some of the knowledge that would have been common to all when the Americans had published them. His only characteristic that could compare to his thirst for knowledge was the intensity of his quick temper.

  The parchments contained his notes and his thoughts; they were also full of excerpts from decaying volumes that had lain totally neglected in the houses of other privileged families. Intellectual curiosity was not fashionable, so most people, even those with the opportunity to learn, had ruined or lost books full of precious knowledge. Those same people would scurry from an opportunity to learn, like formal education, as if they were rats escaping from a sinking ship.

  To find a book in good condition was rare, because when the American society fell, they abandoned their books inside damaged houses and buildings that were at the mercy of violent weather. Fires and floods damaged or destroyed many of them. Some of those that curators had securely preserved in libraries and museums escaped deterioration, for a while. Aton’s peers chastised him when they found him obsessively studying the old books. He thought that his ancient ancestors must have cherished learning above all things. In contrast to a very old and extinct culture of learning, only a few in the ruling class sought education and it was irrelevant to all other divisions of people.

  Under his books, in one corner of the chest, was a leather bag containing four ancient coins, and a dozen pieces of modern silver money. Not much more than half of them were silver, the rest debased with alloy. Slaves of his clan had found the old coins while digging holes for the posts of a new barrier, and by the law, he should have delivered the antique bounty to the warlord, Olar Regalyon. All valuable antiquities discovered, whether in the form of ancient coins of the Americans or their jewelry, were the property of the ruling family, who was supposed to pay for its value in currency.

  Since the actual value of the currency was only half of its stated value, the transaction was greatly in favor of the ruling family. Because of the scarcity of gold and silver, the law was strictly enforced, and if there were any suspicion of hoarding precious metals, the warlord’s soldiers would have plundered the family home from the floor to the roof. Imprisonment and fines would have been the hoarder’s inevitable fate. Independent and determined to the last degree, Aton accepted the risk of disobedience rather than surrender that which he considered his find, and which he deemed his own. This unbending independence and pride of spirit together with his concealed contempt for others, specifically incompetent leaders, had resulted in almost completely isolating him from his peers, and had caused him to be regarded with dislike by the elders. He was rarely, if ever, asked to the festivities and entertainments provided by adjacent clans, or to the festivities of the more privileged class. Too quick to take offense where none was really intended, he usually imagined that others had showed him disrespect, but in reality they had barely given him a passing thought. He could not forgive the cruel jokes whispered by stronger, taller men who despised him for his small stature, but his intellect was strong, and beyond comparison to any person he had ever met.

  Regardless, he would rather have been alone in the woods than join their company, and would not compete with them in any of their sports. Aton was like a lone wolf that had never desired to belong to the pack, and certain clansmen observed his absence from the crowd. When his peers noticed him missing from the game field, they used weakness or cowardice to explain his lack of attendance. Those assertions stung him deeply, driving him to brood within himself and despise the proprietors of the rumor mill that much more, while they perpetuated the cycle of his loathing. Hardly anyone ever saw him in the courtyards around any other clan’s stockade. The servility of the ruling family, headed by the warlord Olar Regalyon, angered and disgusted him. The eagerness of strong men to carry a cushion or fetch an object for a healthy capable man annoyed him and reminded him of trained animals. He thought their conditioned behavior was the same as how a man can teach a dog to fetch a stick. A man would shun all of his pride to try and impress another of a higher class, all the while ignorantly solidifying his own lowly position in society through his own subservient actions. The intoxication of power was as attractive to some men as a raw bone was to a dog.

  In the focus of so much intrigue and continual striving for power, conniving men, on the one hand, were always on the alert for who they imagined to be willing pawns in the game of political change. On the other hand, the ruling family kept a watchful eye on the dispositions of every one of the lower classes. Although Aton was only twenty-five years old, he was already down on two lists. One list was with Olar, as a person whose views, if not treasonable, were doubtful. The other list was in the hands of a possible political disrupter, as a discontented and therefore useful man. Aton was entirely ignorant that he had attracted so much attention and speculation. He thought himself simply despised and ignored. He had no designs for treason against the warlord, and he was a loyal subject
of his own hot temper, too.

  On a low table by his bed were a flint, striking steel, tinder, and a ceramic oil lamp. Near that were his antler-handle knife and his steel axe. Both were small tools, very easy to carry, but extremely useful in the woods. Those were with the leather belt that he had placed on the table the night before when he had undressed to go to sleep. A dozen copper coins, not very regular in shape, and stamped with the symbol of his clan, were in a leather pouch on the table. Using a broadaxe, he had made the table from rough, plank wood that was dotted with wormholes. Constant use had worn the rough wood smooth. Dark splotches of spilled candle wax had stained the tabletop in various spots. The only other piece of furniture was a chair, which was at the side of the table; he had made it from carved wood and bent willow branches, secured with tightly wrapped hemp twine around some of the joints.

  On this table he had put pen to paper, using his magnificent imagination and clever intellect to design wonderful things, like a diagram for an improved battering ram and a drawing of a new design for a spear tip, both of which he thought that he might try to sell to a rival warlord someday. He had already shared the full-scale drawing of his new spear design with his clan’s blacksmith, and he had created an effective prototype. Another more recent schematic was for a flat-bottom boat he had designed to circumnavigate the enormous lake near his home. The forest between his clan’s stockade and the lake was a special place for him. He often traveled there to escape what he thought was a pathetic existence. As a hunter, he was familiar with the surrounding land and knew all of the trails, but he had not conquered the vastness of the water yet. The lake had seemed to beckon him to explore it, and he had never shunned its call.

  To cross the lake, all that he needed to do was finish building the boat that he had designed. It was not an original design; he had copied the shape and dimensions of an old boat hull that he had found while on a hunting excursion in the woods. He had stumbled across it while chasing after a deer that he had shot with his bow and arrow. It had been difficult to see because weeds and shrubs had overgrown its fiberglass hull, camouflaging it. Many generations ago, a massive tsunami had crushed the boat as the force of its wave had thrust it inland. Raging post-impact floodwaters took the remains of the boat’s carcass and damaged it more, leaving the fractured fiberglass hull stuck in the muddy ground between two trees, which had rotted away over the ages. He was always fascinated with ancient artifacts that he found, and this was no exception. He had occasionally found faded plastic bottles, not of much use, and sometimes bottles made from glass, which were rare, and which some people considered quite valuable for use as decorations. Colored glass was the most desired. It was easy to understand why the wreckage of the hidden boat had enchanted Aton. It was because of the material that the boat’s manufacturer had made it from and its seamless construction, obviously the Americans had created it. Aton had no understanding of the material with which they had made it, but he knew that he could try to copy its shape, its flat bottom design, made for stability in shallow water. He had metal woodworking tools that he could use, and had already begun the construction of his own craft, to cross the giant lake.