Ashes of the Earth (17 page)

"Nelly,
I just want to get you home," Hadrian said, handing her an apple
slice.

"You
haven't seen our home lately," she said wryly.

He
stepped to the window, clenching the bars for a moment. "Why did
he have to die?" he questioned the shadowed trees.

"Jonah
knew more than anyone in all the world," came her cryptic
answer.

"Why
were you going to see him?" he asked.

"I
don't know."

Hadrian
gazed with despair into his hands. "So now you don't even trust
me with the truth."

"It
is the truth," Shenker growled. He inched closer to Nelly, as if
he would have to protect her. "She got an urgent message from
Jonah saying he had to see her. We don't know why."

"What
were the exact words?"

Shenker's
fists clenched. "I told you. Interrogation is over. Get out or
I'll—" his protest was choked away by a hand on his knee.
Nelly had leaned forward to calm her fiery companion. With her other
hand she reached inside her tunic and offered up a tattered slip of
paper.

Hadrian's
mouth went dry as he read it.
Come
at once, it said in Jonah's familiar hand.
If
the world is going to shift let us be the reason.

He
allowed himself be pulled by the sergeant out of the cell, Shenker
lifting the note from his hand as he left. "If they come again,"
Hadrian instructed the exiles, "pretend to be unconscious."
He extracted his arm from Waller. "Put me in the next cell,"
he said to her.

"You're
not a prisoner." Conflicting emotions swirled over her face.

"I
need sleep. And you need to assert your authority." He stopped
halfway into the open door of the next cell.

"I'm
sorry?" She did not see the group of men approaching behind her.

"Hit
me."

"I'm
not another—"

"You
really are just another slag bitch at heart, aren't you?"

Hadrian
had seen the fast, powerful reaction following Shenker's gibe. Her
hand came up in a blur, swinging back and hammering his jaw.

He
stared at her and smiled as the blood welled up in his mouth and
dripped down his chin.

"Excellent,
Sergeant!" boomed the deep voice behind her. "The long
quick arm of the law at work!" said Lucas Buchanan.

Hadrian
retreated into the cell as the governor stepped beside Waller, with
Kenton, Bjorn, and a prison guard a step behind him.

"Did
you know Sergeant Waller was once a young star in the lacrosse
league, lieutenant?" the governor asked Kenton. The sport was
one of the few old world traditions of the region he had allowed to
continue. "Don't get inside her elbows. They're deadly."
All the police laughed, except Waller. She stared with cool
resentment at Hadrian.

"The
others?" Buchanan asked.

"Nursing
their injuries," the sergeant reported in a wooden voice. "Not
much good for talking right now."

Buchanan
frowned. "And citizen Boone's project? The evidence on the
events at the library will need to be—" he searched for a
word, "refocused."

"We
are making progress," Waller replied.

Hadrian
hung his head, scrubbing at the blood on his chin.

Kenton
muttered something to one of the guards, who stepped to the next
cell. Hadrian heard the heavy door creak open, watched the shadow of
the guard as Buchanan stepped past him into the cell. Bjorn lit a
cigarette, one of the Booksticks brand—tobacco rolled in an old
book page—that had become so popular in the colony. The
governor emerged a moment later, wearing an air of satisfaction.

"The
owner of the house has changed his mind," Kenton reported. "The
slags forced their way into his dwelling before the murder, leaving
him gagged and bound to a chair. He agrees now that their clothes may
have been singed upon their return the night of the fire."

Buchanan
fixed Hadrian with a venomous stare, as if defying Hadrian to
challenge him. "Write it up," he ordered Kenton.

Kenton
wore a gloating smile as he pushed Hadrian into the empty cell and
locked the door.

Retreating
to the small window at the rear, Hadrian studied the landscape,
revisiting in his mind the many escape scenarios imagined during
other long nights in the prison, and how he might free the two
exiles. There was no outside wire, not even guards patrolling the
grounds, nothing but the window bars, recast from railroad iron. He
twisted his hands around the bars, futilely pounding them with his
fists.

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.