Ashes of the Earth (3 page)

At
last Hadrian became aware of Jonah patiently watching him. His page
was completed.

"You
need to start a second journal, my friend," Hadrian declared.
"Something simple, with designs for possible buildings,
observations on the weather and stars, notes on crops, with some
measured criticism of the government to keep it authentic."

Jonah
cocked his head to one side like a curious bird. "The governor
has been chatting with you."

Hadrian
glanced back at the freshly illuminated page. Did Jonah keep only one
page of his journal out at a time as a hedge against Buchanan's
suspicions? "The governor," he replied, "is going to
find a way to exile me." Hadrian clenched his jaw against the
heartache that rose at the thought of being separated from the gentle
old man, whose serenity and intellect had nourished him for so many
years.

"The
governor," Jonah observed with a wry smile, "is above all a
practical man. You were there when we opened the public baths last
month. The people were ready to kiss his hand for putting running
water on every block. I have shown him designs for a new flour mill,
a steam timber mill, even a rail line. As long as we keep building
new projects, he will stay in office. And I've explained to him it is
impossible for me to proceed without you. If he insists on constantly
arresting you on petty charges, I told him I'll need a cell too, for
we must be together." He paused, wincing, to knead his shoulder
with long bony fingers. "I'm aging fast, my arthritis worsens
every day. I need your hands and legs. You and I will do the detailed
designs here. Then I'll watch in my glass"—Jonah gestured
to the telescope on the veranda outside his workshop—"as
you manage the construction. You will be restored, rehabilitated,
you'll see. We'll build you a room on my cabin and train the warblers
to eat from our hands. Rehabilitated," he repeated. "Back
the way we were."

The
words brought a strange sadness to Hadrian. He watched the flickering
waters of the inland sea. "I wouldn't recognize myself," he
whispered to himself.

But
Jonah had heard. "Inside, we haven't changed," he said.
Then he cocked his head again. "What happened today?"

"We
found a body in the old latrine pit."

Jonah
shrugged. "Surely you're no longer frightened of the dead."

"No,"
Hadrian admitted. "What frightened me was the children playing
with a hanging rope again."

Jonah
replied with a sad, knowing silence.

"All
I've done, for all these years, doesn't mean a thing." The
confession leapt from Hadrian's tongue unbidden, as if something deep
inside had pushed it out. His despair was like a living thing gnawing
at his heart. "I always told myself I survived for a reason. It
was a lie. Thinking I could make a difference was the biggest lie of
all."

After
a moment Jonah lifted Hadrian's hand and dropped a familiar agate
disc onto his palm, a meditation stone worn smooth from years of
rubbing. "Borrow this," Jonah said. "Go back to your
cell and use it. Reach inside. Stop trusting your emotions. The
colony needs you more than ever. And stop escaping. Your bones will
start breaking if you keep giving Sergeant Kenton so many reasons to
beat you."

"I
agreed to spy on you, Jonah," Hadrian confessed, unable to look
the old man he loved in the eye. "Buchanan is going to start a
new campaign to weed out those who don't support him."

"Which
is why I made sure you were coming to live with me."

"He
doesn't trust you."

"Nor
I him." Jonah pushed Hadrian's fingers closed over the stone.
"But he desperately needs me. And together we will devise the
tales for you to carry back. Making a second journal that you can
share with him is an inspired suggestion. If he insists on turning
life into a chess game, then surely we can outplay him. He has no
mind for subtlety."

"You
refuse to accept how dangerous he is."

Jonah
offered another serene smile. "I have ways to deal with our
governor." He jabbed a bony finger at Hadrian's heart. "We
haven't changed," he insisted, "not in the important
places."

"Those
places are lost to me," Hadrian replied, his throat tightening.
"And I don't want to be what I have become." He ran his
hand over his shaggy hair. "The only thing that gives me hope,
old man, is that you still have the capacity to hope."

Jonah's
reply was to gesture Hadrian to follow him onto the veranda. The view
was spectacular, overlooking the town below, the vast, glistening
inland sea to the north, to the south the stables and fields framed
by hills streaked with crimson.

"It's
the best crop ever," the old man said, waving at the fields
beyond. "A surplus," he added in a pointed tone.

Hadrian
studied him, knowing how carefully Jonah always chose his words. "You
mean there's enough to ship outside the colony."

"I
told the governor that if you and I agreed to start building his new
brick factory, there must be one more project started at the same
time. Our bridge."

As
the words sank in, Hadrian's heart raced. They had dreamt of this for
years, a bridge across the steep ravine that cut off all direct
passage to the camps of the untouchables, otherwise requiring a day's
journey.

"Our
bridge!" Jonah repeated in a joyful tone. "The beginnings
of the new world you and I have longed for." He stepped back to
his table and, after a moment's fumbling through stacked papers,
produced a sketch of a cantilevered bridge built of logs. "Buchanan's
agreed that the first vehicles to cross it will be wagons of grain
for the camps! It will mean a difference between life and death for
some of the oldest!"

Hadrian
saw the sparkle in Jonah's eyes. Most of all, it would mean the
contact between young and old needed to heal long-festering wounds
and a release of the flood of knowledge dammed up in the camps for so
many years.

"So,
you see, things are already getting better, my son," Jonah said,
and paused to pluck a fading bloom from one of the potted roses he
kept on the veranda. "We will make a difference, you and I. This
is the way to change things. There are engineers in the camps, and
teachers and poets. Everything will be transformed when we set them
free. We will build a new school, a college even, and you will be its
head. The Dark Ages had to come before there could be a Renaissance."

Hadrian
had seldom seen him so animated, so happy. Jonah had not been able to
make the arduous journey to the camps for nearly two years, had no
idea how desperate conditions there were or how many of their aging
friends had died. And he had no inkling of the many ways Buchanan
might be lying to him. But looking into his radiant eyes, Hadrian had
no heart to tell him. "A Renaissance," he echoed, forcing a
smile. Then he accepted Jonah's embrace.

The
hut was
covered
with flowering vines, surrounded by patches of herbs once neatly
tended but now overgrown. As Hadrian dropped his armful of firewood
by the stone threshold, a woman appeared in the doorway,
acknowledging him with a sad yet grateful smile. She was hairless and
careworn, aged far beyond her years, though her high cheekbones and
intense green eyes reminded him that once, back in the days of the
world, she had been a fashion model. He handed her a dozen sheets of
newly bleached paper, stolen from a desk in Government House. "For
your poems, Nelly," he said.

Inside,
on a pallet beneath the solitary window, lay an old man of Asian
features. His breath came in long, wrenching rattles and his eyes
were unfocused. Propped on a stool next to him was an exquisite,
nearly finished painting of a thrush on a willow branch. "He
hasn't lifted a brush for days," the woman said over his
shoulder. "I try to feed him but he says it tastes like mud.
It's all I have."

On
the floor Hadrian saw the wooden bowl half-filled with a yellow
glutinous substance, gruel made of cattail roots. The winter before,
she had killed their beloved dog to feed her husband, calling it
squirrel. All summer, whenever he had seen movement in the shadows,
the nearsighted old artist, a television reporter in the former
world, had called out the dog's name and laughed.

"If
I can get away this afternoon," the woman said, "I think I
can find some tadpoles to boil."

As
she spoke, Hadrian's belly exploded in pain.

"Get
up, you son of a bitch!" spat Kenton.

Hadrian
sat up, gasping, clutching his stomach. The sergeant hovered over him
in the dusk, twisting the end of his truncheon in his palm. Behind
him Lucas Buchanan leaned a bicycle against a tree.

"Quit
your dreaming!" the governor snapped.

But
Hadrian had not been dreaming as he lay waiting by the ravine. He had
been simply reliving his last visit to the camps.

The
governor lifted a pick and lantern from a pile of tools lying in the
shadows, then pointed Kenton toward a large boulder near the road
before gesturing for Hadrian to follow him into the ravine. Not
daring to ask why Buchanan himself had decided to help with the
grisly chore, Hadrian retrieved a shovel and hurried down the path,
not missing

Kenton's
ravenous glance as he took up his sentinel position. Escaping twice
in one day guaranteed a double beating that night.

The
two men worked feverishly at the body in the pit, clearing an arm, a
hip, a leg, a foot as darkness overtook the ravine. The dead man was
clad in sturdy traveling clothes, wore the leather beltpack commonly
used by trappers and others who ventured into the wilds. His
countenance, shriveled and stained nearly black, was that of a strong
man in his twenties, ready to challenge the world. Or what was left
of it.

Hadrian
studied the stricken way the governor stared at the face. "You
knew him," Hadrian declared as Buchanan lit the lantern. "You
knew who it was when you saw that ring."

Pulling
the ring from his pocket, Buchanan held it in the pool of light. "We
had them made last spring so they could be sent back as a token with
a message, to authenticate the source."

Hadrian
bent to examine the ring. Engraved on it were a seagull and a pine
tree, the symbols of the colony's flag. "He was working for
you."

"There
were two of them," Buchanan explained. "We had a private
dinner where I gave them a send-off speech. Long recon." It
meant a distant scouting expedition, in search of new sources of
salvage.

Hadrian
searched his memories of the spring before. There were always public
announcements, public banquets before the long recon teams set off.
"You kept this mission secret."

"They
were one-man expeditions. They were supposed to leave before dawn,
this one on foot, the other in a sailing canoe bound for the seaway.
The other was brought back three weeks later in a trading boat from
the northern settlement," he explained, referring to the tiny
band of survivors who eked out their sustenance on the far shore, 150
miles away. "They found him floating facedown halfway across."

He
looked at the dead man. "This one's Hastings, one of our most
experienced woodsmen. Micah Hastings. He volunteered instantly the
moment I mentioned I might send out new scouts. His mother comes
every week to ask if we've heard from him."

"He
never left," Hadrian observed as he scooped away more of the
dried sludge from the man's side. "But why keep a salvage
mission secret?"

Buchanan
ignored the question. "All these months I've been imagining that
he'd found a road that had not been made impassable by overgrowth,
that he had gone far to the south and was mapping new salvage yards."
Salvage yards. It was one of the colony's euphemisms for the ruined
towns that were prized for the pieces of metal they contained.
Humanity's technical progress was held hostage to the discovery of
new junkyards. Buchanan paused, his voice growing more distant. "I
had a dream a few nights ago, that Hastings found a family of
elephants escaped from some zoo and was bringing them here." He
contemplated the rising moon. "Do you suppose there are any
elephants left on the planet?"

Hadrian
was beginning deeply to resent the moments like this, moments when
Buchanan pretended they were still old friends. "I don't know.
Probably not."

The
answer brought an odd quiet. The governor paced around the corpse.
"That thing burrowing into his hand," he murmured in a tone
of disgust. "Get rid of it."

Hadrian
hesitated, then raised the lantern over the blackened hand. Something
long and thin extended from its closed fingers. He realized that what
Buchanan had mistaken for a worm was an encrusted strand of leather.
As he pulled it, a flat oval slid out of the dead man's grip, an
amulet of some kind. Hadrian spat on it and wiped it clean, revealing
a piece of copper crudely etched with a doglike figure standing on
two legs. It could have been a wolf. It could have been one of the
voracious martens the new generation had taken to calling tree
jackals. As he extended it to Buchanan, he recalled the strange words
spoken by the leader of the gang that morning.