Ashes of the Earth (36 page)

A
bulletin board beside him held bills for the season's offerings and
lists of cast members. Near the top was a faded broadside announcing
a lecture Jonah had offered six months earlier.
How
Shakespeare Invented the Citizens of Carthage.

He
watched as young actors emerged in costume. Two girls in doublets
picked up wooden swords and practiced a duel. A boy passed by wearing
the bottom half of a donkey.

Suddenly
he was aware of a presence at his side.

"Art
thou some god, some angel, or some devil, that mak'st my blood cold?"
came the whisper. Sarah Buchanan wore an uncertain grin but fright
was in her eyes.

"Not
thy evil spirit, Brutus," Hadrian replied without thinking.

"I
have heard but not believed the spirits of the dead may walk again,"
the girl recited.

"You're
mixing your scripts, Sarah," he said.

The
girl threw her arms so tightly around him he struggled for breath. He
pushed her back, holding her at arm's length.

"You
were gone," she said in a rush. "People told me you were
dead but I didn't believe them. I heard my father speaking to you one
night, yelling at you, and ran down to see you. But he was alone,
just drunk."

"I've
been worried about you, Sarah. Father William is worried about you. I
looked for you at the old mill."

"An
unlessoned girl," she replied, "unschooled, unpracticed,
yet not so old but she may learn."

Her
peculiar theatrical ramblings disquieted him. There was something new
about the girl. Her energetic joy had been replaced with a nervous
fatigue. Her eyes seemed to move in and out of focus. He shook her.
"Sarah, that day you saw the body in the sewage pit. Who did you
tell about it?"

"For
murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous
organ."

Other
actors were beginning to stare at them.

"Sarah,
speak straight. Did you tell someone?"

Pain
flashed in the girl's eyes. "We didn't see a body. We saw a
funny black stick that happened to look like a hand. The governor
said so, it must be true."

Hadrian's
heart sank. The girl, once his prize pupil, was oddly adrift.

Sarah
looked down and giggled. "Silly me, I put my shoes on the wrong
feet."

A
boy in a harlequin suit paced through the crowd, ringing a bell.
"Places," he. declared.

When
her eyes found him again they seemed almost playful. "What does
the director do when he realizes he is in fact just another actor? He
drinks, drinks alone, drinks all night. It's hard getting the script
one page at a time." Suddenly she became grave and seemed about
to weep.

The
harlequin passed again, ringing the bell. A girl pulled Sarah away.
As she disappeared behind a curtain she turned and mouthed two words.
A chill rose up his back. He could have sworn they were Save me.

CHAPTER
Twelve

It
was nearly
sunset
before he reached Jonah's darkened cottage. Hadrian ventured inside
only long enough to retrieve the hidden vault key before lifting a
lantern from the porch. The chamber behind the vines was as he had
left it more than a month earlier. As he closed the door behind him
he felt an unexpected calmness. Even now the faint scent of Jonah's
tobacco still hung in the air, and for a moment he had the sense of
having just missed the old scholar.

He
quickly lit the candles, then settled at the little desk, moving to
one side the sword-knife he had left there and retrieving Jonah's
chronicle from its stand. He slowly leafed through the colorful
manuscript, conscious more than ever that its pages must somehow
unlock the secrets that had been plaguing Carthage and the camps.
Sarah's words hung like a cloud over him. The colony was indeed being
played like a puppet, and the closest thing he had to a script were
the pages in front of him.

He
paused over an entry from nearly a year before, reading its
description of how the lacrosse championship was played during a
snowstorm, then another, weeks later, describing the long graceful
iceboats launched on the lake every winter. The artwork decorating
these corners was of migratory birds and, as with most of the others,
connected by intricate flourishes in rich, varying colors. He went
back to earlier entries from two and three years before. In the
margins they all had short verses, Latin phrases or just words that
read like mottos. He turned back to the later page about the
iceboats. The margin art had changed, the margin words had
disappeared. What was before him now seemed exaggerated somehow,
almost garish. He drew the lantern closer, examining the long
right-hand margin, lifting the magnifying lens. A long, curving,
undulating line of black ink had been laid first, with red, green,
and brown lines woven over it. He forced himself to look at only the
black ink, then grabbed a pencil and traced the black line on a
separate sheet of paper.

Excitement
surged within as he completed the line. They were letters, grossly
squat and widened. It was a visual game he'd seen Jonah play with
children. When the paper was slanted away from the reader, they
assumed normal proportion.
The
eagle suffers little birds to sing. It was Shakespeare. Standing
alone, the words read like a warning. He transcribed the black shapes
in the remaining margins.
For
a single healthy birth,
the
top of the page said.
A
banquet of corncob and frog stew,
read
the next. The phrases appeared both unconnected and strangely
disturbing.

He
returned to the page from eighteen months earlier, describing the
loss of the
Anna.
On the next page, for
the next week, he read the Latin sentence
mundus
vult decipi ergo decipiatur
in
the margin. The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived. He
stared at it, puzzled and unnerved. Surely Jonah had not learned so
quickly that the loss of the
Anna
had been fabricated.

He
pushed pages back and forth, confirming his suspicion. All the early
pages had borders with plain text, but, starting a year earlier, the
border text was concealed.

Hadrian
tried one more, reading first the main text describing the opening of
the new public bathhouse and expressions of pleasure over the running
water heated by steam, using designs of old Roman baths. Again, he
traced the black lines of the margin text.
Not
so much the famous journalist who is mourned but the delicate painter
matched so perfectly with his poet mate. A song broken amid its
lyrical chorus.

Hadrian
lowered the pen. Nelly had spoken of how her television anchorman
husband had died the week before the baths had opened. Jonah was not
in fact offering random musings about life outside Carthage in the
margins, he'd been recording events in the camps as they happened.

He
quickly pulled fresh paper from the shelf and began paging through
the journal, transcribing as he read, pausing over another margin
entry disguised in a vine.
Malesuada
fames, he read in Latin. The hunger that encourages people to crime.

His
gaze drifted back to the little stand where the journal had been
kept. It was of recent vintage, he realized, not salvaged. Holding
the light close to it, he began to examine its joints, then tilted
it, feeling a shifting of weight beneath the top.

It
took him five minutes to find Jonah's hidden drawer. The leather
packet inside held dozens of papers of various sizes and shapes, all
bearing the same handwriting. The bottommost pages were written on
the backs of title pages torn from old novels. The first few were
nothing but poems. His gut tightened as he read.

Reading
crumbling books by bullrush lights

It's
not the way we expected to grow old

In
the land of the free and the home of the brave

He
could only bear to read the opening of a haiku-like verse:

How
cold are the freshly washed

faces
of our dead

The
later messages were all reports on life in the camps. An attempt to
organize a school had failed because too many families were
preoccupied with sickness and foraging for food. A new push by the
Tribunal to organize midwives was described, driven by the appalling
number of exiled women who died in childbirth. The list of diseases
Nelly had spoken about. Others were only short questions on roughly
torn slips. How long to soak the bark?
asked
one.
Antibiotics
lie at the end of our rainbow,
said
another. Still another gave a list of pots and pans and their
capacity, asking if they would suffice. They were the other end of
Jonah's correspondence with the camps.

He
continued to stare, rubbing at his chin as realization edged into his
consciousness. He had misunderstood the sequence, which meant he had
misconnected the pieces. Jonah had not been randomly reporting on
events in the camps, he had been participating in them. Jonah had
started teaching the camps about making drugs, then, months later,
hallucinogens had begun to appear in Carthage. Slowly Hadrian leafed
back to the page where the margin notes had been first hidden, then
replayed in his mind his conversation that afternoon. Jonah had begun
disguising his margin notes after the directory was stolen from
Hamada's archives.

At
last, exhausted and famished, he lowered the pencil and closed the
book, pressing it to his forehead for a moment. He had not simply
missed the sequence, he had missed all the important links. Nelly had
told him Jonah corresponded with her about medicine. He himself had
seen letters surreptitiously being delivered to the camps. But this
changed everything.

He'd
assumed there had been occasional contact during the past few months
but the journal confirmed that the correspondence had been constant,
growing in frequency. And as the correspondence grew more active so
too had the criminals. Jonah had not been engaging in casual letter
writing, he had been launching his own conspiracy to counter them.
But the trusting old scholar had unknowingly chosen as his messenger
a fledgling member of the jackals.

Jori
was asleep at the dining table in the cottage, her head cradled in
her folded arms. Arranged on an oily cloth in front of her were a
small revolver, its magazine open, and four bullets. She had been
cleaning a new weapon.

Hadrian
rekindled the smoldering fire and sat smoking one of Jonah's pipes,
staring into the flames. A log had crumbled to ash before he heard
movement behind him, the soft metallic click of bullets being loaded
into the revolver, followed by the spinning of the cylinder. Moments
later Jori appeared beside him, extending a mug. "I bought fresh
milk in town," she offered, then pulled up a chair beside him.

"I
did like you said," she explained, "but waited until lunch
when the offices were mostly empty. When I stepped inside Buchanan's
office Bjorn was about to leap on me, said I had to be taken to
Kenton right away. Buchanan called him off, saying that I no doubt
had an amusing story to tell. He waved Bjorn outside and shut the
door. By the time I finished speaking about the
Anna
and St. Gabriel I think
he had stopped listening. He laughed, said I should see a doctor
about the effect of my injuries on my brain."

"But
you came back with a gun."

"He
said that, in any event,
I'd
been brave, that
I
deserved a second
chance for trying to penetrate the camps. So I am temporarily
assigned to his flying squad."

Hadrian
lowered the pipe and leaned forward. "You understand what
happened?"

"I
never understand the governor."

"Trust
his actions, not his words. He has to dismiss your story officially,
but appointing you to his flying squad means he is worried you might
speak the truth. Easier for him to keep an eye on you. A lot harder
for Fletcher to reach out to you."

"There's
talk all over town. The Council is in some kind of deadlock. The
others won't ratify the man Buchanan appointed to fill Van Wyck's
seat on the Council. They say they don't know him, that he's a
stranger."