Ashes of the Earth (6 page)

"Of
all the scenarios you could postulate, surely murder is at least one
of them."

The
head of the Carthage hospital was quiet a long time, gazing at the
tobacco smoke that drifted through the moonlight. "Two of his
fingers were broken. There were marks on his upper arm where someone
with a hand like a vise had gripped him."

Hadrian
lowered his voice. "Does Buchanan know?"

"He
was there when I cleaned the body. I showed him. He immediately
reminded me that murder was a legal construct, not a medical concept,
then insisted the injuries were made when Jonah dropped to the floor
from the rafter. When I disagreed, he said we had a duty not to panic
the population, that Jonah would want his death to be used for the
betterment of the colony."

Hadrian
leaned back in his cocoon of warm water and moonlight. Near the
horizon a trail of sparks marked the late return of one of the steam
fishing vessels. Above it the aurora shimmered. Jonah had kept his
astrophysics alive by studying the northern lights and had been
writing a scholarly pamphlet on why their display had increased over
the past generation.

It
was Emily who broke their silence. "An old man died out here
last week," she said in a melancholy tone. "He had no
family left, made his way as a carpenter, but in his spare time he
tried to start little churches. Baptist first, then Episcopal. The
final attempt was Buddhist. They always failed. He came out here on
his last night. I found him dead at dawn, leaning against a post,
looking upward. In his lap he had left a slip of paper. I thought it
was going to be a prayer or a last bequest. After the earth was in
ashes, it said, I could see the stars more clearly."

"Jonah
was the best of us, Em," Hadrian said after a long silence. He
wasn't sure she had heard him.

When
she spoke at last it was in a whisper. "He was always about
getting on with life. The world may have ended for the rest of us,
but he treated it like a bad accident we had to just walk away from."

"At
first I thought it was because he was callused," Hadrian
replied. "But I quickly learned that wasn't true. It was just
courage. More than I ever had."

"I
read old books on psychiatry. Sometimes I think we are as disabled on
the inside as the exiles are on the outside. But not Jonah. I never
knew how he did it. As if he were the last real human on earth."

"On
his body, was there anything else? A knife wound?"

"More
like a line where blood vessels had been crushed, high on his neck,
but just a shallow cut. A knife could have done it, held close to the
neck. Nothing else remarkable. Just some blotches of color on his
lips. Little brown and purple spots. An allergy, perhaps."

As
Hadrian puzzled over her words, Emily stood. "There are clean
clothes on the chair by the door, and you can use the bed in the exam
room off the kitchen, provided you give me ten minutes first. Second
floor, north corner."

She
was taking the pulse of a young man when Hadrian arrived upstairs.
Her patient was barely out of his teens, a handsome youth whose face
strangely sagged along the left side. Emily lifted his left arm and
dropped it. The limb was lifeless.

"Not
a mutation, not a birth defect?" Hadrian asked.

The
doctor shook her head. "His name is Jamie Reese. He's worked in
the fishing fleet for years, the son of the captain of the Zeus, one
of the old sailing trawlers. His crew found him like this on his bunk
one morning. If he were fifty years older, I'd say it was a stroke.
There's paralysis, probably nerve damage. He can't talk, can't write.
Drifts in and out of this coma."

"He
could have been hit on the head, but the concussion had a delayed
effect."

"That's
how it was first reported. But there's no sign of a blow. None of his
crew would talk when I went to the docks to ask about a possible
accident."

"Reese
... Why do I know that name?"

"The
hero from the sinking of the Anna. He was one of the two survivors.
Saved the captain."

Hadrian
looked at the patient with new interest. The Anna had been the first
of the colony's steamboats, lost in a storm more than a year earlier.
Reese and the captain had survived in a dinghy for several days
before being picked up by another fishing boat. He paced around the
bed, lifting the youth's arms, pushing back the sleeves.

"What
are you looking for?"

"I
don't know. A tattoo. Or a mark of some kind."

"His
mother came every day at first, but she's stopped. She was quite
emotional. I thought it was grief, but on her last visit it was more
like fear. Two men came yesterday, smelling of fish. They wouldn't
step into the room, just looked at him from the door. I asked what
was wrong. They asked if he would live. When I said he probably would
they didn't seem relieved, they just backed away."

Hadrian
now noticed a leather strap around the fisherman's neck and pulled it
out. It held a piece of tin stamped with an image, a wolf on two
legs. But unlike the medallion gripped by the dead scout, this wolf
stood in a tree. Not a wolf, he suspected now, but one of the vicious
pine martens that had multiplied in recent years. A tree jackal.
Jackals run with ghosts.

"Do
you know this?"

"Just
a cheap piece of jewelry."

"No.
It's more. The mark I was looking for." He studied the youth
again. Reese had been feted for his heroism after the shipwreck,
would have had his choice of jobs in the fishery. "The two
visitors. Did you know them?"

Emily
shrugged. "They smelled of fish. And something else—spices.
Cloves and cinnamon. I assumed they were friends of his. They asked
how he fared and I said he should survive."

"What
sort of friends stand in the hall and point?"

The
doctor gave another weary shrug. "Fishermen and hunters get more
superstitious every year. Haven't you heard? We're retreating
backward in time, reversing history. We'll have witch trials and
exorcisms before long."

Hadrian
stepped to the end of the bed and laid the shreds of paper from his
pocket on the blanket. "These were under Jonah's desk."

"Hadrian,
I don't have time."

He
held up a restraining hand and assembled the scraps quickly, then
pointed to the missing arcs along the right margin. "Brown and
purple spots, you said."

The
doctor cocked her head, then lifted a piece from the margin to study
under the oil lamp.

"Brown
and purple ink. He bit off these pieces before he died."

Emily's
brow creased with worry as she nodded her agreement. "But it's
nothing," she said as she quickly scanned the pieces on the bed.
"A diary."

"Jonah
spent hours on this. A different page each week," he explained.
"All I know for sure is that there's more to it than you and I
can see." He gazed at the comatose sailor, then tore a slip of
paper from the chart hanging from a peg by the bed and quickly wrote
a note. "Give this to the governor in the morning."

As
Emily read the note her mouth twisted as if she had bit into
something sour. "A police guard? He'll never agree."

"You're
on the Council."

"Why
would I want some brute in uniform hovering over this poor boy?"

Hadrian
stepped toward the door, fighting an overwhelming fatigue. "To
protect the truth," he said, and slipped away.

An
hour after
dawn
he found Emily back in the kitchen, instructing her nurses at the big
table by the stove. She offered him a haggard smile as he poured
himself tea. The only other medical personnel to have found their way
to Carthage had been a chiropractor, a dentist, and two medical
students. She was not only the head physician and hospital
administrator but also chief instructor of its fledgling medical
school.

Outside,
he drank the strong brew and braced himself for the painful day
ahead. The scent of fresh loaves wafted up from a bakery near the
port. Trawlers were leaving the wharves half a mile up the shore.
From the edge of town, cows mooed. The mechanical breath of a steam
thresher starting its day's work rose in the distance. He drained his
mug, set it inside, and began climbing the hill.

At
the library crews were clearing out the debris from the fire. They
said nothing, only stepped aside as he mounted the stairs. Jonah's
workshop lay in ruin, apparently untouched, cordoned off by a rope at
the entry. Charred roof shingles cracked underfoot. The old man's
precious collections lay scattered about. Books lay in pools of
water. The marks of heavy boots stained the shelves where
firefighters had climbed to aim their hose.

He
circled the big table, despairing of finding any evidence in the
chaos, struggling once more to visualize the chamber as it had been
when he discovered his old friend's body, before the fire and fire
crews had destroyed it. Hadrian could see the fresh chips on the
rafter where he'd hacked away the hanging rope. He found the knife
where he had tossed it against the back wall. Lifting it now, he
admired the finely worked hilt, noted the mark of a Philadelphia
maker and a date. 1861. As Nash had explained, such a blade was too
useful to have been preserved simply because of its Civil War
vintage. It had been ground down to a size that made it useful for
assaulting old men.

He
stuck the blade into his belt, his heavy wool shirt concealing it,
then studied the chamber again. The desk had been moved nearly two
feet to position it under the rafter. There were footprints on it,
those of the flat-soled shoes worn by Jonah but also boot prints. It
would have taken two men to move the heavy desk. There had been at
least two killers. With the knife at his throat, the scientist had
been forced to step onto the chair, then the desk, had stood as the
noose was tightened, and then been shoved off the makeshift scaffold.
But if they had had such a knife, why go to the trouble of the
hanging?

He
touched the scraps of Jonah's journal in his pocket. There must have
been a moment when he had seen them coming, had recognized their
intention. He could have run to the balcony to call for help. But
instead he had grabbed his illuminated page and taken two bites out
of it, then ripped up the remainder.

Hadrian
paced slowly along the shelves. Most of Jonah's prize exhibits had
been damaged or destroyed. He ran his finger along the edge of
several shelves, wiping away the soot on the inscriptions his friend
had carved into the edges of the thick boards, knowledge is the
contagion that all tyrants fear, he read, then wonder is the
beginning of all learning. He picked up the stuffed grouse, broken
beyond repair in the chaos of that night. One leg had been broken
off, the other barely attached. Its head was gone. He paused. The
head had been severed. He pulled out the knife, examining the blade,
finding a tiny feather pressed against the hilt. He picked up another
animal, and another. Each had been mutilated. For Jonah, it would
have been like witnessing torture. On the floor were the remains of
the intricate model observatory. It had been sliced into splinters.

A
low moan escaped Hadrian's throat as he recalled Emily's report of
broken fingers. They had not come to kill Jonah. They'd come to
torture him, to obtain something from him. Knowing how treasured his
exhibits and models were, they had begun by mutilating them. Jonah
may have been weak in body but his was the strongest spirit Hadrian
had ever known. Even after breaking his fingers, even after slicing
into the skin of his neck with the knife, his torturers had failed.
They had attacked his collections, held the knife to his throat, put
the noose around his neck. But the old scholar would have shown no
fear, would not have given them the satisfaction of begging for his
life or bargaining with what it was they sought. Jonah had taken two
bites of his page and let them hang him. But why burn the library, he
asked himself as he lifted a book from the floor and returned it to a
shelf.

Because
they had failed, he realized. If they couldn't obtain what they
sought from Jonah, they had tried to make certain no one else could.

He
stared absently at the book he had shelved, then paused over its
title. Favorite American Poets. He carried it back to the desk and
again assembled the torn page. Up from the meadows rich with corn,
the verse began. Over two dozen pages had been marked with folded
corners. He began scanning the marked pages. Longfellow, Frost,
Riley, Holmes, Emerson. Then the words of Whittier were in front of
him, leaping off the page, completing the verse. Fair as the garden
of the Lord, the poet had written. "To the eyes of the famished
rebel horde," he read aloud to himself.