Ashes of the Earth (2 page)

Hadrian
clamped his jaw tightly, refusing to be baited by the governor's
mention of the ghetto thirty miles away, the squalid camps where the
survivors of radiation and other diseases from the apocalypse had
been condemned to live. Slags, the exiles were commonly called,
though many other epithets were used. I'll have you begging with the
half dead in another week, Kenton had threatened Dax. Was he hinting
at a coming purge of the gang leaders? The camps would be a living
hell for the young teenager.

"But
Jonah insists you are the only one he will work with, the only one
who really understands what he's doing. I reminded him that many of
us can read blueprints and follow designs. But the old man just gives
me that damned monk's smile of his and says it's you or no one. As if
he were our wizard and you the only apprentice able to read his
runes." The governor's voice was heavy with resentment. "So
when you complete your sentence you will be released into his
custody," he added quickly.

Just
the mention of the old man who had become like a father to Hadrian
was a salve to his aching spirit. But after a moment he raised his
brows. Ever since Hadrian had been pushed out of the Council and his
schoolmaster's job, Buchanan had harassed him, ejecting him from his
quarters at the school, arresting him on petty charges. "Why
would you do that for me?"

"I
told you. To help Jonah build our public works. He submitted a long
list of proposed projects to the Council. He promises a brick factory
soon, says he can even build a rail line to the mines in five years'
time."

"I
know you better." Hadrian shifted so he could keep an eye on the
half-open door behind him. There should have been deputies
frantically consulting, policemen conferring about the dead man. With
a chill he saw several dirt-encrusted pistols hanging on belts from a
peg on the back of the door, awaiting restoration.

The
governor lifted a marble chess piece, an elephant with a castle on
its back, one of the many random artifacts he collected. When he
finally replied he addressed the rook in his hand. "I've
discovered he keeps a secret journal. We've been unable to find it."

"Perhaps
he's just putting your regime in historic perspective. I tend to
think in terms of feudalism."

Buchanan's
smile was as thin as a blade. "No one cares what you think
anymore. But if the esteemed Jonah Beck were recording such careless
thoughts and they wound up in our new newspaper..."

"You're
asking me to spy on him?"

The
governor toyed with the switch on an old gooseneck lamp. Government
House was one of the colony's few electrified buildings, powered by
bicycle generators designed by Jonah and manned by convicts in the
darker, colder months. "We want only to protect him from
himself. He trusts you. All I want are reports from time to time."

"I
refuse." A drop of blood fell from Hadrian's cheek onto his
tattered shoe.

Buchanan
adjusted his jacket, which hung like a sack on his bony frame.
Everyone had resembled scarecrows in the early years, but he was one
of those who had never been able to regain their weight. "How
many people in the known world, Hadrian? Nine thousand, maybe ten?"

"You
always ignore the camps and the forest people. They probably make it
closer to twelve."

The
governor grinned, as if amused by the jibe. "And once you were
with me at the very top, not just a founder, a leader."

"I
don't recall worrying about what people called us. We were too busy
keeping people alive."

"You
played the survivor's game better than any of us. Now look at you.
Can't even clean out dried shit without making trouble."
Buchanan gestured toward a small stack of papers held together with a
pin. "If I had enough paper to keep a thorough file on you, this
would be a foot thick. You're a failure even at being a failure.
There'd be little protest if I ejected you right now. Agree, or I'll
have you declared an outlaw. No coming back. No more crying on the
old man's shoulder. And no more interfering with my children,"
he added with extra vehemence.

Hadrian
had been examining a photo of an old canal boat pulled by a team of
mules. "Is that what this is about? Your daughters were toying
with a hanging noose."

"A
game."

"You
and I have buried a lot of children through the years, Lucas. This is
how the pattern begins, getting comfortable with the mechanics of it.
I remember once when children joined Scouts and soccer teams. In your
colony they join suicide cults. Surely you haven't forgotten how a
little girl's neck looks when it's stretched? The bulging, surprised
eyes, the laughter forever choked out of her? They don't move on to a
more beautiful world, they just move into our nightmares. Each of
their gravestones is a monument to our failure."

Buchanan
gripped the rook so hard his knuckles whitened. "Since the day
you were thrown off the Council and sacked as the head of our school
you were no longer accountable for my children. Accept my
generosity," he said coldly, "or I draw up papers today to
exile you.

Push
me and I'll banish Jonah too. I can't trust him if I have no leverage
over him. Are you prepared to nurse him through the winter in some
wattle hut in the camps? Frostbite will come first, then chilblains.
After a couple of months he'll look like he had radiation sickness."

Hadrian
stared at the little pool of blood on his shoe. He longed to be in
the camps at that moment, sitting in a smoke-choked hut as some
hairless, half-toothed bard sang the rock songs of their youth. But
he couldn't bear to be forever parted from Jonah, and the old man
wouldn't survive even a month of winter in the camps. He looked up
into Buchanan's icy, expectant grin and slowly nodded.

Settling
into his chair with a satisfied expression, the governor lifted a
large silver ring from the desk. Hadrian realized he'd seen it an
hour earlier. It had been on the finger of the shriveled hand in the
sludge pit.

"We
could have had this conversation next week when my sentence is up,"
Hadrian observed, his gut tightening. Buchanan had been making
certain he had him under his thumb before demanding something more
urgent.

"I
want that body removed."

Hadrian
closed his eyes a moment. Then he looked hard at Buchanan. "I'll
need more than a shovel and basket. Tell Kenton to bring tools in the
morning, a coffin if he can find one." Behind the desk was a
plaque inscribed in strength we endure. It had been Buchanan's
political slogan when he was first elected so many years before. It
had become his personal creed.

"You
misunderstand. Tonight. Only you. I will order Kenton to release you
after the evening meal, on parole until midnight. Take a lantern and
whatever tools you need from the jail shed."

Once
Hadrian had been welcomed there, in this office, once the two men had
trusted each other. They had transformed through the years, trying to
survive, each in his own way trying to build the colony out of the
rubble of the world. Survival, he had learned, was not about merely
adapting, but transforming. Those who had not transformed in the
early years had died. You had to constantly slam the door on the
thousand things that choked you with emotion, learn to be grateful
for the scars that grew over your soft parts. Now whatever was left
of either man from the old times was so disfigured as to be
unrecognizable. Now they were in their final relationship. Buchanan
had won, and Hadrian was becoming his secret slave.

"He
was a big man. I can't do it alone."

"But
dead for a long time," the governor observed. "There's
probably only ... Surely the body's not intact."

"The
sludge preserved him, like the old bog men."

Buchanan
grimaced, then turned to gaze for a long moment over the harbor and
the vast inland sea beyond before tilting his head toward a portrait
of Sarah and Dora. "I lie awake sometimes," he confessed in
a near whisper, "worrying that they think we are going to
destroy the world again."

"Why
wouldn't they?" Hadrian shot back. It was the endpoint of a
thousand conversations they'd had over the past two decades, a
reflection of the strange, many-layered person Buchanan had become.
He would gladly batter Hadrian in public, would shame him, would
outlaw him, but still, when they were alone, he could become the
lonely widower, offering up the unguarded conversation they had
shared in the early years.

"Sarah
wrote something on the wall by her bed. We know what we are hut know
not what we may be. I asked where she got the words and she wouldn't
say. Which means they came from you."

"You
flatter me. I only recommended she read more Shakespeare." Free
from the contamination of the modern world and being so widely
available to the early salvage crews, the Bard's works filled several
stacks of the colony's collection of approved books. "Fascinating,
don't you think, that Hamlet would resonate with her? The destruction
of a royal family."

Buchanan
glared at him. "I am going to make you repaint the slogan you
destroyed on the wall of the town square," he growled. "Say
it. I want you well practiced when you recite it to the assembled
children."

Hadrian
returned the smoldering gaze. "Four weeks of hard labor was my
sentence. Nothing was said about becoming part of your propaganda
machine."

"Did
I mention another week for escaping today?"

"I
refuse."

"I
can picture old Jonah now, frost in his hair, his teeth chattering."

Hadrian
hung his head. "We have not lost our history. We are free of
history."

A
victorious grin split the governor's flinty features. He turned
again, this time to watch a plume of smoke on the northern horizon, a
steam-powered boat working one of the sea's endless schools of fish.
"Be at the sludge pit at dusk. You'll have help," he said,
and pointed to the door.

The
corridor outside was empty. Hadrian stepped to the front window to
survey the street below. Kenton, obviously assuming the audience
would take much longer, was rolling a cigarette by a row of bicycles,
sullenly observing a group of teenagers beside one of the horse-drawn
machines used for scraping roads. Hadrian watched the sergeant, the
skin on his back crawling from the beating to come, then shot down
the stairs, stole a hat from a hook to conceal his face, and climbed
out a back window.

Ten
minutes later he stood in the entrance to the two-story log building,
designed like a great barn, that housed the colony's library. Wiping
the blood off his face, he watched the dusty street for the brown
uniforms of Buchanan's policemen, then pulled the hat low and stepped
inside. He slipped into a side chamber, pausing for a satisfied look
at the shelves of books that had cleared the censors, then studied
the stairway and the landing above for signs of a sentry before
ascending, a volume of Dickens in his hand for cover.

He
paused when he reached the threshold of the large chamber, gazing
through the gaping door upon the slender figure, once the head of a
great university, at the worktable. The sight of the grey-bearded man
working with his nib pen on a sheet of heavy handmade paper always
soothed Hadrian's tormented spirit. The page was from Jonah's secret
chronicle of life in the new world, and every time Hadrian discovered
him bent over the project—often by candle at night—he saw
him as a monk from a thousand years earlier illuminating a manuscript
for the ages. As he laid his hat on a chair and silently stepped
closer, he saw that his friend was completing the details of a small
sailing boat in the lower margin. Green vines brimming with pumpkins
edged the top corners, autumn flowers the bottom, with elaborate
flourishes connecting them.

Jonah
looked up with a gentle smile. "They're giving tea breaks to the
labor crews now?" he asked in a chagrined but good-natured
voice, then gestured Hadrian toward a nearby stool before returning
to his work. Hadrian glanced back at the door, aware that he had no
more than a quarter hour before Kenton and his men began looking for
him. I It-sat uneasily for a moment, then wandered around the
chamber, a place dearer to him than any in the colony. He studied the
mounted specimens of small forest mammals on one shelf, the volume of
the ancient Chinese poet Sutungpo beside dried flowers on another. As
he examined the working wooden model of an astronomical observatory
with a telescope mounted on a pivoting frame, he thought of how the
governor pined for public works to jump-start his new civilization,
while the wizard of Carthage colony yearned to look at the stars.