Ashes of the Earth (23 page)

Emily
stared at him silently, pleading in her eyes.

"I
can't sleep without seeing his dead face. He had grand plans, Em,
plans to fix all our past sins, and someone has perverted them into
death and greed. I have to stop them."

The
doctor sighed. "When's the last time you were there, Hadrian?"

"A
few months ago. In early spring I hauled in a packful of grain and
cut firewood for a few days."

"You
mean you stole a packful of grain from the government silos,"
Emily said with a shake of her head, then worry creased her face.
"Things have changed a lot. The softness is gone in the
survivors. They're—" she searched for a word,
"antagonistic. They will know what Buchanan plans for Nelly, and
they won't hesitate to commit violence against one of us."

Hadrian
lowered his legs to the floor, fighting the pain and dizziness as he
stood. He pulled away the now bloody bandage from his head. "You
misunderstand, Em," he said. "I'm not one of us anymore."

Hadrian
couldn't shake
the
sense that he was in some bizarre dream of the old American West,
limping into the ragged, dusty town, leading his exhausted horse as
fearful children ran to announce the stranger's arrival. Every step
brought new pain, not only to his arm, where the wounds kept opening,
but also in his legs and back. The aging horse had been steady and
forgiving in her gait but he had passed out twice on the trip over
the mountains and fallen, the mare nuzzling him awake on the ground.

His
mount now saw the watering trough in front of a crude log building.
Dropping the reins, he let her trot past him, then stumbled the last
few feet to the trough. With his last ounce of strength he loosened
the saddle and knelt, gulping down the fresh water, then sluicing it
over his head. Ignoring the rivulets of blood flowing down his arm,
he sat propped against the trough and studied the main thoroughfare
of the exile community. Heads poked out of tattered platform tents,
erected during the original expulsion, that some exiles still called
home. Here and there could be seen a new log building with roofs
thatched with marsh grass and reeds, though most of the homes were
the decrepit clay-and-wattle structures put up in the early years.

Men
and women moved by, some observing him with suspicion, others with
idle curiosity. More than a few hobbled on crutches or leaned on
canes. Several wore strips of cloth around their faces to hide
disfigurements. He watched for familiar faces but received only
hesitant, nervous nods from a few older men and women he and Jonah
had helped years earlier.

His
head began to throb. The mare gazed at him, her nostrils flaring. She
smelled fresh blood. Hadrian looked down to see another, new red
patch swell across his sleeve. He grabbed the side of the trough and
heaved himself up.

The
world spun as he took a step. His head swam and he collapsed, his
eyes fluttering open and shut as he sank into unconsciousness. True
to his dream, the last thing he saw was a tattooed Indian hovering
over him.

He
awoke on a straw pallet in a pool of light from the afternoon sun. A
familiar figure wearing a brightly embroidered skullcap sat beside
him, washing his still-seeping wound.

"The
fugitive finds her stalker," he said to Nelly. "Ever the
contrarian."

"It
wasn't you I was escaping from, old friend," the bald woman said
with a sad smile.

As
he sat up the pain from his arm made him wince. "I dreamt an
Indian was attacking me."

"An
Indian," Nelly said slowly, gesturing out the open rear door of
the little cottage, "who wisely carried you here before an angry
crowd gathered around the trespasser from Carthage." A large,
swarthy man could be seen chopping firewood.

"We
used to be welcome here."

"Amazing
what being treated like diseased animals for a generation can do for
diplomatic relations."

Hadrian
looked back outside. As the man chopping wood bent to pick up a
piece, Hadrian saw that half his face was obscured in patterns of
ink. "Really an Indian?" he asked in disbelief.

"They
call themselves First Bloods. I found Nathaniel washed up on the
beach last spring after a storm, more dead than alive."

"From
the far shore?"

"From
one of the original tribes. I'd almost forgotten there had been a
large reserve to the north. Nathaniel says many of his people who
survived have gone back to their old ways. A lot of them are trading,
picking up such work as they can find. There's half a dozen in the
camps now. As you well know, we've been in need of strong backs for a
couple decades."

A
few strong backs were making a difference, Hadrian saw as he sat
alone by the entry to Nelly's home an hour later. She had gone to
forage for food in the forest and insisted he stay behind to
recuperate. Now he saw the little improvements. Yet, too, there were
the new setbacks that inevitably afflicted the exiles. The gardens at
first seemed in better shape than he had ever seen, tilled and
cleaned of rocks, many with new rail fences. But most also had
smoldering stacks where blighted potatoes and pumpkins were being
destroyed. A small windmill had been erected to power a water pump,
but its wind-catching blades were torn and tattered. Several
passersby seemed better dressed than usual, wearing salvaged clothes,
yet others were wearing little more than scraps of canvas. One woman
limped by wearing a vest of woven reeds.

He
dozed off, leaning against the door frame, and awoke to find a mug of
hot tea on a three-legged stool beside him. He did not recognize its
mix of herbs, at once sweet and acrid, but drank deeply and found
himself remarkably invigorated. Finding no one inside when he set the
mug on the kitchen counter, he wandered along the dusty street to the
crest of the hill that overlooked the camps' modest harbor. When he'd
last seen it, it had held only the rundown pier for the exiles'
fishing dinghies. He froze now, confused. The old pier was still
there, dilapidated as ever, but another more substantial one was
there as well. Beside it was a sturdy boathouse.

Hadrian
slipped off the road, to the shadows at the edge of the woods, where
he perched on a boulder to study the harbor. The muscular workers at
the piers did not appear to be from the camps, though there were ones
with fair hair as well as several First Bloods. A pile of firewood
lay by the boathouse. Only Carthage's steamboats needed such fuel.
Any calling here would have incurred Buchanan's wrath if he knew of
it. But the new pier and stack of firewood said that at least one of
the large fishing boats was calling there regularly. Yet there was no
sign of a fish works, no sign even of fish being sold.

He
studied the main street of the settlement again, gazing at the
hobbling, deformed inhabitants, the gaunt faces, the decrepit homes.
He caught sight of a woman wearing an ancient but well-preserved
football jersey with a large number on its back. Nelly had told him
there was trading going on with those in the north but had failed to
say how the starving colony found resources to pay to salvage
traders. The exiles had nothing of value.

Working
his way farther down the slope, he now spied a small, sleek sailboat
anchored beyond the boatshed. Two tall men, one of them a First
Blood, judging from his size and long black hair, walked up a shore
path past the boat, toward a point of land where smoke curled up from
some hidden source. Keeping in the shadows, Hadrian descended the
hill until he could see its source. A cluster of log buildings had
been erected on a little peninsula that was connected to the shore by
a narrow, ten-foot-wide isthmus. The complex was protected not only
by its location but by a recently built palisade of logs. As the two
men walked through a gate in the wall, a third appeared, a sentry
holding a shotgun, waving them through.

Hadrian
felt as if he had stepped into a dark, chilling shadow. He could make
no sense of the scene before him, but the sight left a cold, metallic
taste in his mouth.

Retreating
farther into the forest, he emerged half a mile beyond Nelly's
cottage, giving the appearance he'd wandered to the south, then
lingered to play with a boy and his dog. The boy's deformed foot made
it difficult for him to keep up with his pet. Ignoring his aches,
Hadrian lifted him onto a boulder and coaxed the dog into retrieving
a stick as the boy threw it. A quarter hour later, as he bent to pick
up the stick for the boy, a boot slammed down on it, snapping it in
half.

"She's
worried about you," came a sharp voice. "You disobeyed
her."

Hadrian
looked up into the hard countenance of the man he'd last seen with
Nelly in the Carthage prison. "So have you come to help me,
Shenker," Hadrian asked, "or to punish me?"

"I
am here to bring you to dinner," the exile gruffly replied.

Hadrian
followed a step behind his escort, pausing to uneasily glance at the
boy, now limping away. There had been fear on his face when he saw
Shenker.

"Hadrian,
you remember Dr. Kinzler," Nelly suggested as she gestured him
to her dinner table half an hour later. Before them was a loaf of
bread, a bowl of steamed carrots and mushrooms, and a whole roasted
salmon on a plank, an extravagant banquet by exile standards.

Hadrian
nodded to the diminutive, pockmarked man in gold-rimmed spectacles,
probably the best-groomed figure he'd ever seen at the camps. Kinzler
was dapper in a blue suit jacket and white shirt. Even the patches on
his khaki pants had been meticulously sewn.

Shenker
took the last chair at the table.

"Dr.
Kinzler is now the chairman of our Tribunal," Nelly continued.
"He is building a whole new sense of community. We even have a
name after all these years. New Jerusalem."

Hadrian
raised his brows in surprise. There had been other names applied to
the camps through the years. West Carthage, at first, but when it had
been abandoned others had been tried, depending on the namer's
perspective. Purgatory. Slagtown. Cemetery Creek. "A name full
of promise," he offered. "The improvements are already
noticeable." Hadrian looked back at Kinzler. "I can't help
but wonder what your field of study was, Doctor," he added after
a moment. "Urban renewal?"

Kinzler's
smile offered no warmth. "Early in life I was a civil engineer,
building shopping malls and highways mostly," he said with a
shrug, as if acknowledging the lack of demand for those talents in
the new world. "Later I took a doctorate in chemical
engineering. Even as boy I was happy only when I was playing with
wrenches and screwdrivers or the contents of my mother's spice
cabinet."

"Which
is what brought about the changes in our affairs," Nelly
interjected as she served the fish.

"I'm
not sure I follow."

"Dr.
Kinzler is a tinkerer by nature. I told you I found Nathaniel nearly
dead on the beach. The next day the crippled boat he'd been thrown
from limped in seeking repairs. They fish with handlines for those
big sturgeon. On board was a hunter who'd been returning in a canoe
from a long-range expedition."

"You
mean a long-range salvage hunter."

Nelly
nodded. "They call themselves prospectors. He had half a dozen
mechanical devices, none of which worked. Windup clocks, pocket
watches, old rotary peelers, and the like. Dr. Kinzler offered to
look at them. The next day he had two of the clocks working and
offered to fix everything else. The First Bloods were so grateful
they gave us a huge sturgeon. We had a feast together, like a
Thanksgiving. People brought in roots to boil, made johnnycakes of
cattail and acorn flour. The First Bloods asked if they could bring
more machines to be fixed, with payment by them in fish and goods.
Real trade started. It was a turning point for us. We haven't been
able to spare people for salvage for years. Now they even ask what we
want them to look for."

"All
in exchange for repairs?"

Kinzler
shrugged. "They have the muscle, we have other ways to add
value. I believe it is called specialization of labor."

Hadrian
studied his hosts. "The First Bloods don't have steamboats,"
he observed.

"But
they cut wood for them," Nelly explained. "The fishermen
are happy to buy it since it goes for well below the price in
Carthage."

"Not
something the authorities in Carthage would permit if they knew."

"Governor
Buchanan is against anything at odds with his particular sense of
world order," Kinzler observed with another of his narrow
smiles.