Ashes of the Earth (35 page)

The
monk began his circuit around the clearing again, waving the censer.
Hadrian placed his hand on the tree. Once, on a similar visit, Jonah
had wondered out loud whether the hanging tree felt the pain of the
dead.

"Have
you seen anything unusual when you come up here?" Hadrian asked
after a long silence.

"More
unusual than eight suicide trees?"

The
question seemed to weaken Hadrian. He wearily sank onto a boulder. "I
told you there would be another. I told you about the map. You saw
the secret vault," he said.

"And
haven't I come up here every day since, trying to stop the next one."
William's voice cracked as he spoke. "But I couldn't be
everywhere at once."

Hadrian
found himself looking at the wisps of smoke floating in the air. "The
one who told you about the smoke. Is he always alone?"

"Sometimes
he brings one or two others. Not always the same ones. All tall and
dark, long hair."

"Where
are they from?"

William
hesitated. "They must be hunters. They look at everything with
great curiosity, as if they are new to Carthage." He shrugged.
"Some of my flock just come for the food we provide after the
service. Some like our music. Some like my Latin. Some of them, older
ones, say they remember priests when they were young. There's an
elderly Jewish man from New York. He's teaching us prayers in Hebrew.
We are going to take a group to the gallows."

"The
gallows is still up?"

"Still
up? Buchanan has improved it, made it permanent. Put a little shelter
at the top for the hangman, enclosed the stairway. From a distance it
looks like a shrine."

"They
burn the bridge and turn the gallows into a temple," Hadrian
muttered. "Why would he need it?"

"Why
the woman, of course. Jonah's murderer."

"But
she's gone, father."

William
fixed Hadrian with a troubled gaze. "I'm sorry. I know she was a
friend. Though it's never been done before, the governor and the
judge said it was perfectly legal."

"Never
done what?" Hadrian asked with foreboding.

"Hold
a trial without the defendant. She's already been convicted, Hadrian.
Condemned to hang. Buchanan announced a bounty on her head. A
thousand dollars. More than most in the colony make in a year. He
gave a speech on the square and vowed that within twenty-four hours
of being brought in she will have the noose around her neck."

The
decrepit two-story
building
had been built as a stable and hay barn many years before, but the
town had overtaken it, leaving it lost in a backwater of warehouses
that served the shops on the streets beyond.

The
wagon-repair business that operated in the former stable offered no
indication of the trade plied within, and its gate could be closed
for weeks at a time. When it didn't yield to his push, Hadrian
climbed a familiar tree and dropped over the wall that enclosed the
compound. A tall, shaggy dog with the look of an elkhound trotted
over to him, wagging its tail.

He
saw that the white-haired man at the workbench seemed to be having
difficulty raising the hammer he was using to flatten a strip of
metal. Hadrian dropped one of his colorful maps on the workbench,
beside a half-eaten bowl of noodles with chopsticks perched on the
rim. The man lowered the mallet, then pushed away the bowl and
examined the map with obvious excitement.

"You've
been away," he said.

"I
always come back," Hadrian replied.

As
Takeo Hamada slowly turned his face toward his visitor, his eyes
softened, the equivalent of a smile for the stoic Japanese man. The
cold cigarette he chewed on took on a jaunty angle.

"I
have some questions," Hadrian said.

"Of
course you do." Hamada's voice was raspy from years of tobacco.
He led Hadrian toward the steep stairs to the hayloft, where all the
answers lay, past the stall with a cot where Hadrian had often slept
the past summer. At the landing at the top of the stairs he paused to
light a lantern, which Hadrian held as he unlocked the padlock on the
door.

The
loft still held traces of hay but its stacks and bales were all of
books. Shelves so high ladders were needed to scale them lined the
walls. In the light of a high solitary window, dusty, yellowed stacks
towered impossibly tall. Hadrian and Jonah had often sent volumes
here for safekeeping. Buchanan tolerated the illegal hoard because it
was kept so secret and because he himself sometimes had questions
only Hamada's books could answer.

"On
the northwest shore there was a convent called St. Gabriel,"
Hadrian began.

Hamada
worked the cigarette between his lips as he contemplated the
mountains of books, then pointed toward one of the stacks below the
window. He approached it warily, as if the books were living things,
and pounced on one at the top of the stack.

It
was a regional almanac, a commercial publication with maps and
listings of businesses and towns. He quickly thumbed through it, then
handed it to Hadrian opened to a two-page map of the northwest shore
region sixty years before. Hadrian ran his finger northward along the
shore, pausing at a beige patch marked as Blue Thunder First Nation
Reserve, then moving onward to the edge of the map. No St. Gabriel.

"Search
the town listings," Hamada suggested. "They break out
business enterprises and important institutions."

Hadrian
consulted the book again and picked out half a dozen candidates based
on his rough appraisal of the geography. He took only a few minutes
to find the entry, chastising himself for failing to recall that the
convent had been converted. The enterprise was called the St. Gabriel
Egg Farm. "I need to sit with this," Hadrian said, "go
through it in more detail."

Hamada
gestured him toward a dusty table bearing numerous stubs of
burnt-down candles. "We'll leave you here," the Japanese
archivist said, turning with his dog toward the entry.

Hadrian
worked his fingertip up the coastline again, this time turning back
to read the description of each town as he encountered it, not
certain what he was looking for until his breath caught. The entry
was for a village called Darby, with a single prominent landmark, a
favorite with tourists who had liked to snap photographs in front of
it. The Darby Correctional Facility had been built decades earlier,
after the design of a famous Scottish castle.
Its
classical thick granite walls,
read
the description,
give
little hint of the cells buried inside.
The
walls of the prison had probably been destroyed by blast waves but
its deep-set cells would have served as the perfect bomb shelter.
Moreover, given its remote location and strong lake winds, the site
may have escaped biological contaminants. What had Sebastian said?
His people had found the convent two weeks before a band of men in
grey clothes from the north had, and they had decided to accommodate
each other.

He
paged through the book, its advertisements giving glimpses of the
first world. Car washes, hamburger joints, computer repair shop,
radio stations. He gazed back at Hamada, sitting by the entry with
his dog. In earlier years, on days of blizzards, Hadrian and Jonah
would find their way here, and all three of them would spend hours
beside the potbellied stove, enthusiastically digesting the treasures
of the barn. But now Hamada had grown distant, even wary.

Hadrian
returned the almanac to its stack and moved slowly toward the door,
perusing other titles that had surfaced on the tide of books.
Moby-Dick. America's
Favorite Folk Songs. Great Battles of the Civil War.
He
paused then turned back.

Hamada
did not react when Hadrian set the songbook next to him. "I have
an old mule and her name is Sal," he recited.

"I'm
sorry?" Hamada said.

"She
was here," Hadrian said. "Nelly transcribed that song from
this book. The corner of the page is folded down. It would have been
a day or two before Jonah died. She and Shenker were staying here,
weren't they?"

Hadrian
expected a denial. "I don't keep a guest log," Hamada said
instead. "You know well enough that anyone interested in my
books is welcome to take sanctuary in the stables downstairs."

"And
you know very well the owner of that house where they were taken was
lying when he said they were there, keeping him against his will."

Hamada
stroked his dog's head. "They'd burn us down and not blink an
eye," he said.

Hadrian
put a hand on the old man's shoulder. "Who is it, Takeo, who is
scaring you?" If civilization were a religion, the old man would
be a saint. He had suffered much on account of his books.

Hamada's
voice was hollow when he finally replied. "We should have taken
the books into the mountains years ago, Hadrian. It's too late now."

Hadrian
considered his companion's mournful air, then looked about the
compound. A member of Hamada's family was missing. "Your other
dog. Is she all right?" The two oversized shaggy creatures had
been fixtures in their master's life for more than a decade.

The
reply was long in coming. "She was gentle as a kitten,"
Takeo sighed sorrowfully. "Never harmed a soul." He stroked
the head of the dog at his feet. "This one will bark at
strangers, he's the sentinel. But she would just run and greet them
as if everyone was an old friend."

A
knot began tying itself in Hadrian's stomach. "What happened?"

"It
was nearly three weeks ago. I heard the first cry in the middle of
the night. That must have been when they put the first nail through
her. By the time I got there they were gone." Hamada whispered
now, as if he didn't want the surviving animal to hear. "They
nailed her to the gate, then cut her throat."

There
was nothing to say. Hadrian offered a match to light Hamada's
cigarette. "Takeo," Hadrian said at last, "when I
asked for that almanac, you went right to it. It was on top of the
pile, yet had little dust on it."

"I
went to his funeral, I had to. Wouldn't have missed it."

"Jonah?
Jonah used the almanac?"

"He
came a few times this past year, usually leaning on a boy like a
weary pilgrim. He began to take a special interest in the almanacs."

"You
mean he used other almanacs?"

"Last
winter he spent a whole day here, looking at maps, crosschecking the
almanacs and old business directories." Hamada inhaled deeply on
his cigarette and cast a sidelong glance at Hadrian. "You are
his executor?"

The
question gave Hadrian pause. "I am the closest thing, I guess."

"If
you find the one, it goes back here." Hamada's words came out
like an order.

Hadrian
cocked his head, confused. "Do you mean a book was taken?"

"By
mistake, no doubt. Jonah knew the importance of keeping the books
together. But he was the only one ever to show an interest in the
directories."

"When?"
Suddenly Hadrian had the sense of touching something important. "When
did it go missing?"

Hamada
grimaced. "Last winter, before the Year-End Festival."

"What
did it cover? What geography?"

"South
and west. The old industrial towns."

"Think,
Takeo, old friend. Jonah must have given some hint of why these books
were suddenly so important."

"He
said his wife once worked at one of those complexes to the southwest.
A medical researcher. I thought looking at them somehow made him feel
closer to her. I keep my wife's book of favorite poems close to my
bed."

"What
complex? Surely Jonah wasn't planning to go there?"

But
Hamada was done talking. He just shook his head from side to side,
then rose and locked the door to the loft before settling back to pet
the old dog. He had the expression of a captain who knew he would
soon go down with his ship.

The
Globe Theater
was
an over-painted actress, dressed in Victorian style, its ornate
woodwork offering a pretense of culture that was well suited to its
many productions of Shakespeare and Shaw. Hadrian lingered in the
shadows beside the stage as students streamed in for an after-school
rehearsal.