Ashes of the Earth (8 page)

A
moment later his stout figure broke through the edge of the crowd,
his hand on his truncheon as he marched toward Hadrian.

"If
I see a slag within five hundred feet of the governor," the
lieutenant snapped, "you'll be spending the night in the
hospital."

"I'm
sorry?" Hadrian muttered. He became aware of movement behind him
but did not break away from Kenton's angry stare.

"I
don't play your goddamned games, Boone. I will gladly—"
Kenton's words choked away as he looked over Hadrian's shoulder.

Hadrian
turned. He was surrounded on three sides by children. The boy Dax was
on one side, Sarah and her sister on the other, with at least a dozen
others behind them.

The
lieutenant glared at the children. "You have no idea!" he
spat out before hurrying back to the graveside. For once Hadrian
agreed with him.

When
he turned again to ask for an explanation, the children were gone,
slipping over the crest of the knoll. Only little Dora was visible.
She hesitated, giving Hadrian a quick, self-conscious wave. Then
someone yanked her arm and she too disappeared from sight. He turned
back to the mourners. Kenton was nowhere to be seen. The man by the
tree had lit another cigarette. He wasn't watching the crowd. He was
watching the knoll. He was watching Hadrian.

There
were few lives in the colony that had not been touched by Jonah, and
the eulogies were many. Last came Lucas Buchanan. Standing close to
him was the blond bodyguard Bjorn.

"Friends,"
the governor began. "I owe more tears to this dead man than you
shall see me pay." Hadrian stared in surprise, heard the murmurs
in the crowd. Buchanan wasn't quoting the words, he was appropriating
them for his own. Did he truly not understand that one of the many
strange consequences of his censorship policies had been to turn his
populace into experts on Shakespearean dialogue?

The
eulogy quickly moved into a litany of Jonah's many extraordinary
contributions. Designer of the dams and gear works for the water-powered mills that ground their grains, cut their planks, powered
their carpenter shops. Designer and chief engineer for the fleet of
steamboats. Original organizer of the children's orchestra. Longtime
director of the annual George Bernard Shaw festival. The sounds of
weeping grew ever more audible.

It
was peculiar, thought Hadrian, how funerals for the older generation
were devoid of references to their lives or accomplishments from the
prior world.
Author
of books on astrophysics,
Hadrian
was tempted to shout out.
Chancellor
of the region's university. Holder of patents used in outer space.
Father of three children. Husband to a renowned medical researcher.
But Jonah had already
died that death, on endless nights long ago. His wife, his children,
his university, and the city that hosted it had been wiped out in one
blinding flash. Even the discipline of astrophysics had died, at
least for another century.

He
closed his eyes, steadying himself, then gazed toward the sky. Once
Jonah and he might have gone birding on a day like this, Hadrian
helping take notes on the strange plumage variations starting to
appear. He glanced toward the haunted tree on the western ridge, then
paused. There was a large bird in the tree again. He squinted,
shielding his eyes. Not a bird, but a person in a cloak, watching the
funeral.

Hadrian
looked in alarm at Buchanan, now reviewing the civic awards bestowed
on Jonah. The governor's back was to the dead tree. He droned on.
"Chairman of the Science Advisory Committee, Citizen of the
Year—" Buchanan's words choked in his throat. His mouth
hung open as he stared at the stone cottage nearest the cemetery. A
man in a black coat holding a long musical instrument resembling a
recorder sat on the chimney. The wind stopped. Not a word was spoken.
Only one bitter syllable broke the silence.

"Slags!"
Kenton shouted.

Then
from behind the chimney a hairless woman in a grey cloak emerged. The
recorder began to play a slow, graceful tune that Hadrian did not
recognize until the woman began singing in a powerful, lilting voice.

"Amazing
Grace, how sweet the sound,"
she
intoned,
"that
saved a wretch like me."
Other
voices slowly joined in, from below, until, despite Buchanan's
furious attempts to quiet them, nearly the entire assembly was
singing. "J
once
was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see..."

Hadrian
was grinning until he saw Kenton race off with several officers. He
leapt up himself. "Nelly!" he shouted in warning to the
woman as Kenton disappeared into the cottage. But his cry was drowned
out. The citizens of Carthage kept singing even after the policemen
appeared on the roof. They stopped only as the police began to club
the intruders.

Then
in the uneasy silence came a strange echo. Buchanan spun about and
cursed, bellowing for his police. But they took only a few steps and
stopped as the wind renewed, carrying other voices toward them. Lined
up on the ridge at the far side of the ravine, far from their reach,
were at least fifty more of the bone-thin exiles, many with hoods
covering their ravaged features, singing the eulogy for beloved
Jonah, the last real human on earth.

CHAPTER
Three

the
cabin tucked
between
two steep ridges sat as it had for over a century, flowering vines
creeping up its stone walls, touched by nature but not by the ruin of
man. A sense of melancholy overtook Hadrian as he approached it along
the well-worn path. In his fatigue he saw Jonah waiting for him,
inviting him to sniff the fresh herbs in the kitchen garden before
gesturing him inside. In recent years Jonah had spent most of his
days, and many nights, in his library workshop, but this had been his
home, and the birthplace of the colony.

Hadrian
paused, wiped at the moisture in his eyes, then looked back up the
path. The plainclothes policeman had reappeared when he had walked
into town from the cemetery, lingering half a block away whenever
Hadrian stopped, once conferring with another man in casual clothes.
He had ducked down several alleys and doubled back before slipping
into the trees on the far side of the ridge. The path behind him now
was empty. With a sigh of relief he opened the door and froze.

The
ruin of man had reached the cabin after all. The floors were covered
with debris thrown from shelves and drawers, much of the furniture in
splinters. The kitchen, the sitting room, the bedrooms had all been
ravaged. He righted a ladder-back chair and collapsed onto it, his
head in his hands. Here had been his one possible sanctuary, here he
had expected to feel the restorative presence of his friend again.
Instead it felt as if he had stumbled upon a continuation of Jonah's
murder. It was as if the killers hadn't only wanted the old scientist
dead and buried, they wished his very existence pounded into dust and
cast into the wind.

For
a moment he was back at the grave, to which he had returned an hour
after the burial, sinking in grief to his knees. He had wanted to
apologize somehow. For the colony's parting message to Jonah had been
the senseless beating and arrest of the two exiles, one of them an
old friend of theirs. Hadrian had found himself thrusting his fingers
into the freshly turned earth as if reaching for his lost friend when
his fingers unexpectedly touched something that didn't belong,
something dull grey and plastic. The object was so alien he simply
stared at it in confusion after bringing it to the surface. He was
holding a small phone, a model that would have been old even at the
time the world shifted. Someone had secretly buried a cell phone with
Jonah. Yet he had watched the grave from a distance as the crowd
thinned and had not seen anyone bury anything.

Hadrian
did not know how long he sat in Jonah's house, the memory of the
phone only adding to his despair. Eventually he became aware of the
lengthening shadows and the chill in the sitting room. He lit a
candle, then a fire in the stone fireplace, and began to clean the
cabin.

He
lost himself in the task, carrying what he swept up outside to a pile
at the edge of the garden. Not stopping at righting the work of the
killers, he filled a bucket from the hand pump in the kitchen sink,
collected rags and soap, and scrubbed, feverishly cleaning windows.
As tears welled again in his eyes, he worked even harder, losing
himself in memories of earlier days there.

Emptying
his bucket near the little herb garden, he paused, seeing again in
his mind's eye the reverse writing on the desk in the library. Quaere
verum imprimis.
Seek
the truth among the first things, in the first things. His
interpretation may have been wrong. Perhaps it referred to a
location. He dropped the bucket and ran to the fireplace, running his
fingers over the stones along the side of the chimney until he found
the loose one he sought, pried it away, and extracted a key wrapped
in a scrap of leather.

He
walked with a lantern along the cliff face behind the cottage,
probing the vegetation hanging on the rock with his hands for nearly
a quarter hour before finding the one place where the surface
underneath was not natural ledge stone but mortared rocks. He and
Jonah had erected the wall years earlier to obscure the opening,
leaving only room for a man to slip sideways into the narrow passage.
Hadrian raised the lantern over the small but heavy-timbered door
with the iron lock plate, which Jonah had helped his father erect
fifty years earlier. Jonah's father, owner of an engineering firm,
had insisted the cavern chamber was necessary to preserve his wine
collection. When the wine had been depleted at the first Carthage
Thanksgiving, Jonah had decided to use the chamber for something
else. A brittle, dusty paper with a carefully rendered skull and
crossbones was tacked to the door, over a hand-lettered sign that
warned
toxic
contagion: entry will result in fatal exposure.

Only
the older among the colony's inhabitants would remember the great
debate about the bodies of the wretched souls who'd stumbled into the
fledgling settlement dying of typhus. Sure of his own immunity, Jonah
had insisted on singlehandedly sealing the tightly wrapped bodies
inside the little crypt, taking the corpses away over the ridge in a
handcart at night.

Now
Hadrian nervously held his lantern close to the door. The dust of the
years coated the wood, but the lock plate was clean. Clenching his
jaw, he inserted and twisted the key. The door swung open with a
groan. With a hesitant step he entered the vault, lifting the lantern
to survey the chamber, then stepped inside and shut the door behind
him.

Knowledge
is the contagion that all tyrants fear.
At
least one of the old man's jokes had outlived him. Here was no crypt,
but rather a secret vault of knowledge protected by the myth of
contagion. As he began lighting the candles scattered around the
room, Hadrian remembered once encountering Jonah bringing a dinghy to
shore late one night. No one would have questioned Jonah about the
bodies at the time, but Hadrian realized now they had been given a
watery grave.

Above
a table made of planks and crates and lining the adjacent wall were
shelves of books, scores of books, many of them banned by the
government. On the table, beside a magnifying glass, were more
volumes, of medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry. Jonah must have
collected them in the early years, secreting them when the censorship
campaigns had resulted in thousands of books being sent for
recycling. With an unexpected rush of emotion he sat on the stool at
the table and found himself facing a plank hanging on the wall
inscribed in Jonah's careful hand,
do
not go gentle into that good night, it said,
old
age should burn and rave at close of day. rage, rage against the
dying of the light. The plank was at eye level for a reason. Jonah
wanted to see those words of Dylan Thomas's every time he sat at the
table.

Hadrian
pulled his own meager hoard of words from his shirt, laying the
precious book pages he carried before him, then extracted the
sword-knife from his belt. As he set it to the side, he noticed a
small stand beside the table covered with a tattered square of linen.
Holding his breath he lifted the cloth.

His
heart leapt as he lifted the book from the stand. Jonah had tooled
the thick leather cover of his secret journal with images of oak and
maple leaves. The title, inscribed in elegant calligraphy on the
first page, was simply
Chronicle
of the New World.
Nearly
three inches thick, the book was bound with strands of leather tied
at the back so that adding a page simply required untying it and
removing the back cover. He turned to the one most recently added.
Like the others, it had a date penciled on the back, in the bottom
corner. It was from the week before. He read the first paragraph and
smiled. It was not about secrets of state, it was about secrets of
the spirit.