Alexandria (2 page)

The shadowed demigoddess on the backlit rawhide is again reaching skyward, conjuring new creation from some mysterious deep. They dance in ecstasy as the bass drum booms and the vibrant music swells.

The villagers rise to their feet and step down from the raised seating, joining Lia and the other children who are running out from behind the bonfire. They dance and drink and shout and laugh in the golden amber firelight for what feels like eternity.

The Nezra observe this impassively. Their espionage of the village has lasted well more than a year’s time. This is the night of their choosing because it is the longest night of the year and the village will be gone to inebriated slumber before sunrise. They have watched long enough to know in which cabins the strongest and most powerful men live. They will strike these homes first.

The skeletal remnants of a tremendous feast lay strewn across the tables of the dining hall, and the adults are carrying their fattened stomachs across the long chamber to a small tavern at the end, still serving wine in fired clay mugs. After pleading their parents’ permission, the children run onto the largely deserted promenade to play forts.

When the elaborate ritual of team selection is complete, they scamper off to their respective forts and begin their gruesome campaigns of infiltration and murder. Jack huddles with Jeneth, Braylon, and a few others to conspire and plot strategy. Braylon, the oldest, takes charge.

“We have to spread out to the edges and get around behind them,” he says, scratching arcs and arrows on the ground with a bent stick. “Aiden and Phoebe cut up the middle, Jack and Creston take the left side, me and Jeneth will go right. Everybody else stay here and guard the fort.”

Jack and his partner, a slight boy of only seven, creep down the side of a cabin, stepping slowly and softly. They flatten their backs against the rough wood and peek around to see if the coast is clear. They wait for a shadowed form to pass on the far side of the promenade then scurry across the short expanse. Creston is killed immediately. William leaps from his hiding place in the bushes and slaps his frail back, before wheeling and searching for Jack. He is too late. Jack counters behind, then lunges and swats William on the shoulder, smiling broadly. Creston and William slink off to the dead pile.

Alone and deep in enemy territory, Jack forges ahead. He is on his hands and knees, moving toward the far edge of the cul-de-sac, where he will double back and wage a surprise attack. Prone on the ground, he elbows his way across the exposed space to shelter again behind a darkened hut. He is making good progress, crawling forward, when something lands hard on his back and knocks the wind out of him.

“You’re dead,”
Lia whispers, rolling off onto the dewy grass and giggling hysterically. She looks like a little crazy person.

“Lia…”

“Sorry.”

Jack dusts himself off and starts to head toward the dead pile.

“Wait,” says Lia, “come over here.”

She takes his hand and leads him away from the cabins and the game, toward the small group of buildings situated at the end of the promenade. They pass by the metalworks shop, where tools and arrowheads are fired and hammered, a potter’s shack with its rough stone kiln, and across a thin gravel lot they come to an open door—thick wood beams frame the entrance, aligned perfectly with the village’s centerline. From this doorway it is a straight shot down the middle of the promenade to the bonfire and courtyard at the other end. They look down the way and see a few parents and elders making their way back from the dining hall, turning in for the night. There is a quick shriek from the murkiness behind a row of cabins and Jeneth walks sullenly onto the promenade to join the dead pile.

Lia pulls Jack to the edge of the door. Usually this building is boarded and locked, but on special nights like this it is kept open, so the villagers can roam here and be reminded. Inside it is gloomy with sconcelight. Jack takes up one of the torches mounted outside and they cross the threshold.

It is a museum of sorts, a shrine to lost days, with a large gallery containing artifacts uncovered from under and around the village, and a more intimate room in back that houses the reliquary. Lia huddles close to Jack’s side, he can feel her trembling. He flashes the torch along an array of small mementos mounted on thick boards, smoothed and polished. Many coins, pendants missing their chains, bits and pieces left from the inner workings of machines long since decayed. Their faces are graven as they walk slowly and look with reverence upon each object, the profound antiquity spellbinding the two.

There is a colossal metal gear, half as tall as Jack, with teeth that are flecking off, its surface peeling, various shards of all shapes and sizes, a rectangular case, small enough to be held in hand, made of some strange composite, with its face gone revealing a corroded jumble inside, its purpose unknown—more coins, and a collection of small statues, some of worn stone, some of metal. Jack and Lia scan the menagerie of objects looking for one in particular, an artifact they found together just outside the village only last year when they were scavenging and playing in the forest.

“There it is.”

She plucks it off the shelf and turns it gingerly in her hands. A small gold-plated statue of a tree, growing up out of a heavy base, with raised lettering along the bottom that reads
Big Sur
. More writing underneath, scratched and indecipherable. They guessed it must have been the name of some very special tree. She remembers their excitement when the loose dirt fell away and they knew they had found something more than a simple rock. They washed the muck off in a shallow crick and ran back to the village to show their parents, screaming madly. She sets it delicately back on the ledge and twirls off into the gloom.

“You were good Fire tonight, Jack.”

“Thanks. Your dance was perfect.”

She smiles.

Jack moves down the wall, casting the torch’s glow on a display of metal plates, scoured clean of their markings by the passage of ruthless years. Only one bears writing, tight block script indented on the surface.
Part No. 837503
. He stares intently at the inscription, as if some deeper hidden meaning will manifest itself.

“What do you think happened to them?” Lia asks.

“Who?”

“The fallen.”

“They burned.”

“But what made them burn?”

Jack is silent for a long moment, brooding. “I don’t know.”

They have heard stories about how things used to be, but not much. They have been told that men had mastered the skies with metal wings, and that everywhere there were lights shining down from tall glass buildings even more enormous than the giant redwoods surrounding their village. They have been told that people starved in such droves that the numbers become abstract and surpass the limits of their understanding, and that the world burned fiercely and sickness scourged the land. It is impossible to know how much of this is true, or if it is just the stuff of myth and legend.

The next exhibition is Jack’s favorite. Since an early age he has gone on the village’s hunting expeditions, learning the craft, though he has yet to score a kill. His eyes gleam as he inspects the old worn tool before him, the wooden stock rotted and fallen away, but the barrel, trigger and bolt handle still intact, though sallow with age. It is cold to the touch, and he runs his fingers down the length of the rough metal cylinder. He comprehends this, grasps its purpose. It was used to shoot holes in animals so you could feed your family.

He moves to the next installation, similar, but altogether more menacing. It is immense, far larger than the other specimen, and of a metal that shows less corrosion. The inner workings are jammed with rot but it is remarkably intact, its barrel extending from a long tarnished cylinder dotted with perfectly round holes, its stock solid and heavy. This machine was used to shoot holes in people, the elders have told him.

“Jack, bring the torch.”

She is standing by a door along the back wall, leading to the reliquary. Decades ago, when the village expanded its first small gardens to create the planting fields they have today, their tools kept striking worn stone blocks buried just beneath the surface of the soil. A graveyard. What few remains they found were reinterred at their own small cemetery a short walk from the village, but the stones were brought here. Jack and Lia hold hands as they enter the cramped and musty chamber, firelight jerking and twitching off the ominous stone facades.

Many in the village have old names. Jack moves to the end of the row to find the gravestone that bears his namesake and reads its dimpled and worn carvings.

JACK W. HANFIELD

2071 - 2213

May His Soul Find Peace

His fingers trace lightly across the surface of the gravestone. Next to him Lia is shivering, gooseflesh rising on her thin bare arms. Footsteps click in the main room. Lumps of fear rise in their throats and Lia lets out a short gasp.

“Ahh, here’s our two lead players now,” exclaims Llyde, Jack and Lia nearly jumping out of their skins. “You both did a fine job tonight, I thought. You’re quite the little dancer there, Lia.”

“Thank you.”

“We were just looking around, Llyde.”

“I trust you. I like coming here myself. Makes you wonder what else is out there, buried.” His vision drifts off, momentarily lost in thought. “I do need to lock up though. And your parents are looking for you out there.”

They bid Llyde goodnight and move outside, replacing the torch in its holder as they leave. They can hear their parents calling their names from down the way.

“Jaaack… Liiiaaa…”

“Coming,” they shout back, and trot off to find their parents talking down by the entrance of Lia’s cul-de-sac.

“There you two are—we thought you’d wandered off into the woods, we were about to go looking,” says Marni. “Time to turn in. Goodnight, Jack.” She bends and gives him a hug. “Goodnight, Elora.”

“Night, Marni. Come on, big Jack, let’s go.”

Jack and his mother walk through the empty promenade and onto the dirt path to their cabin. They say their goodnights and settle in, Elora sleeping behind a partitioned area in back, and Jack lying down on a straw mat in the front room. He pulls his fur coverings tighter against the deepening morning chill and falls fast asleep, dreaming of an Age when they rode enormous metallic birds into the sky and lived in high towers that touched the very clouds themselves.

In the last hour of darkness before dawn, the Nezra descend from the trees. The forward scout is the first down, waiting for the night guard to stroll by below, then dropping silently through the air and landing on his back. He slices Llyde’s throat before they hit the ground and slaps a quick hand over his mouth to mask the death moans. When Llyde is still, the man rises and removes a small whistle, which he sounds out once.

In the surrounding forest, the darkness itself seems to advance as the Nezra move forward in stealth. They enter the village. There are dozens of them, bare-skinned except for the cloths wrapped around their waists, shin-high leather boots, and belts, worn like sashes over their shoulders, with various implements attached. They move like shadows, each warrior a black hole unto himself, capable it seems of collapsing all matter and substance down into eternal annihilation and then blinking out of existence.