Alexandria (37 page)

The Temple stands atop a sea of fog like an enormous turret. Silent gray mist overlays the valley and ocean and seals itself against the bluffs, isolating them from the great wide world, and only the broad prominence of the grounds and the provincial hillsides are visible above it. At the edges of this ominous barrier stands a formation of warriors. They glower into the vast gray obscurity, their faces betraying a fear that perhaps some abomination may arise from it, as if the very fog itself might assemble, absent the ways of nature, into an army of wayward ghosts with swords of vapor and come marching across the plateau to do battle.

Their ranks have grown as the crews are called back from the quarry, and old men who’ve withdrawn from service don their warrior’s attire once more and arm themselves for the coming storm. They stand at all points of entry and exit, and they watch.

Halfway up the hillside, a creaky cottage door opens and Jeneth steps out onto the gravel path. Pairs of eyes surveil her movements steadily, from one station to the next. She holds her baby in her arms and walks with her head down—the warriors’ intrusive stares writhe and linger on her skin. She felt welcomer here years ago, when she was first carried into the Temple in her filthy wooden cage. So much has changed. Her eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot. She slept not a wink during the night, and it wasn’t little Mariset that kept her awake.

Across her path walks William. Their eyes touch briefly and in his look he asks a question, subtle and unspoken, and Jeneth catches his intent and shakes her head somberly. No, her signal tells him,
there is no news of Phoebe
. William figured as much, and he shuffles off with the other boys toward the metalworks. Plots and schemes swirl in his mind.

An invisible wall of furnace heat washes over him as he enters. Hot cauldrons of molten ore bubble over fires that rarely stand unlit. By the dingy orange glow he pulls on his leather work gloves and joins the master workers by the cooling barrel. Already his head pounds in rhythm with the striking hammer and he looks dully around the dim shop. Wiry Creston carries an armful of unsharpened blades through the center aisle and outside to the depository where vast piles have accumulated—piles of tools, buckles, harnesses, arrowheads, and more swords and knives than could be counted with the simple maths they’ve been taught.

William reaches his leathered hand into the warm brine and fetches out more cooling blades and hands them off to another waiting apprentice.

“Thanks,” says Jorrie. Jorrie bears the prestige of being Temple born, though he is only half-kin to the Nezra. His mother is of the forest and his veins carry that defect alongside more noble blood. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“It’s okay, Jorrie.”

“Something bad is happening, isn’t it?”

William shakes his head and turns back to the water barrel.

“Come on, you know something… you
always
know something,” Jorrie presses. “What’s going on?”

“If I find out,” says William over his shoulder, “I’ll be sure to tell you.”

The striker sinks more glowing blades into the brine and William watches them darken and steam the water. He knows well enough what is happening, though he dare not breathe a word to anyone—it doesn’t take a spirited imagination to understand that these are the preparations for war.

There is commotion at the door and harried voices call every able-bodied man to the front. They take up arms and push through the smoky metalworks and emerge onto the misty grounds, then follow the general flow of rushing men and hustle off. More followers burst from cottage doors and the Temple’s grand entrance, coursing past the reflecting pool to the edge of the plateau. They stand shoulder to shoulder, their weapons drawn.

Taket heads the frontline of this tremendous swarm, his right arm raised high in the air, ready to give the call that will send the horde behind him storming down the escarpment toward whatever approaches.

The deathly moaning draws closer. Hooves crunch unevenly on the twisted path below.

“Hold,”
shouts Taket.

The flaring nostrils of Balazir materialize from the murky swirl, and his powerful forelegs carry him toward the last rise and he becomes fully manifest, brown-speckled with broad, bellowing ribs. A sagging rider holds dearly to the crooked saddle. He grips the reins tightly with one hand, and the other dangles at his side like a ragdoll’s. Balazir hitches himself up onto the plateau and ambles forward a few paces and snorts toward the many faces that behold him, then shuffles back and settles himself.

Cirune falls to the ground.

His eyes loll back in his head. An entourage encircles him and lays him out flat and begins taking an inventory of his wounds. Through his rattled senses he feels the hands lain upon him, smoothing the sweat off his forehead and peeling back the hardened bandages on his leg and side. With the last of his feeble energy he thrusts his arm into the air, and in his tightly clenched fist is a crumpled scrap of thin hide.

Chapter Fourteen

They walk for days. The sun and moon chase each other around in circles, light and dark in a seemingly endless rotation, and as the firmament spins around them it begins to seem as if they are passing through the eye of a slow motion cosmic hurricane. In the light, they make ground. They pick fruits and berries, and fish the streams and ponds. In the dark, they sit wearily by their campfire and tremble at horrible shrieks of nocturnal slaughter, as delicate woodland creatures meet their end in the jaws of skilled night predators.

They traverse the changing landscape. They pass through regions where the shoreline is serrated from vast wedges of land that have fallen into the ocean, where small archipelagos dot the coast, all with man-made rubble on them. Little islands of ruin. They pass hill country with natural orchards scattered throughout like an enormous marketplace, and traverse graceful stretches of carnage and decay that still bear the mark of a civilization more advanced than their own. On and on they walk, through the serenely dangerous daylight and the howling, raucous nights.

With their map stolen, they lose all sense of perspective, all sense of where they might stand in the midst of this enormous landscape, and over every crest they half expect to see the great city rising from the earth. Time after time it does not appear, but as they ascend each new incline that lingering hope bites at them anew and fills them with the expectation that it must lay just ahead, around the next bend, just over the next hillside, so tantalizingly close it seems if they concentrate deeply enough it will appear of its own volition like some desert mirage made real.

A placid river leads them to a cleft between hillsides and they come upon a broad, olden pathway that follows along the V-shaped groove. Jack holds Lia’s hand as they trek through the sharp ravine, and they emerge at the crest of a grand valley. A splendor of wreckage is spread before them, angular and withering, laid out like a sweeping maze that looks to entrap all who enter.

“Remember this on the map?”

“Umm… sort of.”

Jack slumps down on a fallen tree trunk and peels off his boots. Fine, white layers of skin are fraying off his red and blistered heels. Lia sits next to him and they rub their tired feet and give their bones a chance to settle. He eyeballs the sun and calculates their remaining allotment of daylight. However fast they hike, he figures, nightfall will catch them somewhere near the middle of the monstrous labyrinth.

“Maybe over those next hills.”

Lia gazes off dreamily. “I’m not sure this place wants to be found. What if we passed it already and didn’t know?”

“No, it’s ahead,” he says automatically. “We just haven’t gone far enough.”

They lace their ragged boots and tread down into the valley. The languishing suburbia sprawls for miles in every direction, dead neighborhoods, dilapidated buildings with floors collapsed and layered together like geological strata, and in like kind every layer has some lost story hidden within. Pressed between them like autumn leaves are the skeletons and livelihoods of the masses that once inhabited these communities, reduced eventually to parchment fossils and mineral deposits.

They bounce down the way, gravity doing its part to pull them into the confusion below. The entire valley is so overlaid with craggy trees and crooked, slithering vines it looks like a tremendous grotto.

Lia squints around. “Do you feel like… someone’s watching us?”

“No. I don’t think so.” As soon as the words cross his lips he scolds himself for lying.

They pick a spot on the distant ridge for their landmark should they lose their way down in the low-lying areas, where the old roadways slice through the ruins like sunken chasms.

“These people were crazy.”

Jack laughs. “What are you talking about?”

“How come they all had to live right here?” She spins in a wobbly circle with her arms outstretched. “They could live anywhere.
There’s so much space
. And look at these places, all shoved together.”

“They must have really like each other.”

“They better have,” she says, and gets right up in his face, “cause they lived
this
close.” She widens her eyes like saucers and leers at him. “Come on, Jack. You’re so quiet today.”

“Sorry, I just—”

“Have a bad feeling?”

“Sort of bad.”

“I knew it. I can always tell. And you don’t want to worry me?”

“I guess.”

“Then stop it. If
you’re
worried, I want to be worried too.”

Jack smiles tightly.

She flickers her eyebrows and leers at him again, grinning slyly.
“Should
I worry?”

“Still think someone’s watching us?”

“Kind of.”

“So do I.”

They veer off the broad freeway, favoring concealment over speed, and pick their way through the cramped side streets. Jack chops idly with his machete at the sedge and bracken, and Lia withdraws from her gown a deep green bundle, a huge alocasia leaf packaged and bound with root fibers, filled to bursting with the fruit they’ve picked. She rations Jack out a handful of dark purple berries and palms the rest for herself.

She sneaks little glances at him between bites and he has that far-off distant look about him again—the look that makes her crazy.

She flings a berry and it hits him in the face.

Jack turns his head and raises an eyebrow.

“Well…?” she says demurely. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He scrunches up his face. “So… we’ve been walking five days since they found us. Since they took everything. Five days. If Cirune rode fast enough, he could make it back to the Temple in two and a half days, maybe less. If he even made it there at all—and we have to think he did, right? If they turned right around and went out looking for us again on horses, they could be back on us by tomorrow or day after, I figure. Then I thought, maybe they didn’t wait for anybody to come back. Maybe they just sent out more searchers. And if that’s what they did…”

“Then they could be anywhere.”

“Yes. Anywhere.”

“That’s what you’ve been thinking about all day?”

“Mmm,” he says. “Worried now?”

“Yes.”

They walk down the middle of a long residential avenue, surrounded by straight rows of papery old trees, many with dead trunks rotted out, and their younger offspring are sprouting haphazardly across the open spaces. They pass an unkempt field with a pallid brick building standing at the center. Broken letters on its facade spell
El ment ry chool
. On a grassed-over blacktop there stands a solitary upright pole. They forage around in the overgrown field and come up with just enough to clear their heads and stop their stomachs from growling.

Thick sunlight beats down on them from a pale sky, guiding them along as they shamble through more neighborhoods. Past a wilted office building that looks to be slowly imploding, they come to a wide intersection. The narrow cross street angles into a long, flat boulevard that stretches far across the valley. An old, rusted track runs the length of it, and the metal undercarriages of the railcars have become a pleasant flowerbed for sprays of yellow violets and purple lupine. Lia stops and picks a few stems and twists them together absently as they walk.

Scores of field rabbits dart away quick as light and Jack briefly contemplates the length of time it would take to stop and trap a couple of them. Maybe toward dusk, he figures, when they settle down for the night and make camp. He is deep in such ruminations when Lia places the yellow and purple crown upon his head.

“King Jack.”

“I don’t want to be king.”

“But you’d make a good one. And it looks pretty on you.”

He fights the urge to yank it off his head, and instead laces his fingers through hers and declares her his Queen, to which she consents, and they bound down the vast boulevard, hands clasped between them like lovers on honeymoon. They carry on with the same comfort and ease they once found in their old home village. They make conjectures about the customs and ways of the long-ago people, the unknown lives that were once lived on these very same streets, and now lay buried beneath ever-compounding layers of topsoil. There are two worlds surrounding them in tandem, they see. One world which deconstructs steadily back into the fine particles that once formed its constituents, and another which takes those fine particles and rebuilds itself one minuscule piece at a time until it blooms abundant. In the trees and wildflowers rest the bodies of the folk who once traversed these paths in olden times. Growth and decay everywhere, melted together so seamlessly they look inseparable.