Alexandria (47 page)

“You run?”

They nod.

“How did you find us?”

“Ethan gave us a map,” says Jack, “but they stole it.”

“Who’s
they?”

“Nezra soldiers…”

Hargrove looks to the others, expecting to see some flicker of disbelief in their faces, but they peer back earnestly as if they know it to be true—and the boy, for his age, speaks with tremendous conviction.

“Dad…
they’re coming
. They know how to find us.”

Hargrove takes in a deep breath and turns off toward the horizon as if contemplating the fairness of the day.

“Come on around back.”

They follow him along the side of the house and hitch their horses to the clothesline posts and porch beams. A couple of the men start toward a small gabled shed looking for pails. Jack climbs down and helps Lia to the ground and they stagger around on wobbly legs. A small vegetable garden lay behind the house, with carefully tilled rows sprouting tiny green stalks. Wire fencing extends from the rear of the shed, boxing in a dozen squawking foul. The backyard slopes down to the thin river that feeds the little oasis, and the two men carry their pails toward it to fetch water for the trough.

Jack looks around dizzily—it’s pleasant enough, but he wonders why anyone would kill for this place.

Nyla walks her father over and he extends his hand to Jack.

“Ryan Hargrove,” he says. He turns and takes Lia’s hand and gives it a quick shake. “Come inside. Tell me everything.”

He leads them through the kitchen door at the far end of the back porch. A low counter runs along one wall, and in the center is a slanted wooden table with a gouged and worn surface. Hargrove moves to a rounded fireplace that adjoins the surrounding rooms and lights a small fire under the black kettle that hangs from a swinging arm. Nyla ushers them into the front room and shows them where to lay their things.

“It’s empty out here,” says Lia. “Don’t you have any neighbors?”

“Not anymore. The river’s been drying up. Some years it barely flows. There used to be a lot more here.”

The front room extends forward, bordered on two sides by the long, covered porch. Slatted shutters are folded back and a warm breeze flows through the broad windows. An ill-matched assortment of chairs and tables are stationed about the room, layered with stacks of crinkled parchment. Jack shucks off his jacket and unfastens the blade he’s kept at his side throughout.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” says Nyla, stowing his things on a cluttered shelf by the enormous window. “We’ll have food in a bit.”

She shuffles back into the kitchen to help her father. Jack and Lia fidget in the front room, not sure whether to feel welcome or not. The house is cluttered from floor to ceiling with trinkets and boxes of old knick-knacks, stacks of writings, antique furniture, everything coated in fine layers of desert dust.

“Something’s not right,” says Lia. “This isn’t the place from those legends.”

“Huh-uh,” says Jack, looking cock-eyed at the piles of disarray.

Through an open door he spies a smaller side room, full of equipment and strange machinery. He peeks in and nods for Lia to join him.

“What is that?”
she whispers, clenching onto his shirt sleeve.

Standing in the corner is a large mechanism of gears and springs, taller than them, faced with a dial numbering one through twelve. It clicks when it turns. They slip across the hardwood floor and watch the gears tick round slowly, an eerie mechanical heartbeat.

“Some kind of machine.”

“What does it do?”

Jack shakes his head.

A workbench lines the opposite wall, with awls and files and skinny metal tools laid out next to an assortment of foreign gadgets. He walks toward it and knocks his head into some apparatus hung from the ceiling by wires. He steps back, rubbing his forehead, and at first he takes it to be a taxidermied bird, but with closer inspection he see that it, too, is a machine of some sort. Silver wings extending from a sleekly crafted barrel, with fins like a fish fanning out from the tail-end. It jerks and sways on its wire mount and he reaches up to steady it.

“I know what this is,” he says, Lia clinging to his back, looking up.

He reaches for it again, magnetized, and Hargrove calls them back into the kitchen.

“I suppose you’re hungry.” Four bowls are arranged around the table, steaming with soup. “Not much, but it’ll hold us till dinner.”

“Listen,” says Nyla, taking her seat, “there’s something else you should know… They met Thomas.”

Hargrove sits back and narrows his eyes skeptically.
“My
Thomas?”

“Only he’s not called Thomas anymore,” says Lia, coming round the corner. “He told me to say hello. And that he loves you.”

“Where… ?”

“He lives in the woods with a bear and a wolf. He told us about Arana Nezra the First.”

“A bear and a wolf…?”

“They’re his only friends. He doesn’t trust himself around people anymore.”

“What?”
Hargrove slumps and stares down into his soup, confused. “He ran away forty-odd years ago… It’s not possible. I thought he was dead… or so far gone we’d never hear of him again. Nyla, are you sure it’s him?”

“It sounds like him. It sounds like the man you told stories about.”

“How?
How did this happen?”

“We met him in the valley by the swamp.”

“Wait,” says Hargrove. “Start at the beginning. Where are you from?”

“The forest.” Jack looks to Nyla, and she nods for him to proceed. “We got stolen by these people, the Nezra people, and they took us to what’s called a Temple.”

“Temple?” asks Hargrove. “Where is this Temple? Can you show me on a map?”

“I think so.”

Hargrove screeches his chair back and bustles into the cluttered side room, digging through various piles until he produces a folded map. He lays it out flat on the kitchen table and Jack and Lia huddle over it. It is broader and more expansive than the one lost to Cirune, showing the whole of the great landmass upon which they are situated, not just the western shoulder. Notes and little numbered dots are scribbled haphazardly across the natural features. A crooked line is drawn through the center of the continent, and there is only one note written east of that line—

Unknown Fate

“Right there.” Jack points to an outcropping of land along the central coast.

“Monterey,” says Hargrove.

“That’s what it’s called?”

“That’s what it used to be called.”

Lia reads the tightly scripted letters—
Monterey Bay
. She scans over the map and her eye catches on more fine lettering. “Big Sur…
Jack, look!”

His eyes mist over as he looks at the faded tree symbols demarcating the forest. “That’s where our home was…”

“In the redwood forest?” Hargrove runs a hand across his head and smoothes down his wiry salt-and-pepper hair. “What happened to you there?”

“They came at night—the Nezra—they burned it all down. They…” His throat closes. Looking at that little sketched forest brings it all flooding back. Lia reaches for his hand under the table and squeezes. “They killed everyone… they killed my mother… her parents. They took all the children back here, to the Temple.”

“There’s a man there,” says Lia. “Arana Nezra the Second. Have you ever heard of a king before?”

“I’ve heard of lots of kings,” says Hargrove, “although I doubt very much that he is one. Go on… tell me about him.”

“They say he has spirit eyes. That he was sent from the Beyond.”

Hargrove’s face darkens.

“He has blue eyes. His father told everyone he was special. A gift.”

“Who’s his father?”

“Old Arana,” says Jack. “He’s dead. He knew your brother.”

“He told them about the old days,” says Lia. “They called him prophet.”

Hargrove looks at her. “Prophet?”

“He taught things they never knew. He taught old Arana how to build the Temple.”

“Oh
… ” He gulps in a breath, as if he’s about to speak, and then he rises from the table. “Let me show you something.”

They follow past the fireplace into the side room. Hargrove sets to rummaging through the piles and boxes again, casting aside scrolls and thick books. He extracts a heavy tome from the bottom of a stack, papers slipping off onto the floor, and he thunks it down atop his workbench.

”Here,” he says, opening the leather-bound journal and thumbing through the pages. “Does your Temple look anything like these?”

Various sketches grace the pages, drawn with a skilled hand. One shows a towering cathedral with winged buttresses branching outward. Another shows olden castles with tall gates and watchtowers. Hargrove turns the page. A city built along a mountaintop, with trapezoidal monuments lining its course. On the opposite page, a grouping of pyramids on a flat expanse, three of different sizes.

“It looks like all of them,” says Jack. “What is this?”

“My brother’s journal.”

Below the drawings they see his name signed in cursive—
Thomas Hargrove
. He flips to the back of the journal and his face softens. He turns the picture toward Jack and Lia. Two boys, their arms over each other’s shoulders, with ornery grins on their faces and close-cropped hair bristling on top of their heads.

“We were seventeen when he drew this. Shortly before he went away.”

“He left this behind?”

“He left everything behind. Carried nothing. And he left this Temple, too? You said he lives in the woods?”

“He lives all over. I think he felt bad for what happened.”

“Oh no,” says Hargrove, steeling himself, “what did he do?”

“It wasn’t him,” says Lia. “It was wanderers. They came and burned their houses down. Thomas said it changed them. Made them start killing people.”

“I see.” Hargrove looks in deep thought. He cracks his old knuckles. “How did you come upon Ethan and Renning? Were they at the Temple?”

“They caught Renning spying on them. It was the night we ran away. Ethan was hiding from them. We found him, but his leg was broke, he couldn’t walk. He gave us his map and asked us to come find you. He saved our lives. He let them catch him so we could get away. He wrote on the map—Ethan and Renning are dead.”

“Ethan
. He didn’t want us to go looking for them.” He plunks down on a wooden stool and stares out through the window. “They were spying?”

“Mmmhmm
,” says Lia. “Spying on the Temple.”

“They’re not supposed to approach groups that look dangerous.”

“These people
don’t
look dangerous. Not from far away.”

“You have to know them,” says Jack. “Arana says the world is his.”

“The King?” asks Hargrove.

“Yeah. The King. Everyone who doesn’t follow their ways… he gets rid of them.”

“He’s done this before? What he did to your settlement?”

“He’s done it for years. All through the forest and coast. Says they’re calling on dark spirits.”

Hargrove settles his weary old bones and looks at Nyla. “It’s a genocide.”

Jack nods, though he has no idea of the word’s meaning.

“And you?” he continues, looking at Jack and Lia in awe. “You’ve come all this way? Just to warn us of this?”

Lia nods.

“Ethan said you’d give us answers,” says Jack.

“He did, did he? Answers to what?”

“What happened to everything?”

“That’s not an easy question.”

“Wherefrom came the cycle?” asks Lia, with a familiar cadence that makes Hargrove flinch. “Do you know?”

“The cycle?”

She describes for him the equation that Thomas had drawn around the campfire. Hargrove allows himself a nostalgic smile, thinking of his long-gone brother.

“You won’t find answers to those things, young lady. I’m sorry if you were told otherwise.” The smell of spiced chicken cooking on the grill floats in from the backyard fire pit. Hargrove breathes it in. “Smells like dinner’s about ready. Nyla, would you run out back and check on them?”

“What do you want, Dad?”

“Drumsticks,” he says, smiling. He thrusts his hands in his pockets and studies them seriously. “So… you want answers?”

They nod keenly.

“Well… you’ve made a long journey to be here. You’ve risked your lives. I suppose you’re entitled to some answers.” He turns and ambles back toward the kitchen. “Help me move this table. Not used to this much company.”

Jack and Lia carry the table down a narrow hallway, and Hargrove clears off a smaller table and joins them together in the center of the front room. He arranges a variety of chairs and stools around it, then lays out pieces of silverware.

“We’ll have a little something to eat,” he says, “and then we’ll go.”

“Go?”

“To Alexandria.”

Thomas looks a ludicrous sight riding his pony through the desert, like a windswept vagabond clown lost in the elements. He rides in his britches with a threadbare shirt wrapped around his shaggy, long-whiskered head. The old pony looks tuckered to the brink of collapse. He spurs it on mindlessly, fearing for both of their lives.

The first two days of his travels were quite lonesome. For the last day and a half he has watched the cloud of dust over his shoulder, drawing nearer each time he looks. An army. He wonders if any of his old friends are along for the ride.