Alexandria (50 page)

Hargrove stands in the backyard, crooked up against the clothesline post, and watches the proceedings with a calmness only achieved with age. The men from the outpost scour through the shed, pulling out anything that might serve as a weapon—old garden tools, rusty shears, poles that can be sharpened to spears. Jack shuffles past the door and looks in on them, imagining their chances against the Nezra. Even if the Temple is left guarded only by the old and weak, their chances against them still look slim to none.

A thought cracks open in his mind—the vision of a skull-sized rock crushing a tiny pebble army. He rushes over to Hargrove.

“I know how to get more men,” says Jack in a hurry.

“I’m listening…”

“They’re in the valley… by a fork in the river…”

“Who?”

“Dad—”

Nyla leads her horse over, looking grief-stricken, and laces her arms around her father’s neck. Lia sits on her horse, off to the side, rubbing the little celestial pendant between her thumb and forefinger.

“Be careful, sweetie,” Hargrove tells his daughter. “And don’t worry on us. We know what we're doing.” Nyla looks up to him with deep admiration and holds his cheek in her palm. “Get Marikez. Tell him we need him more than ever.”

She springs up onto the saddle and checks that her freight is tied down securely. The third horse is laden with cargo only, and she tugs its lead and starts to amble down toward the river. Lia takes one last longing look at Jack, then pulls the reins and circles around to follow Nyla.

Jack feels alone at once. He glazes over, watching her ride away, and doesn’t realize Hargrove is speaking to him until he feels the hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

“Come on inside with me, I’ve got a couple things left to do.”

They creak up the back porch steps then move down a darkened hallway to a staircase leading to the second story. Hargrove holds a plated candle before him, his hand cupped around the flame, lighting the way up the groaning steps. They curve around a bend in the staircase and emerge in the stale, musty attic. It looks like a salvage yard of old machinery. The tiny orange flame reveals a menagerie of gears and sprockets, wooden boxes overflowing with antiquated odds and ends, a gallery of long metal rods leaning in the corner, tarnished old wires and casings.

Hargrove weaves through the aisles between heaps, shielding his flame, and works his way to a rolltop desk buried amidst the clutter. He flicks a switch on a tall wooden stand and the attic illuminates with incandescent light, the crooked filament burning yellow-white in its glass casing, throwing harsh shadows against the walls, stark machines in silhouette, looming tall and black along the upper molding like mechanized bogeymen. Hargrove rolls back the corrugated top and busies himself with rummaging through reams of disorganized files, pitching some away haphazardly and collecting others in a neat little pile.

Jack wanders across the creaky floorboards, squinting at the odd collection heaped around him. There are worktables buried in old papers, with measuring sticks and containers full of peculiar implements arranged carelessly, schematics tacked crudely to the wall, the dry pulp edges curling with age. The attic smells more ancient than any place he has ever been. Fine old dust tickles his nose hairs.

A large machine rests in a tight outcropping, its edges touching the cracked plaster walls. It is full of gears and tremendous rollers, like it was meant to flatten things down to nothing and then spit them back out onto the cold metal tray. Jack reaches out slowly, as though it might bite his fingers off, and touches it. Discarded papers crunch under his foot and he picks one up and uncrinkles its folds.

On the Proper Treatment of Common Ailments

Written below are long columns of blocked text, with thin-lined diagrams and pictures. He drops it from his hands and lets it float back to the floor.

He paces along the worktable, drawn to the dismantled oddities scattered across its top like an elaborate riddle, and he works to reconstruct them in his mind, imagining how the pieces might fit together and then, once so, what on earth they might work in concert to accomplish. He leans down and inspects a dust-coated metal box, with crude dials affixed to its facade and a whittled wooden switch stuck in the
Off
position. A thick bundle of wires protrudes from the back and snakes down through the top of a wooden barrel on the floor. He stares at the switch, looks over his shoulder for Hargrove, and flicks it toward the engraving that says
On
. The sharp hiss of static cuts through the stale air and quickly dies, and Jack flinches and jumps back, then, as an afterthought, reaches his arm out straight and jerks the switch back down. He turns—Hargrove is looking at him with raised eyebrows.

“My father’s work.”

“What was that noise?”

“Outer space.”

Jack looks to the ceiling and backs further away, tipping over a box of heavy assemblages that clank and rattle against the floor. Hargrove rests his elbow on a stack of crates and smiles across the expanse of the attic.

“It’s background interference.”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s a radio. You can send and receive messages with it.”

“Messages from space?”

“Other people with radios.”

“Who else has a radio?”

“No one. We wanted to use them on our trips, but we could never get them small enough as to be portable, with the battery and all. So here it sits.”

Jack works the switch again but the juice has run dead.

“Come on over,” calls Hargrove. “Give me a hand.”

Jack winds his way between the thin aisles, boxes and machinery brushing against his sleeves as he passes, and finds Hargrove kneeling in a small niche by an octagonal bay window. Set before him is a tripod with a slender cylinder perched atop.

“Here she is.”

“A scope?”

“Mmm. A good scope. Have a look.”

Jack squats down on the floor and peers up through the eyepiece. “I can’t see anything.”

“Here—” Hargrove settles in his place and swivels the cylinder on its mount, tightening a wing nut at the base, then proceeds to adjust the eyepiece ever so slightly. “Try it again.”

Jack crouches down and sets his eye against the gasket. It tickles his eyelashes and he blinks. When he settles in, he sees the cold lunar landscape through the eyepiece, half in light, half in dark, covered over in craters from the endless pummeling it has taken through the Ages. It looks close enough to reach out and touch, and still distant enough to make his heart ache for faraway lands.

“It’s something, ain’t it?”

“It’s beautiful.”

Hargrove unscrews it from the tripod and hands it off to Jack. “Run this down to Denit. Tell him, if he hasn’t already, to fetch out that little keg of powder from the shed.”

“Powder?”

“Mmm. Powder.”

Jack holds the long scope close to his body and walks down toward the kitchen. Hargrove takes a quick look around, takes a deep breath of the sour air, and descends the staircase.

“Tell ‘em I’ll be out in a minute,” he says, heading into the front room where the wooden trap still lay wide open on the floor. “I’ve got something yet to do here.”

Jack watches him lower himself down the wooden ladder and disappear from view.
Powder
, he thinks.
What good is powder?
A deep uneasiness begins to tug at him.

Outside, some of the fellows have already taken to their horses, waiting to set out. The night is dark and quiet—sunrise is still hours away. He finds Denit tightening his saddle and delivers Hargrove’s message.

Denit pats his hand along his saddlebag. “Already taken care of.”

Jack shuffles down to his horse, feeling like he’s about to throw his dinner all over the ground. He pets his hand down the coarse mane and it makes him think of Balazir—probably standing over on the ridge where the Nezra’s fires are burning. He hooks into the stirrup and pulls himself onto his new horse, then rides over to join the other men.

“Gonna be a long ride,” says Trevor, a tanner from the outpost.

“I know.”

“Denit said you were a fighter.”

“I was a soldier.”

Trevor smiles. “Where do you put our chances?”

“I’m… trying not to think of that.”

“Smart man.”

“You?” asks Jack. “Were you a fighter?”

Trevor rolls up his sleeve and shows tributaries of old scars. “Convoys used to get attacked all the time. Hard work setting a new line.”

“What about Hargrove?”

“Oh yeah. He was quite a bruiser back in his day.”

The kitchen light goes dim as Hargrove snuffs the candles. He looks around the dark kitchen, sighs, and walks back to the front room. A small ornamental cupboard hangs by the doorway, each shelf containing a row of neatly arranged pipes. Hargrove waves his finger before them, tracing over each row, until he lands on one resting on the middle shelf—rich umber wood with a thin carven stem. He slips it into his pocket, then shambles out the back door and climbs atop his horse.

“All right
,” he sighs, sliding into the saddle. He shines a toothy grin over his shoulder, then snaps the reins and gallops into the yawning dark.

Wisps of sunlight creep into the tarnished sky as Thomas and his beleaguered pony straggle into the oasis. The front door is closed, the windows shuttered. The eaves are sagging a bit, the clapboards paling, but still in all it looks as it did when he left home some forty years ago. He pulls the reticent pony to the porch and reaches a shaky hand out to touch it, fearing it to be yet another hallucination. He digs his fingers into the wood and collapses on the steps. The pony, smelling water, fights against its lead and Thomas lets it slip from his fingers. It makes a straight shot down to the river, lumbering slowly on its knobby legs.

Thomas rolls onto his belly and works himself onto all fours. He crawls the last few feet to the front door, then curls his hand into a fist and knocks. Never before in his life has he knocked on this door—always just walked right through—and it saddens him, the realization that this is no longer his home. He reaches up and tries the knob and the door swings open with a high-pitched whine. The interior is dark and quiet. Thomas pulls himself to his feet and stumbles inside.

“Ryan!”

No answer.

He clumps across the front room, thousands of memories shooting off in his brain like fireworks. The same old rug is laid out of the floor, worn thin with age. He sees his father’s old chair, broken down and shoved into the corner. Through the open door, he looks in at the side room where he and Ryan used to play.

“Ryan!”

There is a jumble of old books and papers laid out on the side table and Thomas makes for them. His head knocks into one of the winged models and sets it rocking back and forth. A journal is laid out on top of the pile, its leather cover draped open. There is his own youthful face smiling back at him, drawn with the neat lines and feathered crosshatching that he recognizes as his own. He looks into the shaded gray eyes, shards of clean pulp peeking through the irises to show the light twinkle. There is his brother, spray of cowlick across his forehead. It comes rushing back. They stood on the back porch so the light was better. He set the old polished glass in the corner, and he sketched quick because Ryan was too antsy to sit still for very long. He drew rough lines and filled in the finer details later. His mother asked for a tracing of it to hang next to her desk upstairs.

Thomas holds the leather cover in his hand and wanders away toward the kitchen, letting the journal flap at his side the way a child would do. The house is so quiet. So still. It feels like it hasn’t been lived in for years. There is the table where he took his meals as a boy. He pulls back a chair and sits looking out the window, across the back porch, down toward the river where the old pony meanders along the water’s edge.

He listens to the house settle.

They must be downstairs. In the library. Hiding.

He rises and walks to the front room and slaps his head.
The rug
. Perfectly in place over the trapdoor.

They’ve fled, he realizes, and just as well. Now there won’t be any argumentation about what he came here to do.

He throws back the rug and deftly pulls the rope handle on the trap. It cracks against the hardwood floor. Thomas slips on the ladder and tumbles into the cellar, dropping the journal. He jackknifes forward, clutching his shin, then crawls in the darkness and feels out for the hatch. He tightens his hand around the wheel and grinds it slowly, round and round, until a puff of cool air whispers past his face. Sullen red light fills the cellar. Thomas opens the hatch and laughs.

A metallic buzz rumbles up from the deep and the red light strobes. Thomas grips the edge with clawed hands and his laughter rages down the shaft, mingling with the electric buzz and the spectacle of light. He laughs until tears burst from his eyes and fall five stories to the landing below.

It’s been forty rough years since he has felt such a close kinship with his brother. He snatches the splayed-out journal off the cellar floor and turns to the back page and kisses his brother’s graphite lips.