Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  Copyright © 2011 by Eliot Pattison.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The author would like to acknowledge that the lyrics on page 240 are from Bobby Darin’s song Beyond the Sea, first recorded by US Atco in 1960.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  eISBN : 978-1-582-43877-1

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER One

  CHAPTER Two

  CHAPTER Three

  CHAPTER Four

  CHAPTER Five

  CHAPTER Six

  CHAPTER Seven

  CHAPTER Eight

  CHAPTER Nine

  CHAPTER Ten

  CHAPTER Eleven

  CHAPTER Twelve

  CHAPTER Thirteen

  CHAPTER Fourteen

  CHAPTER Fifteen

  CHAPTER Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER One

  THE FACES OF the many child suicides Hadrian Boone had cut from nooses or retrieved below cliffs never left him, filled his restless sleep, and encroached in so many waking nightmares that now, as the blond girl with the hanging rope skipped along the ridge above, he hesitated, uncertain whether she was another of the phantoms that haunted him. Then she paused and reached out for the hand of a smaller red-haired girl behind her. Hadrian threw down the shovel he was using to dig out the colony’s old latrine pit, gathered up the chain clamped to his feet, and ran.

  He scrambled up the steep slope of the ravine, ignoring the surprised, sleepy curse of his guard and the shrill, angry whistle that followed. Grabbing at roots and saplings to pull himself forward, he cleared the top and sprinted along the trail, his spine shuddering at the expectation of a baton on his back, his gut wrenching at the sound of a feeble shriek from the opposite side of the ridge. As he reached the open shelf of rock, he sprang, grabbed for the swinging rope that hung from a limb over the edge, heaving it up with a groan of despair. He froze as he hauled the child at the end of it back onto the ledge. What he found himself holding was an old coat fastened over a frame of sticks, and he was looking into the blank eyes of a pumpkin head with dried wheat for hair.

  The shriek sounded again, and Hadrian suddenly realized it was one of laughter. The two girls behind him tittered with delight as he cradled the effigy in his arms. More children joined in the laughter, at least half a dozen in the shadows of the trees.

  “No more, Sarah,” he scolded the older girl as he rose, dumping the figure onto the ground. “Not this game. I taught you better.” He saw now the photograph pinned to the effigy’s chest, an advertisement torn from a long-forgotten magazine showing a woman driving a red convertible filled with joyful children eating bags of hamburgers. Such photos were considered by many children to be proof of the paradise on the other side and were the reason so many sought to reach the heaven they depicted. Carthage colony had long ago banned the private possession of salvaged books and magazines from the past century, which guaranteed their hoarding by the young. There were no more cars, no more drive-through fast food, and the only religion in most families was that invented by children as they tried to decipher the forbidden annals of a lost world.

  “Why the stones?” he asked, bending to roll the pumpkin figure’s head toward him. The eyes carved into the flesh, the most prominent feature of the effigy, had pupils of blue pebbles.

  Sarah glanced back at a thin boy in the shadows, taller than the others. “Dax said his eyes would disappear. He’s seen it, in the others who cross over. He says that’s what you take with you to the other side, your eyes, because that’s where your soul lives.”

  “To be or not to be, amen!” interjected the younger girl.

  “To be or not to be, amen!” The children under the trees quickly echoed the words.

  Hadrian shuddered at the strange, frantic homily, then braced himself on a tree trunk. His despair was like a physical weakness. He’d opposed the withholding of the truth from the younger generation, arguing, begging, and shouting until he’d been removed as the head of the colony’s school. Left without the truth about their world, the young would always find their own version of it. Hadrian had begun to think of the children of Carthage as one more population of prisoners. He glanced at Dax, filled with foreboding over the boy’s familiarity with suicides, then shook his head at the girls and began to dismantle the figure.

  Sarah and her younger sister put on the wounded expressions so familiar to him at the school. “We found something special for you, professor,” Sarah offered, handing him a little cylinder of rolled maple leaves tied with vine. “I was going to bring them to the jail window tonight after—”

  The baton slammed into Hadrian’s shoulder like a hammer, the first blow knocking him to his knees, the second causing him to collapse onto his hands.

  “No!” the older girl cried. She lowered her head and charged the guard who’d materialized behind Hadrian, ramming him in the belly.

  “Get back, you damned vermin!” Sergeant Kenton snarled, slapping the girl as he was pushed against a tree. “I told you last night your gangs are finished! I’ll find your—” his fury melted into confusion, then fear, as he recognized Sarah. “I didn’t mean . . .” he muttered to her. “We can’t have prisoners escaping, Miss. You know the governor sentenced Mr. Boone to more hard labor for destroying government property again.”

  Sarah straightened, rubbing her cheek where he’d struck her. “And what, Sergeant,” she asked in a stern, grown-up voice, “shall we tell our father when the prisoner he sentenced cannot work because of the beating you gave him?”

  Kenton cast a baleful glance at Hadrian. They both knew he would be willing to haul dried dung himself just for a chance to use his baton on Boone. The burly sergeant swallowed hard, bobbing his head to the girl with ill grace. Governor Lucas Buchanan was the most powerful man in the colony of Carthage, on the entire planet for all anyone knew, but in his own household his daughters reigned supreme. “Lawbreakers owe a debt to all,” Kenton murmured. It was the safest of responses, a slogan carved over the entry to the colony’s courthouse.

  Hadrian clutched his throbbing shoulder a moment, then rose, brushing dried leaves and dirt off his clothes.

  “Did you know, Dora,” Sarah declared to her sister in an exaggerated whisper, “that back in the days of the world Sergeant Kenton sold shoes?”

  The younger girl laughed derisively and raised her necklace, shaking its amulet at Kenton, who reflexively jerked backward. It was a rattle from one of the local diamondback snakes, a favorite adornment of the adolescent gangs.

  The policeman clenched his fists, then glared again at Hadrian, as though he must be the one broadcasting the sergeant’s secret past. Kenton offered a servile nod to Sarah, then feigned a retreat for two steps before springing into the brush where he seized the lanky boy by his hair. Dax squirmed for a moment before Kenton brutally slapped him. “I’ll have you begging with the half dead in another week!” he spat at the boy.

  Blood streaming from his nose, Dax pushed back his shaggy blond hair and grinned as Kenton marched back down the trail. “Jackals run with ghosts!” Dax shouted at his back. “Keep hold of you
r eyes, Sergeant!”

  Hadrian stared at the boy, as disturbed by his bizarre words as by the policeman’s behavior, then turned to the girls with a disappointed gaze. “No more pretending about the other side,” he said, the words strangely choking in his throat. The last time he’d found a child suicide, he’d not been able to stop weeping for an hour. He gestured toward the golden fields of grain and the sprawling town of log, stone, and scrapmetal houses beyond. “This is the paradise that belongs to you.” He gathered up his chain and followed his jailer.

  Five minutes later he was back in the pit of dried waste, shoveling the fertilizer into a tattered basket, then carrying the load to the wagon that would transport it to the fields. Glancing about to assure Kenton was nowhere in sight, he extracted the secret bundle from Sarah and with a surge of pleasure unwrapped it to find half a dozen pages torn from books. Quickly he stepped to the flat rock in the shadows where ten similar pages gleaned from the dried sludge lay after being washed in the bucket he was supposed to use for drinking water. He leaned against a boulder and studied the contraband Sarah and Dora had passed to him. Three pages from a history text, three of precious maps, colorful maps brimming with towns and provinces and countries that existed only in a few memories now. With a pang he gazed at other pages trapped in the dried sludge around him, ruined beyond salvage, sent for use in the latrine before the new bleaching mill began recycling old books into fresh paper. The last words of dead poets were there, histories of entire civilizations whose names would never be spoken aloud again, mixed with small useless objects like electric clocks, music players, and hair dryers, stripped of metal and discarded. The end of the world had no ending. Most of it had been annihilated in a few nightmarish days twenty-five years earlier. But the rest of it slipped away like this, one shard at a time.

  He stared at one of the maps, of the eastern United States. He could still name people he had known in a dozen of the cities, though their faces had blurred in his memory. He put a finger on each city’s name and mouthed it, as if to keep it alive. “Baltimore,” he whispered. “Portland, Washington, Poughkeepsie, Philadelphia—”

  The two movements from the brush came almost as one. First, a furious Sergeant Kenton emerged with a fresh hickory switch, pointing at Hadrian’s illegal hoard, quickly followed by Sarah running with her sister on a course to block Kenton from reaching Hadrian. But the policeman’s rage had burnt away the intimidation he’d felt earlier from the girls. He sidestepped them, reached Boone in two leaps, and slashed the switch across his face so violently it drew blood. Hadrian bent and took the beating, flinching with each blow, knowing resistance would make it worse, watching the girls through spasms of pain. Too late he realized they were prying up a weapon, a stout stick embedded in the dried sludge.

  Dora, the eight-year-old, pulled so hard on the stick that she tumbled backward when it came free, causing Kenton to pause, as if considering whether to help the governor’s daughter. Then the screams began, as the horror that had been pinned under the stick slowly rose from the surface. Dora shrieked and crawled, crablike, away. Sarah cried out in terror and darted behind Hadrian. An arm, a blackened, shriveled arm, reached from the sludge, extending its grisly fingers as if for help.

  LUCAS BUCHANAN, THE governor of Carthage, always wore slate-grey suits gleaned from the warehouse stores during the frenzied scavenging of the colony’s early years. Hadrian watched uneasily as the tall, lean man rose from his desk to put on his jacket before speaking, always a bad sign.

  “There is only one reason we haven’t permanently exiled you,” Buchanan declared as he paced along the window of his second floor office. He seemed to be working hard to control his emotions. “If we voted today, the Council would toss you aside like the worthless salvage you are. Banish you to the camps or the forest to waste away with the other discards out there.” He paused to straighten one of the many carefully selected photos on his wall. Abraham Lincoln sitting with his generals flanked Theodore Roosevelt posing with a dead buffalo. An image of a busy harbor with square-rigged clippers and steamboats hung over one of Thomas Edison beside his early phonograph. Buchanan was relentless in his efforts to wipe out the past few decades.

  Hadrian clamped his jaw tightly, refusing to be baited by the governor’s mention of the ghetto thirty miles away, the squalid camps where the survivors of radiation and other diseases from the apocalypse had been condemned to live. Slags, the exiles were commonly called, though many other epithets were used. I’ll have you begging with the half dead in another week, Kenton had threatened Dax. Was he hinting at a coming purge of the gang leaders? The camps would be a living hell for the young teenager.

  “But Jonah insists you are the only one he will work with, the only one who really understands what he’s doing. I reminded him that many of us can read blueprints and follow designs. But the old man just gives me that damned monk’s smile of his and says it’s you or no one. As if he were our wizard and you the only apprentice able to read his runes.” The governor’s voice was heavy with resentment. “So when you complete your sentence you will be released into his custody,” he added quickly.

  Just the mention of the old man who had become like a father to Hadrian was a salve to his aching spirit. But after a moment he raised his brows. Ever since Hadrian had been pushed out of the Council and his schoolmaster’s job, Buchanan had harassed him, ejecting him from his quarters at the school, arresting him on petty charges. “Why would you do that for me?”

  “I told you. To help Jonah build our public works. He submitted a long list of proposed projects to the Council. He promises a brick factory soon, says he can even build a rail line to the mines in five years’ time.”

  “I know you better.” Hadrian shifted so he could keep an eye on the half-open door behind him. There should have been deputies frantically consulting, policemen conferring about the dead man. With a chill he saw several dirt-encrusted pistols hanging on belts from a peg on the back of the door, awaiting restoration.

  The governor lifted a marble chess piece, an elephant with a castle on its back, one of the many random artifacts he collected. When he finally replied he addressed the rook in his hand. “I’ve discovered he keeps a secret journal. We’ve been unable to find it.”

  “Perhaps he’s just putting your regime in historic perspective. I tend to think in terms of feudalism.”

  Buchanan’s smile was as thin as a blade. “No one cares what you think anymore. But if the esteemed Jonah Beck were recording such careless thoughts and they wound up in our new newspaper . . .”

  “You’re asking me to spy on him?”

  The governor toyed with the switch on an old gooseneck lamp. Government House was one of the colony’s few electrified buildings, powered by bicycle generators designed by Jonah and manned by convicts in the darker, colder months. “We want only to protect him from himself. He trusts you. All I want are reports from time to time.”

  “I refuse.” A drop of blood fell from Hadrian’s cheek onto his tattered shoe.

  Buchanan adjusted his jacket, which hung like a sack on his bony frame. Everyone had resembled scarecrows in the early years, but he was one of those who had never been able to regain their weight. “How many people in the known world, Hadrian? Nine thousand, maybe ten?”

  “You always ignore the camps and the forest people. They probably make it closer to twelve.”

  The governor grinned, as if amused by the jibe. “And once you were with me at the very top, not just a founder, a leader.”

  “I don’t recall worrying about what people called us. We were too busy keeping people alive.”

  “You played the survivor’s game better than any of us. Now look at you. Can’t even clean out dried shit without making trouble.” Buchanan gestured toward a small stack of papers held together with a pin. “If I had enough paper to keep a thorough file on you, this would be a foot thick. You’re a failure even at being a failure. There’d be little protest if I ejected you right now. Ag
ree, or I’ll have you declared an outlaw. No coming back. No more crying on the old man’s shoulder. And no more interfering with my children,” he added with extra vehemence.

  Hadrian had been examining a photo of an old canal boat pulled by a team of mules. “Is that what this is about? Your daughters were toying with a hanging noose.”

  “A game.”

  “You and I have buried a lot of children through the years, Lucas. This is how the pattern begins, getting comfortable with the mechanics of it. I remember once when children joined Scouts and soccer teams. In your colony they join suicide cults. Surely you haven’t forgotten how a little girl’s neck looks when it’s stretched? The bulging, surprised eyes, the laughter forever choked out of her? They don’t move on to a more beautiful world, they just move into our nightmares. Each of their gravestones is a monument to our failure.”

  Buchanan gripped the rook so hard his knuckles whitened. “Since the day you were thrown off the Council and sacked as the head of our school you were no longer accountable for my children. Accept my generosity,” he said coldly, “or I draw up papers today to exile you. Push me and I’ll banish Jonah too. I can’t trust him if I have no leverage over him. Are you prepared to nurse him through the winter in some wattle hut in the camps? Frostbite will come first, then chilblains. After a couple of months he’ll look like he had radiation sickness.”

  Hadrian stared at the little pool of blood on his shoe. He longed to be in the camps at that moment, sitting in a smoke-choked hut as some hairless, half-toothed bard sang the rock songs of their youth. But he couldn’t bear to be forever parted from Jonah, and the old man wouldn’t survive even a month of winter in the camps. He looked up into Buchanan’s icy, expectant grin and slowly nodded.