Settling into his chair with a satisfied expression, the governor lifted a large silver ring from the desk. Hadrian realized he’d seen it an hour earlier. It had been on the finger of the shriveled hand in the sludge pit.
“We could have had this conversation next week when my sentence is up,” Hadrian observed, his gut tightening. Buchanan had been making certain he had him under his thumb before demanding something more urgent.
“I want that body removed.”
Hadrian closed his eyes a moment. Then he looked hard at Buchanan. “I’ll need more than a shovel and basket. Tell Kenton to bring tools in the morning, a coffin if he can find one.” Behind the desk was a plaque inscribed IN STRENGTH WE ENDURE. It had been Buchanan’s political slogan when he was first elected so many years before. It had become his personal creed.
“You misunderstand. Tonight. Only you. I will order Kenton to release you after the evening meal, on parole until midnight. Take a lantern and whatever tools you need from the jail shed.”
Once Hadrian had been welcomed there, in this office, once the two men had trusted each other. They had transformed through the years, trying to survive, each in his own way trying to build the colony out of the rubble of the world. Survival, he had learned, was not about merely adapting, but transforming. Those who had not transformed in the early years had died. You had to constantly slam the door on the thousand things that choked you with emotion, learn to be grateful for the scars that grew over your soft parts. Now whatever was left of either man from the old times was so disfigured as to be unrecognizable. Now they were in their final relationship. Buchanan had won, and Hadrian was becoming his secret slave.
“He was a big man. I can’t do it alone.”
“But dead for a long time,” the governor observed. “There’s probably only . . . Surely the body’s not intact.”
“The sludge preserved him, like the old bog men.”
Buchanan grimaced, then turned to gaze for a long moment over the harbor and the vast inland sea beyond before tilting his head toward a portrait of Sarah and Dora. “I lie awake sometimes,” he confessed in a near whisper, “worrying that they think we are going to destroy the world again.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Hadrian shot back. It was the endpoint of a thousand conversations they’d had over the past two decades, a reflection of the strange, many-layered person Buchanan had become. He would gladly batter Hadrian in public, would shame him, would outlaw him, but still, when they were alone, he could become the lonely widower, offering up the unguarded conversation they had shared in the early years.
“Sarah wrote something on the wall by her bed. We know what we are but know not what we may be. I asked where she got the words and she wouldn’t say. Which means they came from you.”
“You flatter me. I only recommended she read more Shakespeare.” Free from the contamination of the modern world and being so widely available to the early salvage crews, the Bard’s works filled several stacks of the colony’s collection of approved books. “Fascinating, don’t you think, that Hamlet would resonate with her? The destruction of a royal family.”
Buchanan glared at him. “I am going to make you repaint the slogan you destroyed on the wall of the town square,” he growled. “Say it. I want you well practiced when you recite it to the assembled children.”
Hadrian returned the smoldering gaze. “Four weeks of hard labor was my sentence. Nothing was said about becoming part of your propaganda machine.”
“Did I mention another week for escaping today?”
“I refuse.”
“I can picture old Jonah now, frost in his hair, his teeth chattering.”
Hadrian hung his head. “We have not lost our history. We are free of history.”
A victorious grin split the governor’s flinty features. He turned again, this time to watch a plume of smoke on the northern horizon, a steam-powered boat working one of the sea’s endless schools of fish. “Be at the sludge pit at dusk. You’ll have help,” he said, and pointed to the door.
The corridor outside was empty. Hadrian stepped to the front window to survey the street below. Kenton, obviously assuming the audience would take much longer, was rolling a cigarette by a row of bicycles, sullenly observing a group of teenagers beside one of the horse-drawn machines used for scraping roads. Hadrian watched the sergeant, the skin on his back crawling from the beating to come, then shot down the stairs, stole a hat from a hook to conceal his face, and climbed out a back window.
Ten minutes later he stood in the entrance to the two-story log building, designed like a great barn, that housed the colony’s library. Wiping the blood off his face, he watched the dusty street for the brown uniforms of Buchanan’s policemen, then pulled the hat low and stepped inside. He slipped into a side chamber, pausing for a satisfied look at the shelves of books that had cleared the censors, then studied the stairway and the landing above for signs of a sentry before ascending, a volume of Dickens in his hand for cover.
He paused when he reached the threshold of the large chamber, gazing through the gaping door upon the slender figure, once the head of a great university, at the worktable. The sight of the grey-bearded man working with his nib pen on a sheet of heavy handmade paper always soothed Hadrian’s tormented spirit. The page was from Jonah’s secret chronicle of life in the new world, and every time Hadrian discovered him bent over the project—often by candle at night—he saw him as a monk from a thousand years earlier illuminating a manuscript for the ages. As he laid his hat on a chair and silently stepped closer, he saw that his friend was completing the details of a small sailing boat in the lower margin. Green vines brimming with pumpkins edged the top corners, autumn flowers the bottom, with elaborate flourishes connecting them.
Jonah looked up with a gentle smile. “They’re giving tea breaks to the labor crews now?” he asked in a chagrined but good-natured voice, then gestured Hadrian toward a nearby stool before returning to his work. Hadrian glanced back at the door, aware that he had no more than a quarter hour before Kenton and his men began looking for him. He sat uneasily for a moment, then wandered around the chamber, a place dearer to him than any in the colony. He studied the mounted specimens of small forest mammals on one shelf, the volume of the ancient Chinese poet Sutungpo beside dried flowers on another. As he examined the working wooden model of an astronomical observatory with a telescope mounted on a pivoting frame, he thought of how the governor pined for public works to jump-start his new civilization, while the wizard of Carthage colony yearned to look at the stars.
At last Hadrian became aware of Jonah patiently watching him. His page was completed.
“You need to start a second journal, my friend,” Hadrian declared. “Something simple, with designs for possible buildings, observations on the weather and stars, notes on crops, with some measured criticism of the government to keep it authentic.”
Jonah cocked his head to one side like a curious bird. “The governor has been chatting with you.”
Hadrian glanced back at the freshly illuminated page. Did Jonah keep only one page of his journal out at a time as a hedge against Buchanan’s suspicions? “The governor,” he replied, “is going to find a way to exile me.” Hadrian clenched his jaw against the heartache that rose at the thought of being separated from the gentle old man, whose serenity and intellect had nourished him for so many years.
“The governor,” Jonah observed with a wry smile, “is above all a practical man. You were there when we opened the public baths last month. The people were ready to kiss his hand for putting running water on every block. I have shown him designs for a new flour mill, a steam timber mill, even a rail line. As long as we keep building new projects, he will stay in office. And I’ve explained to him it is impossible for me to proceed without you. If he insists on constantly arresting you on petty charges, I told him I’ll need a cell too, for we must be together.” He paused, wincing, to knead his shoulder with long bony fingers. “I’m aging fast, my arthritis worsens e
very day. I need your hands and legs. You and I will do the detailed designs here. Then I’ll watch in my glass”—Jonah gestured to the telescope on the veranda outside his workshop—“as you manage the construction. You will be restored, rehabilitated, you’ll see. We’ll build you a room on my cabin and train the warblers to eat from our hands. Rehabilitated,” he repeated. “Back the way we were.”
The words brought a strange sadness to Hadrian. He watched the flickering waters of the inland sea. “I wouldn’t recognize myself,” he whispered to himself.
But Jonah had heard. “Inside, we haven’t changed,” he said. Then he cocked his head again. “What happened today?”
“We found a body in the old latrine pit.”
Jonah shrugged. “Surely you’re no longer frightened of the dead.”
“No,” Hadrian admitted. “What frightened me was the children playing with a hanging rope again.”
Jonah replied with a sad, knowing silence.
“All I’ve done, for all these years, doesn’t mean a thing.” The confession leapt from Hadrian’s tongue unbidden, as if something deep inside had pushed it out. His despair was like a living thing gnawing at his heart. “I always told myself I survived for a reason. It was a lie. Thinking I could make a difference was the biggest lie of all.”
After a moment Jonah lifted Hadrian’s hand and dropped a familiar agate disc onto his palm, a meditation stone worn smooth from years of rubbing. “Borrow this,” Jonah said. “Go back to your cell and use it. Reach inside. Stop trusting your emotions. The colony needs you more than ever. And stop escaping. Your bones will start breaking if you keep giving Sergeant Kenton so many reasons to beat you.”
“I agreed to spy on you, Jonah,” Hadrian confessed, unable to look the old man he loved in the eye. “Buchanan is going to start a new campaign to weed out those who don’t support him.”
“Which is why I made sure you were coming to live with me.”
“He doesn’t trust you.”
“Nor I him.” Jonah pushed Hadrian’s fingers closed over the stone. “But he desperately needs me. And together we will devise the tales for you to carry back. Making a second journal that you can share with him is an inspired suggestion. If he insists on turning life into a chess game, then surely we can outplay him. He has no mind for subtlety.”
“You refuse to accept how dangerous he is.”
Jonah offered another serene smile. “I have ways to deal with our governor.” He jabbed a bony finger at Hadrian’s heart. “We haven’t changed,” he insisted, “not in the important places.”
“Those places are lost to me,” Hadrian replied, his throat tightening. “And I don’t want to be what I have become.” He ran his hand over his shaggy hair. “The only thing that gives me hope, old man, is that you still have the capacity to hope.”
Jonah’s reply was to gesture Hadrian to follow him onto the veranda. The view was spectacular, overlooking the town below, the vast, glistening inland sea to the north, to the south the stables and fields framed by hills streaked with crimson.
“It’s the best crop ever,” the old man said, waving at the fields beyond. “A surplus,” he added in a pointed tone.
Hadrian studied him, knowing how carefully Jonah always chose his words. “You mean there’s enough to ship outside the colony.”
“I told the governor that if you and I agreed to start building his new brick factory, there must be one more project started at the same time. Our bridge.”
As the words sank in, Hadrian’s heart raced. They had dreamt of this for years, a bridge across the steep ravine that cut off all direct passage to the camps of the untouchables, otherwise requiring a day’s journey.
“Our bridge!” Jonah repeated in a joyful tone. “The beginnings of the new world you and I have longed for.” He stepped back to his table and, after a moment’s fumbling through stacked papers, produced a sketch of a cantilevered bridge built of logs. “Buchanan’s agreed that the first vehicles to cross it will be wagons of grain for the camps! It will mean a difference between life and death for some of the oldest!”
Hadrian saw the sparkle in Jonah’s eyes. Most of all, it would mean the contact between young and old needed to heal long-festering wounds and a release of the flood of knowledge dammed up in the camps for so many years.
“So, you see, things are already getting better, my son,” Jonah said, and paused to pluck a fading bloom from one of the potted roses he kept on the veranda. “We will make a difference, you and I. This is the way to change things. There are engineers in the camps, and teachers and poets. Everything will be transformed when we set them free. We will build a new school, a college even, and you will be its head. The Dark Ages had to come before there could be a Renaissance.”
Hadrian had seldom seen him so animated, so happy. Jonah had not been able to make the arduous journey to the camps for nearly two years, had no idea how desperate conditions there were or how many of their aging friends had died. And he had no inkling of the many ways Buchanan might be lying to him. But looking into his radiant eyes, Hadrian had no heart to tell him. “A Renaissance,” he echoed, forcing a smile. Then he accepted Jonah’s embrace.
THE HUT WAS covered with flowering vines, surrounded by patches of herbs once neatly tended but now overgrown. As Hadrian dropped his armful of firewood by the stone threshold, a woman appeared in the doorway, acknowledging him with a sad yet grateful smile. She was hairless and careworn, aged far beyond her years, though her high cheekbones and intense green eyes reminded him that once, back in the days of the world, she had been a fashion model. He handed her a dozen sheets of newly bleached paper, stolen from a desk in Government House. “For your poems, Nelly,” he said.
Inside, on a pallet beneath the solitary window, lay an old man of Asian features. His breath came in long, wrenching rattles and his eyes were unfocused. Propped on a stool next to him was an exquisite, nearly finished painting of a thrush on a willow branch. “He hasn’t lifted a brush for days,” the woman said over his shoulder. “I try to feed him but he says it tastes like mud. It’s all I have.”
On the floor Hadrian saw the wooden bowl half-filled with a yellow glutinous substance, gruel made of cattail roots. The winter before, she had killed their beloved dog to feed her husband, calling it squirrel. All summer, whenever he had seen movement in the shadows, the nearsighted old artist, a television reporter in the former world, had called out the dog’s name and laughed.
“If I can get away this afternoon,” the woman said, “I think I can find some tadpoles to boil.”
As she spoke, Hadrian’s belly exploded in pain.
“Get up, you son of a bitch!” spat Kenton.
Hadrian sat up, gasping, clutching his stomach. The sergeant hovered over him in the dusk, twisting the end of his truncheon in his palm. Behind him Lucas Buchanan leaned a bicycle against a tree.
“Quit your dreaming!” the governor snapped.
But Hadrian had not been dreaming as he lay waiting by the ravine. He had been simply reliving his last visit to the camps.
The governor lifted a pick and lantern from a pile of tools lying in the shadows, then pointed Kenton toward a large boulder near the road before gesturing for Hadrian to follow him into the ravine. Not daring to ask why Buchanan himself had decided to help with the grisly chore, Hadrian retrieved a shovel and hurried down the path, not missing Kenton’s ravenous glance as he took up his sentinel position. Escaping twice in one day guaranteed a double beating that night.
The two men worked feverishly at the body in the pit, clearing an arm, a hip, a leg, a foot as darkness overtook the ravine. The dead man was clad in sturdy traveling clothes, wore the leather beltpack commonly used by trappers and others who ventured into the wilds. His countenance, shriveled and stained nearly black, was that of a strong man in his twenties, ready to challenge the world. Or what was left of it.
Hadrian studied the stricken way the governor stared at the face. “You knew him,” Hadrian
declared as Buchanan lit the lantern. “You knew who it was when you saw that ring.”
Pulling the ring from his pocket, Buchanan held it in the pool of light. “We had them made last spring so they could be sent back as a token with a message, to authenticate the source.”
Hadrian bent to examine the ring. Engraved on it were a seagull and a pine tree, the symbols of the colony’s flag. “He was working for you.”
“There were two of them,” Buchanan explained. “We had a private dinner where I gave them a send-off speech. Long recon.” It meant a distant scouting expedition, in search of new sources of salvage.
Hadrian searched his memories of the spring before. There were always public announcements, public banquets before the long recon teams set off. “You kept this mission secret.”
“They were one-man expeditions. They were supposed to leave before dawn, this one on foot, the other in a sailing canoe bound for the seaway. The other was brought back three weeks later in a trading boat from the northern settlement,” he explained, referring to the tiny band of survivors who eked out their sustenance on the far shore, 150 miles away. “They found him floating facedown halfway across.”
He looked at the dead man. “This one’s Hastings, one of our most experienced woodsmen. Micah Hastings. He volunteered instantly the moment I mentioned I might send out new scouts. His mother comes every week to ask if we’ve heard from him.”
“He never left,” Hadrian observed as he scooped away more of the dried sludge from the man’s side. “But why keep a salvage mission secret?”
Buchanan ignored the question. “All these months I’ve been imagining that he’d found a road that had not been made impassable by overgrowth, that he had gone far to the south and was mapping new salvage yards.” Salvage yards. It was one of the colony’s euphemisms for the ruined towns that were prized for the pieces of metal they contained. Humanity’s technical progress was held hostage to the discovery of new junkyards. Buchanan paused, his voice growing more distant. “I had a dream a few nights ago, that Hastings found a family of elephants escaped from some zoo and was bringing them here.” He contemplated the rising moon. “Do you suppose there are any elephants left on the planet?”
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