Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  Because they had failed, he realized. If they couldn’t obtain what they sought from Jonah, they had tried to make certain no one else could.

  He stared absently at the book he had shelved, then paused over its title. Favorite American Poets. He carried it back to the desk and again assembled the torn page. Up from the meadows rich with corn, the verse began. Over two dozen pages had been marked with folded corners. He began scanning the marked pages. Longfellow, Frost, Riley, Holmes, Emerson. Then the words of Whittier were in front of him, leaping off the page, completing the verse. Fair as the garden of the Lord, the poet had written. “To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,” he read aloud to himself.

  The missing words sent a chill down his spine. They seemed to cast the entire page in a different light. To anyone solving its riddle it was not so much a celebration of the harvest festival as a reminder of the misery of the exiles. Hadrian had never before heard Jonah refer to the exiles as rebels. There had been talk of open insurrection from the camps years earlier, only to die away as the leaders of the movement had succumbed to disease. Hadrian stared at the words with new foreboding, trying to convince himself they were just the musings of an aging scholar.

  He stepped out onto the balcony that adjoined the workshop, where he and Jonah had stood only two days earlier, when Jonah had been so full of hope, had spoken of the renaissance to come. He lifted his face into the cool breeze and gazed out over the water. Once it had been called a Great Lake but the term had been lost. Survivors strangely avoided the old place names, as if they too had been extinguished in the destruction. Everything was the same but everything was different. Jonah had died and everything was different.

  Hadrian fought a new wave of emotion, a despair so intense he had to grip the railing for support. As he did so his hand touched a groove in the wood, a slender eighth-inch channel cut at an angle, spanning the entire width of the plank that capped the railing. It might have seemed innocuous, a random defect, a carpenter’s error, but he knew it had not been there when they’d constructed the building. It had been deliberately cut afterward, and Jonah never engaged in random acts. Hadrian searched the entire railing, finding two more grooves, each at different angles.

  Retrieving three pencils from the desk, he laid them on the grooves. They all pointed to the tripod telescope in the center of the balcony, its position fixed by marks on the floor near each leg. He swiveled the instrument to the bearing indicated by the first cut. The end of the long ridge to the west of Carthage leapt into view, on the other side of the deep ravine that separated the colony from the reviled camps. He increased the magnification and a dead oak at the end of the ridge filled the lens. Hawks sometimes perched there, and a bird roosted there now. The tree had become part of the colony’s folklore. Vultures were said to rest there after dining on the dead of the camps.

  He reduced the magnification and turned the scope to the second mark. Town buildings leapt into view. A corner of Government House. A tavern. The colony’s two theaters. Then, increasing the magnification again, the most distant of the structures leapt into view. It was the fish processing plant—more specifically, its roof.

  The third mark aimed directly at the steep slope of the ridge that formed the settlement’s eastern boundary. Nothing was there except large trees, misshapen from the prevailing northwest wind, and a clearing at the top where townspeople liked to take picnics. He paused for a moment, remembering that Jonah kept another, stronger lens tube somewhere, one they sometimes used to study the moon. He turned to survey the wreckage inside, spied a wooden box that had been knocked from a shelf, half its contents spilled onto the floor. Pen nibs, several old chandelier crystals, a paper knife. Remaining inside was the little tattered cardboard carton that held the lens.

  A moment later he had inserted the lens and turned the scope back to the first site. The dead tree could be seen in great detail now, the bird at its top resolving itself into an eagle. Below it, on the lowest limb, was a flash of color he’d not seen before. Three long strips of bright cloth fluttered in the wind, a blue one flanked by two red ones. It was a signal.

  A rustle caused him to spin around. A young woman was collecting charred papers from the desk.

  “No cleaning in here!” Hadrian snapped.

  “I was told to help,” the woman stammered, glancing nervously at Hadrian before gazing at the floor.

  “Not in here, not until I say so.”

  “You misunderstand, sir. I mean the governor ordered me to help you.”

  Hadrian set the papers back on the desk and studied her as she brushed aside a strand of long russet hair. She was a first-generation colonist, in her midtwenties, and would have been pretty had her face not been so heavily mottled. One in five children born in Carthage had pigmentation problems. She lifted the book of poems from the desk.

  As Hadrian reached out to pull the book away from her, he noticed the brown tunic under her quilted jacket. “What exactly is your job, officer?”

  She stepped back from the desk. “Sergeant. Sergeant Jori Waller,” she said nervously. “I usually compile evidence for the tribunals hearing cases, show it to the judges.”

  Hadrian frowned. “You mean you’re an investigator?” Carthage was still a small community in many ways but—probably because it was so small—many of its citizens kept aspects of their lives secret. So many participated in the black market that its shadow touched every street. So many had two faces that old timers joked the population wasn’t nine thousand, it was eighteen. The job of the police, Jonah once had quipped, wasn’t to penetrate the secrets but to make sure people kept their faces straight. Hadrian had never heard of a real investigator in the colony.

  Sergeant Waller shrugged. “Mostly I just compile the facts in police reports. Our crimes are always straightforward, usually settled by the testimony of the arresting officer. A clerical job, really.”

  “But you’re a sergeant.”

  She seemed embarrassed by the comment. “I’m in charge of the office.” Then she added. “There are two others. Paper pushers.”

  “And what exactly did Governor Buchanan say I was doing?”

  “Trying to learn who caused the fire.”

  Hadrian inwardly cursed Buchanan. Though he’d promised Hadrian freedom to conduct his investigation, he still had to have his watcher. Hadrian pointed to the door. “Go back to Government House. In a few days I’ll come tell you what I found.”

  The young woman looked at the floor as she stepped back over the rope and shut the heavy door behind her. He frowned, then glanced at the book still in his hands and thought of the exiles. He would have to get word of Jonah’s death to them, even if it meant making the arduous trip himself. Mail to the camps was forbidden, the trail there often patrolled to discourage travelers.

  He worked feverishly, mindful of the midday funeral, looking at every loose paper, leafing through every book for the slips Jonah often set between pages. There were notes for manufacturing water pipes and household plumbing systems, designs for building a steam laundry, even a steam-powered printing press. Yet there was no sign of the rest of Jonah’s secret journal, no pile of layered ashes where it might have been burnt.

  He paced around the chamber, absently restoring more fallen objects to their shelves, then paused and turned back to gaze at the desk with new realization. Jonah had known the governor wanted his secret chronicle. He would not have kept it in the library.

  His old friend had loved games. Once on Hadrian’s birthday he’d designed a map with the location of little gifts indicated solely by Latin riddles. Stumbling through the mess underfoot, he absently kicked a shard of pottery under the desk.

  Kneeling to retrieve it, he glanced up under the tabletop, saw words, and turned on his back to read them. He recalled helping build the oversized worktable years earlier out of wood salvaged from shipping crates. The container ship they’d discovered wrecked on the coast had provided most of the colony’s early salvage. Several sets of words
were scattered across the underside of the table. THIS END UP. LIFT HERE. KOREAN SHIPPING COMPANY. And a long set, in black like the others, but in smaller letters of what appeared to be an Eastern European alphabet. No. They were backward. A casual observer would have dismissed them as vestiges of some foreign tongue gone dead. But this tongue wasn’t dead in Carthage, not so long as Hadrian lived. The words were in Latin. He found a piece of broken mirror and laid it on the floor to read the words reflected. QUAERE VERUM IMPRIMIS. Seek truth among the first things. The thrill of the discovery died, giving way to despair again. Jonah’s strange humor was going to doom Hadrian’s search before he got truly started.

  In the distance a bell began to peal, calling citizens to the funeral. Hadrian darted out the door so quickly he almost missed the shadow that followed him down the stairs.

  “You!” he exclaimed to Sergeant Waller. “I told you there was a mistake. Go back to your office.”

  The policewoman straightened. “I don’t know why I am being punished,” she said. “But I do know I am not permitted to abandon my assignment.”

  “Punished?”

  Waller looked toward her feet as she replied. “You are a known criminal. Not just a criminal. A saboteur, a dissident,” she added, as if that was his greatest crime of all. “Everyone in the corps knows the governor has a file on you.”

  “Why would you be punished for leaving when I ordered you to?”

  “I failed my last assignment. If I fail another, Lieutenant Kenton will have me mucking out the government stables for the next six months.”

  “Lieutenant? Since when?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  Hadrian winced at the news. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you because you were sent to spy on me?”

  “If I help you in any real way, the governor will pronounce me a conspirator too. If I don’t help you, he’ll say I disobeyed him.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “Pretend to help you?” the sergeant suggested.

  Hadrian gave a bitter grin. “Fine. Here’s what you do. Find out if anyone was working in the library when the fire started. If so, pretend to ask them questions about who was here, what Jonah was doing, whether anything strange seemed to be going on.”

  She offered a hesitant nod.

  “Walk along the street. Ask passersby if they saw anything. Then write up your report. Write what the governor wants to hear. Use bold words. Spice it with rumors gleaned from the street. The citizens grow concerned over public safety. The people are thankful that running water had been installed in time to fight the fire. They wonder if damaged books will be auctioned off for personal latrine use. Twenty pages at least. The governor favors quantity over quality.”

  The sergeant brightened, tore out the frontispiece of the first book within reach, and began writing.

  Outside, a bass drum began to beat.

  THE GOVERNING COUNCIL of Carthage declared a state funeral once every two or three years. Children would be released from school. The colony’s antique hearse would lead a procession of somber leading citizens, followed by one of the town’s two bands playing a dirge. But for the burial of Jonah Beck, the governor had called out both bands and erected a speaker’s platform at the edge of the cemetery.

  Hadrian stood in the shadow of a maple tree, listening as the leaders of Carthage extolled the old man. The Savior was invoked, and St. Peter too. The town had long ago forgotten that their resident wizard was a Jew. A woman waved a stick of incense over the coffin. An elderly matron famed for starting the colony’s first bank took the podium and described seeing Jonah flying toward the moon in the shape of a great white bird. It wasn’t so much a funeral as a somber circus. Jonah would have loved it.

  Hadrian found a patch of grass on a knoll above those gathered and sat. It was a crisp day, the changing weather pushing vast flocks of geese and ducks southward, the colony’s green and blue flag fluttering at half mast on the white-washed pole in the graveyard’s center. Police in brown tunics paced along the fringe of the crowd. An enterprising vendor sold hot cider, fresh apples, and black armbands. Four men with shovels waited by the open grave. A square-shouldered man in a suit, smoking as he leaned against a tree, turned away as he met Hadrian’s gaze. Hadrian had enough of a glimpse of his face to realize he’d seen the man half an hour earlier, outside the library. Was he following Hadrian?

  Hadrian tucked his knees against his chest and tried to focus on the speakers. But his gaze kept returning to the gaping grave, and his grief returned. Seek truth among the first things. Jonah’s voice spoke the words inside his head, stirring him from his numbness. It could have been a simple reminder to make truth his priority. It could also mean to seek it among those at the highest level of authority. He watched absently as Kenton, wearing his new lieutenant bars, approached Buchanan. The two men urgently conferred, Kenton pointing vaguely toward the back of the crowd before retreating with a scowl, clearly unsatisfied.

  A moment later his stout figure broke through the edge of the crowd, his hand on his truncheon as he marched toward Hadrian.

  “If I see a slag within five hundred feet of the governor,” the lieutenant snapped, “you’ll be spending the night in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry?” Hadrian muttered. He became aware of movement behind him but did not break away from Kenton’s angry stare.

  “I don’t play your goddamned games, Boone. I will gladly—” Kenton’s words choked away as he looked over Hadrian’s shoulder.

  Hadrian turned. He was surrounded on three sides by children. The boy Dax was on one side, Sarah and her sister on the other, with at least a dozen others behind them.

  The lieutenant glared at the children. “You have no idea!” he spat out before hurrying back to the graveside. For once Hadrian agreed with him.

  When he turned again to ask for an explanation, the children were gone, slipping over the crest of the knoll. Only little Dora was visible. She hesitated, giving Hadrian a quick, self-conscious wave. Then someone yanked her arm and she too disappeared from sight. He turned back to the mourners. Kenton was nowhere to be seen. The man by the tree had lit another cigarette. He wasn’t watching the crowd. He was watching the knoll. He was watching Hadrian.

  There were few lives in the colony that had not been touched by Jonah, and the eulogies were many. Last came Lucas Buchanan. Standing close to him was the blond bodyguard Bjorn.

  “Friends,” the governor began. “I owe more tears to this dead man than you shall see me pay.” Hadrian stared in surprise, heard the murmurs in the crowd. Buchanan wasn’t quoting the words, he was appropriating them for his own. Did he truly not understand that one of the many strange consequences of his censorship policies had been to turn his populace into experts on Shakespearean dialogue?

  The eulogy quickly moved into a litany of Jonah’s many extraordinary contributions. Designer of the dams and gear works for the water-powered mills that ground their grains, cut their planks, powered their carpenter shops. Designer and chief engineer for the fleet of steamboats. Original organizer of the children’s orchestra. Longtime director of the annual George Bernard Shaw festival. The sounds of weeping grew ever more audible.

  It was peculiar, thought Hadrian, how funerals for the older generation were devoid of references to their lives or accomplishments from the prior world. Author of books on astrophysics, Hadrian was tempted to shout out. Chancellor of the region’s university. Holder of patents used in outer space. Father of three children. Husband to a renowned medical researcher. But Jonah had already died that death, on endless nights long ago. His wife, his children, his university, and the city that hosted it had been wiped out in one blinding flash. Even the discipline of astrophysics had died, at least for another century.

  He closed his eyes, steadying himself, then gazed toward the sky. Once Jonah and he might have gone birding on a day like this, Hadrian helping take notes on the strange plumage variations starting to appear. He glanced toward the haunte
d tree on the western ridge, then paused. There was a large bird in the tree again. He squinted, shielding his eyes. Not a bird, but a person in a cloak, watching the funeral.

  Hadrian looked in alarm at Buchanan, now reviewing the civic awards bestowed on Jonah. The governor’s back was to the dead tree. He droned on. “Chairman of the Science Advisory Committee, Citizen of the Year—” Buchanan’s words choked in his throat. His mouth hung open as he stared at the stone cottage nearest the cemetery. A man in a black coat holding a long musical instrument resembling a recorder sat on the chimney. The wind stopped. Not a word was spoken. Only one bitter syllable broke the silence.

  “Slags!” Kenton shouted.

  Then from behind the chimney a hairless woman in a grey cloak emerged. The recorder began to play a slow, graceful tune that Hadrian did not recognize until the woman began singing in a powerful, lilting voice.

  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,” she intoned, “that saved a wretch like me.” Other voices slowly joined in, from below, until, despite Buchanan’s furious attempts to quiet them, nearly the entire assembly was singing. “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see . . .”

  Hadrian was grinning until he saw Kenton race off with several officers. He leapt up himself. “Nelly!” he shouted in warning to the woman as Kenton disappeared into the cottage. But his cry was drowned out. The citizens of Carthage kept singing even after the policemen appeared on the roof. They stopped only as the police began to club the intruders.