Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  “From the far shore?”

  “From one of the original tribes. I’d almost forgotten there had been a large reserve to the north. Nathaniel says many of his people who survived have gone back to their old ways. A lot of them are trading, picking up such work as they can find. There’s half a dozen in the camps now. As you well know, we’ve been in need of strong backs for a couple decades.”

  A few strong backs were making a difference, Hadrian saw as he sat alone by the entry to Nelly’s home an hour later. She had gone to forage for food in the forest and insisted he stay behind to recuperate. Now he saw the little improvements. Yet, too, there were the new setbacks that inevitably afflicted the exiles. The gardens at first seemed in better shape than he had ever seen, tilled and cleaned of rocks, many with new rail fences. But most also had smoldering stacks where blighted potatoes and pumpkins were being destroyed. A small windmill had been erected to power a water pump, but its wind-catching blades were torn and tattered. Several passersby seemed better dressed than usual, wearing salvaged clothes, yet others were wearing little more than scraps of canvas. One woman limped by wearing a vest of woven reeds.

  He dozed off, leaning against the door frame, and awoke to find a mug of hot tea on a three-legged stool beside him. He did not recognize its mix of herbs, at once sweet and acrid, but drank deeply and found himself remarkably invigorated. Finding no one inside when he set the mug on the kitchen counter, he wandered along the dusty street to the crest of the hill that overlooked the camps’ modest harbor. When he’d last seen it, it had held only the rundown pier for the exiles’ fishing dinghies. He froze now, confused. The old pier was still there, dilapidated as ever, but another more substantial one was there as well. Beside it was a sturdy boathouse.

  Hadrian slipped off the road, to the shadows at the edge of the woods, where he perched on a boulder to study the harbor. The muscular workers at the piers did not appear to be from the camps, though there were ones with fair hair as well as several First Bloods. A pile of firewood lay by the boathouse. Only Carthage’s steamboats needed such fuel. Any calling here would have incurred Buchanan’s wrath if he knew of it. But the new pier and stack of firewood said that at least one of the large fishing boats was calling there regularly. Yet there was no sign of a fish works, no sign even of fish being sold.

  He studied the main street of the settlement again, gazing at the hobbling, deformed inhabitants, the gaunt faces, the decrepit homes. He caught sight of a woman wearing an ancient but well-preserved football jersey with a large number on its back. Nelly had told him there was trading going on with those in the north but had failed to say how the starving colony found resources to pay to salvage traders. The exiles had nothing of value.

  Working his way farther down the slope, he now spied a small, sleek sailboat anchored beyond the boatshed. Two tall men, one of them a First Blood, judging from his size and long black hair, walked up a shore path past the boat, toward a point of land where smoke curled up from some hidden source. Keeping in the shadows, Hadrian descended the hill until he could see its source. A cluster of log buildings had been erected on a little peninsula that was connected to the shore by a narrow, ten-foot-wide isthmus. The complex was protected not only by its location but by a recently built palisade of logs. As the two men walked through a gate in the wall, a third appeared, a sentry holding a shotgun, waving them through.

  Hadrian felt as if he had stepped into a dark, chilling shadow. He could make no sense of the scene before him, but the sight left a cold, metallic taste in his mouth.

  Retreating farther into the forest, he emerged half a mile beyond Nelly’s cottage, giving the appearance he’d wandered to the south, then lingered to play with a boy and his dog. The boy’s deformed foot made it difficult for him to keep up with his pet. Ignoring his aches, Hadrian lifted him onto a boulder and coaxed the dog into retrieving a stick as the boy threw it. A quarter hour later, as he bent to pick up the stick for the boy, a boot slammed down on it, snapping it in half.

  “She’s worried about you,” came a sharp voice. “You disobeyed her.”

  Hadrian looked up into the hard countenance of the man he’d last seen with Nelly in the Carthage prison. “So have you come to help me, Shenker,” Hadrian asked, “or to punish me?”

  “I am here to bring you to dinner,” the exile gruffly replied.

  Hadrian followed a step behind his escort, pausing to uneasily glance at the boy, now limping away. There had been fear on his face when he saw Shenker.

  “Hadrian, you remember Dr. Kinzler,” Nelly suggested as she gestured him to her dinner table half an hour later. Before them was a loaf of bread, a bowl of steamed carrots and mushrooms, and a whole roasted salmon on a plank, an extravagant banquet by exile standards.

  Hadrian nodded to the diminutive, pockmarked man in gold-rimmed spectacles, probably the best-groomed figure he’d ever seen at the camps. Kinzler was dapper in a blue suit jacket and white shirt. Even the patches on his khaki pants had been meticulously sewn.

  Shenker took the last chair at the table.

  “Dr. Kinzler is now the chairman of our Tribunal,” Nelly continued. “He is building a whole new sense of community. We even have a name after all these years. New Jerusalem.”

  Hadrian raised his brows in surprise. There had been other names applied to the camps through the years. West Carthage, at first, but when it had been abandoned others had been tried, depending on the namer’s perspective. Purgatory. Slagtown. Cemetery Creek. “A name full of promise,” he offered. “The improvements are already noticeable.” Hadrian looked back at Kinzler. “I can’t help but wonder what your field of study was, Doctor,” he added after a moment. “Urban renewal?”

  Kinzler’s smile offered no warmth. “Early in life I was a civil engineer, building shopping malls and highways mostly,” he said with a shrug, as if acknowledging the lack of demand for those talents in the new world. “Later I took a doctorate in chemical engineering. Even as boy I was happy only when I was playing with wrenches and screwdrivers or the contents of my mother’s spice cabinet.”

  “Which is what brought about the changes in our affairs,” Nelly interjected as she served the fish.

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Dr. Kinzler is a tinkerer by nature. I told you I found Nathaniel nearly dead on the beach. The next day the crippled boat he’d been thrown from limped in seeking repairs. They fish with handlines for those big sturgeon. On board was a hunter who’d been returning in a canoe from a long-range expedition.”

  “You mean a long-range salvage hunter.”

  Nelly nodded. “They call themselves prospectors. He had half a dozen mechanical devices, none of which worked. Windup clocks, pocket watches, old rotary peelers, and the like. Dr. Kinzler offered to look at them. The next day he had two of the clocks working and offered to fix everything else. The First Bloods were so grateful they gave us a huge sturgeon. We had a feast together, like a Thanksgiving. People brought in roots to boil, made johnnycakes of cattail and acorn flour. The First Bloods asked if they could bring more machines to be fixed, with payment by them in fish and goods. Real trade started. It was a turning point for us. We haven’t been able to spare people for salvage for years. Now they even ask what we want them to look for.”

  “All in exchange for repairs?”

  Kinzler shrugged. “They have the muscle, we have other ways to add value. I believe it is called specialization of labor.”

  Hadrian studied his hosts. “The First Bloods don’t have steamboats,” he observed.

  “But they cut wood for them,” Nelly explained. “The fishermen are happy to buy it since it goes for well below the price in Carthage.”

  “Not something the authorities in Carthage would permit if they knew.”

  “Governor Buchanan is against anything at odds with his particular sense of world order,” Kinzler observed with another of his narrow smiles.

  “Which means what, that you are working on a
new world order?”

  Kinzler, still smiling, pushed the bowl of vegetables toward Hadrian.

  “You wouldn’t tell, Hadrian,” Nelly said, an edge of worry in her voice. “About the wood.”

  “Of course not. Jonah and I both always wished the best for the camps, you know that. It’s only curious that a fisherman would take the risk of helping you escape simply because he likes cheap firewood. If Buchanan knew, he would seize the boat.”

  Shenker squeezed his mug of water so tight his knuckles grew white. Nelly picked at her plate. “The cell door was opened before dawn by someone we couldn’t see,” Shenker told him. “And the rear one at the bottom of the stairs was ajar. We made our own way as best we could across the border. Fishermen would never take the risk to help us.”

  He was lying, Hadrian was certain. But why? Of course he’d want to protect the fishermen who had helped them back to the camps. But it hadn’t been a fisherman who arranged the escape from the prison.

  Hadrian silently studied each of the three in turn, nodding slowly. “I have always wished the best for the camps,” he repeated.

  “And what is it exactly you are helping us with on this visit?” Kinzler asked after a moment. A memory of the man’s wife suddenly came to Hadrian. She had developed a wasting condition like leprosy and had taken years to die, in one of the group hovels with nothing but a mud-and-stick fireplace at either end for heat. Scars from such an ordeal would run deep in a man like Kinzler. It wasn’t his lightless smiles that caused Hadrian to distrust him. He distrusted him because he didn’t show his scars.

  “Jonah’s murder still needs to be resolved.”

  “A crime of Carthage,” Kinzler reminded him. “I still am at a loss to understand what help you bring now to New Jerusalem.”

  “Governor Buchanan has already named his prime suspect. To back down now would be a political defeat. He will send a small army of police to seize Nelly.”

  “He can try!” Shenker spat.

  “Every man he sends will have a firearm.”

  Hadrian did not miss the alarmed glance Kinzler threw at Nelly. “We can hide her,” the chairman suggested. “The forest is deep.”

  “The truth would be better,” Hadrian countered. “Help me find the real killer.”

  “We know nothing.” Kinzler seemed to sense he had spoken a little too quickly. He shrugged. “The citizens of New Jerusalem hardly have incentive to assist Carthage.”

  “I believe Jonah died trying to help the camps. That very day he spoke with me about building a new bridge, about sharing our grain.”

  Kinzler removed his wire-rimmed spectacles. Rubbing the bridge of his nose, he said, “Perhaps we should take you on a tour of our cemeteries. Two out of every three graves are there because of your colony’s refusal to help. They may have been sick but it was malnutrition and the cold that ultimately took them.”

  Hadrian broke away from the chairman’s disapproving gaze and turned to Nelly. “You were in Carthage when Jonah died. Surely you must have some notion as to why he had summoned you.”

  “Healing,” Nelly replied, drawing a chastising frown from Kinzler. She continued. “He was confident there would be a thaw in relations soon. He asked what were our priorities, which should come first, food or clothing.”

  “Asked how?”

  “Letters. I told him neither. It was medicine we wanted. We had survivors with new children, healthy, normal children who were dying of pneumonia and fevers. He asked if we could find willow bark, and when I said yes he told us he’d found an old recipe for making aspirin out of it. It worked! Soon he was sending suggestions for other medicines.”

  Hadrian nodded. Nelly never lied, simply managed not to tell the whole truth. He remembered the books hidden in Jonah’s secret vault, remembered Emily’s description of her lab’s experiments with more potent herbs. “You thought he had more urgent news about a medicine?”

  “He had asked for a list of our common maladies. I had consulted with all our midwives and sent it to him the month before. I thought he had made a new batch, something he wanted us to have right away.”

  Hadrian was about to remind her he had seen the note about the shifting of the world. But a new emotion swept over him. “He never told me about it,” Hadrian said instead, flushing at the bitterness that had crept into his voice.

  “Hadrian . . .” Nelly began. She looked down at her food. “He spoke often of you in his letters. Being picked up for public drunkenness and vandalism, spending frequent nights in jail. How could you be trusted with such secrets?”

  It was Hadrian’s turn to stare silently at his plate. He gestured to the throbbing wound on his arm. “I think I need to lie down.”

  Shenker grinned.

  Nelly helped him to his feet.

  THE POET BARD was working at the table when he woke. It was probably two hours before dawn. In a pool of moonlight at the far end of the table was a stack of books. He watched from his pallet in silence as Nelly read from a thick volume and took notes with a quill pen, remembering the warmth, even hope, with which he had once watched Jonah bent over his own manuscript.

  When at last he stirred she rose and poured him a mug of tea from a battered pot on a brazier, then gestured him to the table as she returned to her work. Once he had known her only to write poems and reconstructions of old songs. But that wasn’t what she was doing now. “Herbal infusions,” he read from the heading at the top of her sheet.

  “These books turned up in salvage a month ago. Nineteenth-century pharmacology. Much more useful than anything later, since it doesn’t require equipment we don’t have.” Nelly offered a quick smile, then returned to her work, pushing a candle closer to her notes.

  “What do the salvage teams have to report when they return?” Hadrian asked after a long silence.

  “Not much.”

  He regretted the words at once, for the chill they cast. Even after so many years, salvaging for many felt like raiding tombs. Speaking about the objects collected was inevitable, but talking about the ruined lands was taboo.

  But clearly Nelly herself had already asked. “The skeletons are mostly gone now. Nature has reclaimed everything less than a square mile of pavement. The few high-rises left are completely entangled in vegetation. Lots of predator animals. Some say animals that escaped from zoos are cross breeding. Lions and cougars. Grizzlies and black bears. So many rumors, crazy rumors. A colony of meat-eating monkeys. Pythons hanging in trees.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

  He lifted a piece of empty paper waiting beside Nelly’s books, admiring the weight and texture. It was handmade. “So much better than anything I’ve seen in Carthage.” The sheet beside it was transcribed with music. An old folk song. “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal.”

  “An artisan in the northern settlements sends it. It holds the color of our berry inks perfectly.”

  Hadrian laid the paper in front of him. There was nothing quite so hopeful as a sheet of fresh, blank paper. “I thought the north only had some struggling fishing camps.”

  Nelly chose not to reply. She got up to lift the kettle to refill their mugs. “I need to know you believe, Hadrian,” she said suddenly.

  “Believe?”

  “In our work. In the future.”

  The words were simple, almost silly, but they brought a strange tightness to Hadrian’s throat.

  Nelly covered his hand with her own a moment. Then she rose with a glint of excitement before gesturing him to wait as she stepped into the drafty little room that served as her sleeping quarters. She returned moments later carrying a bulky, squarish object covered with a cloth, setting it in front of him with a conspiratorial gleam.

  “They brought this in and Kinzler’s shop fixed it.” With a ceremonial air she lifted the cloth, then opened the tattered case underneath.

  His fingers trembled as he reached out and touched the old typewriter, one of the black boxy portables from the 1940s. He thought he should say something but his voice
cracked. She put a hand over his again. “When I first saw it I broke down and cried like a baby,” Nelly confessed. She produced a pocketknife, sliced away the bottom of the paper she had been writing on, and fed it into the platen, gesturing to him expectantly. “I dab pokeweed ink onto the ribbon,” she explained. “I think I’ll be able to saturate some strips of linen to use.”

  Hadrian lifted his fingers to the keyboard and after a moment typed eight words. Do not go gentle into that good night.

  She leaned over his words, a thoughtful expression on her countenance. “It’s going to be different, Hadrian, I can feel it. Jonah felt it.” She ran her own fingers over the keys and typed another line. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

  He stared at the exhortation, remembering the last time he had seen it. “Why do you mention Jonah?”

  “He used these words with us,” she said. “His way of reminding us, of keeping our heads up.”

  “He was feeling his age.”

  Nelly paused, fixed him with a look of uncertainty. “Hadrian, surely you understand. He wasn’t referring to himself. There wasn’t an ounce of self-pity in Jonah Beck.”

  “But that’s what the poet meant. Rage against old age, against death,” he explained, looking back at the typed letters. For the first time he realized they could have a different meaning.

  “Jonah wasn’t speaking about the light of his existence. He was speaking about the light of humanity. He meant it was time to take action.”

  Hadrian stared at the words again. The pain of Jonah’s loss never seemed to dissipate, only took on new dimensions. “Carthage still runs this world of ours, Nelly.”

  She unrolled the paper from the machine and handed it to Hadrian. “Nobody rules us here,” she said defiantly.

  “Because the camps remain unimportant to Lucas,” Hadrian replied. “He’s always assumed they would eventually die away.”

  “If Carthage lets us die, then the best parts of Carthage die too. Don’t you understand?” There was a new torment in Nelly’s voice. “It’s what Jonah was talking about. It was why he died.”