Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  Suddenly Hadrian understood her song. It had been a eulogy for the lost world, a farewell that had taken all these years to give.

  “We should go back,” he suggested. “Bjorn was worried.”

  “A sweet boy. I can see it in his eyes. I can see his pain. When you grow into an ox everyone expects you to be an ox, even if you are something else inside.”

  Restless, hungry cries came from the brush. The wolf uttered a low growl of rebuke and the sounds stopped.

  “We should go back,” Hadrian repeated.

  “I can’t. Go. You need your sleep. I am not done.”

  “Then I am not done.”

  Nelly smiled again and studied him as if for the first time. “Put down your gun, Hadrian,” she said softly, then gestured him to rise so she could reposition him. They sat back to back, legs folded under them, and she began a new litany. After the first few minutes he found himself making humming sounds, as if something inside him anticipated the rhythm, had somehow recognized the song. He lost all track of time. He realized other sounds were coming out of his throat, sounds that came out as if of their own volition and somehow harmonized with those of Nelly, sounds that sometimes continued during the long minutes when her song choked away and she sobbed in pain. When he looked down, two smaller wolves were watching from his side of the old truck.

  There was a blush of dawn in the east when Hadrian finally turned and, with a hand on her knee, quieted her. The wolves were gone.

  “We had a whole world once, didn’t we,” she said, her voice quite hoarse. “Now everything goes dark.”

  “Not everything, not for us,” he said as he reached out and helped her stand. “Surely you don’t forget.”

  “Forget?”

  “You and me and Jonah. We are the ones who rage against the dying of the light.”

  CHAPTER Fifteen

  THEY WERE THIRTY yards from the entrance to the factory when an arrow hit a boulder beside them and exploded. A tall muscular figure emerged from the shadows, nocking another arrow in his bow. Sebastian said nothing as he circled the group, studying them with more amusement than alarm. Jori and Hadrian were in the front, hands tied with their shoelaces, Nelly behind them holding Jori’s gun, Dax in the rear holding the baseball bat they had found in the garage.

  “I was sad when I heard you had died,” the First Blood said to Hadrian.

  “Me too. I wanted to stay alive to get even with you for drugging my drink.”

  Sebastian grinned. “You needed the sleep.”

  Somehow Hadrian found it hard to resent the man. “I didn’t think we’d be greeted with artillery,” he said, pointing to the blackened rock.

  Sebastian extracted one of the strange arrows from his quiver. “Something Kinzler devised. Good for scaring away wolves. They’re thick as flies around here.” The arrow ended not with a point but with a shotgun shell mounted in a sleeve. “The shell slides back when it strikes, slams into a pin that fires it. Shenker calls it a toy. You can’t go in there,” he added, as Nelly pushed Hadrian toward the entrance.

  Nelly straightened up and spoke with an unusual tone of authority. “Of course I can. You know damned well I’m a member of the Tribunal of New Jerusalem, Sebastian. One of your many brothers cuts my firewood. I have important messages for Kinzler. These two followed me after I escaped from Carthage, so the boy and I got the jump on them. They need to be interrogated.” She put her hand on the door handle.

  Sebastian put his foot against the door and fixed her with a solemn gaze. “I heard you last night,” he said to Nelly. “I didn’t believe my brother Nathaniel when he told me about your singing. He said the dead from the old world spoke through you.” There was an odd tone of invitation in his voice.

  “Who I speak for today is the Tribunal. Where is Kinzler?”

  “You missed him. They’re taking a shipment back for Sauger. The biggest one yet, the one they’ve been waiting for. Kinzler left yesterday, to rendezvous with Fletcher at the harbor.”

  “Then you will take my prisoners and let me rest before I set out to catch up with him.”

  Sebastian’s skeptical gaze shifted back and forth from Hadrian to Nelly, then rested on Jori. “You still a policeman?”

  “I am sworn to the service of Carthage,” she replied defiantly.

  Sebastian grinned. “I like her,” he said to Hadrian, then pointed to the sword-knife in Hadrian’s belt. He silently handed it to him.

  Nelly did not resist when he reached out and took the gun from her hand. Sebastian handed his bow and quiver to Dax, trading for the bat. “Guard the door, boy,” he said, and pulled the door open. As he stepped inside, Hadrian resisted the temptation to look about for Bjorn, waiting in the rocks.

  Lifting a lantern from a table by the wall, Sebastian directed them down a long, descending corridor whose aged carpet was caked with mud and mildew. They walked past several dimly lit chambers packed with large stainless steel tanks connected to a web of pipes, in the last of which a man in a tattered lab coat was leaning over a vat. Hadrian heard the low hiss of steam running through pipes overhead. He remembered the smoke he had seen the day before.

  Some elements of the factory were frozen in time. Safety stations with fire extinguishers and fire axes were built in the walls, covered with the grime of many years. A bulletin board displayed notes for a church social, a bake sale, a company picnic. A faded banner boasted WE ARE PROUDLY SAVING LIVES ALL OVER THE WORLD.

  At last they reached a brightly lit conference room, one of the chambers under a skylight.

  “Idiot!” a man shouted from the shadows at Sebastian as they entered. “No one is ever allowed to—” Shenker’s words died away as he stepped forward and recognized the intruders.

  “You’ll be pleased to know I escaped again,” Nelly declared.

  Shenker’s face showed no pleasure at all. “Of course.”

  “An impressive facility,” Hadrian observed. “We never would have imagined one of the old factories could be rehabilitated.”

  The scar on Shenker’s cheek moved up and down as he clenched his jaw, looking from Nelly to Hadrian. He gave a grunt of satisfaction as he spotted the sword-knife at Sebastian’s waist and pulled it away. “I thought I’d never see this again. A gift from my one-eyed friend.” He looked back at Hadrian and replied. “Adapted. Only a small part of the equipment was still usable. But it was enough.”

  “The miracle,” Hadrian suggested, “is that you manage to make chemicals that don’t kill a person outright.”

  Shenker offered a lightless grin. “There were startup difficulties. We don’t have the ability to run lab simulations. There had to be experimentation.”

  “Human trials, you mean.”

  “Salvage crews are accustomed to high attrition in their ranks.”

  Hadrian considered Shenker’s cold announcement. “St. Gabriel salvagers being sacrificed by exile scientists. Interesting way to build an alliance.”

  “Not Sauger’s people,” Shenker shot back.

  Sebastian went very still. The only thing that moved were his eyes, slowly shifting from Hadrian to Shenker. The salvage teams had been largely composed of First Bloods.

  “Still,” Hadrian prodded, “hard to believe you could accomplish so much.”

  “When Jonah Beck starting speaking of penicillin, Kinzler saw the opportunity for something even bigger. We could never synthesize the complex drugs they used to make here. But they had a whole library about chemical production from colonies of mold and bacteria. Some of those colonies in the vats had been dormant all these years, just needed heat and water to come back to life. It took weeks to find the right ones, but once we did, all we needed were the vats, heat, water, and drying tables.”

  “You must be very proud of yourself,” Hadrian said.

  Shenker sensed the sarcasm in his voice. “Be proud of your dead professor. He made it all possible. When we saw those letters we realized the possibilities.”

  “I don’t actua
lly recall showing you those letters,” Nelly inserted.

  Shenker circled them, then peevishly grabbed the bat from Sebastian and with it tapped Jori and Hadrian on the shoulder, pushing them down into the chairs. He studied Nelly again, then pushed her into the chair beside Hadrian and shook his head at Sebastian. “Good thing we don’t rely on you for your brains. Kinzler’s going to be furious with you. She knows too much now to be useful.” He circled the table, eyeing Hadrian as he stroked the heavy end of the bat, then sighed and tossed it behind him.

  “You’re slowly poisoning people,” Nelly declared.

  “You made sure we read our history,” Shenker reminded her. “There’s always been drugs. Opium eaters. Hashish smokers. Cocaine snorters.”

  “They were on the fringe of society. We have no fringe to spare.”

  “You are thinking about it all wrong. The new world will have a new currency. Before we’re done we’ll have carpenters and masons and shipwrights ready to work for us all day for a spoonful of powder. Carthage will pay for what it did to us.”

  “You’ll have carpenters and masons crawling up the walls.”

  Shenker glanced at Sebastian. “We’ll always have strong horses to carry our loads. It’s the way of the world.”

  The First Blood pointed at Hadrian. “Sauger will want him in St. Gabe.”

  Shenker gave a weary sigh. “This is politics. I don’t debate politics with salvage horses. You fail to understand the art of making martyrs.” He pointed to Nelly. “Her body will have to go back to Carthage. You can claim the reward and spend it on Sauger’s whores.”

  “I understand why I have to die, but why did Jonah have to die?” Hadrian asked.

  “Because he was so fucking clairvoyant.” Shenker stepped to a desk by the wall and returned with a book, a well-worn directory of businesses and their products, then sat down. “As soon as he discovered this was missing, he was on to us. Put the pieces together immediately. Nelly told him about the history of St. Gabriel and the way men in grey came to it. He was the one who guessed that meant prison uniforms. Somehow he figured out what we were doing here, knew the effects of what we were making. Always a step ahead.”

  “So you killed him, like you killed the early salvage crews.”

  “They were different. They were experiments. I watched one of them take a swallow of that first batch. His eyes went into the back of his head. He was dead before he hit the floor. Trial and error.” He shrugged. “The old drug companies kept warehouses of monkeys to use. We went through the first crew in a week.”

  Nelly’s face twisted with anger. “You as good as murdered them,” she hissed.

  “The will of the people will not be denied.”

  Hadrian could actually hear the wind of the baseball bat as Sebastian swung it, then the sharp crack of breaking bone. The back of Shenker’s head collapsed so abruptly from the blow that Hadrian doubted he felt a thing.

  “Deny that, prick,” Sebastian spat. “My brother was in that first crew.”

  Shenker didn’t move. He just looked down at the floor as if he had lost his thought. Blood began dripping out of his nose.

  Nelly seemed to stop breathing. Jori stepped to her side as if to defend her.

  “They treat us like this,” Sebastian said with a sigh. “Their packhorses and lab monkeys.” He poked Shenker. “You always talk too much.” Threat was still in his voice, as if he were daring Shenker to respond. One of the dead man’s eyes began filling with blood.

  “My mother is building a cabin in the forest,” the First Blood said conversationally, looking at Hadrian now. “She says we can make a better life there.”

  Hadrian nodded, then spoke in a whisper. “Give thanks for such a mother.”

  Sebastian looked at the bat in his hand, then glanced self-consciously at Nelly. “I’m sorry,” he said, and threw the bat into the shadows.

  “I’m sorry,” Nelly said back, not bothering to wipe away her tears.

  “We’re going to destroy this place, Sebastian,” Hadrian said. “The others need to leave. Alive.”

  Sebastian nodded. “We’re under a lake. Everyone worries about the old pipes breaking and flooding the place.” He gestured down the corridor. “The main water intakes are in a room at the end of the hall. Up a ladder to a wall of valves. I’ll show you.” He handed the pistol to Jori. “The others are just exiles paid to work here. They won’t argue with you.”

  Hadrian handed the book Shenker had been holding to Jori. “For Dax,” he said, then followed the First Blood into the corridor.

  Sebastian grabbed an ax from a hall fire station and led Hadrian to the mechanical room. Quickly they climbed the ladder up a steel scaffold to the intakes. Hadrian began opening valves as his companion pounded the ax into the big cast-iron pipes. A split appeared in the brittle metal of a main and the pipe began to groan, then burst. As Hadrian frantically climbed down through the cold torrent, Sebastian smashed open another pipe, disappearing behind a cascade of water. Hadrian lingered, waiting for Sebastian as the deluge rapidly rose around his calves, then suddenly the big man appeared, laughing as he slid down the ladder rails.

  The water rose with frightening speed, surging at their knees now, forming an angry wave as it reached the narrow hallway, then poured into the production rooms. Sebastian could not stop laughing as he slammed the ax into one vat, then another, on down the row, splitting them at their seams, oblivious to the flood swirling at his waist. By the time Hadrian was able to pull him away, several other tanks were floating away.

  Outside, the three operators were sitting on the ground with their hands on their heads, staring in confusion at Bjorn, who pointed his shotgun at them, and Dax, who aimed one of the explosive arrows.

  Sebastian, who’d darted into a small room by the entrance, emerged holding two packs. “Food for our journey back,” he announced.

  Bjorn frowned as he hung the packs on saddles. “There’s only enough horses for us,” he said.

  “Dax will ride with me,” Hadrian explained, and gestured his companions to their mounts. Water began spraying out of the seams between the closed entry doors. Dax paused long enough to stuff the book Jori had given him into a saddlebag.

  As the rest of the party rode away, Hadrian helped Dax mount behind him, then turned his horse to look at the chagrined exiles who had been forced out of the factory. Lifting the pack from his saddle horn, he dumped out half its contents, then pressed his heels to his mount and was gone.

  THEY SAT AT their campfire that night long after the logs had burnt to embers, with Nelly offering a low, sad humming song toward the sky and Dax staying closer than usual, not objecting when Jori held his hand. The boy had been unusually quiet. The ruined lands had deeply affected him.

  Something had been troubling Hadrian all day. “Last spring,” he asked Dax at last, “did you take Jonah to one of the ghosts?”

  “There was one from St. Gabe who was a ghost. He brought us toys and told us about the other side. For half a day he lay in the grass by the mill after taking his medicine. I forgot Mr. Jonah was coming to read to us. I was shaking him, calling in his ear, when Mr. Jonah appeared. He spent a long time studying him, holding his wrist, looking into his eyes, smelling his breath, wanting to know what kind of medicine he had taken. Then he just stops breathing. His white eyes were open, and we watched as they went all dull, like dirty marbles.”

  Dax paused and pushed back his wayward hair. “Mr. Jonah knew he wasn’t from Carthage. He asked about others like him, and I told him about all the ghosts and their travels. He said this one would travel no more, for we had just seen the dying of his light.

  “Then Mr. Jonah gets out a paper and starts taking notes and finds the sturgeon-skin pouch that had the last of his medicine. He said there’d be no reading that day, that I was to go to the fishery and tell them to take the body home.”

  Jonah had watched the dying of a ghost’s light. The words echoed in Hadrian’s head long after the others had f
allen asleep.

  THE LAST NIGHT before New Jerusalem, Hadrian’s restless sleep was disturbed by a faint rattling. At first he thought the noise was the scolding sound of a little night animal on the nearby ledge, a wood mouse or vole chattering its teeth at an intruder in its nest. But it did not cease as he approached the moonlit ledge. Sebastian was just one more grey mound on the boulder-strewn landscape, but then he moved, and Hadrian saw the glint of his gun barrel. The sound was coming from the First Blood, from his hands. As Hadrian inched forward he heard the words. Hail Mary, full of grace. The First Blood was counting prayer beads.

  Sebastian continued for a few moments after Hadrian sat beside him, finishing his rosary prayer. “I’m sorry,” Hadrian said. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know anyone else was here.” The ledge overlooked a river and a broad expanse of forest. Miles away could be seen the silver plain of the frozen lake.

  Sebastian raised the beads in his hand. “My mother was raised in one of those old Christian schools. She prays every day, gave beads to each of us when we began salvage trips. She’s not going to like it when I tell her I killed that Shenker.”

  “Shenker killed your younger brother.”

  “I won’t tell her that part. It would ruin her.”

  “Then tell her he was a murderer who was trying to kill many others.”

  The First Blood nodded. “And you know what she will do? She will pray for Shenker’s soul. She will ask me to join her. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.”

  They watched the sky in silence. A meteor, or a dying satellite, burnt out high overhead.

  “Do you ever think how it might have been at St. Gabriel,” Hadrian asked, “if you’d sent Sauger and his men away when they first showed up?”

  “There were three dozen of us but most were children and women. I was only five or six. Our men had been away at jobs in the cities when the sky fell in. Sauger had a dozen strong men. They helped build our first house. That place where Sauger has his tavern used to be our church. The chicken farmer had preserved that chapel all those years, because he had religion too. At first they would come and sing like everyone else, listen when my mother read from her Bible.”