Alexandria

by Kaden, John

  “Thanks… but we should probably keep moving.”

  “Now I suspect you’re crazy again. You’re already beat to hell, both of you. I don’t care to think what’ll happen to you out here alone at night. There’s more than wolf packs in these parts, you know.”

  “How do we know you won’t steal from us?” Lia asks.

  Miles laughs, a hoarse cackle. “What would I steal? Shoes that won’t fit me? A sword I have no use for? I offer you a hot meal and a safe night’s sleep. All I ask in exchange is a little company. Take it or leave it.”

  They confer softly and decide that if the old man wanted them dead, he could have simply let the wolves kill them and saved himself the trouble.

  “Okay,” says Lia. “We’ll go.”

  Miles nods an affirmation. “Follow me.”

  They set out through the labyrinthine ruins, conversing about all manner of things relative to their separate journeys, and the bear and the wolf walk easily down the avenue alongside them.

  Arana paces across his parlor, cold sober and obsessed with the discrepancy he sees in front of him. The buckhide map has been pulled from the wall and spread out flat on the dark-stained dining table with a ring of candles around it, and it shows new markings over a far-off southern desert region, unknown to the Temple, culled forth from the bloodied Renning while young Phoebe cried and cloaked her face against his chest. A smaller map lay crumpled on top of the larger one, returned to the Temple by Cirune, with a hastily scribbled star drawn in along the southern coast. The markings on the separate maps do not match. Arana revolves around the table, observing the plots from every angle as if some minor overlooked detail will resolve the disparity.

  Thin vertical shafts of light track across the chamber as the sun wheels toward the ocean, and when the thin orange crescent sinks beneath the surface, the pale light darkens and disappears with the dawning of night and the parlor illuminates with dirty hearth fire.

  It begins at sunset.

  Arana leaves the maps behind and stills himself before the flames. He sits on his lounge as unmoving as a stoneworked bust of himself, and he does not stir even when the terrified screams float through with the night breeze and become general on the grounds. There is no use risking an escape by doing it softly, he reminds himself. Their methods are becoming more effective by the day.

  The swollen moon shines down through a dwindling aperture in the overcast sky. Whorls of cloudmist bleed over it until only a vague luster shows through, then finally it is gone and the entire valley seems to disappear under the darkling stratus. Miles breaks off a young branch from a nearby tree then rifles around in his satchel and comes out with a small bundle. He looses out a length of soaked linen from the bundle and fixes it to the stick and strikes it ablaze.

  There are scratchings in the darkness and a quavering growl rumbles from Ruck’s throat, his shiny teeth bared to the gumline. The bear’s eyes look diabolical in the fire. Jack’s pulse quickens as she edges up next to him and rubs her hide against him like an over-sized cat. Miles swishes the torch around and guides them across an open lot with a stagnant fountain situated in the middle, the muddy water covered with green foam. There is a quick, burbling splash as they pass.

  “How far up was it?” asks Miles.

  “Two or three days,” says Lia.

  “I think I know the place. Old tourist town. The fellow that chased you, was he a big man?”

  “Yeah, he was.”

  “Bald and bearded?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s Collins, if memory serves. They’re good folks. They tame wolves up there. Breed them and tame them. I ought to make my way back there one of these days.”

  “You know them?”

  “Not well, but yes. I’ve met a lot of people.”

  Jack tells him about the mansion and the old matriarch, and about Sajiress and his people.

  Miles shakes his head. “No, I don’t believe I ever came across any of them. Don’t sound familiar. Were they friendly?”

  “They were nice.”

  “Some of them were a little too nice,” says Lia. “Where all have you wandered?”

  Miles rattles out a heavy sigh. “Been up and down the coast. Spent some time up in old Canada. That’s a hell of a long ways north. As beautiful as ever up that way. Nearly settled there, but other destinies called to me. That was all a very long time ago. Went down south for a while. Too hot down there. There’s people that make it work, but I don’t know how. I’d planned on walking the course all the way down to a different land, but I turned and came back. Just didn’t suit me.”

  “Is there anything down south?” Jack asks. “Anything… strange?”

  “I saw nothing but strangeness. What do you mean, exactly?”

  “Like a new city, or something?”

  “There’s cities along the way, but none new. There’s a few new towns scattered about, though. Some of them have things pretty well figured out, and some of them… well, there’s a lot of misery out there yet.” Miles looks at him with a shine in his eye. “Does that answer your question, Jack?”

  “Yeah…”

  The wolf marches beside a line of brush that clings to the outer facades. Along the way, he rummages in the weeds and digs his paws into the earth, and a couple times comes out with something alive. He sleeks his forepaws low on the ground with his hind end curved up into the air, and carefully parses the creatures apart with his fangs and gobbles them, then bounds down the avenue to catch up.

  After a few more corners are turned they reach the camp. Two leaning walls enclose it, the rest of the building is scattered across the intersection. Firewood is already stacked in the center of the clearing and Miles lights the tinder, then nestles the torch in a pile of stones. He hustles around, quick for an old man, and clears the weeds and debris off a broad ledge.

  “Here, sit down, rest yourselves. I’ll start the fish cooking.”

  Ruck and Lily prowl opposite ends of the neighborhood. They venture down the street a ways, snarling occasionally at the shadows that move through the undergrowth. The smell of cooking fish brings them back. The sit on the outer bounds and watch Miles officiate over the fire as if he’s performing some arcane ritual with the gutted fish as offerings.

  “That’s one thing that’s earned my keep with them,” he says, leaning forward and turning their dinner over the flames, “they’ve got a taste for cooked meat.”

  Ruck stares at the shrivel-eyed fish with saliva dripping from the slack corners of his mouth. Lily paces. Miles settles back and lets everything brown over the flames.

  “Have you ever been to the east?” asks Jack. “We’ve heard it’s bad out there.”

  “It’s a hard trip to make. Long stretches where there’s not much to live on. I’ll bet if you could get far enough east, things would get better. But that’s only a guess. I’ve never made it that far and I probably won’t ever try to again. Ah, here.” Miles pulls out the translucent skeletons and pitches several fish out into the street in varied directions. The animals chase after their respective shares and hunker down protectively to eat. He carries the rest over toward Jack and Lia and sits down to join them. “I’d urge you to eat quick.”

  They comply, and when they’ve finished Miles cleans up and carries their skins and heads away. Ruck leaps on him, forepaws planted on his shoulders, and licks his neck with a greasy tongue, then lopes over the rubble and runs a circle around the fire and jumps on the ledge where Jack and Lia sit. Lia giggles as Ruck bumbles into her and licks her and burrows his head into her side. He hops on Jack and straddles him across the ground, snorting and yapping, and they roll around like brother pups playing on a den floor.

  Lia watches Miles tangle with the bear. Lily drags him to the ground and plants a leg across his chest and seems to almost ravage him, his old legs flying up in the air as the huge bear spins him around and clobbers him. As they wrestle, Lia feels certain that the man will be mauled, that the bear will ri
se above him with fresh blood on her fur and the old man’s entrails dangling from her vicious maw. But she doesn’t. Miles gets up laughing and dusts himself off. The bear sits forward like an enormous toddler and glances around at the others.

  Miles stumbles back, winded, and plops down in front of the fire. He passes a leather flask around and they drink. After a few moments of idle conversation, Jack poses another question.

  “When’s the last time you went up north?”

  Miles cackles again. “You’ve asked about every direction except west. Don’t feel like swimming?” He settles back coyly on his elbows and levels on them. “Why are you two out here? Did you run away from your parents?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ve run from something.”

  “We’re looking for something,” says Lia. “A place, maybe you know of it—it’s called Alexandria.”

  Miles scratches at the wiry hairs on his chest. He shakes his head. “Don’t know it. Where is it?”

  “That way,” says Jack, pointing.

  “I don’t like to disappoint you, but there’s no such place over there, or anywhere around here, unless I’ve missed it all these years. How did you come to know of it?”

  “We met someone who came from there,” says Lia.

  “Have you considered that you’ve been taken for fools?”

  “We’re not fools,” she says, and holds his gaze after she says it.

  “I’ll take you at your word. Why do you seek this place? What do they have that you should risk your lives to find it?”

  “Answers.”

  “To what questions?”

  “It’s supposed to know things.”

  “What does it know?”

  “Not really sure.”

  “What do you want it to know?”

  “What happened to the world.”

  “If you want to know what happened to the world, just take a look around. It’s written everywhere.”

  “We want to know why it ended.”

  “What’s the use of knowing what broke it? It’s already broken. Why should there be cities to burn down in the first place? Why should there be glass and steel and men to put them together? Why should there be anything? Where did it all come from?” He stops talking and stares at them, waiting for an answer.

  “Um… the Beyond?” Jack offers timidly.

  “Mmm. Maybe. Maybe not. What about that? Can this place you seek answer that?”

  “I don’t know,” says Jack. The thought had never occurred to him.

  “Well, you have to start asking the right questions if you want the right answers,” says Miles. “Of course, it’s not really the end of the world, or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it. The world won’t end for a very long while yet, trillions of years in truth, but that’s not much comfort. As for what happened to civilization, you could know all the aspects of it and still be left to speculation. They argued for thousands of years about the fall of Rome and that was small compared to this.”

  “What’s Rome?” asks Lia.

  “An empire from the ancient times. And the funny part is, their monuments will probably outlast our own. Long after we’ve turned to dirt, there will stand the Parthenon on the Acropolis, laughing down at our crypts. But in due course, time will take that, too, and there will be nothing left of any of this, not even a memory. Not even a graveyard or a ghost to haunt it.” He hitches himself onto one knee and declares to the night. “The gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, and all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” He settles his eyes on Lia.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not my words.”

  “Whose words are they?”

  “An old poet’s. But not his anymore, either.”

  “Whose are they now?”

  “Time’s. She gets everything in the end. That’s what it means—all that you will ever have shall be taken away, in some manner or another. That I can assure you.”

  His words leave them despondent and they sit quietly and avoid looking at each other. Miles watches them with a peculiar expression on his face.

  “Of course,” he continues, “the end is not the end…” He kneels by the fire and rustles around in the brush for a stick. “They had a theory, centuries back. A theory that binds the forces and describes everything in the known and unknown world, numbers and letters and symbols that summed everything up very nicely.” He scribbles the equation on the ground with the bent stick, rapt with concentration for a long moment as he delineates the strange figures in the dirt. It looks like hieroglyphics when he’s finished and Jack and Lia scowl at it.

  “What does it say?”

  “It is… a cycle. Round and round, you see?” He swirls his finger in the air. “The simple to the complex and back again for a length of something that is not Time, in which all things that can ever be shall happen… even this,” he says. “Even this.”

  Miles looks at them intently, smiling.

  Jack and Lia stare at the equation.

  Miles dusts it away. He flickers his eyebrows impishly and stirs the fire with the stick he used to inscribe the theory. Wood sparks dance in an eddy of cool air and fly upwards.

  “But what it says, I do not know.”

  “Is that what made everything? Some cycle?”

  “Didn’t make us. Allowed for us. Wherefrom came the cycle? That’s the real mystery.”

  “Do you know?”

  “It wouldn’t be a mystery if I knew. I suspect maybe that’s the point. I’m not sure even the mystery itself knows. It may be conjecturing the same questions about its origins as we are, lost in some cosmic ocean of creation wondering why it should be so. Over the Ages, they believed every different thing you can imagine and then some. They all perished away just the same in the end.”

  Jack and Lia wear confused faces. Miles uses so many old words they’ve never heard before that they struggle to decrypt his meaning.

  “So they all just died?” Lia asks, pulling on a thread at the hem of her gown.

  “Mmm. Billions of them.”

  “But why? Why did they have to die?”

  “They didn’t—not in that way, at least.”

  “They wanted to die?”

  “No. Quite the opposite. They wanted to live forever. They’d doctored themselves in such a way that death was denied its natural course. Over a century and a half, some lived. No one’s meant to live that long. They betrayed the cycle.”

  “What?”

  “Their covenant. To die. To go back into the dirt and be reborn. They fought against it—and they lost. They thought themselves masters of the land, and the land taught them otherwise. Her lessons are strict—I can see by the scars you wear that you know I’m true.”

  Jack thinks back on The Solstice of Fire. They have known of cycles before, civilizations coming together and falling apart, death and rebirth, these notions were not hidden from them.

  “So that’s it? They broke the cycle and they died?”

  “No. Of course not,” Miles bristles. “I told you, you can see this from every angle and still not make any sense of it. Of course there’s more. But what do you want me to tell you? Do you want to hear about bombs going off and children burning? Families dying of plague and starvation? About how they longed so dear for a hero and none came? I won’t talk about it. There’s no use in it. Those things are small. Massacre. Famine. Disease. They all happened. For thousands of years they happened… and civilization carried on. It was something inside them… something deeper. Destruction like this has happened before… and it will happen again, many times over, and not just here, but in exotic places so remote we could never touch or see them, worlds apart from our own.”

  The fire dwindles low and Miles starts toward a pile of scrap wood to replenish it.

  “I’ll get it,” says Jack.

  “Thank you.”

  Lia sits ba
ck with her palm resting on her cheek and watches Jack tend to the fire. An uncomfortable thought itches her mind.

  “If it’s all going away someday,” she says softly, “if we lose everything and we can’t ever get it back… then what’s the point?”

  Miles nods slowly. “That’s better. Much better. You’re a clever girl.” He inscribes a circle on the ground with the stick. “For death is only part of it, you see. Just as you have an obligation to die… so, too, do you have an obligation to live. To avoid either is to break the cycle. There is no need to ask how civilizations come to an end, Jack. Time will see to that. The question you should be asking… is how do they begin?”

  Jack crouches by the fire. The bear and the wolf slumber next to him on the ground. He looks at the old nomad’s face. He imagines him clean-shaven with slicked-back hair. He imagines him decades younger and less worn. He wonders why he didn’t see it sooner.

  “You’re the prophet.”

  “I’m prophet of nothing.”

  “You’re Thomas.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Miles says blithely.

  Jack sees something in his eyes and wonders if it is the shame of deceit. “Then tell me how you know all this.”

  “I know nothing. Everything I’ve told you could just as well be false.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “Leave where?”

  “The Temple. Did you leave because they started killing people?”

  “What?”

  “Jack?”

  “Did you blame yourself? Why do you live out here with animals? Is it because you don’t trust yourself around people anymore?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “My mother is dead,” Jack bursts. “And her parents are dead, and our home is gone. It was burned to the ground. Burned by a man named Arana Nezra, and you knew him. You knew him when he was just a child. He has blue eyes. And you knew his father. You were there when it started. And all I want to know is why? Why?” he fires, red-faced and trembling. “You have so many answers, can you tell me that? Can you tell me why my mother is dead? Is it part of your cycle?”