Alexandria

by Kaden, John

  “It’s not?”

  “No. It’s an outpost. Finding the outpost could lead them to the right spot, though. They don’t seek it for the beauty or the sciences. They’re not interested in the finer crafts. If they’re as I remember, as you say they are, then they’ll seek the knowledge to make war machines. It would be disastrous if they ever found it.”

  Jack and Lia stare glumly at the little star for which they’ve risked their lives. Thomas reads their disappointment and smiles.

  “You desire to reach this place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll help you.” He places his finger on the star. “These people can take you there. You’re on the right track, and it’s not far off. Not far at all if you cross the wetlands.”

  “The wetlands?”

  “It would take days to go around, tough climbing, or one day to pass through. The choice is yours. Get some rest. I’ll lead you there tomorrow.”

  They situate themselves in various nests and fall asleep by the dying glow of the campfire cinders.

  They stir in the dead of night. Jack looks up groggily and sees Ruck in the center of the intersection with his head turned skyward, crying out in the moonlight. His woebegone howl is answered back in kind. Ruck and his nameless counterpart tarry back and forth until Thomas grumbles for him to shut up. The little camp quiets itself and they drift back to sleep.

  Come morning light, Jack stumbles off the ledge and walks out into the street. Thomas is rolling with the bear again. He shouts a brief salutation to Jack even as Lily’s enormous brown mass descends upon him and pins him to the ground. She flips him over with her snout and closes her jaw playfully around his arm and shoulder. He extricates himself, buckskin jacket tousled, his wild hair sticking up in spikes, and as he is rising from the ground Lily rams him and sends him staggering forward. Thomas grabs her by the jowls and whispers to her.

  “Nice day for walking,” he says, turning to Jack.

  “How far is it?”

  “Just over those hills. We’ll make it by nightfall.” He swivels and shouts down the street. “Ruck!”

  The wolf jumps from some disheveled interior and trots back toward their camp with something bloody in his mouth. He edges up to Jack and sets the catch at his feet. It is too mangled to even discern what creature it might have been.

  “Brought you a little present, Jack. Say thank you.”

  Jack bends and pets the wolf and scratches at his ears. Ruck licks him with his bloodstained tongue, then fetches his kill and meanders away.

  “Is your friend awake?”

  “I’m here,” says Lia. She stands by the toppled wall and scratches her head and yawns.

  They waste little time gathering their things, and as the full, round sun is liberated from the horizon they set out toward a notch in the southern hills. Ruck bustles along at his master’s feet, and the stench between man and animal is indecipherable. Jack and Lia fall in close together, nervous butterflies twitching in their bellies. Lily rumbles along behind them, serenely oblivious to such matters as those that worry her human companions. She is thinking dimly of fish.

  “Not a bad escort,” Thomas tells them, with the air of a man profoundly at home in his element. His nimble old limbs traverse the treacherous ground easily, and he quotes the old poets and sings old songs with meanings lost entirely on his small audience. Jack and Lia watch him with confounded expressions as he carries on in his odd manner. Ruck wears a face of endearing bafflement, as though he were charged with taming Thomas instead of the other way around, and looking like he finds himself utterly failing at the task.

  They amble on merrily through the morning, and by the day’s high point they find themselves scaling the pass that cuts through the hills. Thomas takes to quizzing them about the world.

  “The earth and sun—which goes round the other?”

  “Earth goes round,” says Lia.

  “Mmm. Good,” affirms Thomas. “What is it that keeps your feet on the ground?”

  “What?” Jack asks.

  “Our shoes?” says Lia.

  “Hmm…” says Thomas, pulling at his beard and grinning. “If you throw something up in the air, why does it fall back down?”

  “Because it’s heavy.”

  “Wouldn’t a feather fall, too?” Thomas poses.

  “Oh, yeah…”

  They confess to being stumped, and Thomas expounds lengthily on the concept of gravity and the interactions between the forces. “Strange what people passed along and what they didn’t,” he concludes. He sweeps his arms across the broad landscape. “Wherefrom came the mountains?”

  “Haven’t they always been there?” asks Lia.

  “Not hardly. The whole earth’s not always been here, how could the mountains?”

  “Oh,” she says. “I don’t know.”

  Thomas explains to them the movement of the plates beneath their feet, he talks of swirling rock piles in space that look like autumn leaves spinning downstream in a circular current, he talks of distant planets like their own, he tells of travels that were made into the mysterious blackness and how there are human skeletons in the void, their empty sockets looking down at the earth from crypt-like space stations. Jack and Lia listen attentively to the words they understand, and they stop him with their own questions when he uses words they don’t. Beyond a certain point, his meaning becomes too abstract for their thinking and they simply nod along politely.

  Up the hill they climb, Thomas lecturing all the while. As they near the top, he grows quiet and watches their faces drop open.

  A broken city lay before them, a saw-toothed and sinister heap of skyline, rising above the lush terrain with tendrils of ruin leaking out from the heart of it. The great bulk of the earth has pulled most of the sleek buildings to the ground, and the colossal beams and pillars remaining upright have settled against one another, pyre-like, forming new structures that bear little resemblance to the old. Grim cathedrals of wreckage with steeples of emaciated gridiron.

  The entire basin is washed over with wetlands, and the avenues that crisscross the massive swamp are little more than muddy waterways, gilded with a lime-green veneer and stippled with reeds and rushes. Everywhere there are embankments of mangrove and palm trees, and the creeping vines that scale the towers seem to be almost holding the structures together rather than rending them apart.

  It looks wholly unpassable. They walk toward it, human and beast alike, pilgrims in a forsaken land. The broad route runs alongside a tremendous mound and the terrain begins to change around them.

  “Here lays a mass grave of millions,” says Thomas, throwing his arm nonchalantly toward the mound. “Dead from fallout and biological plague.”

  “Bio-logical,” says Lia, the word new on her tongue.

  Beneath their feet, millions of mortal husks have disintegrated and fed the land. The vegetation is lush here. It grows dense and jungle-like and they fight against it. Jack chops them a narrow path and they worm their way through slowly. The animals become mischievous. Lily takes to sitting down right in front of their path and Thomas repeatedly coaxes her to move, murmuring to her like a child.

  They reach a clear vista and Jack surveys the swamp from a closer vantage. It is encircled by rough, densely overgrown hillsides, and it would be a slow and torturous hike to cross around.

  “How are we supposed to get across it?”

  “There’s a way. If it’s not been stolen. We ought to stop along here and set up for the night before it gets dark. You’ll want to cross in the daylight. And you’ll want to stay on the main channel.”

  They heed his words and settle themselves. They dine on scant pickings and a couple of rodents by the light of a small fire, then lie down wearily to sleep. Jack and Lia toss and turn and the night feels much longer than usual.

  When light finally breaks, Thomas leads them to a rank waterway that feeds the swamp, and he is less profuse in conversation as they near the head of it. They pad along the mud
dy ground on the eastern bank and Lily wades out into the water. As she lumbers along in the current, Ruck watches keenly from the bank, with one forepaw raised daintily as if waiting for it to be kissed.

  Thomas comes to a full stop and looks around at the trees, seeming to almost count them. He steps away from the bank and takes giant steps through a confused web of flora, pulling branches aside and scouting around.

  “Come here and give me a hand.”

  Jack swings the machete down and hacks his way through to the spot where Thomas stands. He pulls the leafage away, and tucked down underneath is a little rowboat made of lashed-together reeds and wooden crosspieces.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Found it,” says Thomas.

  “Whose is it? Are there people here?”

  “None that I’ve seen, other than passing wanderers.” Thomas pulls at the prow of the little skiff and dislodges it. “This looked to have been forgotten. So I took her out. I’ve explored only through parts of this, and I know it’s crossable, but, listen,” he says heavily, “keep on the main course. Don’t stray. Easy to get turned around in there.”

  Jack nods and helps him drag the skiff back to the muddy bank. Lia looks pensively at the small craft. They tether it to the shore and then launch it out into the water to test that it floats. The reeds are pitched and hide-covered and it slips straight with the current and bobbles atop the water, right and true.

  “This passage will take you across to the far side. Keep a quick pace and you’ll make it by sundown.” He looks down to the ground and takes a slow, deliberate breath. “I hope you reach your destination,” he tells them earnestly. “Careful of what you find there. It’s a dangerous substance they handle. I’ve seen with my own eyes what it can do in the wrong hands, as I’m the one that placed it in them.”

  “It’s not your fault,” says Lia. “It’s monsters.”

  Thomas lets out a terse laugh. “I make no excuses. I wish there was more I could do for you.”

  “There is something,” says Jack.

  “Oh?”

  “If you see your friend Collins again, tell them they’re in danger if they stay there. The Temple will come looking for us. They’re likely to kill anyone they come across.”

  Thomas winces. “Of course. I think I’ll see them again very soon.”

  “I’m glad you told us what you know. And she’s right—it’s not your fault. They still would have become killers.”

  “That may well be.”

  “We’d better not waste any more light,” says Jack, glancing at Lia. He climbs into the little skiff and grabs the makeshift ore resting in the hull.

  Thomas nods cordially. “I’m glad to have met you.”

  “Thank you,” says Lia. “We’d have been eaten by wolves if not for you.”

  Thomas smiles. Lia takes his hand and steadies herself as she steps into the skiff. When they’re situated, he unties them and heaves against the stern and pushes them into the current.

  “If you see my brother, tell him that Thomas says hello. Tell him I love him.”

  “Who’s your brother?”

  “You’ll know him if you see him.”

  Jack plunks the ore into the water and they float downstream toward the sprawling marsh, and a network of moss-covered branches envelops them. Thomas stands on the bank like some rustic frontiersman, his long beard flowing in the breeze, and the bear and the wolf sit nobly at his side. They stay for a long while and watch Jack and Lia diminish away into the rusted iron swamp, worrisome looks on each of their faces.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Arana speaks to his father. It matters not whether they are connected through portals in time and space, where living mouths commune with dead ears and a resonance is carried across the threshold, or more detached and mundane channels through which thought and message evanesce and never return. He whispers breathlessly with newfound ease, and he forgives his father for the forgery of his youth and the unkept promises of transcendent greatness. He feels his father’s presence, the duality of him, tangible and elusive as he was in life—the legendary man who carved the Temple’s first stone with strong, gentle hands.

  Behind him, the amphitheatre is half-full of women and children, stark and clear in the bright morning light. They sit with strangely placid faces and watch the man they know as their King commune without hurry in the blinding sun.

  Arana imagines that his father would not know him if he were truly here now, so different is the boy from the man. He thinks of what he was meant to be—a protector of his father’s vision, a kind authority. Long hours he has spent searching for some connection between himself and that boy, and the trail has run cold. Through peacefully closed eyes he asks his father for his own forgiveness in return.

  Silence greets him, and he expected nothing more.

  He turns slowly and faces the sparse crowd, stripped of false vestiges. They do not thunder with applause, nor do they shun him. They only sit in the liquid sun and wait.

  Down the quarry road, a battalion marches. Arana looks on sternly as they assemble before him. Rows of horsemen lead the parade, war-painted and severe, followed by men of every age, suited and armed and freshly shorn, marching with stoic calm toward the amphitheatre. The great and courageous Sons of the Temple, clad for an undertaking more dangerous than any they’ve met before. The ranks fill in slowly. Morning shadows glide across their faces as the men form one line after another and settle into rigid formation.

  When the last warrior takes his place, Arana paces forward to the lower gallery and speaks to his followers.

  “Some of you are old enough to remember a man named Thomas,” he says plainly. He meets recognition in some of their eyes. “Some of you remember his betrayal of my father. This man arrived unbidden, he spoke dangerous lies about his true home, and he fled in our time of need. He left us to suffer. Some of you remember this.” His voice is crisp and low and it cuts through the air like a whip-crack. He speaks simply. Gone are his well-practiced theatrics. “But all of you, even the youngest… all of you remember the two men caught spying on our land barely a month ago yet. You remember barring your doors and hiding in the darkness.

  “We know now that these men share the same origins as Thomas. We know they are from a place that preserves dead ways, a place that seeks to use these ways to destroy us. They hate what we have built. They hate the vision that we share. And the day has come when we must make a stand, or allow ourselves to be swept away by their wickedness.”

  Younger siblings and worried mothers nod somberly in the amphitheatre. In the wings, Keslin cracks a thin smile.

  “In recent days,” Arana continues, “you have noticed that certain people were taken from their duties. These people were corrupted—and they are now safely removed, and will remain so until the matter is resolved.”

  Stifled chatter crisscrosses the amphitheatre.

  “This morning, our army will march south to the hidden city. We do not know what they will encounter when they get there, but I will say this—our numbers have never been stronger. There are no other fighters spoke of in the land with the power to overtake us. Join me in asking that the light of the Beyond shine down upon them on this important venture.”

  Arana closes his eyes and raises his face toward the bright, clean sky—his only deceit—and as the warriors steel themselves for another ruthless campaign, the gathered forms in the audience raise their faces as well, true believers all, and the Temple grounds hum with the sussurus of their whispered incantation.

  The reed skiff glides through the murky water, leaving behind swirling fractals of slimy film that spin around in their wake like elongated curlicues. Slithering forms cut gracefully through the surface then resubmerge in silence. Jack dips the ore and rows them slowly forward, perched up on his knees like a little gondolier, looking side to side as they go. There is a ubiquitous buzz that permeates the swamp and he listens in, trying to separate the sound out into its constituent pa
rts—there are insects of many varied forms, the rasping of sedge grass rippling in the wind, smoothly flowing water, and a deeper, more subliminal noise that sounds like the steady breath of the swamp itself. Lia sits curled in the stern and watches the dark landscape drift by like a gloomy cyclorama.

  “I don’t like this.”

  “It’s just a little ways farther. Thomas said we’re close.”

  “I heard him.”

  They crouch low and float under a fallen pile of warped I-beams, crosshatched over the water like a jumbled overpass. A gallery of long-legged birds sits perched atop, and they turn their heads dismissively as the tiny boat moves past. Jack rows them around a bend in the waterway and pilots the craft toward the rising sun. The iron skeletons of a once great city rise above them, fragmented and decayed, more imposing than they had seemed from the hillside.

  “By the billions…” says Lia, looking up at the structures.

  “How much is that?”

  “Too much.” She scoots around and kneels behind Jack, resting her chin on his shoulder. “Want me to row for a while?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Do you think the world will ever look like this again? All full of buildings and people?”

  “Not for a long, long time.”

  “I don’t know if I’d want it to,” she says wistfully. “It’s not very pretty.”

  “I’m sure it looked better when it was new.”

  “Not as pretty as the mountains.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “And how did they build all this anyway? Did they steal people and force them to work?”

  “They would’ve had to steal a lot of people,” laughs Jack. “I think they used machines.”

  “Somebody had to build the machines. Seems impossible. Didn’t they do anything but build things and fly around all the time?”

  “That sounds all right to me.” Jack peers at her over his shoulder. “You’re sour.”

  “I’m just nervous.”

  “What’s wrong?”