Alexandria (3 page)

The scouts flash strange hand signals, pointing out certain cabins as they stalk down the promenade. The warriors crouch, their movements feline as they position themselves in front of the cabin doors. They remove thin flat metal pieces from their belts and wait. The scouts stand by until all are in place then sound out the whistle once more.

The warriors slip the metal rods through the crack between door and jamb and pop the wooden crosspieces up and out of the bar holders and burst through the doors.

Mayhem erupts. They kill first the men, then the women, and finally bind the children with rough, fibrous ropes and cast them out onto the dirt-packed ground. Most are murdered before they even wake up. The few that struggle are rheumy from sleep and alcohol and are subdued with little effort. The first slew of cabins is sacked in a matter of moments, screams piercing the night, terrified children wailing and struggling against their bindings. When the cabins are cleared, the scouts take torches and set the thatched roofs ablaze.

A few old men and women step outside, hearing the commotion, and look on dumbstruck at the carnage. The Nezra leap on them like panthers, cutting open their throats and dumping them on the ground, while others move to the cabins that are still closed and dark.

Jack stirs in his sleep, hearing his name, and thinks he is still dreaming. He rubs his eyes and sits up. Lia is calling his name. She is screaming.

He rolls off his thin mattress and moves to the front of his cabin, sliding the wooden bar up and cracking the door ajar. The village is on fire. There are his friends, wriggling on the ground, their wrists and ankles tied behind their backs. He starts to run out but stops—he sees the warriors and the violence they are performing, and his bladder lets go and his legs buckle and shudder uncontrollably. Olen hobbles out of his cabin, cursing and swinging a long heavy stick at one of the dark assailants. Two more come up from behind and unmercifully cut him down.

Jack slides the door shut, panicking at the realization that he is charged alone with defending his home. He leans down and grabs his bow, then reaches a trembling hand and pulls one long arrow from its satchel. Forcing himself to breath deeply, he calms his hand enough to pull the door back open and slide the arrow against the bow and draw the string back taut. He sees one of the warriors outside, walking toward him, face steady and full of wrath.

“Jack?” His mother is rousing herself from sleep.

His fear turns to unspecified redness and a bizarre calm overtakes him. He lets the arrow fly. It is a dead shot. His first kill.

The arrow pierces the warrior midchest, missing his ribs and striking directly into the meat of his heart. He falls to his knees, never breaking his gaze. Jack is momentarily hypnotized by the desperation in the dying man’s eyes, and he doesn’t hear the two warriors scaling along the outer wall of the cabin.

“Jack!
Get in here!” Elora is screaming, moving around the partition.

A soot-blackened arm grabs Jack and wrenches him from the doorway and throws him down. Another warrior jabs his knee into his back, colliding his head with the hard dirt ground.

“Jack! Oh no no no, Jack!”

He sees the dark foot step over him and make for his cabin’s entrance. Motes of light swirl like pixie dust, his vision fades to black, and Jack’s fragile mind will record no more events from this night.

Chapter Two

Jack awakens in a cage. Thick, straight branches lashed together with ropes, two long poles extending from the top, which the warriors use to carry them, like demented pallbearers. His head is throbbing as he opens his eyes to slits and looks around, searching for his mother, for Lia. There are only children in the cages, at least from what he can see. He is situated near the middle of this morbid caravan, cages stretching out in a line to his front and rear, sounds of crying and screaming all around.

He peers through the wooden slats—off to the east the sun is rising, brilliant pink gossamer clouds spreading out in a herringbone across the azure sky. Billows of smoke from his still-burning village creep over the canopy of trees.

The soot that camouflaged these warriors in the nighttime makes them look strange and unearthly in the daylight, like demonic wraiths marching lockstep through some enchanted forest. When he turns to look at the man holding up the back of his cage, Jack finds him already staring through the rough wooden bars, his gaze cold and accusatory.

He trembles to hold back tears, but cannot—his cries join in with the rest of the chorus as they bounce along in their little cages. The worst are the babies. Their cries pierce the tranquil morning and send forest creatures scurrying to their burrows. No words are spoken.

They are heading north, this much he knows. Jack has seen this landscape before. They are not a far walk from the village and he yearns throughout his body to run there now. He slides his hand along the bottom of the cage, to the corner, and tests the rope bindings there. A rough hand pries his fingers away. Jack looks up. The stare is unwavering.

He withdraws and huddles in the corner of his cage, watching the horizon bob up and down with each step taken, feeling those unforgiving eyes burn into the back of his skull. They march on like this for some time, leaving the land of his familiarity and entering unknown territory.

They pass by copses of thick, tall trees and move down a shallow ravine with a burbling stream running through at the bottom. The procession halts and the cages are set down on the sloping bank. The warriors step away, shuck their loincloths, and walk slowly toward the gentle waterway. They wade out into the waist-deep stream and scoop up handfuls of water and slather themselves with it, their flesh streaked with running darkness.

There are no longer sounds of weeping. The children are catatonic as they watch this bizarre spectacle. For one brief macabre moment nearly all of the warriors are submerged at once, thrashing and scrubbing the soot from their heads, and the surface of the water appears molten and boiling. Tendrils of black emanate from each man and cloud the narrow stream. The Nezra leave their filth swirling behind them and emerge tawny and dripping.

The cleansed warriors climb the bank and dress themselves in simple attire. One returns carrying a wooden bucket. He moves down the line, allowing each of the children to take sips from a cup that he dips and then offers through the narrow slats. When this brief respite is complete, they heft the wooden cages and continue along through the forest.

Through their tears the children gape at the gargantuan trees towering above, with auburn bark and trunks as big around as Jack’s whole cabin. He thinks briefly of the little statue he and Lia found, and longs all over again for his ruined village and his mother.

Haylen is in the cage in front of him. She looks terrified. She and Jack shoot each other furtive glances, the expression behind her eyes always carrying the same question—
What is happening to us?
He desperately wishes he could talk to her, comfort her, but he dare not make a sound.

The crying abates eventually, only the occasional low whimper breaks the serenity of the beautiful forest morning. The steady crunch of footsteps and birdsong are the only other noises. Overhead, the sun reaches its zenith. Warm light dappled by the leafy canopy strobes across their faces.

And still they move forward.

Their northward trek has been arcing to the west gradually, and as the sun begins to fade toward evening they find themselves marching straight toward it. They make a tight turn up a rocky hillock and Jack can see the front of the convoy. The two forward warriors are mounted, riding the backs of some magnificent beast he has never seen before—tight, dark brown coats with flowing manes, thick muscular haunches.

He scans the cages looking for Lia, to no avail. She must be near the back of the line, he figures.

When the mounted warriors reach the top of the small hill, one of them raises his hand stolidly in the air and brings everyone to a halt. He dismounts and flashes quick signals to the rest of the men and the cages are once again placed quietly and softly on the ground. The warrior takes a bow from his back. Another joins him, also armed, and they hunker down and slink over the mound.

Time passes and they wait.

Jack becomes mortified, wondering what ghastly murders they are committing on the other side of the hill.

The sunlight grows dusky and still they are not back.

Finally the two disappeared warriors crest over the top of the hill, one of them carrying a small deer around his neck and shoulders like a shawl, its limp head swaying back and forth. More hand signals and the cages are again hoisted, but only momentarily. They arrange the little wooden prisons in a circle around the small clearing and set them back down.

For the first time since morning the children are left alone as the warriors huddle and whisper to each other, the first real verbal communication any of them have witnessed among the strange clan. Several of them splinter off with knives and begin butchering the animal, and others walk off into the darkening forest for tinder. Most remain to watch the cages.

“What are they going to do to us?”
Haylen whispers.

“I…”
Jack’s throat catches—the thought of her question sends a new ripple of shivers down his spine.
“I don’t know,”
he finishes weakly.

From the vantage of this new arrangement, Jack can see more around him. He realizes for the first time that there are women along on the caravan, probably kept back at the tail end of the procession. They pick up the babies from their tiny baskets and begin nursing the ones that will feed, then bouncing and cooing the others to quiet their mewling. The women are pretty, not altogether dissimilar from the women he knew in his own small village.

He again courses his eye across the circular row of cages. There is a shrouded form bundled on the ground just outside the ring, containing the clan’s only casualty. Behind him is Lathan, a boy of five. His face is drawn back in a stellar rictus of shock. Jack tries to get his attention but the boy stares off in a daze. The children are all mangy and reeking of their own filth. They haven’t been let out of the cages once all day. They are starving. He can see the hunger in them and feel it in his own belly.

Five cages behind him he sees Lia. She is already looking straight at him, her big brown eyes still glossy and moist.

Are you hurt?
she mouths, pointing to her temple on the identical spot where he feels a bruise throbbing on his own forehead.

He shakes his head.
Are you?

No
.

What she does next breaks Jack’s heart. She moves to the front of her cage, gripping the bars tightly, and just looks at him. Tears well up as he scoots forward and does the same. They stare at each other, simply and intensely, while the nightcalls of nocturnal creatures echo through the thick primeval woods, the last frail glimmers of sunset fading fast.

Several Nezra warriors materialize from the shadows carrying sticks and branches in their arms. In the center of the ring of cages they construct a smaller ring of stones and stack their kindling and branches there. One of them strikes a flint across a flat rod and in several moments the tinder catches a spark.

Jack holds Lia’s stare as the warm firelight oozes across their faces.

The campfire grows and the men come back with hunks of flesh skewered on sharp sticks and begin holding them over the flames. The smell is overpowering. The bucket is brought around again and they are allowed another drink.

The warriors and the several women they have brought along eat and drink in silence around the fire, while a halo of petrified faces look on with hungerlust. When they have eaten their fill they pass scraps and half-eaten bones through the slats of the cages. The children gnaw on them like wild animals, cleaning every last bit of meat and scraping at the marrow.

Settling in right next to the cages, the warriors lie down to sleep. The man carrying the back end of Jack’s cage throughout the day lies down facing him, letting his dreadful stare linger before his eyelids finally close and he falls asleep.