Alexandria (41 page)

“All this while, the change was happening. They began producing more weapons than tools. The grand vision was put on hold. Despite their child savior, these good people started to see everyone in close range of the settlement as an enemy to be bested. Troubled wanderers no longer found a home with Arana. They were chased away or, at worst, killed on sight. What I saw around me were the makings of something terrible. For the second time in my life, I left the place I’d called home and ventured out on my own. I left in the middle of the night, fearing they would have killed me if they’d known I was leaving.

“I went south for a while, but it wasn’t to my liking. I spent long decades out there alone, and finally ended not far from where I started. My foolishness has caused a lot of death, Jack. You were right—I don’t very much trust myself around people anymore. When I saw you two out wandering on your own, I knew—at least a part of me knew—that you’d run away from them as I had.” His hard face cracks with tears. Thin rivulets run down his cheeks and leave tracks of clarity on his begrimed skin. “I am so sorry… for everything that has happened to you. None of it ever should have happened.
None of it.”

Ruck leaps up and dutifully licks his tired face. He pats the wolf down and settles him back on the ground, then looks at Jack and Lia with eyes that seek neither forgiveness nor consolation. They sit bundled under their fur, trying to untangle the strands of Thomas’s story. It does little to soothe their grief.

“I still don’t understand how they could’ve done what they did,” says Lia. “We lost everything, too, and we didn’t turn out like them.”

“Mmm,” says Thomas. “You don’t want to hurt them back? You don’t want to take from them? Show them how they’ve hurt you?”

Lia starts to say
no
, then stops herself. “Yes. But they
did
hurt us. If they’d hunted the people that burned them, that would be different. We didn’t burn their homes down. They burned
ours.”

“Yes, I see. But suppose you settle down somewhere again, some nice little place that you’re happy to call home. Suppose you’re settled there, all nice and cozy—maybe you’ll have a couple young ones of your own—and then one night, long about the middle of the night, you hear strangers out in the darkness. Strangers with unknown intentions. You might feel differently, then. You might feel threatened and strike out blindly, to protect your own. It’s a short step from there to much darker tendencies. A trauma like what you went through, it changes a person. It’s changed you, I’d wager, in ways that your young minds can’t yet fully understand. And it’s not the thinking part of your mind that’s been affected, but a much older part, an ancient part. It’s hard work to stay civilized. It’s hard work because it’s not natural.”

“So were going to end up like them?”

“No. I just mean you have to try at it. Take Ruck and Lily for example. Consider the two possibilities. One in which the bear and the wolf are raised separately in the wild, each by their own kind, and in that way they would surely be hateful enemies. Each would fear the other and like to kill them. Or, consider they are raised by me, in which case they become friends. Same bear. Same wolf. A difference only of what they are taught and how. And of these two possibilities, I tell you, young man, young lady, it is
this
one,” he says, gesturing to Ruck and Lily sleeping cozily by the fire, “that is the unnatural of the two.”

“Unnatural?”

“Mmm. I think some part of them cares about me as they would their own kind. Then there’s another part that, if they’re provoked in such a way, could revert back to the rawest wild. But the same could be true of me. And you. There are savage ways in all of us.”

Jack flinches. “We’re not savages.”

“Are you so sure? There’s a thin line in here,” he crooks an elbow and points to his cranium, “that separates the higher from the lower, and at this thin line there are monsters, brutal monsters, rattling their cages, deep within the earliest forebears of our minds, fighting to break through. Always been there, even long before the downfall. Always. While they busied themselves in steel towers, there were some hidden workings buried deep, then and still, violent remains from an earlier Age when our ancient kin lived and died by the sharpness of their teeth and the quickness of their retreat—these workings written inside a body in such a way that it could spell a creature’s fate before it’s ever birthed from its mother’s womb. And it takes a lot of work to overcome that. For if you feed the monsters, the monsters will grow. And if they grow strong enough, they escape into the higher reaches and run wild and chase anything civilized clean away.”

“It’s wicked.”

“It’s not wickedness, not outright. It’s the drive to live. It’s what kept you alive out here in the wild, I reckon. It’s what tore civilization to the ground, and it’s also what gave them the will to build it up in the first place. Fierce protection of yourself and others like you. All creatures have it. But, lo, it rattles those cages. Doesn’t know when enough is enough. Yes, Jack, there are monsters in you, and even you, Lia. But it’s your choice whether or not you feed them.”

The fire has burned down to embers and Thomas pokes at it with the stick.

“Is that what happened to Arana? He fed them?”

“Partly. He’s a different case, altogether. He’d not been born, yet, when the fires happened. Before I left, he’d shown sparks of being a bright young boy. Had a gentle way about him. It’s discouraging to hear that he’s crowned himself King. Absurd. If he’s King, then I’m Emperor of the Universe.”

“So what’s wrong with him?”

“He was brought up with all that rot his father taught him, and I guess he believed it.”

“So… he has no powers?”

“Only the power to make people think he has.”

Jack nods, remembering all the times he feared some force would overtake him. “Will the people at Alexandria know how to stop him?”

“Doubtful. Not if they’re as strong as you say. Arana wants to find this place very badly, doesn’t he?”

“He’s searched for years.”

“Then he’ll someday find it. This map that Ethan gave you, what did it show?”

“It was a drawing of the land and the rivers, all down the coast, and there was a star at the bottom where he told us to go.”

“Can you draw it?”

“Sure.”

Jack takes the stick and works from memory, drawing a rough depiction of the shoreline. He fills in a few remembered details, then finishes it off with a little star.

“Ah,” says Thomas, with a touch of relief, “I see. Ethan was smart. This is not Alexandria.”

“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.”