Ashes of the Earth (9 page)

Ten
thousand geese we have counted this past week, more than double the
migration rate of five years ago. Nature is well pleased with her
scoured planet. Once I dreamt of fixing a camera to the leg of one of
these feathered vagabonds. Now I dream of becoming one.

The
earliest of the pages read like an almanac, giving a statistician's
review of life in the colony, listing number of inhabitants, babies
born during the past year, cows, horses, and pigs in the colony
farms, the size of the grain harvest, milk production, tons of flour
produced, even the gallons of syrup gathered in the maple groves.
Every page had the same format, elegant text framed in a box, the
shaded borders containing artwork and sometimes brief aphorisms or
quotes, several in Latin.

An
unexpected contentment settled over Hadrian as he ranged through the
journal. His old friend was still alive in the pages, his presence so
real he could smell one of the sassafras twigs Jonah often chewed
when coming in from the forest. He couldn't help taking pleasure in
the accounts of the little events that made up life in Carthage.

A
pet goat followed a girl into the school building. Two hundred pies
were consumed in the last night of the midsummer fair. A new schooner
had been launched to haul lumber and salt from up the coast.

Surely
this had been Jonah's real goal, simply to document the normalcy,
show the colony as a living organism, demonstrate how, despite all
their trials and the self-destruction of advanced societies,
individual humans would find a way not only to survive but also to
celebrate life.

Every
few weeks came a different type of page, ones filled with drawings
and instructions, like little manuals for civilization. These
recorded the designs for the equipment and buildings that had
advanced the colony. The pile driver used for building the docks, the
water-powered saw mill, the first steam boiler.

He
found himself gazing at the darkest corner of the vault, where Jonah
had leaned wide planks, pinned to which were detailed drawings of his
future projects. Hadrian stacked these planks against the
bookshelves, exposing an obsolete highway map that he pulled away
from the wall. Then he choked with emotion as he brushed away the
dust accumulated over years. Waist high on the wall were six rows of
identical marks cut into the wood. Hadrian did not need to count
them. He himself had carved ten in each row, twenty-five years
earlier.

This
was the place of first things.

It
was a
storm,
Hadrian had told himself when he glimpsed the first flashes on the
horizon. Hiking in the mountains by the lake, he had been in a low
ravine when he'd seen the brilliant flashes of light reflected off
the clouds and felt the first gale-force winds. He had gone in two
days ahead of the rest of the family to do repairs on their little
cabin deep in the mountains and felt it prudent now to descend closer
to the lake to find phone coverage, to tell his wife to wait at home
with the children until the weather improved.

The
storm was like none he'd ever seen, with intense bursts of light on
the horizon yet no rain, only long angry strokes of lightning arcing
across the sky and violent blasts of wind that began leveling trees
along the ridgetops. He was not surprised to find no phone service by
the time he reached the water and had been about to return to the
cabin when he first heard the frantically ringing bell. Running down
the coastal trail toward the sound, uneasily watching the strange
white-capped roiling in the water, he nearly stumbled over the
bearded man hammering the old bell mounted at the edge of a high
cliff, a vestige of an old fog warning system. Neither man spoke, for
they had both caught sight of the large sailing yacht struggling to
reach shore, her mast broken, a makeshift sail shredded in the wind.
Suddenly a huge wave appeared and just as suddenly swallowed the
boat. Tears streaming down his cheeks, the stranger had turned and
pointed toward a little cabin tucked into the bottom of the ridge.

In
the house two other men waited, a pair of hunters who'd also fled
toward the bell. The four of them had watched in disbelief the
horrific, confused television reports of rogue nations engaging the
rest of the world with nuclear and biological agent strikes. First
one station, then another had abruptly left the air, until the only
one they could receive was Canadian, from across the vast lake. Those
final broadcasts had lasted a few more hours, then with one more
blinding flash on the horizon they too were silenced. There was no
more television, no more radio, but they had heard enough to know
that those who had survived the initial blasts would likely die of
radiation or biological poisoning.

Their
host, a retired professor of astrophysics, they learned, had brought
them to his wine vault, insulated under two hundred feet of stone. He
had quickly explained that it had a filtered ventilation system that
had been overdesigned by his father, and they had frantically stuffed
the vault with food, bedding, and every candle and oil lamp they
could find. Their host did not know how long they would need to hide
underground but gave his scientific opinion that sixty days should be
sufficient for the air to clear. Winding an old alarm clock, he set
it to ring every twelve hours. After every two rings, Hadrian had
sliced a mark into the wall.

For
the first few days they had spoken of their families, pretending they
would see them again, and how they hoped the roads would not be too
clogged when they finally drove home. After the first week Jonah had
sat for hours at his table making calculations. It was then that he'd
begun to speak in colder technical terms, about the reach of warheads
and the half-life of radiation, the depletion rates of biological
agents. He had worked in weapons research, developing models for the
government demonstrating how once the low-quality, wide-ranging
biological warheads favored by lesser nations had been deployed they
would contaminate the entire planet, would wipe out nearly all human
life as well as other higher life forms.

In
the long silent hours, Jonah had developed a new model, using weather
data from the last newspapers, showing how their location—one
of the most remote in the eastern part of the continent and protected
by the high ridges—had been spared the worst contamination by
an unusual shift in wind patterns.

His
three guests—but almost never Jonah—had sunk into dark,
silent depressions lasting days at a time. In the night, in the
blackness when the last candle was extinguished, they wept.

Hadrian
stayed in
the
vault for hours, reading many of the pages but also exploring the
shelves. They held not only rare volumes—everything from common
cookbooks to popular bestsellers to foreign dictionaries—but
also glass tubes and columns containing the remnants of experiments,
stacks of old magazines, even, in an old shoe-box, a hand calculator
and half a dozen corroded batteries. Hadrian had been the old man's
closest friend in Carthage, but still Jonah Beck had kept many
secrets from him. Much of what was in the vault was illegal. But that
did not explain why Jonah's journal was so secret, or why Lucas
Buchanan so urgently wanted to find it.

At
last he returned to the stool and studied the little plaque again.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It
wasn't just a reminder. It was a manifesto. Jonah had been nearing
the end of his tragic life. But there had always been one tragedy he
thought he could reverse. On the very day he died he had spoken to
Hadrian as if he were on the verge of doing so. With a new, rising
pain, the realization came to Hadrian. Jonah had accepted death not
simply because he thought he had saved the exiles, but because giving
in to his killers' demands would have jeopardized those plans.

He
sifted through the pages again, pausing over an entry made eighteen
months earlier, mourning the loss of the colony's first steamboat,
the
Anna,
in a storm, listing the names of the two men who drowned and mourning
the loss of the sturdy little fishing vessel, named after Jonah's
long-dead daughter.

Hadrian
arranged on the desk the shreds of Jonah's last ornamented page, more
frustrated than ever by his inability to understand the real reason
Jonah had tried to destroy it.

He
lifted the magnifying glass, then examined one piece of the colored
margin after another. He studied the vines, looking for a pattern.
Their twists and turns suddenly seemed to him not entirely random. He
spotted a numeral two formed by the vine over one pumpkin, then saw a
three in the one at its side. He found another number, then a letter.
Stopping for a moment to reconsider the image as a whole, he began a
more systematic search, starting at the bottom of the page.

As
his eyes adjusted to the puzzle, the words leapt out to him. Aurihus
tener lupum.
I
am holding a wolf by the ears. He stared uneasily at the declaration,
then worked his way up the unbroken left side and along the top. But
there were no more words, only letters and numbers.
H2GMAN4MGSS3GBC2CC, the series began. The remainder had been in the
pieces his friend had bitten off.

"Jonah!"
he cried out in frustration, pounding the table with his fist. Why
had it been so necessary to hide the words and letters? From whom was
he hiding them? Surely his friend had not died over a jumble of
letters and numbers. He did not know how long he stared at the paper
fragments but at last he returned the journal to its stand, blew out
the candles, and left.

Back
in the cabin, he replaced the key behind the chimney stone and made
himself some tea in the kettle hanging in the fireplace. It was two
hours before dawn, but he could not sleep. He carried a rocking chair
out onto the porch where he and Jonah had spent so many evenings. His
gaze drifted up toward the moonlit clearing on the cliff where the
old bell had stood. It had hurt to find the secrets in the hidden
chamber, but he slowly realized that Jonah had kept the secrets from
him to protect Hadrian. Something in the vault, Hadrian was certain,
was the reason Jonah had been murdered. He had held the wolf by the
ears, but the wolf had turned on him.

As
he watched the stars setting, he felt more alone than ever in his
life. His discoveries had brought back pains he believed he'd
banished years earlier. Distant memories flickered in his
consciousness, and suddenly he smelled licorice and was with his
long-dead son, teaching him the constellations, hearing the boy
whisper his questions, as if he feared to upset the beauty. His son
reached to hold his hand as a shooting star streaked overhead. He
felt the touch, as real as the stab of a blade. Tears welled in his
eyes. In the early years Jonah had often assured him that in time all
wounds would heal, but it had never been so for Hadrian. His soul had
been cauterized twenty-five years before, but the scar kept cracking
open, letting the pain ooze out again and again, numbing him to the
life around him. It had been the reason for his recklessness, why he
had lost everything in the colony.

He
blinked through his tears, struggling desperately to keep his son
with him, whispering to him the names of more constellations and
planets, now pausing as a new, brighter star appeared on the horizon.
Suddenly he froze, scrubbing at his eyes.

It
was not a star but a lantern, a bright lamp blinking on and off in
the clearing above the lake. It was, he recalled, where Jonah's
telescope on the opposite side of the ridge would be aimed if it was
aligned with the easternmost mark on the railing.

Ten
minutes later he stood behind a tree at the edge of the clearing,
watching two men with a large box lantern into which baffles had been
inserted. They were using it to send signals toward the lake as they
spoke in low, urgent tones. Hadrian dared a step closer, desperate
for a glimpse of their faces, then was suddenly wrenched off his feet
by the violent blow of a stick. He grabbed at his assailant's legs as
he went down, and they landed together in a tangle of limbs.

"Punic
prick!" the man spat. He stank of fish and spices.

Hadrian
twisted, avoiding a punch, taking hold of the man's ankle so that he
was thrown off balance as he tried to rise. Hadrian rolled as the man
fell again, hearing now laughter from those at the lantern. A fist
hammered into his ribs. His opponent, heavier than him, groped for
something in his belt. But before he could extract his knife, Hadrian
grabbed a rock and hammered it into his knee.

"Bastard!"
the man moaned, clutching at his leg.

Hadrian
sprang to his feet and ran, staying on the trail for only fifty feet
before veering off into the treacherously rocky field along the
slope. He knew the terrain better than his pursuers. He crawled into
the deep shadow under a ledge, then listened as they searched, until
a man shouted from above and they retreated. Daylight was coming, and
these were creatures of the night.