City of Ruins (19 page)

“Yeah. Usually.”

“That doesn’t seem very
thmmb-skizzly
.”

“I know.”

“So this Jeremiah we are detained with…”

“He’s what they call a ‘prophet,’” I tell
him.

“What are they?”

“As near as I can figure, they go around
telling people to treat each other better, and everyone winds up
hating them for it.”

“Melonokus had similar
szzzn!
experiences,” Clyne says.

“But then later, people act like they agreed
with them all along, like they just want to be lovey-dovey too.
Even when it’s not true. Did that happen to Melonokus?”

I step a little closer to Clyne—whether to
protect him or just to shut out the crowd a moment or two longer,
I’m not sure. I look at Thea and she seems to be doing the same
thing with the two littler kids, just drawing them close. Clyne, as
usual, seems more excited than scared.

“We are required to read
Jail Notes of a
Bad Lizard
in school now. There is little mention that once,
before the Bloody Tendon Wars had
sknnnt!
ended, mere
possession of the writings was enough to earn a jail sentence of
one’s own. But in that volume,” — and if it’s possible to describe
a dinosaur face as “brightening up,” I’d say Clyne suddenly looks
like he’s seen a report card with all A’s— “Melonokus notes that
the hardest prisons to leave are the ones we build ourselves,
szzlp!
, in here.” And Clyne taps the right side of chest,
where I guess his heart is. “Although we also seem to spend far too
much time detained by
zgggt!
authorities here on your
world.”

Jeremiah has been watching us. “And what
messages do strangers bear in a time when few are ready to
listen?”

“He’s been making plans with the goat-demon!”
one of our guards shouts. There’s no more shutting out the crowd
anymore; another couple of rocks come whizzing by.

Then Clyne turns to Jeremiah and repeats the
last part of what he just said, about the hardest prison being the
ones you keep yourself locked up in, inside. But now he says it in
Hebrew.

Jeremiah nods. Slowly, and then a little
faster. “How strange that I should find myself sharing thoughts
with a goat-demon. I have been thrown in stocks and left in prison,
too. But I have so far kept the jailers out of here.” He taps his
own heart — on the left side — then turns toward the crowd
surrounding us.

“These people are innocent!” He points to us.
“None deserve to be held by you! They are strangers who have come
to us in their time of need! Even if it is
our
time of great
need as well! Who is to say this is not part of God’s plan, too?”
He stands by the cold remains of the fire. “If it is me you blame
for the presence of the goat-demon,” he says as he points to Clyne,
“blame me as you will! Though this demon, perhaps born horribly
deformed —”

“I was a good egg,” Clyne says, a little
indignantly.

“—is likewise merely a stranger, who comes to
us asking for help. We talked before of helping ourselves —
planting crops for the new year, even though our numbers are small.
I then said we needed to make blessings, here, where the temple
stood, to ask for a good new year. A year that will sustain and
nourish and not brutalize us. But the Rebuilder and his friends
have helped me see — we need to rebuild
here
first,”— and
Jeremiah taps his chest again, this time so everyone else can see
it— “before we start raising walls again. We carry the temple, and
all it stood for, inside us now. We each have these seeds, and we
each tend the crop that’s been given us. Yes, the harvest is past,
the summer is gone, and we were not saved. But there comes another
time to plant and reap. Right now, the sun has returned, and the
frost is melting. I am no longer content to stay in these ruins. I
have
new
planting to do.” Jeremiah walks toward the edge of
the circle. Thea — and the guy named Rocket, who is apparently
related to Rolf — move to let him by.

Jeremiah passes us, and keeps walking into
the crowd of people holding the rocks and sticks. No one stops
him.

“We haven’t decided your fate yet,” the
Gehenna-woman says.

“My fate is not for you to decide,” he
replies. He then puts his hands on two of the crude spears and
pushes them aside. Jeremiah stands his ground, as everyone else
shifts on their feet, wondering what to do, wondering whether they
should hurt the prophet or let him walk away.

“Egypt,” A.J. whispers.

“What?” I ask.

“If he goes, he’ll keep walkin’ straight to
Egypt, after he’s done plantin’. Jeremiah just disappears from the
Bible completely, once he leaves Jerusalem. We gotta stop him.”
Maybe it was the bonk on the head that’s keeping him from thinking
clearly. It’s also keeping him from moving too fast, so when he
goes after Jeremiah, I catch up quickly and put my arms around his
shoulders.

“A.J., no, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

First off, there’s no reason to believe that
those people will let us walk past the spears the way Jeremiah just
did. But there’s an even bigger reason I have to stop A.J. “If he’s
supposed to walk off, to disappear, you’ve got to let him. You’ve
got to let history fix itself.”

“Don’t you get it, boy? History can’t be
fixed now. It was broken bad enough the first time through. And all
the time-travelin’s made it worse.”

“What about your time-traveling? You thought
coming back here to save Jeremiah would change all that?”

“When that Mr. Howe and I broke in, we both
knew I was willing to take the time jump. The idea was to go back
far enough to stop the whole Project Split Second, if I could. I
didn’t know it would land me all the way back here.

“So, when I did find myself this far back, in
the living days of the Good Word, I figured maybe I could still
give history a push in the right direction. An even bigger push, if
I could help save the life of Jeremiah…help him stick around
longer.”

“But you just said history can’t be
fixed.”

“Not the one we already have, boy.” He rubs
his head. “I’m talkin’ about comin’ up with a whole new history. A
better one.”

“Is that what they wanted to do in Project
Split Second? What my mom wanted to do?”

It’s just one more thing I don’t find out
about my mom. The Gehenna-woman speaks up again, after Jeremiah has
been standing calmly for a few moments, tightly surrounded by some
of the crowd, who are still deciding whether to let him go or to
kill him.

“Let him pass,” the lady says. “Let him
gather his seeds. Maybe he can do some good outside Jerusalem’s
broken walls. He was no particular use inside them.” And for a
moment, everyone seems calmer, like they all let their breath out
at once. Jeremiah grabs a homemade spear from one of the men’s
hands, then breaks off the tip, turning it into a walking stick. He
looks like he’s ready to go.

“But leave the goat-demon here,” the lady
adds, “until we decide what to do with him.”

There goes the calmness. Right away, someone
in the crowd makes a move. People are getting jostled, and my first
thought is that someone is going to hurt Jeremiah after all,
because that seems to be what usually happens to prophets
anyway.

Except this guy isn’t coming for Jeremiah.
Whoever he is, he pushes past him, and comes toward us. I can see
the white hair over the heads of everyone else. It’s someone moving
fast —

Toward Thea, who is with Naftali and the
Bearded Boy.

Naftali’s the one he grabs.

It’s not just anyone from the crowd. It’s
Rolf.

He must’ve been keeping low, using the crowd
as cover, until he was close to us. And I finally get a real good
look at him, now that he’s all grown up.

That was his white hair. But now his skin
stretches over his face in a weird way, and his eyes look like
they’re getting ready to pop out of his face. But he’s still just a
Dragon Jerk kid, as far as I’m concerned.

And of course, being Rolf, he’s holding a
gun.

Now he turns his attention to me. “Giff me
your hat, so I can get out of here,” he says with just a trace of
his old accent. “Before I haff to hurt one of these kids.”

“You promised you wouldn’t let them hurt me,”
Naftali says, almost crying, looking at me.

Right. I did. No more soldiers, no more being
scared.

I don’t want that to be a lie. It’s too easy
for grownups to lie to kids, and I don’t want to become that kind
of grownup.

And maybe I’m more like A.J. than I realized,
because as I look into Naftali’s scared eyes, I realize I do want
to try and make history turn out better.

His, anyway.

“Are you listening!?” Rolf barks at me.

I am. If I’m going to help Naftali, I don’t
have a choice.

Chapter
Seventeen

Thea: Strangers

583 B.C.E.

My friend Eli will do whatever he can to help
Naftali, but I don’t think he should give away the soft helmet —
the “cap” that allows him to journey through time. Rolf Royd wants
it, in exchange for the boy’s life.

I believe instead we need to devise another
plan.

I’m not sure what that plan should be. Huldah
might know. But she stays down below, tending to the sick. She
refuses to come up because she is afraid, I believe, that she
couldn’t survive the heartbreak of what has happened to her
city.

Eli was forced to decide whether to give away
his “cap” after Rolf, the time traveler from the Third Reich, snuck
up on us. Our attention was elsewhere. Mine was with the two boys,
Naftali and James. They’ve both been cast aside by history, or
perhaps, swept away by it, the way Eli and I have. Each has losses,
their entire families taken: In Naftali’s case, they appear to have
been hauled away to slavery by the invading soldiers. In the case
of James—who calls himself the Bearded Boy by way of making
something of an entertainment of himself — he was told by
authorities that his parents vanished in a mysterious incident —
similar, perhaps, to the way Eli lost his own mother. Eli and I,
meanwhile, have become victims of another mob, survivors in
Yerushalayim who are deciding whether to kill us.

The people here have survived a calamity even
worse than the fires in Alexandria. They’ve seen family members
killed by an invading army or taken into slavery. And though like
the mobs ruled by Brother Tiberius in Alexandria, the people here
are motivated by fear, they are also motivated by their broken
hearts. They want nothing else to cause them hurt, and the arrival
first of me and Eli, and then of K’lion, and the group he calls his
“carnival,” only terrified them more.

They seem to think that getting rid of us,
and of Jeremiah — who, I gather, routinely chastised them to listen
to their god, and perhaps even blamed them for their troubles —
might protect them from this heartbreak.

They are wrong, of course.

As I am discovering, nothing can really
protect you from that.

So the survivors here were deciding whether
to harm us in order to prevent more harm to themselves. If Eli kept
his cap, we could disappear if we had to, but how many could we
take with us? And what would happen to the others we might have to
leave behind? Especially to those younger than us, like James, the
Bearded Boy?

I had been translating for him and Naftali,
so they could converse — could keep themselves calm while our fates
were being decided.

“So are you an Essene?” Naftali asked the
Bearded Boy.

“I don’t know what that is,” James
replied.

“They’re priests,” Naftali explained. “Holy
men. With no hair cut.”

I made a cutting motion with my fingers
around my hair, as I translated the words for James.

“Living in the desert,” Naftali added.

“I’m no priest,” James said. “That’s for
sure. I done some mean things before Rocket took me in. I used to
steal food when I had to.”

“At least you had food around to steal,”
Naftali said.

I was trying to keep them talking to each
other, but wished I could serve them breakfast instead.

I was getting hungry myself.

That’s when Rolf struck, just as he did back
in the caves with Merlin and Arthur, only this time, he didn’t have
to use a sword — he had a gun. I have come to know guns in my
travels.

He grabbed Naftali, and demanded Eli’s cap.
Then he threatened Naftali.

And now during all these slow, stretched-out
moments while Eli is deciding what to do, his cold gaze reaches me,
as well. “You, too? Will I never be rid of any of you?”

For a moment, it appears he might try using
the weapon on me. I already know what his Reich was capable of. I
remember flying over the field, in K’lion’s time-ship, watching the
mother and child as the German soldier — the good soldier — took
aim at both of them.

I remember the clap of thunder then.

And I am not going to let that happen
now.

You won’t.

The voice again. It is coming back, in
occasional wisps, though I had hoped never to hear it again at all,
now that the slow pox has passed through me. I have enough to think
about.

“I want your hat, Danger Boy,” Rolf spits at
Eli again. “Or I will start shooting.”

“How do you know about ‘Danger Boy’?” Eli
asks.

“Do you think, just because the stupid
Americans made a show of kicking me out of their secret program, I
am no longer informed? That because of a mere thing like public
appearances, I stopped working on my own? Or that I don’t still
have allies on the inside?”

“What do you mean, ‘public appearances’?” Eli
asks him.

It is the one called Andrew Jackson who
answers: “They had to pretend to fire Rolf from Project Split
Second when a newspaper ran a story about what he’d done as a
Nazi.”