Alexandria - By John Kaden
Chapter One
They gather around the bonfire, drunk and laughing, unaware of the malicious eyes spying them from the forest. The entire village, from newborn to elder, will join the ceremony tonight, paying their respects to a world they never knew. Above the towering redwoods rises the same cold moon that shone down on forgotten Ages, still bearing the relics on her dead and pockmarked face—the old lone banner hanging static in the void, pale red stripes and a blue starry night, the patriotic emblem of a country long gone.
An avenue cuts through the center of the village, laid in stone and lined with torches flaring wildly in the cool night breeze. Rings of huts and cabins branch out like cul-de-sacs, their entrances thrown open and flickering candlelight seeping out onto the footworn soil. A boy of twelve bursts from one of these little dwellings and tears off toward the promenade, takes several long strides and stops, reverses his direction so suddenly he almost topples over, then runs back inside.
His mother is laughing at him, her young cheeks flushed from wine. She sits on a little rawhide stool and braids feathers in her hair.
“Forget something, Jack?”
He slinks over and picks up a bundle of palm fronds, taller than him and painted brilliant red and orange. The cycle is tonight. Jack is playing Fire.
He flashes a lopsided grin and runs off, weaving between several people, careful to not thwack them with his enormous multicolored fronds. He pauses at the entrance of a cabin with walls of thick pine and a thatched roof.
“Jack. Come in,” says Keethan, lacing his boots by the light of a dented metal sconce. Jack unloads his bundle on the stoop and greets him with a deferential nod. “Are you ready for tonight?”
“Yes, I think so. I hope so.”
“You’ll be fine, I know. You’re a good study. Lia is just out back, almost ready.” He calls over his shoulder, “Lia, Jack is here.”
“Coming,” answers back a sweet high-pitched voice. Lia walks in, leading her mother by the hand, and Jack is struck by how pretty she looks in her little deerskin dress, lined with fur, skinny brown arms dangling at her sides, covered halfway to the elbows in an odd assortment of bracelets and charms. Her long, oil-black hair is tied up and fastened with much ornamentation and she wears a curious smile on her face.
“Where is it?”
Jack narrows his eyes on her and tilts his chin toward the door. She says nothing, but arches her small eyebrows in childish and demure provocation. Jack is trapped and knows it. He moves stoically onto the stoop, attaches his headpiece, and hoists the great orange fronds, deadpan. Lia grins wildly, her large brown eyes turn manic.
“Be Fire.”
He sighs and begins undulating spastically, the colorful palm blades rustling and erupting over his head until Lia collapses in a peel of shrieking laughter. Her mother moves to pick her up off the floor, the little hyena, and sets her back on her feet.
Keethan winks to his wife. “You see, Marni, see what she does to him?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’ll be afraid to leave his house after tonight.”
A deep bell toll reverberates through the village, along with the whispering sound of distant cheers. Keethan collects his things and ushers them outside, blowing out the candles as he leaves. Bonfire flames lick the sky above the roofs of the low cabins and rich woodsmoke stings their nostrils. Lia elbows Jack and takes off running, and he raises his fiery appendages like a spear and chases after. Keethan and Marni walk hand in hand down the stone promenade, joining up with Jack’s mother and the few last remaining stragglers and heading off to the courtyard to watch the cycle—The Solstice of Fire.
The Nezra hide in the trees, motionless. Their heads and bodies are shorn hairless, their smooth skin blackened with soot ash, the whites of their eyes lucent and clear. Brave Sons of the Temple—far away from home, risking their lives for righteous glory. Most are concealed well back in the forest, but two scouts perch at either end of the village’s promenade, using the high limbs as watchtowers and regarding the ceremonial proceedings with blank stares.
At the far end opposite the courtyard, past a small cluster of wood and stone buildings, a village guard makes his rounds. He walks the outer bounds of the settlement beyond the tree line, a thick fur draped around his shoulders, an enormous bow slung low across his back. Several pouches around his waist jostle and bounce with each step he takes across the uneven forest floor.
High above him, the darkened form follows his movements with cool detachment. When the lone guardsman curves right and trudges off out of sight, the soot-rimmed eyes return their vigil to the courtyard and the revelers seated around it.
The children crouch behind the fire, fixing their costumes and fidgeting before their big moment. Most of them have played in the cycle in years past—it has been performed since long before even the eldest in the village were children and played in it themselves. It has gone on for centuries.
“Nervous?” Lia asks.
Jack is shifting from foot to foot. “No, are you?”
Lia smiles serenely and shakes her head no.
Rows of wooden benches encircle the footworn stage and every seat is full, the village having nearly outgrown itself. Olen steps to the front of the spirited congregation and moves to quiet them, his wild shock of gray hair lit like a halo by the roaring bonfire.
“Been a good year,” he says. “One I’m thankful to have seen.”
The small audience stills itself, rapt with attention as Olen’s grizzled old voice cracks over the fire. He dispatches the village business, carrying on about the new irrigation system and giving brief salutations to those who helped in its construction. He calls out the new mothers and fathers, holding their little bundles close for warmth. Small, pink faces peer out and gaze at the fire like solemn little monks. When these niceties are complete, Olen lowers his gaze.
A drummer boy beats a taut, hide-wrapped barrel and a low bass rumble vibrates the ground. Two men traverse the clearing carrying long wooden poles, which they mount before the fire. Stretched between the uprights is a patchwork stitching of hides, glowing amber, backlit by the roaring flame.
“Much has been lost,” says Olen, his voice turning grave. “Turned to dust. Gone. The world was not always like this. Almost every people I’ve encountered in my long years has told a story of terrible fire and destruction, and the tellings run common. I’ve dreamt since I was a boy that someday we’d know why. But for now, at least, this is all we have… and all we know.”
Behind the luminescent screen of animal skins, silhouetted by fire, a wiry girl named Jeneth rises and begins rhythmically stirring her arms through the air. The shadow she casts is enormous next to her slight body, a spectral apparition summoning forth the Ages, her limbs disproportionate, her figure warped and flickering.
Two lines of children snake slowly around the fire, moving with a crouching skip-step, and the lines join at the center to form a circle. The circle splits and becomes a figure eight. The figure eight splits and becomes two loops, and they in turn split again and suddenly there are four small circles churning like gears, the children in their regalia marching in step with the drum swell.
They take out lengths of colored ribbon and begin passing them back and forth, hand over hand and above their heads, and when they step out to the far reaches of the dirt-floor stage, the entwined ribbons form complex patterns of eclipsing diamonds. Jeneth writhes ecstatic, her shadow looming—the dance of civilizations coming together and falling apart.
A little boy stumbles and loses his ribbon and the corners of his mouth curl up sheepishly as he runs to retake his position and catch up to the steps. In the furthest row of benches the boy’s parents grin wide and a hushed giggle lights through the crowd.
The rhythm turns warlike and severe. Each cell pulls its thread from the geometric vector and the children begin to bind themselves with the ribbons. Jeneth is frozen behind the screen of skins, her image wavering, ethereal in the dancing flames.
A reed flute sings an eldritch melody as young Haylen steps tenderly forward. She wears straps of hide around her limbs and torso. There are bones, animal bones, tied to the straps—ribs where her ribs would be, femurs and fibulas attached to her leggings, skinny bones covering her arms. Her face is painted in a grotesque skull masque. She is Famine, Sickness, and Death. In the audience, the levity fades and their moods become serious. Tears well in some of their eyes as Death pirouettes in wide meandering arcs through the bound ranks, taking their small hands from the bindings and gently kissing them, and at her very touch they shrivel and thrash in the dirt.
Three boys enter, Jack in front with two behind, and they bear their makeshift flames high above their heads, rippling and twisting them with violent arm motions. The triad breaks and they sweep the brightly painted palm fronds across the ground and swirl them back through the air, a frenetic firestorm, chaos and destruction that sends the beleaguered chorus scratching and crawling across the ground. Jeneth appears now as just a small dark mound, her back arched over and her head buried in her hands.
The deafening riot of drums ceases abruptly, the calamitous Fire recedes, and the night is still—even the forest seems rendered silent, suspended momentarily as if time’s very passage has stopped. The stage is empty. The cowering mystic form behind the screen undulates, adagio, like a faint and laboring heartbeat.
Lia steps to center stage, unhurried, and begins her dance in silence. She is draped with garlands of lush greenery and wreaths of pressed flowers. Graceful and gorgeous, her tiny ballet sweeps across the vast open space as the reed flute pours out a few sparse notes. Jeneth is ascending now, the pulse of her movements growing stronger with each beat. Lia is lost in her dance, elegantly rising on one arched foot and spinning urgently and perfectly, then crouching and sprinting lithely across the dirt stage and soaring into the air, spinning and spinning.
The shadowed demigoddess on the backlit rawhide is again reaching skyward, conjuring new creation from some mysterious deep. They dance in ecstasy as the bass drum booms and the vibrant music swells.
The villagers rise to their feet and step down from the raised seating, joining Lia and the other children who are running out from behind the bonfire. They dance and drink and shout and laugh in the golden amber firelight for what feels like eternity.
The Nezra observe this impassively. Their espionage of the village has lasted well more than a year’s time. This is the night of their choosing because it is the longest night of the year and the village will be gone to inebriated slumber before sunrise. They have watched long enough to know in which cabins the strongest and most powerful men live. They will strike these homes first.
The skeletal remnants of a tremendous feast lay strewn across the tables of the dining hall, and the adults are carrying their fattened stomachs across the long chamber to a small tavern at the end, still serving wine in fired clay mugs. After pleading their parents’ permission, the children run onto the largely deserted promenade to play forts.
When the elaborate ritual of team selection is complete, they scamper off to their respective forts and begin their gruesome campaigns of infiltration and murder. Jack huddles with Jeneth, Braylon, and a few others to conspire and plot strategy. Braylon, the oldest, takes charge.
“We have to spread out to the edges and get around behind them,” he says, scratching arcs and arrows on the ground with a bent stick. “Aiden and Phoebe cut up the middle, Jack and Creston take the left side, me and Jeneth will go right. Everybody else stay here and guard the fort.”
Jack and his partner, a slight boy of only seven, creep down the side of a cabin, stepping slowly and softly. They flatten their backs against the rough wood and peek around to see if the coast is clear. They wait for a shadowed form to pass on the far side of the promenade then scurry across the short expanse. Creston is killed immediately. William leaps from his hiding place in the bushes and slaps his frail back, before wheeling and searching for Jack. He is too late. Jack counters behind, then lunges and swats William on the shoulder, smiling broadly. Creston and William slink off to the dead pile.
Alone and deep in enemy territory, Jack forges ahead. He is on his hands and knees, moving toward the far edge of the cul-de-sac, where he will double back and wage a surprise attack. Prone on the ground, he elbows his way across the exposed space to shelter again behind a darkened hut. He is making good progress, crawling forward, when something lands hard on his back and knocks the wind out of him.
“You’re dead,” Lia whispers, rolling off onto the dewy grass and giggling hysterically. She looks like a little crazy person.
“Lia…”
“Sorry.”
Jack dusts himself off and starts to head toward the dead pile.
“Wait,” says Lia, “come over here.”
She takes his hand and leads him away from the cabins and the game, toward the small group of buildings situated at the end of the promenade. They pass by the metalworks shop, where tools and arrowheads are fired and hammered, a potter’s shack with its rough stone kiln, and across a thin gravel lot they come to an open door—thick wood beams frame the entrance, aligned perfectly with the village’s centerline. From this doorway it is a straight shot down the middle of the promenade to the bonfire and courtyard at the other end. They look down the way and see a few parents and elders making their way back from the dining hall, turning in for the night. There is a quick shriek from the murkiness behind a row of cabins and Jeneth walks sullenly onto the promenade to join the dead pile.
Lia pulls Jack to the edge of the door. Usually this building is boarded and locked, but on special nights like this it is kept open, so the villagers can roam here and be reminded. Inside it is gloomy with sconcelight. Jack takes up one of the torches mounted outside and they cross the threshold.
It is a museum of sorts, a shrine to lost days, with a large gallery containing artifacts uncovered from under and around the village, and a more intimate room in back that houses the reliquary. Lia huddles close to Jack’s side, he can feel her trembling. He flashes the torch along an array of small mementos mounted on thick boards, smoothed and polished. Many coins, pendants missing their chains, bits and pieces left from the inner workings of machines long since decayed. Their faces are graven as they walk slowly and look with reverence upon each object, the profound antiquity spellbinding the two.
There is a colossal metal gear, half as tall as Jack, with teeth that are flecking off, its surface peeling, various shards of all shapes and sizes, a rectangular case, small enough to be held in hand, made of some strange composite, with its face gone revealing a corroded jumble inside, its purpose unknown—more coins, and a collection of small statues, some of worn stone, some of metal. Jack and Lia scan the menagerie of objects looking for one in particular, an artifact they found together just outside the village only last year when they were scavenging and playing in the forest.
“There it is.”
She plucks it off the shelf and turns it gingerly in her hands. A small gold-plated statue of a tree, growing up out of a heavy base, with raised lettering along the bottom that reads Big Sur. More writing underneath, scratched and indecipherable. They guessed it must have been the name of some very special tree. She remembers their excitement when the loose dirt fell away and they knew they had found something more than a simple rock. They washed the muck off in a shallow crick and ran back to the village to show their parents, screaming madly. She sets it delicately back on the ledge and twirls off into the gloom.
“You were good Fire tonight, Jack.”
“Thanks. Your dance was perfect.”
She smiles.
Jack moves down the wall, casting the torch’s glow on a display of metal plates, scoured clean of their markings by the passage of ruthless years. Only one bears writing, tight block script indented on the surface. Part No. 837503. He stares intently at the inscription, as if some deeper hidden meaning will manifest itself.
“What do you think happened to them?” Lia asks.
“Who?”
“The fallen.”
“They burned.”
“But what made them burn?”
Jack is silent for a long moment, brooding. “I don’t know.”
They have heard stories about how things used to be, but not much. They have been told that men had mastered the skies with metal wings, and that everywhere there were lights shining down from tall glass buildings even more enormous than the giant redwoods surrounding their village. They have been told that people starved in such droves that the numbers become abstract and surpass the limits of their understanding, and that the world burned fiercely and sickness scourged the land. It is impossible to know how much of this is true, or if it is just the stuff of myth and legend.
The next exhibition is Jack’s favorite. Since an early age he has gone on the village’s hunting expeditions, learning the craft, though he has yet to score a kill. His eyes gleam as he inspects the old worn tool before him, the wooden stock rotted and fallen away, but the barrel, trigger and bolt handle still intact, though sallow with age. It is cold to the touch, and he runs his fingers down the length of the rough metal cylinder. He comprehends this, grasps its purpose. It was used to shoot holes in animals so you could feed your family.
He moves to the next installation, similar, but altogether more menacing. It is immense, far larger than the other specimen, and of a metal that shows less corrosion. The inner workings are jammed with rot but it is remarkably intact, its barrel extending from a long tarnished cylinder dotted with perfectly round holes, its stock solid and heavy. This machine was used to shoot holes in people, the elders have told him.
“Jack, bring the torch.”
She is standing by a door along the back wall, leading to the reliquary. Decades ago, when the village expanded its first small gardens to create the planting fields they have today, their tools kept striking worn stone blocks buried just beneath the surface of the soil. A graveyard. What few remains they found were reinterred at their own small cemetery a short walk from the village, but the stones were brought here. Jack and Lia hold hands as they enter the cramped and musty chamber, firelight jerking and twitching off the ominous stone facades.
Many in the village have old names. Jack moves to the end of the row to find the gravestone that bears his namesake and reads its dimpled and worn carvings.
JACK W. HANFIELD
2071 - 2213
May His Soul Find Peace
His fingers trace lightly across the surface of the gravestone. Next to him Lia is shivering, gooseflesh rising on her thin bare arms. Footsteps click in the main room. Lumps of fear rise in their throats and Lia lets out a short gasp.
“Ahh, here’s our two lead players now,” exclaims Llyde, Jack and Lia nearly jumping out of their skins. “You both did a fine job tonight, I thought. You’re quite the little dancer there, Lia.”
“Thank you.”
“We were just looking around, Llyde.”
“I trust you. I like coming here myself. Makes you wonder what else is out there, buried.” His vision drifts off, momentarily lost in thought. “I do need to lock up though. And your parents are looking for you out there.”
They bid Llyde goodnight and move outside, replacing the torch in its holder as they leave. They can hear their parents calling their names from down the way.
“Jaaack… Liiiaaa…”
“Coming,” they shout back, and trot off to find their parents talking down by the entrance of Lia’s cul-de-sac.
“There you two are—we thought you’d wandered off into the woods, we were about to go looking,” says Marni. “Time to turn in. Goodnight, Jack.” She bends and gives him a hug. “Goodnight, Elora.”
“Night, Marni. Come on, big Jack, let’s go.”
Jack and his mother walk through the empty promenade and onto the dirt path to their cabin. They say their goodnights and settle in, Elora sleeping behind a partitioned area in back, and Jack lying down on a straw mat in the front room. He pulls his fur coverings tighter against the deepening morning chill and falls fast asleep, dreaming of an Age when they rode enormous metallic birds into the sky and lived in high towers that touched the very clouds themselves.
In the last hour of darkness before dawn, the Nezra descend from the trees. The forward scout is the first down, waiting for the night guard to stroll by below, then dropping silently through the air and landing on his back. He slices Llyde’s throat before they hit the ground and slaps a quick hand over his mouth to mask the death moans. When Llyde is still, the man rises and removes a small whistle, which he sounds out once.
In the surrounding forest, the darkness itself seems to advance as the Nezra move forward in stealth. They enter the village. There are dozens of them, bare-skinned except for the cloths wrapped around their waists, shin-high leather boots, and belts, worn like sashes over their shoulders, with various implements attached. They move like shadows, each warrior a black hole unto himself, capable it seems of collapsing all matter and substance down into eternal annihilation and then blinking out of existence.
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.