The Refuge Song (21 page)

chapter 24

She sat heavily on the bench. “Just before they came for him, he was in a bad mood, but that wasn't unusual. He'd come across a stash of stuff, the week before. Bought it, found it, or nicked it—he didn't say, and I didn't ask. He'd thought at first he was on to a good thing—thought it might be worth something for a change. But then he said it turned out to be nothing—just papers. Hard to sell, at least to Omegas. He couldn't read, himself—like most of us. I tried to teach him a bit, but he was never patient enough. Once, he might have tried to sell the papers to Alphas—they're just as curious about the Before as we are. He used to have a few Alpha contacts who traded with him from time to time. But it'd been years since he'd dealt with any of them. Since the drought years, and all the new Council reforms, you couldn't trust them not to turn you in for breaking the taboo. So he was having trouble shifting these papers. That's all I knew.”

“You never saw them?”

“I told you. I'd never have let him bring something like that into this house. At first, I thought the papers must've been in the storehouse. Thought the Council must have got them, before they burned it. But then I learned that they'd tortured him. And I remembered how they turned this place inside out. So I thought of the Kissing Tree.”

I looked at her blankly.

“He found it when he was a teenager,” she went on. “We used to go there when we first met. I was living in a boardinghouse. Joe had the storehouse, but Greg was always hanging about there, under our feet. There wasn't ever much privacy. So he used to take me to the Kissing Tree.

“It's a huge tree, and hollow on the inside. Somewhere private, and out of the weather, at least.” She didn't look embarrassed—instead, for the first time since I'd returned to New Hobart, she gave me her old grin. “Joe even put up a little shelf. We used to keep candles there, and matches, a blanket. Even after we were married and I'd taken over running this place, we went there sometimes. Used to take a bit of a picnic, grab a moment away from the kids.” She exhaled slowly, making her way back through the years that had passed since then. “We hadn't been there for ages, when they took him. Years and years. But it was our secret, that place. Just the two of us knew about it. And I know he used to keep stuff there sometimes, if he had something that he didn't want the Council patrols to get wind of. Or sometimes if he didn't want to give Greg a cut of something.”

“Where is it?”

“In the forest, south of here.”

I sat down beside her on the bench, head down, picturing those blackened stumps.

“Don't take it so hard,” Elsa said. “You didn't burn the whole forest down. And even if the tree's gone, I don't even know for sure that there was anything hidden there.”

“You never checked?” I said.

“Haven't you been listening to me?” Elsa said. “I saw them take him, and I found out what they did to him.” She shook her head slowly. “The only reason I'd ever have gone within a mile of that place would be to burn the tree down myself, and anything in it.”

Ω

Zoe was still waiting outside, and she came with us to the tithe collector's office, to tell Piper and the others. They insisted that we take a small guard of resistance soldiers with us to the forest. There'd been no sign, yet, of Council troops massing close to the town, but we were taking no chances. At the southern gate, on the Ringmaster's orders, the soldiers issued us with horses. Zoe had to help me mount, and I braced my broken arm against my ribs, but couldn't stop my sharp intake of breath as she boosted me into the saddle. Elsa had never ridden before, so she sat behind me, clutching me tightly around the waist.

It had been three days since the battle, and our troops had gathered the bodies from where they'd fallen, but the earth was frozen solid and refused our dead, and there was no time for burials, anyway. When we rounded the hillock behind which we'd sheltered during the attack, I saw the mound of bodies, horses and humans alike. The snow was a map of death, red streaks showing where the carcasses had been dragged. Our soldiers had tried to burn the bodies, but the snow and the wet wood had hindered the flames, and most of the corpses were still whole. The snow had stopped them from rotting, I guessed, as well as burning—there was none of the rancid scent of decay. Instead, just the raw tang of blood, overlaid with the richness of charred flesh. Near the edge of the piled bodies, a fox, emboldened by its feast, stood watching us. He was not twenty feet from where our horses passed. I tried not to look at his red muzzle.

“Simon ordered the bodies dragged there,” said Zoe. “It was the best option. Apart from anything else, it'll make it harder for the Council to use the hillock for cover if they mount an attack.”

All I could think of were Zach's words:
What are you offering them? You're offering war. Thousands will die.

I couldn't see any of the white-shrouded bodies that Elsa and I had prepared. “What about the children?” I said.

“They'll be burned,” said Zoe. “The Ringmaster wanted them brought out here with the others. Said it was a waste of time, and oil, to burn the bodies properly. But Piper argued with him. He's got troops building pyres now, just inside the northern wall.”

Piper had saved my life many times, but I had never been as grateful as I was for this gesture.

As we rode on, I stopped myself from staring back at the unburied dead, but the snow beneath us on the plain continued to testify to what had passed there. A spray of blood, next to a broken sword. A boot lying empty. Elsa grabbed my waist more tightly when our horse skidded on a patch of red-edged ice.

It was a relief when the first of the burned trunks began to pierce the snow.

“Nobody's going to be coming here for a picnic for a long time,” said Elsa, as we crossed the threshold of what had been the forest. “The two of you really did a job on this place.”

The forest was only the beginning of the charred trail that I had left on the world. Now there were the half-burned bodies, too, as well as those killed on the island. I wondered whether the Council soldiers had buried them, after the massacre, or if the dead still lay in the courtyard, baring their bones to the sky.

There were the bodies of the children, too, wrapped in white and stacked in the wagons like candles in a drawer. My twin had done this,
not me. But they were bound to me now, as inexorably as he was. Perhaps Zach had been right when he'd said, on the road, that I was poison. It was hard to argue with the bodies that I had left behind me. I was a walking emissary of the deadlands, spreading ash wherever I went.

Elsa's breath was warm on my ear as she continued. “When the forest was burning, even with the wind blowing from the north, we could hardly breathe for days—the smoke was so thick. But it slowed them down, all right. Between that and the protest at the market, we had the diversion we needed to get a few more people out of the town. At least a few that I knew of, wanted by the Council for various things, managed to get out when it all kicked off.” She leaned the side of her face into my back. “When I saw the fire, I knew it was you and Kip.”

It took us a long time to find the tree. Elsa directed us straight to the forest's eastern flank, but the years and the fire had changed the place so much that she couldn't recognize the usual landmarks. We dismounted, leaving the horses with the guards, and wandered together among the black stumps and the few trees that had withstood the flames.

Elsa found it in the end. Before the fire, when the smaller trees around it were still standing, the Kissing Tree would have been less distinctive. Now it stood almost alone, the largest tree within sight. Like the trees that had surrounded it, the top of the tree had burned away, but its thick trunk wasn't so easily purged. We approached it, while the guards fanned out to form a loose circle around us, backs to us as they surveyed the area.

The trunk's surface was scorched, split into charcoal scales. The fire had stripped the tree's height, but not it's width—the three of us, holding hands, couldn't have encircled it. At its base, the sides didn't meet—there was a gap, just a few feet wide and almost as tall. The trunk was a cloak falling open at the front, revealing the hollow within. Once, this would have provided a cave-like shelter, big enough for two people to lie
in, if they curled close to each other. Now everything from six feet up was gone, and the tree's cave was roofless, a ringed space open to the snow.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“They tortured my husband, Cass, and killed him. They drowned all my children, and killed Nina.” She gave a shrug and a small shake of her head. “There's nothing a burned-down tree can do to hurt me.”

Zoe dropped to all fours and peered through the gap in the tree. She crawled inside and took several minutes there, craning around to survey the whole space. “If Joe left anything in the tree itself, it's not here now, thanks to your stunt with the fire,” she called. She backed out and stood, dusting her knees. “If he'd left something on the shelf, it's gone now. No sign of the shelf at all. The whole trunk's charred, inside and out.”

“So we dig,” I said. I dropped to my knees. I could use only my left arm. The snow and the top layer of dirt shifted easily, but within an inch or two my fingernails were snagging on frozen ground.

Elsa sighed as she knelt next to me. “If it's any consolation, Joe was too lazy to bury anything properly. If there's anything here, at least it won't be buried deep.”

Zoe came to my other side, and the three of us dug together. The gap was too narrow, and we got in one another's way, and the icy soil was tightly packed. After the first few minutes my left hand was so chilled that I couldn't feel my fingers anymore. It took us nearly an hour to clear a hole a foot deep, and about as wide.

My chilled fingertips didn't feel the trunk when at last we reached it, but I heard the different sound that our scraping made. The shriek of our nails on rusted tin.

When we finally dug it free, it took all three of us to maneuver the trunk out of the hole. It was big—at least three feet wide and two feet deep—and so heavy that I feared the contents must be totally waterlogged. The metal had lost any polished smoothness that it might once
have had—it was furred with rust, an ochre and green patina that rasped beneath our fingers when we brushed the last twigs and dirt from the top. There was no lock, but rust had sealed the lid closed. It took Zoe a few minutes of levering with a knife, and one well-aimed kick, before the lid sprung open an inch.

I rocked back on my heels, and pulled Zoe back with me.

“Let Elsa look first,” I said.

“Don't worry,” Elsa said. “I'm not expecting any love letters. I know my Joe—this'll be a stash of contraband, and nothing to do with me.”

The top of the trunk was clear of soil now, but she brushed it once again, more slowly this time. Then she lifted back the lid, which grated all the way, a husky sigh.

The trunk was crammed full of papers. The stacks of loose pages had merged together with mildew and age. I wondered if that was why I hadn't sensed the trunk beneath us, while we were digging—whether the mildew, rust, and water had consumed it so completely that it felt indistinguishable from the earth around it.

Elsa peeled off a page from the top. Damp had thickened it so that it crackled when it bent.

She read out loud, speaking haltingly as she navigated the unfamiliar words: “Year 1, Oct 23.
Memorandum (14b) for the Ark Interim Government: Security Protocols.”

“Hell on earth,” said Zoe. “We need to get a cart out here, and take this stuff back to Piper. Now.”

chapter 25

We sent one of the guards back to the town for a cart. It was dark by the time we'd hauled the chest back to New Hobart and unloaded it at the tithe collector's office. Concealing our find from the Ringmaster wasn't an option—his soldiers were among the troops with us in the forest, and manning the gates of the town. But when we were all gathered in the meeting room, I saw how his top lip crept up in distaste when I opened the chest.

“I don't even want to touch this stuff,” he said, holding back slightly as the rest of us drew closer to the trunk.

“Elsa's husband didn't die from touching these papers,” I said. “He died because your Council had him tortured to death. If you don't want to know what's in here, then stay out of our way.”

Piper lifted out the top sheet, and read it out loud. He had to pause over some of the strange words, and at sections when the paper had succumbed to mold, or simply crumbled away.

Yr. 1, Nov. 24. MEMORANDUM (14b) FOR ARK INTERIM GOVERN­MENT: SECURITY PROTOCOLS

. . . and preserving the security of the Ark remains our first priority. However, the condition of survivors on the surface (particularly the percentage of survivors whose retinal damage has left them effectively blind [65 percent—see report from Expedition 2]), allows us to conclude that the current security measures are adequate . . .

“It can't be real,” the Ringmaster said. We'd told him about Sally's Ark paper, but I understood his incredulity. Our whole world was built on the ashes of the Before. It seemed inconceivable that any part of the Before could have survived the blast, even if only for a while, was hard to come to terms with.

“How the hell did Joe get hold of all this?” Zoe said, crouching by the trunk and lifting out more of the papers. “He wasn't any kind of explorer, by the sounds of it. Not exactly the type to discover this Ark himself.”

“He never went farther than the market towns within a few days' travel of here,” Elsa said. “Not in the twenty years I knew him.”

Piper shrugged. “Someone got those papers out of the Ark. Whoever stumbled upon the Ark first—perhaps even before the Council found it. Somewhere along the way these papers got lost, or stolen. They probably changed hands—who knows how many times, or whether the people who had the papers could even read them. Until finally they ended up with a low-level chancer like Joe. My guess is he had no idea what he'd stumbled onto.”

“He must've shown some of the papers to someone,” I said, “when he was trying to fence the stuff. Someone who realized their importance —and they told the Council.”

“It doesn't matter how he found it, or how he was discovered,” the Ringmaster said. He had stepped farther from the chest. “What good can come of it? What good ever came out of the Before? The one thing that we know for certain about these people is that they, and their machines, destroyed the world. They brought about all of this.” His sweeping arm might have been intended to indicate the broken world beyond the walls. The rubble fields, the wreckage of taboo towns. The deadlands to the east. But we all knew what he really meant, when he spoke about the blighted world: us.

He went on: “I freed this town because I wanted to uphold the taboo and stop the machines from being resurrected. What can this Ark offer us apart from more machines?”

“You're scared,” said Piper. “Too afraid of the machines to think of what it could mean to us, if we find the Ark.”

“I am scared,” the Ringmaster said. He looked around at us all, one by one. “If you knew what I knew, you'd be scared, too. You should be grateful for the taboo. We all should. If your twin didn't have some idea of how much people feared the machines, he'd have done more than build the tanks. Even when I first met him, when he'd just come to Wyndham and hadn't even called himself the Reformer yet, he was already talking about some of the things they used to have, in the Before—machines and weapons that you can't even begin to imagine. He's always been curious about the Before. Think what you're doing, when you want to start poking around among this taboo stuff. If it weren't for the taboo, the Reformer's soldiers would've come after you in vehicles without horses, and a hundred times faster. They'd have overrun us at New Hobart with weapons that can kill a squadron of men half a mile away. You think he hasn't done his best to find these things out, and re-create them? Most of it he can't build again; it was all destroyed. The relics he's tracked down are incomplete. He used to
talk a lot about fuel, and other materials he couldn't get hold of. But he knows such difficulties aren't the only obstacle. It's the taboo. If he came out of Wyndham tomorrow riding on some kind of electrical carriage, he'd be lynched. People wouldn't stand for it—the fear of the machines is too strong.” I remembered how Piper had paled when he stood in the shadow of the tanks; how even Zoe had moved warily around the hanging wires and the pipes. “Knowing about the tanks is what's driven half the army over to me,” the Ringmaster said. “People won't stand for the machines, not yet—and harnessing that fear is the only thing that gives us a chance to stand against your twin and the General.”

“You're right that the machines are dangerous,” I said. “But it's more dangerous to ignore this. The Council wouldn't have cracked down so hard on Joe if they didn't have some idea of the significance of the papers. Xander said that there are people in the Ark again, wherever it is. I'd bet my life that Zach and the General have found the Ark, probably long ago. The papers in the trunk would be only a fraction of what the Ark must've held, and they're important enough to keep the Council searching.” I waved at the trunk that sat open before me. “There could be maps of Elsewhere, in here, or of the Ark itself. Designs for weapons, maybe, or machines and medicines that could help Omegas. Who knows what else.”

“Exactly.” The Ringmaster spoke over me. “You're messing with things that you can't understand.”

“She understands more than you know,” growled Sally. “And you'd understand more if you let her speak.”

I tried to give my words the same certainty that I'd always envied in Piper and Zoe. “We can't stop Zach and the General unless we know what they're doing,” I said.

“I'm the one whose troops are standing between this town and certain defeat,” he said. My voice had been rising as we argued; his remained low and steady. It was more menacing than if he'd shouted. “Without my soldiers, you'd be overrun in no time. Tanked, by the same machines that you want to seek out. The soldiers have followed me because they know I'm making a stand to protect them against the machines. If I betray that trust, we lose their loyalty, and New Hobart will fall.”

“There could be knowledge in this trunk that could change everything,” I said. “Not just the kind of change you're used to thinking of, like a different ruler for the Council, or even a more merciful system of refuges and tithes. I mean real change. A chance to find out what the Before really was, and what they could do. Whether Elsewhere exists, and whether they do things differently there. The kind of thing that could change everything, forever. The kind of change that might have saved your wife and your children.”

He stepped forward, and grabbed my wrist. “Nothing's going to save them. How dare you even bring them into it?”

Piper and Zoe had both sprung forward, and I heard knives drawn, a sound like flints being struck. I kept my eyes fixed on the Ringmaster's. I was thinking of Elsa's words, in the holding house kitchen:
there will always be more children.

“You're right,” I said. “Nothing can save them. But there are other wives, other husbands. Other children not born yet. The question is whether you're too afraid of knowledge to give them a chance of a different world.”

For a long time he kept holding my wrist. Then, with a shove, he pushed me away.

“Take the papers. Search them. But I expect a full report of everything that you find.”

Ω

. . . Now we have reached Yr. 20, there can be no more deluding ourselves. The Ark's stated aim, prior to the detonations, of gathering the most distinguished in their respective fields, has inevitably resulted in a population of advanced age. There are now 1,280 people inside the Ark of whom fewer than 20% are of breeding age. Since the detonation, there have been only 348 births, more than 70% of which occurred in the first decade. It is self-evident that there is no viable breeding population within the Ark. While our supplies will last for many further decades, and the nuclear power cells will outlast us all, the psychological effects of continued subterranean life are continuing to manifest in increasingly troubling ways. What, then, is the purpose in preserving the Ark's isolation from the surface, if the protected population cannot even offer any realistic prospect of perpetuating human existence?

was at its inception intended to be for the preservation of all people, not to provide a shelter for a privileged few. Even now, electricity for the Pandora Project is preserved at the expense of all other priorities. We, the undersigned, reiterate our hope that the Interim Government will refocus its priorities on the pressing needs of the survivors outside the Ark, and indeed those within it, rather than continuing to prioritize the . . . 

Ω

We had the trunk hauled to Elsa's place, where I could work in peace and away from the constant interruptions of the tithe collector's office, where sentries and couriers came and went both day and night. I was glad, too, to be back with Elsa, although Piper and Zoe insisted on posting a sentry at the holding house door, and another in the alley
behind the courtyard. I didn't object—I was just relieved to be away from the tithe collector's office, and the web of allegiances and suspicions that filled those oversize rooms. Simon, Piper, Sally, and the Ringmaster presided there, interviewing scouts, defusing disputes between their troops, and arguing over our next steps. And even in the hubbub of the meeting room, I was aware that the Ringmaster watched me constantly.

It was a respite, too, to be away from the mutterings of Xander. He never troubled me deliberately—indeed, he showed little interest in anyone but Sally—but when he drooled, or babbled about
The Rosalind
coming back, I found myself scrutinizing my own hands for signs of his twitching movements. I noticed that Zoe, too, avoided him, and I couldn't bring myself to blame her, knowing how I myself flinched from him, too.

At the holding house I moved into the dormitory, where there was room to spread out the documents, and attempted to arrange them into some kind of order. I started by laying the papers out on the empty beds; soon the floor, too, was claimed, the documents covering every surface as if the snow from the courtyard had crept inside. I kept one bed clear, for sleeping in, but had to pick my way to it through an obstacle course of papers. My arm still bound in a sling, I spent my days and most of my nights squatting on the floor, bent over the pages.

Elsa came to the dormitory when her work at reassembling the holding house permitted, and sat with me for a while as I read. She'd never been to school, and although over the years she'd taught herself the basics of reading, it was a painstaking process for her. These papers made reading doubly difficult: each word had to be extricated from the mess of mold and holes, so that it was a process of piecing together rather than reading. After a few initial attempts to read them, she stopped trying. She still came to sit with me, though. She would take up one of the stacks of
paper, coax apart the mildewed pages, and then hold them on her lap. Always she'd been brisk and busy when children had filled the holding house. But in the paper-strewn dormitory she was still. Her hands, red and scratched from scrubbing and sweeping the trashed building, were motionless for once, as she held the papers that had led Joe to his death.

While she sat with me, I worked in silence. The things that we had in common—the children, Nina, and Kip—were also the things that we couldn't bear to discuss. But we'd learned to navigate each other's silences, and there was a comfort in those quiet hours together in the dormitory, or the meals eaten in the cold kitchen.

Most of the time, though, I was alone, with the papers and my visions for company. It was the variety of the documents that made them so frustrating. Sometimes I was able to piece together a few fragments that seemed to belong together, even if they weren't consecutive pages. But more often the pages seemed to be gathered from completely unrelated documents. Some were ripped in half, while others had succumbed to damp, the creeping black mold hard to distinguish from the writing itself. On the island, I'd seen the children work at untangling fishing nets. The process of salvaging the words from the damaged papers felt the same: a disentangling. Even among those that were intact, there were often words, or whole passages, that I couldn't understand. But I could figure out enough to sort them roughly into different piles. Many were labeled
report
or
memorandum
,
appendix
or sometimes
briefing paper
,
and used the same dry, convoluted language as the document that Sally had found all those decades ago. Many others, page after page, were simply lists of numbers, or diagrams that I couldn't decipher.

Even the paper itself was unfamiliar. Except where the mildew had furred it, it was very smooth under my touch, and so thin the writing on the other side was visible when I held it up to the light. The pages left
a fine dust on my fingers, and some of them disintegrated in my hands. Those that looked on the point of falling apart I had to transcribe anew, even the columns of numbers and symbols that meant nothing to me. It was clumsy work, with my left hand.

A few of the papers were dated. Whatever the date had been before the blast had been rendered irrelevant, along with everything else. These papers started at Year 1, and the latest date that I found was Year 58. But even among those that were undated, it was often possible to trace the trajectory of the years by the form the documents took. The earliest were printed, the letters smaller and more uniform than any printing I'd seen before. But no documents dated Year 43 or after were printed—from then on, the people of the Ark had reverted to handwriting. Often, papers had been reused, the margins and spaces in the earlier printed documents crammed with added writing, handwritten letters and numbers jostling one another all the way to the edge of the page. Each page told a double story.