The Last Escape Read online

  Jingo nodded slowly. "Many men have used the knowledge I gave them to profit from their fellow townsfolk. Some have been burned at your pyres for sharing too much of what they know, for their heresy. Others have died en route. As you know, the journey to this place and back to Brighton is dangerous."

  "Of course." Ivory nodded.

  "Unfortunately, the seeds of knowledge I plant in the minds of my students doesn't flower in Brighton. The knowledge always dies in those with whom I share it."

  That saddened Ivory, making him contemplate his own fate. At the same time, he felt quick with his wits, fast with his feet, and remarkably skilled with a bow. How could any demon hope to sink his teeth into his flesh? Ivory asked, "Am I like the others?"

  "You are unusual."

  "How so?"

  "You learn more quickly than they did. You understand complexities with less effort. If your uncle had been able to wrest you from Muldoon's overbearing protection at an earlier age, who knows what you could have learned?"

  So many questions came out of nearly everything Jingo said. "Can I still learn? I'm learning now. I'm bringing more books back to Brighton to read. I always do."

  "And you always return them when you are done. You are a fine young man, Ivory."

  "But," Ivory thought through his conclusion, "because I became your student at too late of an age, I'll never reach my intellectual potential. Is that what you're saying?"

  Jingo nodded.

  "I'll disprove that assumption."

  Jingo chuckled. "You may, Ivory. You just may."

  "How do I compare to the other students you have right now?"

  "I have no other students now."

  Ivory asked, "How many students have you had in the past?"

  "Through the years, perhaps as many as a hundred."

  The number was much larger than Ivory would have guessed. "How many of them live in Brighton? Can you give me their names? Can I meet them?"

  "They are all dead."

  "All one hundred? How is that possible? Did they all go to the pyre?"

  "They died as I said they died."

  "You can't know that for sure."

  "I can."

  "How?"

  "Old age."

  "Were none of them as young as me?" Ivory asked.

  "Most of them were much younger."

  "Then how is old age possible? Most of them must still be alive."

  Jingo turned away from the sky and took a long, evaluative look at Ivory. "You've been coming to me for four years. During that time, you were my only student. Before you, I taught your uncle and he was the only one. Before him, I taught your grandfather and while I taught him, he was my only student. It was in the time of your grandfather's father that I taught more than one student at a time."

  "What? How is that possible? How old are you?"

  Jingo laughed. "As intelligent as you are, you sometimes lack in curiosity, Ivory. Boys typically ask that question well before their seventeenth year."

  Ivory felt the sting of the seemingly poor measure of some part of his intellect. "Are you going to answer?"

  "I'll warn you: you won't believe me."

  "Why do you say that?"

  Jingo laughed again. "Nobody ever does."

  "The answer, please."

  Jingo paused long enough to let the drama build and said, "I'm three hundred and forty-three years old."

  "You're right." Ivory shook his head with a laugh. "I don't believe you."

  Chapter 3: Blackthorn

  Three boxes sat on the long table in Blackthorn's dining hall, each constructed of a rich reddish colored wood. Inlaid in the lid of each was a rectangle of a different pale yellow wood, with a grain that laid a pleasing pattern of light brown waves. The sides of the boxes were cut in a pattern of rectangles of red and yellow wood that gave the illusion of lines of cubes piled at angles. The surface of each was smooth to the touch, perfectly smooth, like a polished blade.

  The boxes were among the few of Blackthorn's possessions that he prized, crafted by the hands of an ancient artisan with skills long since lost to time. They'd been in his family for generations. When Blackthorn was a boy, his mother had the boxes sitting on the mantle above the fireplace. Inside, she saved small treasures that were special to her, but otherwise had no value.

  Blackthorn had emptied the boxes onto the old table in the great room of his father's house on the day she died. Of all the useless, sentimental items inside, the only one that Blackthorn had been able to put a story behind was a lock of hair, his own, taken from him by her when he was a baby. That is what his mother had told him.

  Blackthorn's face hardened as he thought back to the night he'd learned about the other trinkets.

  He recalled Uncle Lawrence, wriggling against the ropes that tied him to a chair in front of the fireplace. At Blackthorn's prompting, Uncle Lawrence had revealed the trivial stories that had turned each trinket into a treasure in the childhood heart of Blackthorn's eventual mother. At the conclusion of each tale, Blackthorn tossed the cherished bauble into the hearth, watching the old man's eyes brim with tears, proof of tiny lacerations on a liar's heart, soon to be accompanied by the pyre's pain on old, gray skin.

  Uncle Lawrence was a traitor. And so was Blackthorn's mother.

  On that night, the real General Blackthorn had been dead for just a year. The boy Blackthorn was growing into the role of dominating the council, holding the people together to fight the demons, to fortify the walls, to tend the crops, and to maintain order. All the while, his silver-tongued uncle had been reaching into his fat pockets and buying favor from the merchants in town, bending the thoughts of the clergy, and licking his own mother's lips between his lascivious kisses.

  Together, Uncle Lawrence and Blackthorn's mother plotted to take control of the council, to rule the three townships with their weak-minded ideas. Neither of them knew war the way a soldier knows it—from the inside, with blood on his hands and an enemy's guts spilled on his feet. Neither had put their life on war's altar as a sacrifice to the safety of the townships. Neither knew the purity of service. Neither had earned a say in ruling anything beyond their own servants. Both were warts on the township, diseases to be burned away.

  And they were stupid for thinking they were smart enough to outwit him. It was a fatal stupidity.

  Blackthorn's suspicions were born at his father's memorial procession. He noticed then that Uncle Lawrence's touch lingered too long on his mother's tearless cheek, that the desperate look in her eyes was not grief, but longing. Blackthorn kept a vigilant eye on the two thereafter.

  Before the grass had even sprouted in the dirt over his father's grave, his mother and uncle were sneaking through the dark nights to find moments of carnal pleasure. When they started to ask odd questions of the people they thought were their confidants, questions like, "What do you think of the justice that General Blackthorn meted to those barren women today?", or, "Is General Blackthorn the youngest man to ever sit on the council?" Blackthorn knew. He was also astute enough to understand that those seemingly innocuous questions were saying more than they were asking. They said he was young, inexperienced, and cruel. They were bits of bait that his mother and uncle used to fish for like-minded conspirators.

  For a long time, Blackthorn let his mother play the grieving widow in the daylight and act like a barren whore at night. He let her and Uncle Lawrence build their ring of collaborators, which unfortunately for them, included more than one spy. Blackthorn believed, or hoped, they'd come around eventually to accept him as their leader.

  They didn't.

  As the months passed, Blackthorn came to see in his mother a brutally ambitious woman, who saw herself not just an equal to men, but as some kind of fairy tale queen, above all men, and she seemed to have no scruples about how to put herself on a throne. The conspiratorial grumblings she sewed in the minds of her collaborators grew into concrete plans, and they eventually chose a day to put their plan into action, to take co
ntrol of Brighton.

  As for Blackthorn, he was to be exiled. Exile had a merciful sound to it, but for most men, exile meant death.

  As Blackthorn pondered the sting of betrayal by his own mother, he thought about leaving Brighton to the loathsome political snakes. He thought about a simple, brave life, thriving in the realm of the beasts, rather than dying at their hands. He longed for the honest simplicity of it.

  It was the memory of his father that kept him in town. He couldn't disrespect his father's work and his father's memory by turning governance of the city over to a conniving uncle and a slut of a mother.

  On the eve of the plot to unseat him, Blackthorn, with a half-dozen loyal men, surprised his uncle and mother in his own father's bed, naked, entwined. While his men dragged his begging uncle downstairs to bind him to the chair before the fire, Blackthorn drew his nicked sword from its scabbard. Each blemish on the blade reminded him of a demon whose cleaving bones marred it. It reminded him of those long days of battle, when he was sure he would die riding at his father's side. It reminded him of that final day when his father had given his life so that this naked whore of a mother could live.

  Blackthorn found in his heart a comforting cold that would be his friend for the rest of his life. It was a coldness that loved rage, one that focused anger into a clear vision of duty, free of pity or remorse.

  With his mother crying, holding a sweat-dampened bed sheet over her breasts, she pleaded, she insisted his eyes were lying to him, she begged forgiveness. All she received in exchange for her false tears was Blackthorn's blade. He cleaved each of her arms as she screamed, then her legs, and last, as she lay there bleeding to death in that bed, he severed her head.

  Blackthorn marched down the stairs, and there, subtly tortured his uncle's soul with the trinkets he threw into the fire. When only ash remained of those keepsakes, and a strong desire to cut out that silver tongue, Blackthorn had one last torture come to mind. He cut off his uncle's penis and shoved it into the man's mouth, forcing him to chew, to taste.

  Then Blackthorn cut out the tongue and ordered his men to take the broken man out into the square and put him on the pyre under the midnight moon.

  Blackthorn didn't need to watch his uncle burn. He had his justice. He had his bloody sword, his bloody knife, and a cold, wet, dead man's tongue in his hand. He lifted the limp, sticky slug of a thing and looked at it for a while, fascinated with its texture and color. He almost threw it in the fire, but dropped it into one of those exquisitely crafted boxes instead. There it stayed, the first in a collection of traitor tongues that, through the years, nearly filled all three boxes.

  Chapter 4: Ivory

  Ivory and Jingo sat in silence for a while as Ivory thought about what Jingo had said. Three hundred and forty-three years old. Was it possible? Ivory had never known Jingo to lie, but so many things Jingo had told him through the years, Ivory simply didn't understand.

  Jingo finally spoke. "Do you remember that book I had you read about biology?"

  Ivory grimaced. That one had been particularly painful. It seemed like every page was written full of words he'd never seen before. Most of the pictures were abstract blots of colors. It was as if he was reading a book about a magical zoo of creatures that could never exist, doing things that made no sense. Ivory nodded.

  Jingo gestured across the horizon. "In ancient times, we had a knowledge of the world that is so far beyond your comprehension that I know it must seem all made up."

  "Sometimes," Ivory admitted.

  "That biology book represented a peek into a body of knowledge that your people have lost completely. That is why it all seemed so foreign to you. Do you recall what you learned about cells?"

  Nodding, and then looking down at his arm as he ran his fingers across his skin, Ivory said, "The book said a body was made up of billions and billions of cells that worked together. It called a person an organism, a community of cells."

  "You recall the pictures?"

  "Yes," said Ivory, remembering how he'd tried to analogize in his mind that a cell was something like a town with all of its own parts working together to make it function. "The pictures were very strange. Hard to believe, even."

  "I assure you," said Jingo, "Every word in that book was true. Perhaps on your next visit, I can prove some of that to you."

  "How?"

  "I know the location of a microscope that still functions and is powerful enough to see a cell."

  "The microscope is a device for seeing very small things?" Ivory asked.

  "Yes."

  "What does all of this have to do with what you said earlier, that you were three hundred and forty-three years old?"

  "Your people know about the red spores that blow on the wind, like some plant pollens in the spring?"

  "Of course." Ivory nodded. "The biannual Cleansings, perhaps the most enduring tradition in the three townships and villages, is based on the red spore. It takes place two weeks after the wind carries the red spore in the spring, and two weeks after the spore blows red in the autumn."

  "Those spores," said Jingo, "they infect men at the cellular level."

  Shaking his head, Ivory said, "But cells are so small they can't be seen. I've seen the red lumps on people before they're burned. Some are as large as a man's fist."

  "Yes," said Jingo, "That is one way the fungus grows in a person. One of the other ways occurs within the cells that make up a human organism. Specifically, the fungus involves itself in the process by which cells replicate. As part of the process, it modifies an enzyme called telomerase. Telomerase manages the length of telomeres and controls how a cell ages."

  Waving his hands and shaking his head, Ivory said, "I remember some of those words, but you're talking over my head."

  Jingo smiled. "Let's simply say that the fungus interferes with the way cells age. It stops them. If cells stop aging, the organism stops aging."

  "That's why you've lived so long?"

  Jingo nodded. He put his hand on one of the large red lumps on his skull. "If these don't consume me one day, I suppose I may live forever."

  "That is why you seem to know so much about so many ancient things," said Ivory. "You were an Ancient?" Ivory stood and looked out over the crumbling city. "You used to live here when…when…"

  "When it was alive?" Jingo finished. "Yes. When a million people lived here, people as normal as you."

  Ivory dropped back down to his seat. "All those stories about men flying through the air, driving on the highways, talking through devices to others far, far away," Ivory looked up at the sky, "going to the moon. All true?"

  "Nearly so."

  "What happened to us?" Ivory asked. Us? It was the first time Ivory had thought of himself as one with the Ancients.

  Jingo waved a hand at the fungal lumps on his head.

  "No," said Ivory. "I don't understand. The Ancients had so much knowledge that the people of Brighton don't have. They had all those weapons. Guns and bombs." Ivory made a few ambiguous hand motions. He still had only the vaguest idea of what those were and what they could do. There seemed to be so many accounts in the stories he'd read, and they all seemed to describe such things differently.

  "The answer is more complicated than you know."

  Ivory said, "I don't need to leave until the morning. Take the whole afternoon and explain it to me if you need that long."

  Chapter 5: Ella

  "I have a sister?" William asked Ella, furrowing his brow in disbelief.

  Ella hardly heard the boy. She scoured the open, battered doorways for a familiar face, hoping she'd see her daughter peering back at her. She wondered whether she'd recognize the girl. How long has it been, Ella? Twelve years? She'd be fifteen now.

  Bray said something, but she barely acknowledged him. Frederick and Jean were dead. Was Melora, too? She dispelled the thoughts racing through her head.

  "Ella! We have to go!" Bray gave up on his warnings, switching to orders and tugging her arm instead.
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  Ella snapped out of her thoughts and stumbled after him, numb and disbelieving. William was at her heels, his questions chasing her like ghosts in the air. Ella stared at the faces of the dead townsfolk, each grisly death a suggestion of how her daughter might've met her end.

  "Hurry," said Bray.

  Ella knew they had to leave. But how could she depart without proof?

  The guilt of leaving Melora with Jean and Frederick gnawed at her soul, each step forcing her to relive the choice yet another time.

  And now she'd never see Melora again.

  The slain stared at her with vacant eyes, offering neither comfort nor condolence.

  When they were halfway to the mouth of the alley, Ella heard voices.

  "This way!"

  Soldiers.

  Her heart jolted. She'd been so preoccupied with finding her daughter that she'd forgotten the danger they were in. William needed her. She needed to be a mother to him. She ripped free of Bray's grasp and scoured the alley. The paved walkway extended for several hundred feet, but there were several doorways close by. Bray raised his sword, preparing to fight, but Ella knew better. Too many feet were pounding the street. Too many gruff voices were shouting and grunting. They were outnumbered.

  "Come on!" she hissed.

  She weaved into another alley and led Bray and William through one of the open doorways. The rank odor of blood filled her nose. Bodies were strewn across the floor. A dead woman clutched a bedroll in clawed hands, as if using it for protection. The townsfolk had been struck without warning. These people were peasants, not soldiers. They were more suited for slaughtering pigs than for slaying men.

  She surveyed the room. The house was similar to her aunt's and uncle's—small and sparse, with a storage room on the right-hand wall. She stepped between the bodies and led her companions to the door on the right wall. She yanked it open.