Exit Kingdom

Wasn’t no chance to. The burns got him first.

Abraham nods. Then the shivers seize him again.

They took my pills, he tells Moses. The ones for my leg.

It don’t matter. We’ll get more. Anything you need.

We goin to the cathedral?

Uh-huh.

Good. I could use a rest from wanderin for a bit.

Moses nods – though he understands now that there are no rests from anything, not really.

*

Back at the citadel, Abraham is rolled away into the back rooms of the medical wing. The old pastor, Whitfield, finds Moses and claps him on the shoulder.

They’ll take care of him, he says. You needn’t worry.

I ain’t worried, Moses says.

You were there, in the assault?

I was.

It was bad, I heard. We had some casualties, but not many.

Uh-huh.

We’ll plant new growth over the burn. It’s something.

It don’t matter. It’s just a symbol.

Don’t disdain a symbol, says Whitfield. In this world, a symbol is the closest we come to magic.

This may be true. Moses is too tired to think very hard on it.

Did you find the girl? Whitfield asks.

Found her and lost her again.

She might have made it?

Could of.

We’ll pray for her recovery in the chapel. But I’ve seen very few women as industrious as she. I have great faith that she’s still out there and may find her way home.

Moses wants to ask him What home is that, Pastor? Instead he just nods, because it is true. The Vestal is as industrious as any. And it’s also true that she’s likely still out there on the wide, long roads of the country, having claimed her divorcement from Moses as just one more gorgeous escape.

*

They clean Abraham’s wound and wrap his leg with sterile bandages. Then they hook him up to an IV and give him something to make him sleep. Moses stays by his bedside, watching his brother’s dozing form, unable to sleep himself – exhausted though he is.

Once Abraham’s eyes flutter open, and he seems to pull himself from sleep as a drowning man surfacing for a brief moment.

Mose?

Yeah. Right here, brother.

Mose, have I still got my leg?

It’s still affixed. The doctors say you’re gonna get restored.

Goddamn miracle baby, ain’t I?

You are at that.

For a moment it looks as though Abraham will nod off again, but he revives himself once again and starts digging around with clumsy fingers on his chest.

Mose?

Yeah.

Here. Take this.

His fingers get under the cloth of the hospital gown they put him in and clutch at something. It’s the yewess bee given him by Albert Wilson Jacks, Moses sees, still attached to its leather shoelace. Moses takes it from him and slips the lanyard over his head.

They got machines here can talk to it. I know they do. Plug it in somewhere and find out what kind of bee it is.

Moses says he will, and then Abraham lies back and shuts his eyes and dives under the surface of wakefulness once more.

Later Moses takes Abraham’s plastic talisman and hands it to Whitfield.

What is it? Whitfield says.

Moses shrugs.

It was give to Abraham. Can you all find out what it does? I’ll be back. I gotta run an errand.

*

He drives back to the valley, where the gasworks have mostly burned themselves out. The ground is charred black, and the structures that still stand are twisted and skeletal. The stink of sulphur is everywhere, and ash blows in the breeze, itself lighter than the snow that is now falling. And so there are two currents of air visible – the one that carries to the ground a speckled white to erase the destruction of man with its own destruction, and the other that blusters upwards the grey, dusty remains of people and things, like the tide that takes souls to heaven.

It is quiet, peaceful, and Moses searches the remains of the valley. He turns over the corpses one by one and looks them in their faces, searching for some sign of the Vestal Amata, dead or alive as she may be.

Some of the dead have risen again, and they struggle to move towards him over the snowy, ashy earth. But their skin is charred black and flaky, and it rustles in the breeze, the flakes of their burned flesh like the leaves on a budding tree in the springtime. A shimmying, fluid quality of death he can’t remember seeing before. One of the dead, man or woman he can’t tell, is a walking skeleton. Its skin has been burned away entirely, a blackened exposed skull with its wide bony grin. And, too, its eyeballs have been boiled out of the sockets, so it finds its way blindly through the wreckage, stumbling pathetically and falling face down into the mud, rising again and smelling its way forwards a few paces.

Moses puts them all down, spending his ammunition indiscriminately to make the valley an entirely quiet, entirely dead place. He puts down the ones who are still walking and examines the others. Rummaging through the wreckage, he finds the bladed cudgel he dropped in order to carry to safety the man he thought was his brother. The cudgel’s handle juts straight upwards like a chiding finger, its head bent and melted into the remains of some fallen tower. He pulls once, twice, at the handle, trying to dislodge the thing, but he is obviously unworthy of this particular Excalibur, as it does not budge – and then he thinks that this is as good a resting place as any for the brutal bladed thing. He continues to look.

Finding nothing, he widens his search, stomping through the base of the tree line where the fire has wilted the evergreens and cooked them all black on one side.

He circles the valley once, and then again higher into the trees. On the third time around he sees something caught in a tree branch, dangling and whipping back and forth in the snowy air. He comes closer and takes it in his hand.

It’s the Vestal’s little wooden cross pendant, the one she wore around her neck, and it’s a sign if it’s anything. He recalls the Pastor Whitfield’s warning not to disdain symbols, and he realizes he does not disdain them at all – though he wishes he knew how to read them. He is illiterate in the language of symbols.

What does the cross mean? That she is alive? That she left it as a breadcrumb for him to follow? That it fell, unknown, from her neck in her escape? Or simply that it was blown off her body in one of the explosions and that she is now part of the dusty ash he breathes into his weary lungs?

Symbols everywhere, and they refuse to be read.

He takes the cross, twining the thin silver chain around his thick, calloused fingers, holding the tiny wooden pendant tight in the meaty palm of his hand. He holds it as though he will never let it go.

Though that, too – the gripping of the cross – that too is a symbol for the speculation of those who know the language.