Chapter 12 The Night Road

They moved at the second hour of the night, and they moved like Petra. The west postern opened on the governor's seal and closed behind them on silence. Lysander had gone ahead through the guard quarters an hour before, and the two guards of the household had been bound with their own belts and gagged with their own scarves and propped against the wall of the granary where they would be found at the dawn count, embarrassed and alive. A man who could take a stockade's watch without a wound and without a death had learned his trade somewhere the arena had not taught it, and Corvinus did not ask where. The column filed out in an order that had been rehearsed at dusk behind the granary rafters, out of sight of the palisade walk. First the lame and the slow, with the children, in a knot that stayed together by touch in the darkness. Then the fit men in a loose skin around the middle, carrying the stores and the water in the order Cassius had written on the back of a ration sheet. Then the rear guard, Maro at its tail, walking backward in the last of the moon with his hand on his sword and his eyes on the settled roofs of the stockade. They made the first rise of the ash line by the third hour. The column said nothing. The column had been taught by a week of buried town and open road that sound carried across ash the way it carried across water, and the discipline of Petra had grown teeth in the month since the first tremor. Mothers carried children who had learned to sleep through motion. Men carried the litters of the wounded without being rotated, because the rotation had been set and the order was the order. Livia walked at the center of the column, and she walked reading the ground. Twice she stopped the head of the line with a raised hand, and the column stopped without a word, and stood in the dark while she put her fingers to the ash at her feet and smelled the air of the vents. The first time she motioned them on after a count of twenty heartbeats. The second time she did not raise her hand again, and she said, low, to Corvinus, "The second mouth is drawing now. The ground drinks it. There is no turning back from the side of the road we have crossed." By first light they had put the coast behind them and Catania behind them and the pens of the holding camp behind them, and the mountain stood across the whole of the sky ahead, grey against a grey dawn, its summit a black hollow against the paling east. The ash was thin out here, where the first eruption had laid it in a fan to the northeast, and the going was not the knee-deep drag of the first march but a surface like coarse snow over a buried world of walls and terraces and the bones of farms. They rested at a dry watercourse in the middle of the morning. The column lay in the lee of the cut, out of the wind, and Cassius moved among them with the ration, and the wounded were re-dressed by the women who had learned in the deep chamber, and the children were fed first, because the order was the order. Caius came to Corvinus at the head of the cut with the archive fragments in his hands. The madman of the temple had carried them the whole way from the buried town, wrapped in oilcloth under his tunic, and in the week of the holding camp he had read them and re-read them until the linen was soft at the crease. He knelt on the ash and laid the fragments flat. "I have the last table," Caius said. "The one the first builders left unfinished. They sealed the first mouth in the time of their fathers. Then the god opened his second mouth below the temple's foundation stone, and they knew they could not close it in the time they had, and the singers went up to the crater to die in the smoke, to buy the work time." He read from the fragment, and his voice was the voice of a man reciting something that had been waiting a thousand years to be read aloud. "'We have heaped the stones. The god opened his other mouth. The singers have gone up to the smoke. We who remain go down to the water. If this is found, finish what we began, for the god does not forgive unfinished work.'" "Singers," Maro said. He was standing at the edge of the cut, listening. "What does that leave us?" "It leaves us the second mouth," Caius said. "It leaves us the shaft below the temple, wide as a man's arms at the neck, opening into the rock where the foundation stone sits. And it leaves us the hewn stones, cut and stored in the lowest chamber by the first builders, sized to the neck of the shaft, waiting a thousand years for the hands that were taken from them." He folded the fragment carefully. "The work is waiting, Tribune. The archive says the god does not forgive unfinished work. The god has been waiting a very long time." Corvinus looked at the fragments, and at Livia, who had come to stand at Caius's shoulder and had listened in silence. "You have known of this since the holding camp," he said to her. "I knew the second mouth existed," Livia said. "I did not know the stones were waiting." She looked at the mountain. "I was taught to read the signs that keep people alive, not the plans that were buried with them. Caius was taught the other way. Between us, we can read the whole of the god's house. That was not true a week ago." The column moved again at noon, and the pace of the second march was the pace of a force that had a clock on it. The sun climbed and the ash glittered and the mountain grew, and by late afternoon they had crossed the line of the old walled farms and the orchards where the trunks stood grey as bone with their crowns gone, and the track began to climb. They came over the last ridge of the day into the long shadow of the mountain's western shoulder, and there, at the head of the valley that led to the buried town, they saw the god's temple standing on its outcrop against the orange sky. The road north from Petra, what remained of it, was a river of ash between two dark walls of rubble. The town itself was a white plain where the roofs had been, and the temple on the ridge rose out of it clean and black as a tooth, the columns still standing, the door still standing, the smoke of the deep fire still rising through the inner vent where the first chamber breathed. Livia went up the steps first. She did not hurry. She walked the old stone way, and she touched the frame of the door, and she stood in the threshold with her hand on the worn edge of the jamb where a thousand years of hands had rested, and she said, in the middle of the evening wind, "The god kept our house." The column passed through the door behind her, into the outer chamber where the fire bowl sat cold and the mineral walls threw back the lamplight in scattered gold, and down the slope of the passage to the first chamber where the water ran clear out of the deep spring. The wounded were settled against the warm curve of the rock. The children were counted. The door was posted. Corvinus came up the passage again to stand at the threshold in the last of the light, and below, on the long road north, he saw what he had known he would see: the dust of riders, far down the ash river, moving against the current, with the fading sun behind them. They had bought the lead of a night and a day. The mountain was sheltering the column. But the governor had remembered his son, and his after-action, and the five names that mattered most, and the pursuit was already on the road.