The Pillars of Salem Read online

right of the road.

  At first, Elkhanan couldn’t see what she was pointing at, but then it leaped out at him. Just as she said, someone in a long coat appeared to be standing alone beneath a large oak, still as stone, a shadow coalescing from the rain. Yedi took a few steps into the grass and paused.

  “Nothing to fear there, Yedi,” Sergeant Whitley’s voice came from behind him. “Take a closer look.”

  The young man glanced once over his shoulder before trotting out to the mysterious figure as they watched. He slowed to a walk a few meters away, then stopped within arm’s reach. He turned and waved them closer. Most stayed where they were, but the girl and a few of the more adventurous followed him. Elkhanan walked part of the way with them, but hung back to let the others in closer.

  “It’s one of the pillars,” Yedi said, breathless.

  “What pillars?” The girl was almost afraid to ask.

  He stared at her for a moment. “You really don’t know anything about Salem, do you?”

  “It’s not like I had a choice about coming here.”

  He sighed.

  “Look, this country, these farms and meadows…it’s all peaceful now, but it wasn’t always. Tikvah was settled by two major groups with different languages, religions…very different ways of seeing the world. One group, the Wohadans, didn’t want to share the planet with the Adenists, and they were willing to kill to have it to themselves.

  “This wasn’t like the big wars we’ve all seen on the news. There weren’t any drones blasting each other in deep space or operators taking out an enemy base millions of miles away. This was different. It was personal, face to face, one person killing another, standing as close as you and I are right now.”

  He looked around at the dozen faces, wet and dry, gathered around him and the gray stone pillar.

  “The Adenists just wanted to be left alone to build their utopia and couldn’t bring themselves to believe the threat. For many years the Wohadans attacked isolated settlements and random targets of opportunity. They sabotaged infrastructure…”

  “Tell them what happened at Salem, young man,” Elkhanan interrupted.

  “Right…Salem.” Yedi pursed his lips and looked at the ground for a silent moment.

  “The Adenists believed all people were essentially good, and…I don’t know. Maybe they’re still right even after all this. But you can’t expect to be left alone by people who hate you so much that they want you dead. There was a particularly ugly attack at Salem and the citizens there decided they’d had enough. Completely against orders from Dobair, they organized into militia companies and began fighting back. It was the signal that all the rest of Tikvah was waiting for. Every other community across the planet followed suite. The war was everywhere and bloody. There was no neutral ground. Eventually everyone had to pick a side just to survive.

  “Ten years later, there were no more Wohadans on Tikvah. They were all either dead or gone off world.”

  “So what’s with the pillar?” someone asked.

  “Pillars,” Yedi corrected him. “Plural. There are thousands of these pillars around here, one for each of Salem’s dead.”

  One of the boys, a wide-shouldered brute of a young man, spoke out over the hushed exclamations. “You mean…someone is buried here? This thing is a tombstone?”

  The girl and a few others took a step back, away from the pillar.

  “No, nobody’s buried here. This is just where he died.”

  “How do you know it was a ‘he’? Is there a name on it?” asked the girl.

  “There is, but you can tell just by the height. Pillars for women are smaller than the ones for men, and this one’s about two meters, so it must be for a man.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “I don’t know if it’s fair or not, but there are a couple of reasons for it. First, women are generally smaller than men, so the pillars imitate real life in that way. Second, although everyone fought and died in the war, men did more of both. Women were usually restricted to home defense and logistical support, while the men took the fight to the enemy.”

  “What does it say?” she asked. Yedi read the inscription aloud so everyone could hear.

  Ethan Knowles

  -----

  Second son to Mikhail and Karen

  Husband to Ayela

  Father to Jacob, Chaya, and Ethan

  -----

  Died here for his people and his God

  On the twenty-second day of the third month

  Of the one hundred and twenty-eighth year of Hope.

  “Hope,” the girl repeated. “Tikvah. That’s so sad.”

  They walked on, then, and the rain eased to a steady shimmer, chattering on their hoods and shields.

  The pillars came more frequently as they walked, scattered at first, with no discernible pattern. One here, another over there on a hillside. Lonely, stone historians waiting for a willing ear. A cluster of five or six stood two meters tall surrounded by the crumbling remains of a barn or farmhouse at the apex of a hill. Little remained but the foundation and a frame that would stand a thousand more years if left undisturbed. Like so much else on Tikvah, it was an eclectic mix of primitive and modern construction. The pillars, on the other hand, were cut from an indelible material that would survive anything short of a direct meteor strike. One of them at this place was smaller than the others, a meter high instead of two.

  “Why is the woman’s pillar so much smaller than the men’s?”

  “It’s not,” Yedi said. “That one is for a child.”

  “Oh.”

  ‘Oh,’ indeed, thought Elkhanan. What else can a person say? He kept his eyes forward after that, concentrating on the road and on keeping painful memories at bay.

  Sergeant Whitley announced they should arrive at the gates of Salem within an hour. The rain stopped, and they walked in silence. Even the fat man stopped complaining about his aching feet and wasted time. The rain ceased for a spell, but the air was still and tepid, enveloping the walkers in a foggy dolor. The trees grew denser here, partially concealing the swelling ranks of the dead sentinels all around.

  “It’s morbid,” a woman breathed. “Why do they want to be reminded all the time about so much death?”

  “So we will never forget,” her husband told her. The peace that we find here now, he explained, was bought with much blood. “This is a good thing to remember.”

  They felt as if they had intruded on a lover’s row in which everyone pretended nothing was amiss when someone walked into the room. The combatants paused their arguing on the roadside or in the fields wherever they stood just long enough to watch the parade of strangers pass by.

  A small house lay beneath a copse of trees, and two pale pillars stood between it and the interlopers. One pillar was a meter high and the other a meter and a half: a mother and child. The girl ventured out alone and read the inscriptions on each pillar in turn, the fingers of one hand pressed to her lips. She kept her face toward the fields when she returned and refused to speak or to look at anyone.

  Elkhanan Barlow hobbled on, jaw set, turning neither to the right nor to the left.

  The trees parted at last, and the group began the last descent of their trek. The first structures of Salem emerged from the gray mist in the distance. Residential developments meandered from the edges of town along roads that branched into the surrounding landscape to the right and left and far sides of the city—none at all on this side—and budded houses at regular intervals. The green expanse before them ended abruptly in the distance at a long, gray wall, broken only by a large gate in the center, more of Tikvah’s anachronistic strangeness.

  Larger structures toward the center of town tended toward white, but most of the houses were traditional Tikvan green and yellow and brown, intended to meld with the background. They varied more in form than in color, here a collection of domes, there a cube adorned with complex geometric patterns, yonder a house flowing into a hillside with a garden and fountai
n on the roof. People moved about on foot or in vehicles, on errands or social appointments. Children played. The company seemed to have stepped from the dreariness of Mirkwood onto Christian’s Pleasant Meadow.

  This prosperous and welcoming vision disrupted Elkhanan’s steely detachment despite the overcast sky. He stopped and gawked at the panorama, still as one of the pillars. Something about Tikvah had, at last, taken him by surprise. There he stood until someone jostled him from behind.

  “Don’t stand in the way. You’ll get run over.”

  “You watch where you’re walking, young lady.” He pointed his cane at her. Everyone moved faster now, stepped lighter.

  “Oh! Thank God! We’re almost there,” someone said.

  But their ease was short lived. Salem was further than it first appeared, and the rain began anew. The pillars were more numerous here. Two hundred or more stood in clumps—three here, two there—in a broken line along the opposite side of the valley with singletons sprinkled randomly over the terrain. In the otherwise open prairie, they assumed an aspect of burned stumps, the last ashen evidence of a near-forgotten wildfire.

  Elkhanan closed his eyes and filled his lungs with the humid air as if he could know the place by its scent alone. He pulled his shoulders back and lifted his chin, took another breath and then a step.

  The two kilometers down that hill—a small mountain, one might say—taxed the walkers more than had the previous five. The city gates appeared always the same distance: so close, finally within reach, and still so far to