Of course, I tried the same thing with the other decoys when I rigged their guns before we ran into the Carving. And it likely didn’t turn out any better for them than it did for my father’s village. “It’s dangerous to try to trade with this. I don’t even know if the Archivists will touch it anymore.”
Vick shakes his head but doesn’t argue. He moves farther back into the cave and pulls at one of the rolls of thick plastic. “You know what these are?” he asks.
“Some kind of shelter?” I ask, looking more closely. I can see ropes and thin tubes rolled up inside.
“Boats,” Vick says. “I’ve seen some like this before on the Army base where I lived.”
It’s the most he’s said about his past and I wait to see if he’ll say more.
But Eli calls out to us in a voice filled with excitement. “If you want food, I’ve found it!” he shouts.
We find him eating an apple in the second cave. “This must have been the stuff that was too heavy to carry,” he says. “It’s all kinds of apples and grain. And a lot of seeds.”
“Maybe they stored this in case they had to come back,” Vick says. “They thought of everything.”
I nod in agreement. Standing there looking at what they’ve left, I feel admiration for the people who lived here. And disappointment. I would have liked to meet them.
Vick feels it too. “We’ve all thought about breaking away,” he says. “They really did it.”
The three of us fill our packs with food from the farmers’ stores. We take apples and some kind of flat strong bread that seems like it will last for a long time. We also find a few tarred matches that the farmers must have made themselves. Maybe later there will be a place where it’s safe to have a fire. Once we’ve finished filling our packs, we find a few more in the storage cave and fill them, too.
“Now for a map and something to trade,” I say. I take a deep breath. The cave smells like sandstone — mud and water — and apples.
“I bet it’s here,” Eli says, his voice muffled at the back of the cave. “There’s another room.”
Vick and I follow him around a corner and into another recess of rock. As we shine our flashlights around, we see that it is clean. Well-organized. Full of boxes. I walk across the room and lift the lid to one of them. It’s packed with books and papers.
I try not to think This must be the spot where he learned. He could have sat right on that bench.
“They left so much,” Eli whispers.
“They couldn’t carry it all,” I say. “They probably took the best of it with them.”
“Maybe they had a datapod,” Vick suggests. “They could have entered the information from the books into that.”
“Might be,” I say. Still, I wonder how hard it was to leave all of the real copies behind. The information in this cave is priceless, especially in its original form. And, their ancestors had brought it all in originally. It must have been hard to walk out without it.
In the center of the room stands a table made of small pieces of wood that had to have been carried through the entrance of the cave and pieced together. The whole room, like the township, has that sense of being assembled carefully. Every item seems filled with meaning. The Society didn’t drop it into your lap. You worked for it. Found it. Made it yourself.
I shine my light across the table and onto a hollowed-out wooden bowl filled with charcoal pencils.
I reach inside and pick one up. It leaves a small black mark on my hand. The pencils remind me of the tools I made for writing back in the Borough. I gathered pieces of wood a few at a time on the hill or when a maple tree in the Borough lost a branch. I’d tie them together and lower them into the incinerator to char the ends for writing and drawing. Once, when I needed red, I stole a few petals from one of the blood-colored petunias in a flower bed and used them to color the Officials’ hands and my hands and the sun.
“Look,” Vick says behind me. He’s found a box with maps inside. He pulls some of them out. The warm light of the flashlight changes the papers, making them seem even older than they really are. We sift through them until we find one that I recognize as the Carving.
“This one,” I say, spreading it out on the table. We all gather around it. “Here’s our canyon.” I point to it but my eyes are drawn to the canyon next to ours on the map. A spot there has been inked with thick black ink Xs, like a row of stitches. I wonder what they mean. I wish I could rewrite this map. It would be much easier to mark how I want the world to be, instead of trying to figure out how it really is.
“I wish I knew how to write,” Eli says, and I’m sorry I don’t have the time to teach him. Maybe someday. Right now we have to keep moving.
“It’s beautiful,” Eli says, touching the map gently. “It’s different from the way we paint on the screens back in the Society.”
“I know,” I say. Whoever made the map was something of an artist. The colors and scale of the whole thing fit together perfectly.
“Do you know how to paint?” Eli asks.
“A little,” I say.
“How?”
“My mother taught herself, and then she taught me,” I say. “My father used to come here and trade with the farmers. Once, he brought a paintbrush back for her. A real one. But he couldn’t afford any paint. He always meant to get her some but he never did.”
“Then she couldn’t paint,” Eli says, sounding disappointed.
“No,” I say. “She could. She used water on rock.” I think back to the ancient carvings in a small crevice near our house. I wonder now if that was where she got the idea for writing on stone. But she used water and her touch was always gentle. “Her paintings always vanished in the air,” I tell Eli.
“Then how did you know what they looked like?” Eli asks.
“I saw them before they dried,” I say. “They were beautiful.”
Eli and Vick fall silent and I can tell they might not believe me. They might think I’m making this up and remembering pictures that I wish I’d seen. But I tell the truth. It was almost like her paintings lived — the way they shone and vanished and then new things appeared under her hands. The pictures were beautiful both because of the way they looked while they existed and because they could never last.
“Anyway,” I say. “There’s a way out.” I show them how this canyon continues through to a plain on the other side from where we entered. Judging by the map, there’s more vegetation out there and also another stream, bigger than the one in this canyon. The mountains on the opposite side of the plain have a small dark house marked on them, which I take to be a settlement or safe place, since it’s the same marking the farmers used to denote their own township on the map. And past that, to the north of the mountains, is a place marked SOCIETY. One of the Border Provinces. “I think it will take two or three days to reach the plain. And another few days to cross it and get to the mountains.”
“There’s a stream on that plain,” Vick says, his eyes brightening as he inspects the map. “Too bad we can’t use one of the farmers’ boats and go down it.”
“We could try,” I say, “but I think the mountains are a better option. There’s a settlement there. We don’t know where that stream leads.” The mountains are on the top edge of the map; the stream runs down and disappears at the bottom of the paper.
“You’re right,” Vick says. “But we might be able to stop and fish. Smoked fish last for a long time.”