The Pillars of Salem
Harold Carper
Copyright 2014, 2015 by Harold Carper
http://soilfromstone.blogspot.com
http://www.AmericanTorah.com
"The Pillars of Salem" by Harold Carper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Wattpad Edition
The Pillars of Salem
by Harold Carper
"This was all in the adverts," said a young man walking beside old Elkhanan Barlow, a rucksack on his back and a small, glossy black box in one hand. "I don't know why anyone is surprised at having to take the Walk."
Elkhanan peered at the young man through narrowed eyes. Thirty-five or forty off-world immigrants on this Walk, he thought. At least one of them isn't a complete dullard.
"What is your name, young man?" he asked, his voice like a pencil on course paper.
"Yedi, sir," he replied, looking over his shoulder as if to see if someone overheard.
"Don't be embarrassed. Yedi is a fine name. Short for Yedidya if I am not mistaken. How old are you?"
"Yes, sir, it is. I'm eighteen standard. I'll be nineteen in three months."
As they walked, Sergeant Whitley, their guide to Salem, pointed to unusual trees, crops engineered for Tikvah's soil and atmosphere, historic breeds of sheep and cattle, items that should have been of particular interest to people who have chosen to join a self-consciously agrarian culture.
Grumbling faded into footsteps and thin conversation as one hill blended into the next. They followed a narrow road with pavement arrayed in striated green and yellow. It contrasted just enough with the cultivated fields that a body wouldn't lose his way, but not so much as to disturb the rustic elegance of the rolling fields. Tractors whirred or thrummed in the distance, depending on their load. Ballistic shuttles glinted high overhead, racing to schedules set by anonymous bureaucrats far away in Dobair or Tikvah City.
The temperature rose with the sun, and sweat soaked shirt backs and matted hair. Some of the walkers exchanged jackets for hats and water bottles. Elkhanan began to fall behind, Yedi still his ever present shadow. By the end of the second hour, Whitley, slowed the pace of the whole group to compensate.
Complaints rose again like a tide. What an absurd test this is! How much further? Will we have to do pushups next? What sort of insane place have we chosen to call home?
"Mr. Whitley, will you please make this older gentleman board the shuttle? He's slowing everyone down." Elkhanan heard the fat man in the hand-tailored trousers from across the irregular sea of heads and thought of the Hebrews crossing the wilderness and their interminable kvetching.
HaShem, is fire from heaven an option in this wilderness? He laughed, and when Yedi turned to see what the joke was about, he answered the younger man's raised eyebrows with a waggle of his own.
"Sergeant Whitley," answered the uniformed man. "Not Mister."
"Fine. Sergeant Whitley, can you tell the old man to board the shuttle? This heat is killing me, and just look at my pants."
"The old man is Mr. Barlow, and no, I cannot tell him to board the shuttle. I wouldn't if I were able."
"Why not? This exercise will take hours longer than necessary if he insists on walking the entire way. You have a family, sergeant. Don't you want to be home with them?"
"Time and efficiency aren't everything, Mr. Wooten." It was the first time Elkhanan remembered hearing the pompous oaf's name. "Age and experience carry a great deal of weight on Tikvah. You will do well to keep that in mind."
Whitley called a break then, and some of the young children distributed water and a snack, a chewy cake which appeared to have been baked from scratch in someone's kitchen.
Elkhanan walked around the group while others dropped wherever they found themselves. When he reached the front near Whitley, he sat on a rock beside the road to watch the children chasing each other about the pavement through an obstacle course of grownups. The fat man stalked by in the opposite direction, headed for the shade cast by the shuttle.
Elkhanan watched the young man, Yedi, a few paces off the road surrounded by a half-circle of young people. He gestured first this way at a large bird flying overhead, then that way at the base of a nearby tree, shifting his black box from one hand to the other. His eyes were alive with excitement, as if his whole young life they had looked forward to this moment and this place. One of his disciples, hands on his hips, nodded his head and watched the bird. A girl tilted her head just so and twirled a finger in her hair. Yedi didn't seem to notice.
When they resumed walking, the young man was at Elkhanan's side once more.
"A soaring eagle does not beat the air, nor a swift ship push against the sea," Elkhanan said and winked at him.
"Excuse me, sir?"
Elkhanan pointed at a large bird flying high overhead.
"Watch the eagle as it flies. It does not see the air as an enemy to be defeated or even as a thing at all distinct from itself. It uses the air like an extension of its own wings and never gives it a single thought." He laughed again. "Stay your course, young man. One day you'll understand what I am telling you today."
They walked in silence for a while, and when the old man continued, he spoke between pauses to catch his breath and compose his thoughts.
"I knew a girl once long ago. Pretty and so full of life. I was brash then, all lightning and thunder, primed to fight the world and maybe the whole galaxy. But if I was a storm, she was the sun. She brightened every room. Made everyone smile. She couldn't help it. There have not been many like her."
When he didn't speak for a few minutes, Yedi asked where she was now. Elkhanan acted as if he hadn't heard. He looked toward the top of the next hill, the lines on his face somehow deeper now.
"What is your name, young man? Your face is familiar."
The boy paused and glanced away before answering.
"Yedi, sir."
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing, sir. You just...I thought I heard something."
"I've watched you with the others," Elkhanan said. "There is a born leader in you. I'll make sure the sergeant notices, but if I am any judge of men, he already has. You will do well here."
A few minutes later he said, "You remind me of my son Martin. I wish he could have come."
"Tell me about him," Yedi said.
"Bah! You don't want to hear an old man prattle about a stranger."
"Please. I would like to hear it."
Elkhanan gave token resistance but only a token. He told Yedi of a man who was a great soldier and leader of men, who fought for peace between worlds and nearly achieved it before he was murdered in the crowded chapel of a poor mining community on some unnamed, numbered rock orbiting a dying, red star. Two hundred innocents killed by a zealot from an old Earth sect who called themselves "Fire." Those miners and their families had done nothing to warrant such violent hatred. Their great sin was allowing the visit of a man who wanted peace, and Fire wanted anything but peace.
Nothing ever changed. The war to end all wars lingered, a distant dream, no closer today than a thousand years ago. A man like Martin worked his whole life for peace, but what is a man against the universe. War was in the genes and the very souls of men, and the few who bent that evil inclination toward peace found themselves in the end swept away by the tides of history and divine decree.
"I carried a gun in my time, too, when Martin was still little. I have seen the things that men hide in their hearts. All men. A civilized man keeps his demons chained in the basement and brings them out only when necessary. Those people of Fire carry their evil in their hands and on their foreheads like a badge of honor, as if a man should be proud to kill, to destroy peace wherever we find it."
He wheezed, his air expended by talk and passion.
"What am I saying?" he said at last. "It is a beautiful day on Tikvah—every day is a beautiful day on Tikvah—and I sully it with such gloominess." His cheeks balled up beneath his eyes as he smiled behind his bushy beard. "Martin was a good man," he said and jabbed Yedi with his cane. "A great man. Yedi will be a great man also, because he is first a good man."
Yedi grinned and looked up the road.
An afternoon wind brought dense, low clouds that blocked out the sun and brought some small relief from the heat of the early afternoon. But after darkening the sky, the wind died away again, and ghostly fingertips of a warm rain began to tap at the arms and faces of the walkers. A handful of personal shields came up with a telltale crackle and buzz which, after a few minutes, faded into the background of cicadas and locusts. Others donned the rain coats Whitley and Yedi handed around, while the fat man—what was his name again?—grumbled the louder and the day dimmed to near twilight.
A girlish yelp came from the opposite side of a cluster of fellow travelers, and Yedi was across the road in an instant.
"What happened?" he asked. It was the same girl who had hung on his every word earlier that day.
"Somebody's out there, looking at us," she said, pointing into the field to the 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 fountain 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 go. Old Elkhanan limped along, Yedi never far away and never once suggesting his older companion should ride the remaining distance to town. No one complained anymore about his slower pace, and some of those on the shuttle, observing that the old man refused to ride even now at the journey's end, disembarked to walk with him.
As they approached the city together, they could see that the gate was not as massive as it had appeared from the hilltop. In fact, most of that apparent size was actually a large collection of pillars, fifty or sixty standing close together before the gates, the majority of them barely above waist height. They were arranged in rank and file like soldiers on parade.
Some gasped or cursed as they realized the meaning of what they saw.
"There are fifty-eight of them," Yedi said to a man who walked nearby, his voice low as if he were afraid he might wake someone. "Two men, five women, and fifty-one children."
Elkhanan remained silent, jaw set and eyes straight ahead.
"You memorized that?" the man asked, looking at him askance.
"It seemed important."
"But...what happened?"
"Suicide bomber. He knew there would be a school outing that day. The precise schedule was confidential, but the killer had access. He waited here by the gates until the bus passed by, and then he killed them all with a bomb hidden under his clothes."
"But...why? And how did he have access to the schedule?"
"How?" Yedi laughed bitterly. "His own child was on that bus."
"My God!"
When they reached the place in the shadow of the deceptively ornamental walls and gates of Salem, Private Cooke stopped the shuttle that had followed them the entire way and let out his remaining passengers. Sergeant Whitley called the whole group to gather around him. His had very little to say, a conclusion only. The Walk itself had been the introduction and the body of his speech.
"There are only two ways by which anyone may become a citizen of Salem: by birth or by taking the Walk. Welcome to Salem."
There was no longer a need to explain the purpose of the Walk. It was plain to everyone: Some things must never be forgotten. Whitley told them where they would go once inside the gates, what the town expected of them over the next few days and weeks: required briefings, classes, et cetera. Elkhanan ignored him and continued walking as if no one else was there. He had seen too much and grown too old to waste precious time on yet another briefing.
He approached one of the two tallest monuments and read the inscription, unblinking, his jaws locked together. Finished reading, he hobbled to the second column and read that one too. At the first of the middling height pillars, he paused. He blinked. Just once at first, then again. He coughed, blinked twice. Her name was Arla, the stele said, daughter, wife, and mother of five. Elkhanan cleared his suddenly dry throat as he read, chin trembling. Rain pooled in the base of each carved letter until the weight of the water overwhelmed surface tension and rushed down the stony face like tears.
Having approached unnoticed, Yedi reached out to touch the letters. The old man's cane flashed out and struck him on the wrist. He yanked his hand away with a sharp inhalation. Elkhanan stared back at him, eyes red-rimmed and fiery, before turning away and moving to a child's pillar. He touched the top of the white stone, speaking under his breath, and continued on. He moved from one to another, mumbling, breath hissing in and out, coughing now, clearing his throat again. Four pillars he touched, lingering for a minute at each, before returning to Arla's monument. Leaning on his cane now, he placed his left hand on Yedi's chest and pushed him away, not in anger, but gently, needing room to breathe.
Elkhanan eased his frail body onto his knees before the monument, ignoring the water that pooled around him. He put both hands on the cool, stony surface and began to chant.
"'Eshet khayil mi yimtza, verakhok mipeninim mikrah. Sheker hakhen vehevel haiyofi. A woman who fears HaShem is to be praised."
Tears began to fall, unhindered at last, as he lifted his face to heaven. His hat slipped off, and the rain began to wet his thin, white hair. Sergeant Whitley was silent now, and the rise and fall of the old man's voice was the only sound above the quiet hum of Salem. Some understood more of the words than others did, but all understood their meaning.
"Give her the fruit of her hands, Adonai, for her works...her works shall praise her...in the gates..." The old man forced these last words out from the depths of his hollowed core, and they proved too great a foe for him. He collapsed against Arla's pillar, his shoulders shuddering beneath the storm of emotions released after so many years.
Yedi knelt on the hard pavement beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. Elkhanan seized the younger man's lapel, pulled him closer. Their tears mingled in the rain and flowed together into the soil of Tikvah.
"Help me," Elkhanan said when he had caught his breath, and they finished the prayer together.
"Veyilaveh 'eleiha hashalom ve'al mishkavah yihyeh shalom. As it is written, 'Peace shall come, and they will rest on their beds, all who walk in uprightness.' May she and all the daughters of Israel who slumber with her be granted mercy and forgiveness. Veken yehi, ratzon venamaramen."
They remained on their knees, the gentle pattering of rain an accompaniment to the weeping of a woman behind them among the walkers. The fading light of Tikvah's sun passed a predetermined threshold, and the Gates of Salem began to glow with a warm, yellow light.
"I have tried to forget," Elkhanan gasped after a long silence, his voice weak, full of gravel and the long, painful years. "Dear God, I have tried to forget, but I could not."
Yedi held his great grandfather tight in one arm, and in the other, he held the small box containing the medals and service records of General Martin Barlow.
"It's alright, Grandfather. We're home now, and it's good to remember."