The Furies (37 page)

John recalled his conversation with Ariel in her laboratory, the one that had ended so abruptly when the evacuation alarm sounded. He'd pushed it out of his mind during the confused hours since then, but now it struck him with its original force. Running Cloud had been Ariel's Ojibway paramour. And he'd gotten her pregnant. “Why did you do that? Bring him back to Haven, I mean?”

She fiddled with the ring in her hand, idly turning and fingering it. “When our family lived in Europe, the women found husbands in the nearby villages. We swore the men to secrecy and they became Furies. But after we came to America, Mother insisted that we live in isolation, so she established the rules for taking paramours. If you wished to become pregnant you had to travel far from Haven to find a man. And as soon as you were with child you had to leave your paramour and return to the family.” She frowned. “My cousins and I hated the rules. It was an unnatural way to live.”

John nodded. “I have to agree with you there.”

“I met Running Cloud while we were inoculating the Ojibway at Chequamegon Bay, about three hundred miles west of Haven. We were posing as French missionaries, but the tribe's chiefs had encountered churchmen before and noticed we were different. We didn't harangue them so much about God, for one thing. For another, we had both men and women in our expedition, and the women were young and looking for partners.” She closed her hand on the ring and shook her head in wonder. “I was only thirty-two years old. I was curious and willful and eager to fall in love. And Running Cloud was even younger. Twenty summers, he told me. That's how they measured time, by the number of summers they could remember.”

John shifted uncomfortably on the trunk. The tone of Ariel's voice—soft and wistful—made it clear that she still had feelings for Running Cloud, despite the passage of so much time. “So you wanted to defy Elizabeth,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You wanted to challenge her rules.”

“I just wanted to live with the father of my children, the same way Mother had lived with Arthur, my father. Running Cloud was willing to leave his tribe and join our family. We waited until I was four months pregnant, and then we canoed the three hundred miles back to Haven. When we arrived I told Mother she had a choice: either kill us or marry us.” With a fond smile, she slipped the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. “While Mother agonized over the decision, Delia made me a wedding ring. Some of my cousins helped her with the metalwork, but she designed it.”

Ariel extended her arm and admired the ring on her hand. She was still smiling, but John knew her story wasn't going to be a happy one. She'd already told him, back in her lab, that it hadn't ended well. “How long were you married?” he asked.

“Three years. We built our own house on the family farm, a small cabin thatched with birch bark. Running Cloud finished building it the day before I gave birth to our daughter. She was a happy little girl, always laughing. She loved to walk in the woods.” Ariel stopped smiling, just as John had expected. “I thought the three of us would be enough. I thought we could form our own little world. But it wasn't enough for Running Cloud. He missed the world of his ancestors.”

“What happened? Did he go back to his tribe?”

“I woke up one morning and he was gone. And so was our daughter.”

“Jesus. What did you do?”

“We organized a war party. We had only ten men and twenty women, and Running Cloud's tribe had twice as many warriors. But we had guns, flintlock muskets. Not an accurate long-range weapon, but effective for close-quarters combat.” Ariel lowered her head and stared at the floor of the cargo hold. “We reached Chequamegon Bay just two days after Running Cloud did. I convinced Mother to let me try talking to the chiefs first, so she and I walked into the tribe's camp, unarmed, while the rest of our soldiers took positions in the woods. We found the chiefs in the wigwam and presented them with peace offerings, but they threw the gifts in our faces. They called us
Mi'tsha Midé
. That was their word for witches.”

“Where was Running Cloud?”

“The chiefs had already killed him. They said we'd corrupted his spirit, so he had to be burned. As soon as I heard this, madness took hold of me. I screamed, ‘Where's my daughter?' and charged at them. One of the chiefs lifted an ax, a heavy iron ax we'd given the tribe a few years before when we first made contact with them. But before he could bring it down on my head, Mother stepped in front of me. She knocked the ax handle aside, but the blade hit her face.”

John winced. So that was how Elizabeth got her scar and lost her eye.

“Then it was chaos,” Ariel continued, still gazing at the floor. “Our soldiers heard the screaming and rushed into the wigwam, firing their muskets. The gunfire terrorized the Ojibway. We slaughtered them as they ran for the woods. Afterwards, we found my daughter in a ditch they used as a trash dump. The chiefs had burned her, too.”

Ariel had begun to cry as she told the story. Her tears slipped down her cheeks and nose. One of them dripped from her chin to the floor of the cargo hold. John slid across the trunk, closing the distance between them, and put his arms around her. He felt her trembling. “I'm sorry, Ariel,” he murmured. “I'm so, so sorry.”

He held her close and gently rubbed her back. She went on crying for a minute or so, her rib cage quivering under his hands. Then she raised her head and rubbed her eyes. The stones in her ring flashed and glittered. “No one challenged Mother's rules after that. She expected me to learn something from the tragedy and become a more dutiful daughter. But the lesson was too harsh. Whenever I saw that scar on her face…” Her voice trailed off. Instead of finishing the sentence, she pulled the ring off her finger and returned it to its box. “In the end, I decided to leave Haven for a while. Aunt Delia wanted to know what was happening in Europe, so I volunteered to be her spy. I traveled east to Quebec with a purse full of gold coins and bought passage on a ship heading across the Atlantic.” She put the ring box in her backpack and zipped it up. “For the next twenty years I gathered information for Cordelia. I attended parties in the royal palaces in London and Paris. I met King William of England and King Louis of France. I also met Isaac Newton, who was much more interesting. I saw the beginnings of the scientific revolution, and it inspired me. By the time I returned to Haven I was committed to the ideal of bettering the world. I'd found my purpose in life, and it's sustained me ever since.” She turned to John and looked him in the eye. “But I'd lost something, too. I didn't seek another paramour. For the next three centuries I had no interest in lovers or children. I lived my life as if I'd outgrown the need for them.”

John still held her. She leaned into him, pressing her shoulder against his chest. She wasn't trembling anymore, but her body seemed unusually warm. “So what changed?” he asked. “Why did you walk into that bar in Greenwich Village and pick me up?”

“Because of Sullivan, believe it or not. Or rather, because I was afraid of his rebellion.” Ariel gave him a sober look. “I saw how dangerous it was, how it threatened all of us. For the first time it seemed possible that our family could be destroyed. And that thought filled me with an unbearable urgency. Before everything ended, I wanted to have another child. I wanted to sleep with a man again.” She allowed herself a smile. “But it couldn't be just any man, of course. Not after I'd waited for so long. So I asked Delia to help me. Although she hadn't ventured outside Haven in hundreds of years, she had information about billions of men in her computers.”

John remembered the computer screens in Cordelia's room at the top of the Pyramid. He imagined her scrolling through the vast archives of the Internet until she found the sad story of John's daughter. “And you chose me because we both had daughters who were murdered?”

“No, not just that. I saw something noble in you.”

“But I told you, I wasn't noble. I was going to—”

She hushed him by placing her index finger to his lips. “Forget nobility then. I sensed a deep connection between us. Do you know how Mother chose my birth name? She named me Lily because she loved the flower. She named all her children after flowers and other plants.”

“Okay, but what does that have to do with—”

“When I had my daughter, I decided to follow Mother's tradition. So I named her Ivy.”

John couldn't speak. He was shocked into silence.

 

 

Over the next five hours they polished off the roast beef sandwiches and got some more sleep. John found a couple of padded blankets, the kind used to cushion furniture in moving vans, and spread them across the floor of the cargo hold. Ariel was so tired, she drifted off almost as soon as she lay down. He lay next to her and for a while he studied her tranquil face, framed by her tangled locks of red hair. Then he fell asleep, too.

When the truck stopped again and its rear doors opened, brilliant late-morning light flooded the cargo hold. The tall Ranger medic who'd unlatched the doors was silhouetted against the brightness. “Rise and shine,” she called out. “We're here.”

John sat up and squinted at an utterly flat landscape. Fields of bright yellow wheat stretched to the horizon. He got to his feet and stepped to the edge of the cargo hold, looking for signs of civilization, but there weren't any farmhouses or barns in sight, just acres and acres of cultivated fields. “Where the hell are we?” he asked the medic.

“Western Minnesota,” she replied. Then she stepped toward the front of the truck, moving out of sight.

By this point Ariel had awakened. She stretched her arms over her head, then stood up and put on her backpack. Meanwhile, John jumped down from the cargo hold and looked around. On the other side of the truck, at the edge of another wheat field, was a dilapidated trailer resting on cinder blocks. It had dirty beige siding and a rusty screen door and looked like it had been sitting there since the Great Depression. On the roof, though, were several tall antennas and a large satellite dish, and a couple of black SUVs were parked nearby. Just beyond the trailer, a long paved strip ran through the middle of the wheat field, straight as an arrow, for at least half a mile. It was an airstrip.

Ariel climbed down from the truck and stood beside him. “I've been here before. This strip is owned by the Ranger Corps. It's got a nice, long runway.”

John looked up and down the strip. “Don't see any planes on it, though.”

“They're probably busy elsewhere. The Rangers operate airstrips across the country. And they have a dozen Gulfstreams.”

“Gulfstreams? Are those jets?”

She nodded. “They can go four thousand miles nonstop at five hundred miles per hour. And they only cost twenty million each.”

“Jesus, where did you Furies get all that money?”

“We've been investing in stocks since the stock market started. Come on, let's see who's in the trailer.”

They walked past the Ranger medic, who was checking the oil in the truck engine, and headed for the rusty screen door. Inside, the trailer was bustling. Two women typed on computer keyboards while two others barked orders into portable radios and yet another woman monitored a radar screen. A stern, husky man stood near the doorway, holding an assault rifle. Although he wore jeans and a T-shirt, John could tell he was a guardsman, not a Ranger. The modern clothes didn't fit him well, and his chin was red and nicked because he'd just shaved off his Amish beard. He bowed in front of Ariel, then pointed at the far end of the trailer, where there was a door to a private office. “The Chief Elder awaits you, milady.”

“Thank you, Horace,” she said, patting his arm. She marched to the door, opened it, and stepped into the office. John followed her and closed the door behind them.

Elizabeth Fury sat at a desk covered with papers, most of which seemed to be maps or satellite photos. She looked up and regarded them with her lone eye. “You're late. I arrived an hour ago.”

Frowning, Ariel sat in one of the two folding chairs that faced the desk. “You were in an SUV, Mother. SUVs are faster than trucks.”

“Perhaps. I have to admit, it was an exhilarating experience, moving down the road at such a high velocity.”

With a start, John realized that Elizabeth had never traveled in a car before. She'd been cooped up in Haven since the seventeenth century. He looked at her in wonder as he sat down in the other folding chair.

The Chief Elder noticed him staring at her. She scowled. “Are you accompanying my child everywhere now?”

“Leave him be, Mother.” Ariel leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. “What's the status of the dispersal? How many of our people are still in transit?”

Elizabeth reluctantly turned back to her daughter. “Most have found safe accommodations in Canada, either in hotels or rented cabins. They've been instructed to keep their locations secret and communicate with my deputies only through secure channels.” She pointed at the door. Her deputies, John guessed, were the women working on the other side of the trailer. “We need to take these precautions because the Riflemen are actively pursuing us.”

“So it's true?” Ariel's voice rose. “Some of their fighters survived?”

“Old Sam spoke aright. Sullivan kept several dozen of his men in reserve. After the destruction of Haven he searched the surrounding area, trying to determine how we escaped. Unfortunately, his men caught up with one of our trucks before it reached the Canadian border.” She picked up one of the papers on her desk and passed it to Ariel. It was a photograph of a charred truck that had crashed into the pillar of a highway overpass. “According to the local newspapers, witnesses saw several motorcycles speeding away from the scene. Sullivan's men must've used their rocket-propelled grenades.”