a time, when the echoes of the Old World were still fresh, they had been almost unstoppable.
FIRST INTERLUDE
The hammer came down on the chisel with a final clink, and the engraving was complete. Stretching some fifty feet across the sheer face of the rocky bluff, the Latin alphabet stood capitalised and proud. It had taken two hours of painstaking work to etch the letters, and finishing touches had delayed them twice as long.
James Chadwick stepped back, admired his handiwork, and wiped his brow. His critical eye picked out niggles and imperfections from start to finish, but he knew it would do; it was more than satisfactory. He had chosen his site carefully, within plain sight for half a mile around, yet sheltered from the elements. Fortune granted, it would last some hundred years before weathering began to blur its form.
He inspected it critically, trying to see it from the point of view of virgin eyes, those who might stumble upon it in the high grass, once the ruins of the Old World had crumbled to dust. Would they see what he saw—see the beauty, a window to a whole world of knowledge and truth? Here before him was something the people of the Old World would have taken for granted: a key to the sumptuous bounty of the mind. Even if he and his kind failed to pass anything else down through the ages, here was something that might provide a window to a new beginning. This was one of many fail-safes built across the land, just in case it all came to nothing.
But that would never happen as long as he had a hammer to hand. Not as long as Alexander Cain drew breath.
“Crooked,” Alex called from the ridge afar.
“It’ll do.”
“When they bow down before these letters in ages to come, you might think different.”
James rolled his eyes and stared across the meadow at his silhouetted form. “When they make statues of you and me, we’ll see who’s worrying about neatness. It’s all there.”
“That it is.” Alex rode across the meadow, his white steed parting the tall wheat until he was abreast James’s chocolate colt. “There might be hope for us all yet.”
“Even if we lost everything else?” James thought of the vast stores of books that lay in the libraries he loved so dearly, his childhood playgrounds; the vast treasure troves that lay locked amidst moss-covered underfunded public shacks.
“It’s happened before,” Alex said. “Mankind has lost all sense of itself time and time again through the ages. But no matter how far we’re knocked down, we always find our feet again. It might take decades, centuries, maybe millennia, but we get there, if we have but the simplest tools.” He planted his hands on his hips and surveyed the alphabet emblazoned on the stone rock face. “Cornerstones like this, they’re all we ever really need.”
James had heard it all before, enough times for it to roll off his own tongue and into the ears of countless young’uns who gathered to hear their oratories wherever they bunked during their travels. Yet to hear the words straight from Alex’s mouth never lost its charm, that unique spark that seemed forever undiminished. He really was a relic of an older world, one gone from this Earth. Oftentimes, to hear Alex speak was to be at peace.
“You packed the capsule like I told you?”
James nodded, kicking the dirt mound at his feet. “Just like all the others.”
“You’re sure?”
“Do I look like an amateur?”
Alex reached down from his mount and clapped him on the shoulder. “Only in a certain light.”
“You can be a real arsehole when you put your mind to it.”
“Practice, my friend. Practice.” His white mare wheeled around and headed back into the wheat stalks. “The sun’s getting high. Better move. We have a long day ahead.”
James nodded, but his mind was elsewhere, on the steel box at his feet, covered in a mound of fresh dirt. Beside the alphabet was a sizable arrow pointing to the very spot where it lay buried, filled with a few vital trinkets; the OED, writing implements and carefully wrapped paper, maps marking the sites of bank vaults they had filled with literature, poetry, philosophy and scientific texts, and sealed their heavy doors with thick films of resin. Such tombs of wisdom would last for hundreds of years, at least long enough to endure the ravages of any new dark age that may befall the world, with any luck.