Remains, Part I

“We’ve never been this far south,” Boaz said, nervously lifting the old, thirsty lantern to illuminate the broken landscape before him. His companion paused only for a moment, then stepped off the cracked flagstones that had once borne men and merchandise. He kept his face out of the light.

“Shazer,” Boaz said. “I said we’ve never been this far south.”

“I heard you,” Shazer said. “Are you coming?”

Boaz lifted the lantern as high as he could. The sun was still setting and should have cast off its light with impunity, but it did not. There was a stickiness to the summer twilight and the emerging gloom clung like sweat to the old bones of architecture, to the trees, and to the skin of the two men.

Boaz had surveyed the area three times now, but he did it again anyway. The desperate shafts of light dusted the memory of the road, lost to the haze of the south and, Boaz noted glumly, to the haze of the north as well. Where the men stood, the track had found some relief from the fields of thorns and desolation that flanked it for three miles to the north and who knew how many miles to the south. A deep-cut stream bisected the road, spitting out a small pool.
The stream had once been tamed by a wide bridge, now little more than jutting arches and rotting timbers left from some attempt to renew the crossing of old. The pool had also been tamed once, but the remains of such a settlement or outpost were even less coherent than those of the bridge. Boaz’s lantern revealed hollow structures that reminded the man of his father and the other old men who played dominos together while the sun was high, though they could only remember pieces of the rules. It had been so long since these walls had served the purpose of their creation that they seemed to have forgotten it. They slumped against each, crumbled into heaps to nap in the evening heat, and stared vacantly at their environment, their eyes wide.

“This is too far south,” Boaz muttered, then called for Shazer to wait.

“Stop grousing and bring the light,” Shazer said, without turning around. “Let’s finish up here before it gets too dark. We’ve wasted too much time already.” His head was moving rapidly as he took and inventory of the buildings and other features of the ruin.

“Are you sure we’re going to find something here?” Boaz said, lowering the lantern a little.

“Something solid?”

This time, Shazer did turn. His eyes showed pity, his jaw disgust.

“I have told you,” he said. “Caravans stopped here for a thousand years or more, before the….”

His confidence wavered for a moment as he swallowed the word he had almost uttered. As he recovered and found an alternative, the bravado returned.

“Before the new road,” he finished. “We’ll find something solid. Something we can sell.”