Post Tenebras Lux
A dystopian short story.
This short story was prompted by “The Spark” challenge at The Lunar Awards, where we were given the first line and asked to take it where we would. I treated it like a “take your pencil for a walk” exercise, trying to write what came to mind without worrying about being derivative or overusing old tropes. I’m fairly pleased with the result. Enjoy!
8th August, 224 A.D.
When anyone in town needed help, they contacted Rocky Germain. When Rocky Germain needed help, she contacted me. And when I needed help, I had the Books to consult. That’s how it was supposed to be. The problem is, the Books don’t have all the answers. And the other problem is, Germain began to think she didn’t need me. This is the only defence I can offer to any who may come after. My hope is that there still remains someone from the Order who will discover this Testament, if the townsfolk do not find it and throw it into the flames with my body. I trust that my writing in the Old Script rather than the Common will render my account illegible to those whom it would not profit. Germain is the only one on the island who would be able to read it, and with her it hardly matters any more.
I have begun all wrong. Forgive my incoherence; time is pressing, and there are many matters to attend to before the townsfolk come.
This, then, is the last Testament and Witness of Xiawa Adamson, Agent of the Order of Knowledge for the Atlantic North East sector. If any of the Order finds this, I charge you on the Seal of the Temple of Learning to deliver it to whoever is the current Magister as speedily as is expedient. It has been some twenty years since I last received official communication from a Mentor, and I know not whether any of my colleagues still breathe. If any reads this who knows not of our Order, I cannot charge you, but I urge and exhort you to take to heart what may be learned from this tragedy.
I was one of the youngest of the Order of Knowledge when it was founded. Indeed, one might say I was born into it, for I was conceived just before the Darkness and held in storage until 37 A.D., when it was decided that my older sisters would each carry as many of us to term as conditions allowed, for it was clear that the Enclave would not hold indefinitely. My sister-mother, Helga of blessed memory, was seven months pregnant with me when the Enclave fell. I was born prematurely in the hard cold scrabble of the Alaskan encampment, where I spent my early years before the Order found its permanent home. Those early days stood me in good stead when in due course I was sent here across the water.
In 60 A.D., after completing my Novitiate in the Mediterranean West sector, I was sent here to Lyis, which is the chief island of this archipelago and was considered a promising strategic starting-point for the Order’s efforts in Atlantic North East. I have been here now for 164 years.
During this time, I have tutored five generations of Rockys, culminating in the past five years with Germain. I can only wish she were as wise as her father Fergus. His reign as Rocky (for such they term their chieftains) was long and by any significant measure successful. Under my tutelage, he encouraged the temples to establish schools, for all the castes and not only for the nobility. He constructed a new sewerage system. He started work on a new hospital in the town, built along thoroughly scientific lines. After decades of toil, I felt that at last we were beginning to see fruit, that society was beginning to approach a degree of civilisation that held some similitude to the world as it was B.D.; the world shown in the Books.
The pox changed that. It took Fergus at the height of his powers. If it had taken Germain too, instead of Geraint or Gerardine, all might yet have been well. They would have been more amenable to my tutelage, I believe. But Germain was the one who survived.
Her father’s unexpected passing meant there was no well-oiled introduction where the future Rocky was brought to me in what has become their time-honoured tradition. In fact, I was unaware of the pox’s arrival on the island until Fergus had been in the machair sand nearly a month. He had been a busy man, and in latter years had taken the trip out to my shieling no more than once a month. It was high summer, and I was much out on the hill studying the wild bees and meditating on the future of our Mission. I am getting old. Even the hacks our father (cursed be his name) made in our genome cannot fully stop aging. They can only slow it so far. I would have only a few more decades left, I believe, in the normal course of things. The need to pass on the Books, to train a successor not to the Rocky but to myself, was much on my mind. There had been no letters from the Order for such a long time, and I could see that although there was progress, there was yet much to be done before Restoration could be complete. I had to teach somebody to read the Books. When I came down from the hill these five summers ago and found the girl Germain looking for me, I thought she might be the answer.
Germain was then just eighteen years old, and sharp as talons. In native intelligence and quickness, she far surpassed her siblings and perhaps even her father. Although Fergus had died without telling her of me, she had learned of my existence from his papers and had worked out from his hidden clues where she might come to find me. When I told her about the Books and the learning of the Old Script, she was eager and earnest. She came to me once a week in those first years, and she learned faster than any of my previous tutees had. She has a gift for languages, I believe. She has a gift for many things.
When Germain had learned enough of the Old Script to begin deciphering the Books for herself, she sucked knowledge from the pages like marrow from bones. I had never had a pupil so apt to learn, so hungry for all she could absorb about the world, so curious and questioning. She would have had me move into town, into the Keep, so that she could learn faster and access the Books more readily, and it was with great difficulty that I persuaded her of the necessity of keeping the veil of secrecy drawn across my very existence. I have been diligent in following the Order’s protocols. I have suffered heat and cold and hunger and insects and loneliness for 164 years, to further our Mission. The townsfolk knew nothing of me other than the tales of Cailleach na Mòintich that they told to scare the children, or the darker tales they whispered around the fire in winter. They watched the Rocky make his or her monthly pilgrimage into the Black Glen, hauling the supply-sledge of offerings to the spirits, and neither they nor the bonzes at the temple, in whose very theology was encoded this arrangement for provision for our Agents, had any notion what was really going on. The current Abbot may have had his suspicions; I knew from Fergus that he was a learned and astute man and not given to superstition, despite his position. The greater mass of the townsfolk, though, if they had learned of my presence and realised what I was, they would long ago have burned me as the child of Darkness that I am.
Our Order was founded to expiate the sins of our father (cursed be his name); to undo a little of what he brought on the world. That mission, that destiny, was etched in my very heart from my earliest days. For that, I had suffered and striven so long. And now that I could see the fruit swelling on the tree, the embryo of Restoration knitting its limbs in the town, while I felt my own lifeblood begin to grow cold and thin, I made my great mistake. Or perhaps it was that an oversight in the administration of our mission unfolded a hideous consequence; however, I do not wish to absolve myself of responsibility for the tragedy of Rocky Germain. I made a mistake. I felt the weight of years and the hope of victory, and I hurried.
I am not honest enough. My last sentence was true, but not complete. For I fell into the snare of flattery, and that was the true seed of my undoing.
Germain was the sharpest, the keenest person I’ve ever met. And her hunger to learn from me, her naked and pure thirst for knowledge, was flattering. Her father and grandfather had been good and steady pupils. Her father had become a wise and enlightened ruler. But the magnesic flare of Germain’s intelligence dazzled me. I began to think of her as my daughter. I began to train her in the custodianship of the Books, rather than sticking to the principles of statecraft and the path of development. And when she started reading the Books and begged to borrow Volume One and take it home with her between our meetings, her entreaties quickly eroded my scruples.
She started at Aardvark and worked her way through Abbey and Agassiz and American Literature, all the way to Argentina. She gulped all of it down, but the entries that most fascinated her were the technological ones. Aeronautics and Aircraft and Antibiotics and so on. She summoned the temple schoolmaster and had him and a couple of the bonzes start working on a project to build a hot-air balloon. I let that pass, for hot-air balloons were more or less appropriate to the archipelago’s stage of development. She had the director of the new hospital begin experiments with the extraction of penicillin from bread mould, which I encouraged. She seemed to accept, if with some disappointment, that we could not jump straight to the helicopters and F16 jets she saw illustrated in the Book. But I had continually to remind her of the importance for her as Rocky to concentrate on managing the archipelago well.
I had also to continually field her questions about life B.D., which of course I myself know only second-hand. She was frustrated at the limits of our knowledge, although the information contained in the Books was opening new worlds to her with every paragraph.
“Surely you have more than this,” she would say, running her hand over the red leather with its embossed gilt title. “Why do you only give me a Children’s Britannica?”
And I would shake my head and tell her again, no, that was all the Order had sent with me, and it came from such a long time ago because when the Darkness came, most information from later than that era had been destroyed. But I think she didn’t quite believe me. I think she always thought there was a hidden stash somewhere, perhaps in a cavern underneath my shieling. And she would flutter her eyelashes at me, and bring me sweetmeats, and I very nearly disclosed to her the true nature of the Darkness and my burden as a child of the Darkness, but I waited. Perhaps if I had explained to her how our father’s (cursed be his name) hubris, on top of the rot that had spread through the body of human knowledge, had nearly destroyed the world, she would have acted differently. Perhaps.
Now the pox that had killed Germain’s father and siblings, it had been determined, was first transmitted to the islands by a trader from across the water in Centire. The man had died early on in the outbreak, and word sent back to his people. I was not party to the missives that were sent back and forth between Lyis and Centire, and it remains unclear to me how the situation deteriorated. I suspect that the Chief of Centire took offense at a poorly-worded letter from Germain, when she was in the heat and shock of grief. She is not as tactful or as empathetic as Fergus was. In any case, when she announced a trade embargo (which I considered sensible, until we could learn more about the pox’s means of transmission), Centirean ships began to harrass the archipelago’s fishing boats. In the febrile atmosphere, the rumour then began to spread that the pox had been intentional.
The rumour did not reach Germain’s ears until later, and I think that at first she dismissed it. She discussed the pox with me, and I explained to her as much as I knew of such diseases and their spread. I urged her to focus on the development of the hospital and the water supply works her father had begun. And she did continue that work. She also tasked Dr Mugarraid at the hospital with the study of the pox and the need for a cure, for she feared another outbreak. I encouraged her in that endeavour. She was reading through Volume Five of the Books by then (Click to De Gaulle), but I handed her Volume Eighteen (Tree to Way) and pointed her to the entry on Vaccination and Inoculation.
She was quick to grasp the principles. It took longer to convince Dr Mugarraid of the idea, for of course she had to persuade him of its merits without showing him the Books. She concocted a tale, based on the story of Jenner that the Book included, of how the laundrymaid’s daughter had survived the pox unscathed after being exposed to a weakened form of the germ when boiling the sheets from the beds of patients at the Keep. Once Mugarraid was willing, they tested it using first sheep and then a few bonzes who were willing to offer themselves. It seemed a resounding success. She kept from me the trials that failed. I knew nothing of the dozen orphanage children who are buried on the island in the bay.
The Book was written long before the vaccine sceptics had arisen just before the Darkness. I hesitated to inform Germain of them, for doing so could be interpreted as deviating from the Rule, but I reasoned that she needed to know, as an inoculation (so to speak) against that particular lie of Darkness. She took the measures I suggested to help the islanders accept the treatment. She took the vaccine herself, in front of a crowd of townsfolk. So did Dr Mugarraid and a number of leading citizens and all the temple. The Abbot preached on it for several weeks. The result was satisfactory. About a third of the townsfolk took the vaccine the first autumn. Nobody died, and when there was a resurgence of the pox among sailors at the docks, it was noted that the vaccinated took only very mild symptoms, while the unvaccinated died or barely survived. News of the vaccine began to spread abroad, and people from other islands in the archipelago came clamouring to receive it.
Then we heard, three months ago, that a fresh wave of illness had hit Centire. It is a sign of their desperation that they sent an embassy to Germain to ask for help. Gone were the bluffs and feints of aggression. The ambassador grovelled on the stone pavement in front of the Rocky’s seat. Germain had a self-satisfied grin on her face when she told me about it. She told me too that they had granted his request. They sent Dr Mugarraid and a crew of nurses over to Cambeltun, the chief port of Centire, to administer the vaccine.
The medical team were safely back in Lyis well before the consequences of their treatment became known. I think the nurses were unaware of what they were administering. Only Dr Mugarraid, under Germain’s orders, knew.
Germain told me about it herself. She came on her usual visit to my shieling, and as we sat in the sunshine drinking the mint tea that I had brewed, I asked her how the mission to Centire had gone. She showed her white teeth as she smiled, and laughed a low laugh.
“Oh, delicious,” she said, and for a moment I knew not whether she referred to the tea or the mercy mission. “Do you remember Volume One? Aardvark to Argentina?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Do you remember the entry on Anthrax?” she asked.
And so I knew what she had done.
I know Germain thinks I have now outlived my usefulness. I know that soon the townsfolk will come, ready to burn the witch, for so they will think me. She is riling them up with talk of destroying superstition and witchcraft, talk of leading the archipelago into the enlightenment of science. She will dig beneath the shieling in search of more knowledge and find naught but peat and hard gneiss. I will hide this Testament in my black box and hope that some day, one of the Order will find it and take heed.
Our mission is Restoration. We’re not the first to hold the motto Post Tenebras Lux. I had hoped we’d be the first to fulfil it. We know all about the Tenebras. But are we truly able to bring Lux? For the first time, I have begun to fear the Books are not enough.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment or share!
If you liked this story, you might also enjoy:
"Do you remember the entry on Anthrax?"
Oof. That's a good line.
Superb! love how you stretched the first line into something with an entirely different feel and thus released an entirely different story. ingenius