Episode 105 · The Fire Tower

Maxim woke at five without an alarm. His father had woken the same way, and his grandfather before him, the one who had kept horses. The yard was still dark, and the things begun and never finished sat in their places like sleeping animals: the wheel-less trailer by the fence, the stack of roof tiles for a roof that did not yet exist, the boat engine bought cheap one autumn, wrapped in a tarp. Soles had sent him back here after the three walls: whatever came through walls came for what Soles carried. He counted them from the doorway without meaning to.

He made coffee and opened the delivery notebook. He wrote by hand on squared paper, like his father. Monday: building-materials depot in the north district, two runs. The print shop, one pallet. The two shops on the boulevard, early in the morning, before they opened. Beside the materials depot, in pen, he had drawn the same short diagonal mark three times over the past month. He knew what the mark meant. Late.

The phone rang at half past five. Maxim let it ring once so he could finish pouring the coffee.

— Maxim.

The dispatcher sounded like a man who had gotten up early just to get an unpleasant call over with.

— Calling before you leave so you don’t make the trip. I gave today and tomorrow to someone else. And the rest of the month. You know why.

Maxim looked at the three marks in the notebook.

— I know.

— Nothing personal. You were good. It’s just that lately you’re not where you say you’re going to be.

— I understand.

— If anything changes, I’ll call you.

Nothing was going to change, and they both knew it. Maxim hung up, turned the phone face down on the table, and drank his coffee to the bottom, slowly, hot, the way he drank it every morning. Then he drew a straight line through the materials depot, then Tuesday’s row, then the rows for the following week. He was left with the print shop and the two stores. That would not even pay for the diesel.

He told no one. There was no one to tell. Tesa had her hand in a cast, Krista had Castell, and Soles had a palm stitched twice and an archive basement with a rail bent like wire. Maxim had seen him come out of there leaning against the wall, dried blood beneath his nose and an expression Maxim had never seen on him before. The face of a man frightened by his own hands.

He climbed into the truck and headed toward the boulevard and, from there, as he had every morning for two months between runs, first past the hospital, then past Soles’s house. It was not on the way. He had rearranged his deliveries so it would be.

At the railway crossing by the silos, the gate came down just as he reached it.

Maxim braked without hurry and stopped first at the barrier. The red light began to flash. The bell tinkled thinly, like a toy. To the right and left, the track disappeared into the morning fog, straight and empty. No train. Maxim looked at his watch. Looked at the track. Looked at his watch again.

Two minutes passed. Then two more.

He did not like crossing gates. Never had. Whenever he sat at one, he felt a small, precise tightening in his chest. He knew where it came from and did not think about it.

The red light flashed. On and off. On and off.

Then it stopped going dark. It stayed lit and grew, became warmer, more yellow, and began to move the way fire moves under wind. The smell of diesel changed into pinewood, burned pitch, and salt. The bell fell silent. In its place came a deep, steady roar Maxim knew from sleep though he had never heard it awake: the sea striking stone, far below, very far below.

Maxim reached for the steering wheel and felt the coarse bark of his tree. One plant shone among the gray outlines. A man stood beyond it, his hands dark, his face turned toward a light too distant to see.

Maxim called. The man did not turn. Maxim closed his hand on the needles of the plant.

— Fire I —

Tertius had kept the fire for twenty-two years.

The tower stood on the rocky end of the breakwater at the mouth of the harbor, as tall as ten men stacked one on another, built of gray stone, with an iron platform at the top where the fire burned. From sunset to sunrise, the fire must not be allowed to die. That was the whole law. A prefect had written it on a bronze plaque fixed to the wall beside the door, and Tertius could not read, but he knew it by heart. At the foot of the tower, the service boat rocked on its mooring.

The grain ships came from the south at night so they could catch the land breeze at dawn. They came blind through rocks known only by name, and the only thing they had was his fire. If the fire burned, they entered. If it did not, they shattered against the breakwater, grain and men together, and the next day the city had no bread.

Tertius could feel them coming.

He did not see them. No one could, in that darkness, until they were close. But he felt them an hour beforehand, like a change in weather in his joints, like a door opening somewhere far away in a large house. He knew how many there were and how fast they came. He put wood on the fire before it needed it, and the sailors in the harbor said the old man in the tower built the flame higher at exactly the right moment, as though someone whispered to him.

No one whispered. He simply stood there. He had stood there all his life.

The feeling had not always been there.

In his first winter on the tower he could feel nothing at all. The fog came in at dusk one night and stayed, and the flame lit only the fog itself, a yellow ball around the iron platform. Beyond it there was no sea, no harbor, no world.

— No one sails in this, the harbor watch shouted up at midnight. Save your wood, old man.

He was not old yet. He did not answer. He went down the spiral for wood and climbed back with it on his back, and went down again.

He saw nothing all night. He heard only the water on the rocks and the fire eating what he gave it. Every armload felt like bread thrown into a well.

At dawn the fog lifted off the water like a lid. Inside the harbor, tied to the quay, sat a grain ship that had not been there at dusk, her sails wet, her crew asleep on deck. No one had heard her come in. No one aboard looked up at the tower.

He went down and slept. The next winter, on a clear night, he felt the first ship an hour before it came.

❦