Star's Reach (29 page)

Eighteen: Mule’s Pace

It took Berry and I a couple of weeks, as I
wrote earlier, to finish going through the papers from the Skeega
ruinmen. Every couple of days we found something that mentioned the
White River Transport Facility, but it wasn’t until we’d read most
of what they’d left at Troy Tower that we got the records from the
seasons when the Skeega ruinmen worked on it.

It was late in the afternoon, and I’d spent
nearly the whole day reading the dullest kind of report a ruinman
can file with the guild: here’s where it was, here’s when we worked
on it, and all we found was concrete we cracked to get the iron
inside. That’s what you find more often than not in the ruins of
small towns and suburbs, because a lot of people kept living in
those straight through the end of the old world; the small towns
stayed small towns and bits and pieces of the suburbs turned into
small towns themselves, and the people who lived there stripped old
buildings for anything they could use long before ruinmen got to
work there. So that’s what I’d been reading, one report after
another from the small towns near Skeega, and then I pulled out
another stack and nearly dropped it, because it said WHITE RIVER
TRANSPORT FACILITY right across the top.

That was the most exciting thing about that
stack of paper, though. The place was a truck depot in the years
before the Second Civil War, when there were lots of little
rebellions catching fire here and there all over Meriga and there
weren’t enough soldiers or fuel to stomp on all of them. That’s all
it was: lots of trucks, big round fuel tanks to keep them fed, and
a bunch of long low bulletproof buildings for the clerks who
managed the trucks and the soldiers who guarded the fuel. Most of
it got burned by rebels toward the end of the Second Civil War, and
it was abandoned and used by squatters afterwards, so the papers
that might have sent us on our way were long gone. The ruinmen who
dug the place up found a whole mess of buried pipes, and made a lot
of money selling the metal, but that didn’t do Berry and me any
good.

After we’d finished reading all of it, we sat
there for a little while, and neither one of us said a thing.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I guess we go to Memfis, then.”

Berry grinned. “I was hoping.”

I thought about routes, and added up the
money I had. It would be a long walk, unless—

“You know,” I said then, “we could go from
here to Cago.”

His eyebrows went up. “And from Cago?”

“Across to the Misipi, and down by riverboat
from there.”

That got me an open mouth, and then another
grin. “I always wanted to ride a riverboat someday.”

“Get ready,” I told him. “We can get out of
here tomorrow, and get to the Misipi in a couple of weeks.”

That’s pretty much what we did, too. We said
our goodbyes to the old ruinmen who lived at Troy Tower at dinner,
shared another glass of Genda whiskey with Tashel Ban that night,
got up before the sun did and headed west down the Skeega road.

We weren’t quite alone on the road, but it
seemed close to that sometimes. The lake schooners go around the
north end of Mishga from Troy to Cago, and when the winds are good
it’s at least as fast as walking there and a lot more comfortable.
All the cargo goes by boat, too, because it’s cheaper and safer
than loading it on a wagon and hoping for the best. So most of what
you get on the Mishga roads are farmers heading to market, with a
few players or an elwus walking with them just to add a bit of
color to it all. That made for less trouble finding places to stay
the night, and it was also the reason we figured out that we were
being followed.

That happened just west of Ipsee. We took the
wrong fork of the road there, and got most of the way to Anarba
before we had the chance to ask a local farmer for directions and
found out that we’d made a mistake. That meant a couple of hours on
rough farm roads going south, but we finally made it back to the
straight road to Cago and got to a little town, a place called
Leen, just before sunset. Leen has all of one place where travelers
can spend the night, a big farmhouse that’s probably going to give
it up and become a tavern in a few more years. It’s already got a
big sign out front, and the front room and dining room have been
knocked together into a space big enough to feed a pretty large
party; it’s just a matter of time before the bar goes in and the
fields get sold or leased to somebody else.

I hired a room there, we got the road dust
off us, and then we went down to the big room out front and saw
about some dinner. The place was still enough of a farmhouse to
cook up a meal that would make a fieldhand comfortable after a long
harvest day, and so the two of us were sitting back and feeling
very full when the door banged open and a man came in: just a plain
traveler in dusty clothes, with the kind of bland ordinary face
you’d have a hard time remembering from one day to the next. The
woman who ran the place went over to him, and I could hear about
every third word as he hired a room and got a meal ordered. All the
while he was talking to her, though, he kept looking past her,
across the room, at Berry and me.

That’s when I realized that I’d seen his face
before, though I couldn’t remember where. He might have noticed
that I was watching him, because he stopped looking at me, and then
a minute or two later he was on his way up the stairs to his room.
The woman who ran the farmhouse went back to the kitchen. I turned
to Berry, and his face had that blank look he gets when he doesn’t
want anyone to know that he’s noticed something.

“Sir and Mister,” he said very quietly. By
that time, as I mentioned earlier, he only used my title for other
people’s benefit, or for a joke, or when he wanted to say something
important.

I figured I knew this time which it was. “The
man who just came in.”

A quick nod. “He’s following us. We passed
him on the road to Anarba today.”

I considered that for a while, and couldn’t
think of any good reason why somebody else would make the same
double-back we did, and end up at the same place. I nodded and
said, “We can talk in a bit,” and he nodded back and put his
attention into finishing up the last of his dinner.

Once we got up to our room and the door was
locked, Berry said, “I don’t think he was following us before Troy,
but I can’t say for sure.”

“The roads from Melumi were pretty crowded,
but I don’t think I saw him,” I said.

“If he wasn’t—” He didn’t go on, but I knew
what he was thinking. The roads in Meriga are about as safe these
days as they’ve been since the end of the old world, but every so
often you hear of someone with valuables being robbed or worse, and
noticing that you’re being trailed by some member of a gang who
simply makes sure you’re where they want you to be is supposed to
be one of the few warnings you’re likely to get.

All of a sudden, I thought of the riders who
had followed us north to Luwul. It didn’t seem likely at first that
there was a connection, but as I thought about it there in the
farmhouse in Leen, the idea was hard to shake.

“Then we’ll dodge him the way we dodged the
riders,” I said.

Berry looked up at me with a grin. “Any idea
where we can find Plummer? He’d know what to do.”

We both laughed, and didn’t think anything
more of it.

We might have gone ahead as we did in Tucki
and travel by night, but that end of Mishga is too thickly settled
for that; we’d have been spotted in no time, and the whole
countryside would be talking about the two ruinmen who were hiding
in the dark. Instead, we left the farmhouse early the next morning,
and got in among farmers from a little town nearby who were on
their way to the market at another small town whose name I forget,
twenty kloms or so down the road. We stuck with them right to the
market town, and didn’t leave the town the next morning until we’d
found another group of travelers who were going the way we
were.

That’s more or less how we traveled all the
way to Cago. The first few days we didn’t see any trace of the man
we’d spotted at Leen, and I’d just about begun to wonder whether
the whole thing was a mistake, when Berry caught sight of him on
the edge of the crowd at the market at Jonsul, and let me know
where to look. He was turning away by the time I found him, but it
was the same man, I was certain of that.

We caught sight of him again every two or
three days from there to Cago. Once we got near the Inyana border,
just to be sure, we veered off on a side road when we were sure no
one was looking and crossed down to another road running the same
way across the very northern edge of Inyana. Sure enough, by the
time we got to Sowben, there he was again, watching as we got into
town at the end of a long day walking alongside a wagonload of
metal from an old airport outside of Elcart that the ruinmen there
had sold to a local metal merchant.

By that time we were close enough to Cago
that there wasn’t much point in making any more detours. Berry and
I kept on the Inyana road, staying with the metal merchant’s wagon
and talking shop with him and his prentices, partly because there’s
safety in numbers and partly because they were good company and it
was pleasant to spend time with people who knew most of the same
things we did and shared in another part of the same work. Still,
that meant that the man with the bland face had no trouble at all
keeping track of us.

We spotted him a couple of times in the days
that followed, never more than a glimpse here and there. To this
day I don’t know if he hadn’t realized that we were onto him, or if
he knew it, and showed himself to us now and then just to keep us
on our toes. We kept waiting for a gang to show up, but none ever
did.

Finally one morning we got to the edge of the
Cago ruins, and the road veered south a bit to stay clear of them.
Cago was a big city in the old world, the biggest still above water
anywhere in Meriga, and even though ruinmen had been digging into
the ruins there about as long as they’d been busy anywhere but
Troy, there are still plenty of buildings standing, most of them
close up against the shore of Lake Mishga. It’s the only place I
know where you can get an idea of what the drowned cities of the
coast must have been like before the seas rose, just ruin after
ruin as far as your eyes will reach.

Most places in Meriga, the roads stay as far
away from the ruins as they can, but south and east of Cago you
don’t have much choice unless you want to go deep into Ilanoy farm
country, so the road runs right up under the ruins. Berry and I and
the metal merchant and his prentices had a fine time talking about
the buildings we passed and what the local ruinmen found the last
season and all. Most of the other people on the road hurried along
past us and gave the ruins nervous looks over their shoulders, as
though a robot was about to come lurching out from between two
heaps of brick that used to be factories and butter us all across
the pavement. Most people nowadays are like that; they’re glad to
buy the metal we salvage and even gladder to have somebody taking
the risks you run when you’re cleaning up what the old world left
behind, but they don’t like to think about it much, and when you
walk alongside what’s left of Cago you pretty much have to think
about it.

We walked most of a day alongside those
ruins, and weren’t to Cago yet by the time the sun went down. We’d
just about gotten to a town called Munsa then; the metal merchant
had friends in the business a little further on and wanted to get
to their place that night, but Berry and I were tired, and so we
said our goodbyes and went to find a place to stay in Munsa. There
was only one, a big comfortable inn, and it still had rooms to
hire, so I handed over some coins and we did the usual, upstairs to
our room to wash off the road dust, downstairs to the big room to
get a meal. The room was a cramped little place without a window
and the food wasn’t half so good as you get in Inyana farmhouses
along the road, but I didn’t mind; I was tired, and wouldn’t have
minded a bit of bread and bean soup and a place to sleep on the
ground.

The common room was mostly empty when we got
there. We sat down and called for our dinners, and I was about
halfway through mine when all at once Berry nudged me hard in the
side with one of his elbows. I tried not to let anything show on my
face, which wasn’t too easy, since Berry has sharp elbows; still,
nobody seemed to have noticed when I looked up from my food and
gave the room a lazy glance. I expected to see the man who’d been
following us, and didn’t. It took a moment before I realized that
the only face in the room that was turned toward me was one I
recognized.

By then he had seen me as well, and came over
to the table where Berry and I were sitting: an old man with just a
trace of white hair around his ears and eyeglasses as round as
moons. “A very good evening to you both,” he said. “I hope you
won’t mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” I told him. “It’s a long way
from the road to Luwul, Plummer.”

That got me a smile I couldn’t read at all.
“True indeed,” he said, and sat down across the table from me. “A
very long way.”

I’d half decided not to tell Plummer that
Berry and I had someone following us, but we got to talking about
the trip west from Troy, and the moment I mentioned the road we’d
taken along the northern edge of Inyana he gave me one of his looks
and said, “I take it you had unwelcome company.”

“More or less,” I admitted.

“Riders? I recall some difficulty with them
on the road to Luwul.”

“No, just one man on foot.”

Plummer considered that for a moment. “If you
would like to lose him, there might be a way. Still, all in good
time. Where are you going next?” I told him, and he nodded once.
“If the two of you have any interest in company on the trip, there
might indeed be a way. Sanloo’s the next place I need to be.”