Star's Reach (30 page)

“How’s the medicine business?” Berry asked
him then.

“Oh, prosperous as always. I’m pleased to
report that the good folk of Hiyo and Inyana are less hostile to
fine natural elixirs than their Tucki equivalents.” He sat back,
glanced past me just for a moment, and then smiled. “We should talk
about that later, however,” he said, and his hand moved: one finger
on the edge of the table, and then four. “Tomorrow, perhaps?”

We said our goodnights, and he got up and
went to the stairs out front. Berry and I finished our dinners and
got up, and I made sure to turn around a little more quickly than
usual. Sure enough, somebody was leaving through a door at the back
of the common room, and I couldn’t be sure but it certainly looked
like the man who was following us.

Up in our room, Berry and I looked at each
other for a long moment. “The only question I’ve got,” Berry said
finally, “is whether Plummer’s showed up by chance or not.”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I tend to
trust him, though I know that might be a mistake.”

“I know.” Then: “But it probably wouldn’t
hurt to have that conversation.”

We waited a while, until the hall outside our
room was dead silent, and then I went to the door and opened it as
casually as I could, as though I was headed to the washroom. No one
was watching. One, four meant room fourteen, and that wasn’t too
far away from our room; the trick was to make sure nobody realized
both of us were going someplace, and that’s something every
ruinman’s prentice knows how to do.

Whenever two or three or half a dozen
prentices want to go somewhere in their mister’s house where only
one was supposed to go, you walk soft and match your footsteps to
the others who are with you, so the mister and the senior prentices
only hear one set of footsteps. Now of course they did the same
thing when they were younger, so it’s a bit of a game. If you do it
well enough to fool them, you can usually get away with whatever it
is, even if they find out about it later on.

This was no game, but Berry and I both knew
the way of it, and went down the hall right in step with each
other, past Plummer’s door as far as the washroom, then went back
to the door slow and soft as air so nobody would hear us. I tapped
on the door—one, four—and a moment later Plummer opened it, beamed,
and waved us silently in.

We made plans in a whisper. Berry went to get
our gear, making less noise than your ordinary mouse; Plummer went
and got something that I later figured out was clothing, and then
we climbed out Plummer’s window into the stableyard behind the inn
and followed him into the night. After that most of what I remember
was hurrying through dark alleys, trying to keep close to Plummer,
as he led us on a zigzag path that seemed to go on for kloms and
kloms.

Finally we stopped. I could see next to
nothing but stars sparkling above us. The moon was down, and a dim
light came from a little window in what looked like a low
flat-roofed shack just ahead. Plummer whispered to Berry and me to
wait, and then went to the shack and tapped on what must have been
a door. The light vanished; I heard the door creak open and then
shut again. In the silence that followed I heard an odd faint sound
that finally turned into the murmur of moving water.

The door creaked again, and then Plummer was
motioning us forward. I found my way through it by feel, and let
myself be guided to a bench by someone I couldn’t see. Berry came
through the door, black against the dim starlight, and then whoever
it was pulled the door shut again. A moment later, light: a dim
lamp in the middle of the ceiling, revealing a tidy little room
with a stove in one corner, shelves and cupboards here and there, a
table in the middle and a little curtained window in each wall.

“Well,” said the fourth person in the little
room, a stocky gray-haired man in rough work clothes. “You’ll do,
no question. You’ve all eaten? Fair enough. Get some sleep while
you can; we’ll be going at first light.” He made a gesture toward a
low door like a hatch. I thanked him—I was pretty tired by then—and
stooped to get through the door; on the other side was an even
smaller room with four bunks, stacked two to a side, with a
straw-filled pallet and a blanket on each. That was enough for me;
I found a place for my gear, got settled in one of the bunks, and
fell asleep right away.

When I woke up, it took me a long moment to
remember why I was sleeping where I was. About the time I got awake
enough to figure that out, I noticed that there was a good bit of
light coming in around the sides of the door, and remembered what
the man had said about starting before the sun was up. The other
three bunks were empty, and I wondered for a moment whether Berry
and Plummer had somehow managed to leave me behind.

Then I noticed that the room was
moving—rolling just a bit from side to side. I rubbed my eyes and
laughed, and went to the door. The room on the other side was empty
and the door to the outside was open, but that didn’t worry me; I
could see the green bank of a canal sliding slowly past a few
meedas from the door.

Outside the cabin, the sun was splashing its
light down on the canalboat, the water of the canal, and the banks
and farms to either side. The man who’d welcomed us last night was
on the towpath up ahead, next to a gray mule who plodded along the
way as patient as only mules can be, and the towrope ran back from
the mule’s collar to the front end of the boat—the bow, I should
say; I learned that word and half a dozen other bits of boat talk
over the days that followed.

The cabin I’d taken for a shack the night
before was right up near the aft end, a little stable for whichever
mule wasn’t working was just behind the bow, and between them was
the long body of the boat, with hatches here and there that let
into the hold. Berry was aft, handling the rudder, when I came out,
and Plummer was sitting on the roof of the cabin. Both of them were
dressed in the sort of cheap work clothes you expect to see on a
boatman.

Plummer slid down from his place with a grace
you don’t expect from an old man. “Good morning!” he said. “There
are clothes a little more suitable than your leathers back in the
cabin, and I recommend you try them on. If you’re considering food,
there’s bread and soup in the kitchen—the galley, I should say—and
some quite acceptable apples.”

I thanked him and said, “Where are we?”

“Our captain,” and he motioned with his head
at the man beside the mule up ahead of us, “calls it the Calsag
channel. If I gather correctly, it runs from Lake Mishga south of
Cago out to the main Cago Canal west of here, which will take us to
the Ilanoy River and the first steamboat south.”

“Good,” I said. “Thank you again—this is
pretty clever.”

“Most people react to being followed by
hurrying.” Plummer gestured ahead, to where the mule and the
captain plodded slowly on. “Most people who follow others, if they
lose their target, count on that, and hurry to catch up. Fall
behind, and quite often you won’t be found.”

Even though he was looking away from me, it
felt like he was watching me as he said that. I had no idea why, or
what he wanted me to say or not say. “You do that a lot?”

“Now and again.”

“I guess selling medicine’s a risky
business.”

That got me a quick unreadable look back over
his shoulder. “It can be.”

The conversation didn’t go anywhere else, so
I went back inside and had some of the bread and soup and one of
the apples, washed up, and got out of my ruinman’s leathers into
the same kind of coarse cotton clothes Plummer was wearing.
Afterwards, I went out again just as we got to a lock. There was a
line of canal boats waiting there, so we joined it, and sat there
while two boats at a time went up and two more going the other way
came down.

The captain came aft as soon as he’d gotten
the mules settled in the stalls up front. “Morning,” he said. “You
ever handle a mule?”

“You find me anybody from the Tenisi hill
country who didn’t,” I told him, “and I’ll buy you a drink.”

That got me a nod and the kind of ready smile
one working man gives to another. “Fair enough. When we get going
again, I’d like you to spell me; your boy hasn’t worked with mules,
but he’s good on the rudder—and so’s our other passenger.”

I remembered just in time that Plummer’s
friends didn’t use names. “Sure. Anything I ought to know?”

“Just keep Sal on the towpath and we’ll be
fine.”

By the time we were in the lock, I’d gone
forward, gotten introduced to Sal the mule, sorted out which of us
was boss, and got her harnessed up. Once we were ready to move
again, Sal and I headed down the towpath, and pretty quick she
settled into the same steady plod as the other mule, whose name was
Josey. I got to know both of them pretty well over the days that
followed, because that’s how I paid my way down the Cago Canal.
Night and day, the boat kept moving at mule’s pace, a couple of
boatlengths behind the boat ahead and in front of the boat behind,
and night and day the captain and I spelled each other, four hours
on and four hours off.

The only breaks in that slow pace were when
we lined up at a lock, or when we pulled into a wide place to load
or unload something at one of the little towns that lined the
canal. That latter was a break only in a manner of speaking,
because it was me and Berry who did the loading and unloading, and
none of it was particularly light. We hauled out kegs of nails and
wood screws, crates of shovel and hoe and rake heads, all the metal
parts and machinery for a wind turbine some farm family had saved
up a couple of years of profits to buy, and boxes that had stocky
brown jugs of Genda whiskey in them; we replaced it all with
barrels of oranges and molasses, bottles of rum, and twenty-keelo
sacks of corn and millet from Ilanoy farms. Still, what ruinmen
haul on the job is no lighter.

All considered, it was a pretty good time,
and the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about canal boats
before I’d started the trip gave it a bit of interest, too. There
aren’t a lot of canals down in Tenisi, but they’re all over the
northern part of Meriga, from Nyork west all the way to the Misipi.
I asked Plummer about that once, when we were sitting on the roof
of the cabin and Berry and the captain were doing their half of the
work.

“The canals? They’re quite old,” he said.
“They came before the old world, or what most people remember as
the old world. Most of them were abandoned when fossil fuels came
to power everything, and had to be dug out and fitted with locks
again afterwards. That started after the Third Civil War, and it’s
still going on; if I recall correctly, there are two canals being
reopened in Hiyo as we speak.”

“That was generous of them,” I said. “The
ancients, I mean.”

He glanced at me, took a long swig from his
whiskey bottle. “As far as anyone knows, they never thought twice
about it. Once they had their cars and planes, they no longer
needed the canals, and—” A shrug. “That was that.”

“No, I meant it. At least they dug the things
out in the first place.”

“I suppose that’s—“ Plummer stopped halfway
through the sentence, and a moment later I saw why. There were
soldiers, a long line of them, crossing a big stone bridge up ahead
of us. We got off the roof—you have to get down most times when a
canal boat goes under a bridge—and watched the soldiers march past
as we got closer to the bridge.

We were almost under it when the end of the
line came past, and there was a captin on horseback right at the
back. He glanced at us, looked up and down the boat, then looked
straight at me. “You with the hat,” he said. (I was wearing one, a
cheap straw hat I’d bought for a couple of coins in one of the
little towns along the way.) “Care to make a better wage than
you’re getting now? The jennel’s looking for soldiers.”

We had enough soldiers in Tenisi that I knew
what to say. “Born with a bad foot, Sir and Captin. I can just
about keep up with a mule.”

He considered that. “Too bad. If you’ve got
friends who might be interested, tell them Jennel Tarl’s hiring, a
hundred marks for signing even if they’ve never touched a gun
before.”

“I’ll tell ‘em, Sir and Captin,” I said, and
the man nodded and spurred his horse after the line of marching
men.

The damp black shadows under the bridge slid
over us then. After we came out the other side, I got back onto the
roof and looked over my shoulder. “I wonder what that was
about.”

“Something we’ll see quite often in the next
few years, I fear,” Plummer said. He drank more whiskey. “An aging
presden and no heir is a recipe for trouble, and that means
soldiers: for the loyal, the ambitious, those who simply hope to
survive. And when she dies...”

He wasn’t looking at me that time, either,
but I had the same feeling again as though he was watching me,
seeing how I would react. I didn’t have the least idea what to say,
and I didn’t really want to say much of anything, either. What
Plummer had said a bit earlier about the Third Civil War suddenly
made me notice that my time was a lot better than fifty or a
hundred years ago or, well, pretty much any time since the old
world started to come apart.

Not that long ago, there hadn’t been long
lines of canal boats moving iron and oranges and grain from one
side of Meriga to the other, and for that matter there hadn’t been
enough iron and oranges and grain, or much of anything else, for a
lot of people all through that time. When Sheren died and left the
presden’s office for others to fight over, I wondered, would it be
back to that? I didn’t want to think about it just then, but the
idea was hard to chase from my mind. As I write all this, here at
Star’s Reach, it still is.