Star's Reach (39 page)

You can sail from Nardiga straight up the
Lannic to the North Ocean and get to Rosh that way, but as Slane
said on board the
Jennel Mornay
, you’ll have to take your
chances with Jinya pirates on our side of the ocean and Arab
pirates on the other. Since the Arabs are still fighting with Norj
and Rosh and the others over who’s going to follow what religion,
and Jinya pirates are, well, Jinya pirates, your chances of getting
through into the North Ocean that way aren’t so good. That’s why,
after our Third Civil War was over and the river trade started up,
so much freight started coming up from the South to Memfis along
routes Meyco’s navy keeps good and safe, and so much started coming
across the North Ocean under the guns of Genda’s navy, and then
down through Genda to Cago. Memfis was already a big city by then,
but it was the river trade that turned it into one of Mam Gaia’s
biggest.

It was already a big city because there
aren’t many places anywhere in the world that you can get so much
to eat out of the water. That’s one of the first things I learned
once Berry and I got there. From Memfis south for well over a
hundred kloms, the Misipi widens out into something that’s almost
ocean but not quite, wide enough from east to west that when you
stand on one shore you can’t see to the other. The priestesses call
it an estuary; people in Memfis just call it Banroo Bay, after a
city that’s down under the water toward the mouth of it, and depend
on it for a good half or more of what they eat.

Back before the Third Civil War there were
still places in Banroo Bay where there were too many poisons left
over from the old world to risk eating anything. Now you can just
about dip a net into the water anywhere and pull up something good.
There are villages and towns all around Banroo Bay where people
keep themselves fed and make their money doing something not too
different from that, and a lot of people in Memfis make their
living from the water the same way. I used to look out from my
window high up in the Memfis guild hall toward the end of the
rains, when it was safe to sail but the roads weren’t dry yet, and
watch the little boats heading out before dawn to bing back fish,
crabs, shrimp, seaweed, and just about anything else that lives in
the water and is good to eat.

They don’t bring back whales, of course, nor
seals or porps or any of the other mammals, who are too high on the
food chain. The priestesses say the mouth of the Misipi is probably
clean now, but nobody really wants to find out the hard way that
it’s not quite clean enough. Go to the markets in Memfis, though,
and you can get just about anything else that anybody on Mam Gaia’s
round belly likes to eat, and some things I’m amazed that anybody
eats at all, but most of the time when you sit down to dinner at a
Memfis table you’re going to get rice, which grows like weeds in
the low country to either side of the Misipi’s mouth, and fruit,
which grows in the hill country further back so well it puts weeds
to shame, but also a mother of a lot of seafood.

Well, really, there’s a mother of a lot of
everything, because Memfis is rich—rich from the river trade, rich
from the ships that come there from all over Mam Gaia’s round
belly, rich from the seafood out of Banroo Bay, rich from the farms
and orchards, and rich from plenty of other things, too, including
good unstripped ruins within reach of the Memfis ruinmen. It’s rich
even compared to other rich towns in Meriga, and let’s not even
talk about what it looks like to a farmer’s child like me from the
Tenisi hill country. I figured out pretty soon after Berry and I
got to Memfis that it was a good long ways past anything I was used
to, but I didn’t realize just how far until the rains came rolling
up off the Gulf of Meyco.

That was after I finished healing up from the
knife wound Thu gave me, and after I finished making all the
arrangements with Jennel Cobey and the Memfis ruinmen for the next
season’s dig. That took a lot of time and a lot of work, and I
spent more days than I like to remember going over the papers and
making sure nothing got missed. Then I took them to a couple of
misters from the Memfis guild who were making a point of helping me
out and had them go over the same papers with me. All of that paid
off when we started digging, but I didn’t know that at the time;
all I knew when the clouds started piling up blue-black in the
southern sky was that I was tired of all the papers and
negotiations, really tired, and wanted to relax for a bit.

Then the rains started, and I got my wish and
then some.

The rains in Memfis aren’t like the rains we
get inland in Shanuga or Melumi. There you get plain heavy rain,
enough to soak you to your skin if you stay out in it for a while,
and boats have to pull up to the shore and get covered with tarps
or they end up flooded after a bit. In Memfis the rain comes down
like an ocean that somebody poured on your head. The clouds aren’t
just the blue-black you get elsewhere, they’re literally dark as
night, and if you’re caught out on the water in a boat you might as
well just start swimming because the boat’s going to be full of
water and heading toward the bottom long before you have any chance
to get it to land. The small boats they use to bring in fish and
everything else get hauled out of the water as soon as the clouds
come in sight, and get stacked upside down in the big indoor fish
markets close to the water; the riverboats take their smokestacks
down and go into big sheds; and any sailing vessels that get caught
in Memfis by the rains—most of them are far away over the ocean by
the time the rains come—batten down their hatches and hope for the
best.

You don’t just go anywhere when the rains
come, though, the way you do in most other places. Every one of
Memfis’ fifteen or seventeen neighborhoods has its own way of
dividing itself up and its own rules about who goes where; none of
it’s written down or official, but you can end up dead in a gutter
if you ignore it and somebody decides to get upset. The ruinmen at
the Memfis guild hall explained all of that to Berry and me, and
once the clouds started rolling in I made some plans about where to
go once the rains started.

It turned out that I could have spared the
trouble, because I’d made some good friends among the youngest
Memfis misters by the time that happened, and the evening that the
thunder rolled and the lightning snaked across the black sky, a
couple of them came pelting up the stairs, laughing, and pulled me
with them back down the stairs and out into the street.

That was my first time meeting the Memfis
rains, and I gasped and spluttered and laughed pretty much the way
I would have if they’d tossed me into Banroo Bay, which couldn’t
have made me any wetter. The two misters who’d come to get me were
as drenched as I was, of course, and so were all the other misters
and prentices who were spilling out of the guild hall and the tall
narrow houses on either side. Everyone was laughing and whooping
and splashing each other with water, but they were also drifting
down the street toward the big covered market where the ruinmen and
the chemists and a few other guilds buy their groceries. Light was
pouring out of the market’s windows and doors, and a kind of music
I’d never heard before was blaring out over the pounding rain.

Inside all the stalls had been cleared away
from the middle, leaving plenty of bare tile floor. The musicians
were up at one end on a platform, with instruments you don’t see in
other towns. The kind of music they play in Memfis isn’t something
you hear in most other parts of Meriga, either, though I’ve heard
that Sanloo and some of the other river towns have bands that play
it too. It’s got its own rhythms and notes that bend and slide and
wail, and a lot of it gets played on horns, which nobody else but
the army uses these days. I never did learn much about it, other
than that it’s what Dizzy played when he was on his way home to
Nyork after the fight over Troy, and that it’s the best dancing
music I’ve ever heard, but most people in Memfis know a lot about
it, and there must be more than a hundred bands that play it
there.

So the musicians had their place, and they
were starting to play. Around the other three sides of the
building, all the stalls had their usual signs taken down. The
ruinmen had most of one side, the chemists had half of another, and
each of the other guilds had their places, which I learned later
they’d had since the market was built more than a hundred years
ago. There were big fancy banners hanging from the ceiling where
the signs for the stalls usually go, and down below on the tables
was more food and drink than I’ve ever seen in one place at one
time. Prentices from all the guilds were hauling in covered pans
and kettles and barrels and tarp-covered boxes, and when they ran
out of room to put anything more on the tables they stacked things
up in the spaces behind. I’d already figured out that there was
going to be a mother of a party, a mother with babies and a
grandchild or two, but it was when one of the misters I was with
told me that all the food and drink was free that I started to
realize just how rich Memfis is.

I was right, though; it was a mother of a
party. There must have been more than a thousand people inside the
market by the time the dancing started, and we were all wet and
happy and, before long, pretty thoroughly drunk as well. Most of
the women were wearing thin little dresses that didn’t hide much at
the best of times, and given a good dousing with rain—well, let’s
just say you didn’t have to wonder what they’d look like if things
got friendly enough that the dresses came off. Me, I did my share
of dancing and drinking, and I must have had something to eat,
though I don’t remember the details too clearly, and I ended the
night by stumbling back out into the rain with a couple of women
from the picker’s guild, laughing and kissing all the way to the
place where they lived, which might have been all of six doors down
from the market. Things were very friendly by then, and the dresses
came off pretty quick once we got someplace private; from the
sounds I heard through the walls to either side, we weren’t the
only people being friendly there, either.

I woke up with the kind of pounding head
that’s practically welcome, since it reminds you of what kind of
night you had the night before. Things got lively again, and
finally I kissed them both and stumbled back to the ruinmen’s guild
hall. I bathed and got something to eat and slept for a while, and
then damn if we didn’t head on down to the market and do it all
again.

That’s Memfis in the season of the rains, one
party after another, night after night, until the skies dry out and
everyone gets back to doing the work that pays for all that food
and drink. By the time a couple of weeks have gone by it’s not
quite so crowded or so wild as it is when the rain first comes
down, but every night until the rain stops there’s food and drink
and music for everyone who happens to come by, so long as they’re
where they should be. That’s Memfis, too; the burners and smelters
and a couple of other guilds have their own parties in another
covered market about a klom from the ruinmen’s guild hall, and
ruinmen don’t go there if they don’t want to get beaten or worse,
and of course nobody from the guilds outside the Memfis city walls
is going to get past the guards and wander into one of the parties
inside the walls.

I didn’t mind that the first year, when I was
half drunk on Memfis and the other half on pretty Memfis women. I
minded it even less the second year, when I was more than half
drunk on running my own dig for a successful season, and still
thought that Star’s Reach might be one shovelful of dirt away. The
third year, when I knew for certain that the dig was a failure,
dancing and drinking and spending the nights with pretty Memfis
women beat the stuffing out of sitting in my little room in the
Memfis guildhall, and facing the fact that everything I’d done
since I fell through the floor in Shanuga and found the dead man’s
letter had brought me to a bare blank wall with no way forward. Not
that sitting in the little room would have gotten me any closer to
Star’s Reach, or to anything else but misery. There are times when
getting drunk and falling into bed with someone you’ve just met is
as reasonable as anything else you can do.

But the other side of my story, or this part
of my story, is the two seasons I spent digging in the Arksa
jungle, hoping that I was going to find Star’s Reach or at least
some clue of how to get there. If I had all the time in the world I
could tell that in some kind of order, from the day we first broke
ground a month after the rains to the day we packed up the last of
the tools and went back to Memfis, but we’re not that many weeks
from running out of food, and I still have other things I want to
write down for—well, for whoever reads this, if anyone ever does.
It’s my part of the one big story Plummer talked about all those
days and kloms ago on the road to Sisnaddi, and if nobody ever
reads it, at least I had the chance to tell it.

The Arksa jungle—that’s part of the story the
way Memfis is, and for most of the same reasons. The Tenisi hill
country where I grew up has woodland here and there, but it’s too
far inland, too high up, and too dry in the dry season to get the
kind of jungle you get down close to the Gulf of Meyco. There are
parts of Arksa that are like the Tenisi hills, or so I was told,
but the part where we were digging was close enough to Banroo Bay
that the best way to get there from Memfis was to hire one of the
steamboats that work up and down the bay and go across to a little
town on the far side of the Misipi called Url, and then hire wagons
and go from there. The old Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility
was a couple of days north and west of there.