Star's Reach (40 page)

The first time I went there was a few weeks
before the rains set in, that first year I was in Memfis, a week or
so after Jennel Cobey’s men took Thu and let him go. We took a boat
across to Url, hired some horses with the jennel’s money, and took
the main road up out of the soggy land near the river to Josbro.
That’s a fair sized town, and if you go past it a ways you get to
Wanrij, which is just a road house, a shrine, and a once a week
market. We stayed the night at the road house, and then hired a
guide and went into the jungle to find the place called WRTF.

It might as well have been any other patch of
jungle, green and dark, full of huge tree trunks rising up from the
ground, birds yelling at each other up where you can’t see them,
and a million different bugs flying around, most of which took at
least one nip out of me. We did some searching, and found what was
left of concrete walls here and there, overgrown with tree roots or
sticking out of the undergrowth all anyhow like an old man’s teeth.
We poked the ground with metal rods here and there, and got a rough
sense of how far the buildings went, then tied red cords around the
trees that would have to go.

That’s something I’d never done before, since
the ruins in Shanuga had been cleared long before I was born, and
it’s something most people in Meriga won’t do at all, since cutting
down trees is one sure way to get Mam Gaia good and mad at you.
Still, ruinmen do it when they have to, and we had to. That meant
getting priestesses to come out and do the ceremony, paying to have
ten times as many trees planted and tended somewhere else, and
dealing with lumbermen, which nobody wants to do.

As soon as the rains were over and the ground
was dry enough, we were back with the priestesses, and we stood
around and looked respectful as the priestesses asked forgiveness
for each of the trees that had to come down. They finished around
noon, and the lumbermen came about an hour later, men with big
dirty beards and shabby leather clothes and old rattletrap wagons
drawn by oxen. Most of the ruinmen made themselves scarce, but I
was in charge and that meant I had to go around with them and make
sure they knew which trees to take.

You don’t pay lumbermen. They mill the trees
they take, sell the useful wood to carpenters and turn the rest
into charcoal for the blacksmiths, and they’ll take more than
they’re supposed to if they can make it look like a mistake, or at
least that’s what people say. When I got back to the site after
they finished, the only trees they had taken out were the ones we’d
marked, but maybe that was because they knew we were keeping track.
Still, the site was cleared and ready to dig, and that was what
mattered.

We used to joke back in Shanuga about the old
habit of calling a place where ruinmen work a dig, because the
Shanuga ruins don’t take much digging. The Wanrij dig, which is
what everyone ended up calling ours, was another matter. The whole
thing was covered with four hundred years of fallen leaves and mud,
and that had to be dug up and hauled away before we could get to
the ruins themselves. It was a big installation, big as a town, and
before long we found mud-filled stairs heading downward, rough
concrete poured into gaps in good concrete, and all the other signs
that tell you that somewhere down below are underground shelters
from the last days of the old world.

That was an exciting time, and it took some
work to keep everyone working in their own sections when somebody
found a promising stairway, but I wanted the dig to be done right.
That was partly because I knew Jennel Cobey was paying good money
for it, and partly because I knew that the Memfis misters were
watching me to see what kind of ruinman I was, but more than
anything else it was because this was my dig, my very first dig,
and damn if I was going to let anyone mess it up. So all the
misters and prentices kept busy in their own sections, and we got
it cleared one shovel of mud at a time.

I didn’t get to do much of the shoveling,
though. Back when I was Gray Garman’s senior prentice, I did a lot
of the work of running his section of each year’s dig in the
Shanuga ruins, but I’d never had charge of a dig, much less a brand
new dig in a ruin that nobody had touched since the old world
ended. That meant a lot of time in my tent over to one side of the
ruin, ordering supplies and tools, coping with squabbles, settling
accounts with the metal merchants who came out to buy scrap once we
started turning it up, and much more. Berry was my senior
prentice—well, of course, he was my only prentice, but the custom
still held, and that meant that he ran a mother of a lot of errands
for me, and sat in at the end of each day when all the misters and
their senior prentices met to discuss how things were going and
what needed to be done.

That usually happened in my tent, but not
always. Once a week we had a mister’s lodge, the way ruinmen always
do, and of course Berry couldn’t come to that. Once or twice a week
we’d walk up the rough little road we’d made through the jungle
from Wanrij to the roadhouse, and the misters and senior prentices
would meet there.

The cook at the roadhouse was named Maddy,
and she was a failed scholar, though we didn’t know that at first.
She’d come out with our meals when we met there, and ask how the
dig was going; we didn’t find out that she’d been to Melumi until
the failed scholar we had at the dig happened to mention that the
two of them had been friends at the Versty. We teased Maddy about
that afterwards, but we also asked her advice when it came to the
kind of questions scholars can answer, and we all got along
wonderfully after that.

I just never knew what was going to happen.
One morning the prentices started yelling over on the eastern side
of the dig, and it turned out that a snake had come crawling out of
the jungle during the night and was sleeping in one of the old
stairwells. It was a big one, almost ten meedas long, which is
bigger than they usually get even in the jungle. I asked the Memfis
misters what they did with snakes like that, and that’s how we
ended up having snake chops for dinner the next two nights, which
saved a good bit of money on our food that month. One week it was a
fever that came through and put half the misters and prentices flat
on their backs, another week it was a shipment of tools I ordered
back before the rains that didn’t arrive on time—it never did show
up, in fact—and the next week it was something else again.

One week, it was Jennel Cobey. He came to see
the site late in the first season, on his way from Memfis to
Sanloo: political business, he told me, so I didn’t ask any more
questions. He was as curious as always, wanting to know everything
we were doing at the dig, and the prentices stared and whispered as
I took him all over the site and he talked to me as though I was a
jennel too. He stayed for three days and then rode away with his
soldiers and servants first thing in the morning.

When the misters and I met at the roadhouse
in Wanrij that night, some of them talked about other jennels who
were hurrying around the country with their soldiers. There was a
cold feeling down in the pit of my stomach as we talked. I knew, we
all knew, that all those jennels and soldiers meant six kinds of
trouble sometime soon.

By the end of that first season, we’d cleared
the whole site and gotten down to the first basement level of all
the buildings. We had to stop there, because we were too far from
Memfis to risk staying at the dig until just before the rains;
instead, tools and gear had to be packed up and hauled back down
the road to Url, and parties of prentices went with them, heading
home to Memfis. By the time everything was shut down, clouds were
rolling in from the Gulf, and we left the site in a hurry and beat
the rains by two days. Then it was Memfis parties and pretty Memfis
women, and days spent at the ruinmen’s guild hall sleeping off rum
and whiskey and planning the next season’s work. We knew by then
where there were stairways going further down and where the
underground shelters probably were, and if Star’s Reach or anything
connected to it was still at WRTF, that’s where it would be.

Finally the rain stopped, and the parties
stopped, and as soon as the roads were dry I was on my way to
Wanrij with Berry and the first party of misters and prentices. A
mother of a lot of mud had washed into the ruins during the rainy
season, and once we had the camp up and running again, that had to
be dug out again. There were snakes—no more of the really big ones,
luckily—and other things that thought the ruins we’d dug up made
good homes, and they had to be chased back out into the jungle.

Then there was a little lake not far away
from the dig, where we sent prentices to get water the year before,
and it somehow got a resident gator, a big one. You don’t kill
gators unless you have to, and we didn’t have to, so the prentices
hauled water from a different lake that second year, and we got
used to the way our gator would roar most evenings, calling for a
mate or just letting everybody else on that part of Mam Gaia’s
round belly know that he was alive and minded to stay that way.

Since we’d cleared the site and knew where to
look, the work went faster that season. One shovelful of mud and
basket of concrete chips at a time, we got the deep stairways
cleared and the rough concrete broken, and started getting into
underground places where nobody had been since the old world ended.
One afternoon, I was in my tent writing out orders for the next
month’s food, and Berry came at a run: they’d smelled the sour
lightning smell deep in the ruin, behind a concrete plug that had
just been cleared away. The orders could wait. I went back with
him, fast.

It was two levels down, and would have been
dark as midnight except that we’d spent the extra money to get
plenty of electric lamps. As it was, the prentices and misters were
a crowd of shadows around a rough doorway in the concrete. Beyond
the doorway was darkness, and a very faint point of red light off
in the middle distance. I knew exactly what I was seeing, and so
did everyone there, even though none of them had nearly fallen onto
a trapped floor the way I did.

There was some talking, and then the senior
prentice of one of the Memfis misters walked into the room. He knew
what he was doing, too; he stepped from safe spot to safe spot all
the way to the little red dot, found the switch, and turned it
green. The rest of us followed, and for a moment I was sure that
the door on the other side of the room was going to lead us
straight into Star’s Reach.

It didn’t. What was on the other side was a
shelter, pretty much like the one I’d found in the Shanuga ruins.
It had plenty of metal in it, a radio, and some guns, and that was
all. The prentice who’d crossed the floor was made a mister on the
spot, and we all cheered and congratulated him, but all the same it
was a bleak moment, and not just for me.

The days and weeks and months went on. W
found and emptied every underground room in the ruin; we found
nearly enough metal to make the dig pay for itself even if it
hadn’t been a contract dig, and a few real prizes like the radio;
we even found a room with a row of old metal filing cabinets in it,
full of the moldering scraps of what used to be paper, just enough
of it still readable that the failed scholar I’d hired for the dig
was able to tell us that it was what the ancients called “human
resources records,” which was their phrase for all the papers they
needed to tell them who got hired and who got fired from a job.

What we didn’t find was one single scrap of
anything that had to do with Star’s Reach or with messages from
other worlds. If it had been any other dig, it would have been a
success, but it wasn’t any other dig, and as the season wound up
and the ruin was stripped down to the rebar in the concrete, I
couldn’t shake the feeling that I had wasted years of my life on a
daydream.

We finished the dig a month before the rains
came. The prentices and the misters packed everything up, one party
at a time, and hauled tools and tents and cooking pots back home to
Memfis. The last wagon from the metal merchants came and went. We
filled in all the holes we’d dug and sent a letter to the
priestesses, letting them know the site was clean and that we’d be
most grateful if they could tell people who wanted to get right
with Mam Gaia that they could come plant trees there. Then, last of
all, I sat down in my tent and wrote a letter to Jennel Cobey,
telling him that we hadn’t found Star’s Reach.

That kept me busy until late that night. The
next morning Berry and a few of the other prentices folded and
packed my tent and the few other things that were left at the dig,
and loaded them on a wagon. I took one more walk around the site,
made sure everything was in order, and then went to join them. We
hadn’t hired any horses this time, since it was clear that the
jennel wasn’t going to get what he hoped he was paying for. The
teamster tapped the oxen with his stick, the wagon started to roll,
and the rest of us—me and Berry and half a dozen prentices who were
more or less friends of his, and had been lent to me by their
misters—started walking up the dusty road to Wanrij.

Twenty-Three: The Thing That Matters

You never know where you’re going to find the
thing that matters. That’s one bit of wisdom I learned on the long
road from Shanuga to Star’s Reach, and if it hadn’t gotten through
my skull already, this morning would have pounded it in nicely.

Anna and I were about to put breakfast on the
table, Thu and Berry were talking politics over in the corner, and
Eleen and Tashel Ban were bent over something they found in the
computer yesterday. It was just an ordinary morning at Star’s
Reach, and then Tashel Ban let out a bit of hot language I don’t
think I’ve ever heard him use before. Thu and Berry looked up from
their conversation; I set down the plate I was carrying; Eleen
stared at him; only Anna kept on with what she was doing, spooning
soup into bowls as though no one had said a thing.