Star's Reach (45 page)

We sat there saying nothing for a while as
the stars wheeled and the river birds talked about whatever river
birds talk about when the moon’s coming up out of the mist in the
east. “That,” Plummer said finally, “was what I wanted to talk
about. I suspect you have some idea of what comes next.”

“You won’t be here when I wake up in the
morning,” I told him.

“Exactly,” he replied, and we both laughed.
“You have, as you said, a job to finish first. When that’s done,
we’ll meet again, and then you’ll have a decision to make.”

I nodded, though I don’t think he could have
seen me. Then, because I’d been wondering: “Why did you decide to
talk about this tonight?”

“Good,” he said, and I realized I’d asked
another question he wanted me to ask. “It’s a very easy thing to
pass judgment on the old world and call it evil, the way the
priestesses do: easy, and not wholly unmerited. It’s a much more
difficult thing to understand it, to grasp some part of why people
then did what they did. The former isn’t of use to us. The latter
is.”

He stood up then. “In your place,” he told
me, “I would go back to the big tent. There’s loose straw there,
and that’s noticeably more comfortable to sleep on than the bare
ground will be. Breakfast will be at dawn or close to it, so I
won’t keep you longer.” I looked toward the tent, and when I looked
back at where Plummer had been, he was gone. I laughed again, got
up, and crossed the field to the big tent.

The next morning I woke up early and lay
there in the darkness for a moment before I remembered where I was
and what I was doing there. I stretched and brushed bits of straw
off me and went outside. The sun hadn’t quite gotten around to
peeking around Mam Gaia’s belly; there were a few pale stars still
shining overhead and more of them off to the west. More to the
point, there were clattering sounds and just a bit of smoke coming
from the smaller tent where Plummer and I had dinner the night
before, and if there’s one thing you learn when you’re on the road,
it’s that a good hot meal comes way up on the list of things to
look for.

So that’s where I headed. Ellis was already
there, and so were a bunch of other people from the sirk, and they
waved me over as soon as they saw me; we all said our good
mornings, and then I said I’d be glad to help get things loaded up
if there was anything I could do, which is how you ask for
breakfast on the road. That got me a big plate full of bacon and
hotcakes and a mug of chicory brew, and I sat with them and mostly
listened as they talked about the day ahead and the trip up to
Clums. It was like having a meal with ruinmen or members of any
other guild; Ellis was the mister, the performers were the senior
prentices, and the others had their place, right down to the big
men who hauled things and handled the oxen. They were as friendly
as you could ask, but there was never any question who was in the
guild and who wasn’t.

Afterwards, I paid for my breakfast by
hauling on ropes and carrying rolls of canvas tenting over to the
wagons. That was hard work, but it’s nothing I hadn’t done plenty
of times already as prentice and ruinman, so I didn’t mind. Once
everything was done and the first of the wagons was rolling out of
the field, Ellis thanked me and told me that any time I happened by
where they were, I was welcome to a couple of meals and a free
show. He didn’t have to say that I could pay for it with a few
hours of work, but again, that’s the way you do things on the road.
So I thanked him and said I’d keep an eye out for their posters,
and he gave me a big grin and climbed aboard the last wagon. I
waved as they headed north, and only then realized that nobody all
morning had so much as mentioned Plummer’s existence.

I spent a good part of that day thinking
about that, and about the people Plummer talked about the night
before, his guild of rememberers. It was a good day for thinking.
The weather was clear and not too warm, the road dry but not yet
dusty, and there weren’t that many people traveling the way I was
going, which was across the Hiyo and down into Tucki. That was out
of my way, strictly speaking; Sisnaddi was only another couple of
days ahead if I kept going along the north banks of the Hiyo; but I
wasn’t in all that much of a hurry to get there, and I wanted to
visit Berry and make sure everything was working out between him
and Cob.

There used to be a bridge across the Hiyo at
Madsen. Of course it’s gone now, but there’s a ferry there, a big
one, that goes back and forth across the river. I paid the two bits
it cost to get on, and sat next to the water as the engine groaned
and puffed and burned peanut oil and the Hiyo rushed past. Then I
was in Tucki again, heading south on roads that weren’t much more
than cart tracks, past farms and fields and big patches of
forest.

It all reminded me of the country Berry and I
walked through, back at the very beginning of our search for Star’s
Reach; and that reminded me of how far I’d traveled and how many
things had happened since then. If I’d been on one of the busier
roads, with plenty of people to talk with and everything, that
wouldn’t have been a problem, but I was alone a lot of the time,
and that meant I didn’t have anything to do but think, and wonder
what was going to happen when I finally admitted to myself that the
whole business had been a waste of time.

I was pretty much convinced by then that
that’s how things would turn out. Now and then I tried to talk
myself into believing that I could find something in the archives
at Sisnaddi, some piece of paper with the letters WRTF on it that
would point me to the place I needed to go, but the further I went
south into Tucki the less likely that seemed. I walked past old
bits of ruin here and there, rounded chunks of concrete rising up a
little ways out of the grass, and it occurred to me more than once
that they were telling me that what was left over from the old
world didn’t really matter any more. Another hundred years or so of
rains pounding down on the concrete, wearing it away a bit at a
time; another hundred years or so of ruinmen stripping metal out of
anything that might pay for another day’s room and board; another
hundred years or so of people in Meriga and all over Mam Gaia’s
round belly living their lives in ways that made sense, instead of
chasing some wild dream of talking with creatures from some distant
world—what would be left after that, but a few old stories about a
time when we tried to touch the stars and almost killed Mam Gaia
and ourselves doing it?

So that’s what I was thinking as I walked
south day after day from Madsen to Lebna. From there the empty nuke
was only a few hours more south and east. I left Lebna after noon,
saw the gray towers looming up within an hour or so, and got to the
place where the trail led down off the road well before sunset. I
could hear voices down below, and followed them down to Cob’s
camp.

Cob and Berry and Cob’s prentice Sam were
busy hauling chunks of metal out of a half-stripped building when I
got there. Berry saw me first, let out a whoop, and came pelting
over to throw his arms around me; Cob and Sam were less excited but
not a bit less welcoming, and so we stood there and talked for a
bit, and then I helped with the hauling until we’d carried as much
out as was ready to move. By then it was getting on for time to
eat, so we all went into the main building, and Cob and I talked
while Berry and Sam got dinner ready.

Not much had changed since we’d been by. The
ruin still had plenty of metal in it, and Cob was doing well enough
that he had money put aside in the guild at Lekstun for when he got
too old to work. He’d thought about getting another prentice or
two, but never quite gotten around to it, so it was no trouble at
all to have Berry there, quite the contrary. “You got yourself a
good one,” he told me more than once. “Prentices like that aren’t
so easy to find.”

Then dinner was ready, and we ate bean soup
and bread, just as if I was back at the Shanuga ruins, and talked
the way ruinmen do. I was watching Berry and Sam, though, and after
dinner was over and the two of them had hauled the dishes off and
were washing them and chattering in one of the other rooms, I
turned to Cob and said, “Those two look like they’ve gotten pretty
close.”

He snorted. “You could say that.”

I’d pretty much figured out already what he
was hinting at, though it surprised me more than a little. “You
know Berry’s a tween?”

“So’s Sam,” said Cob.

“I didn’t know,” I managed to say then

“Well, there you have it,” said Cob. “I
figure, Mam Gaia bless ‘em, it’s not as if they’ve got lots of
other people to pick from, and as long as it doesn’t keep ‘em from
doing their work, it’s not exactly any of my business.”

I nodded, and we talked about something else
after that. Still, that night when we’d all wished blessings on
each other’s dreams and the rest of them were asleep, I lay on my
pallet and thought about that. Of course Cob was right. I don’t
know of any reason why a tween couldn’t get as friendly as he
wanted with a man or a woman, take your pick, but it’s not
something that happens, or at least if it happens nobody talks
about it. The priestesses like to say that it’s nobody’s fault but
the ancients’ that some poison from the old world got into
somebody’s insides and messed with their children’s children, and
of course they’re right, but some people still aren’t comfortable
around tweens at all, and let’s not even talk about sharing a
bed.

The next morning I woke up early. Cob was
still snoring, though the other two pallets were empty, and I
slipped outside and stretched and decided to go down to the creek
at the bottom of the little valley to wash up. I got most of the
way there before I heard water splash, and then Berry’s voice, low
enough that I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I looked
around, and saw Berry and Sam sitting on the bank not ten meedas
from where I was.

They were paying too much attention to each
other to notice me, which is just as well, because it didn’t take
much work to figure out what they’d been doing, and what they were
probably going to do again before long. I backed away fast and
quiet, and went to a different part of the creek, on the other side
of the ruins. By the time I finished and came back to the main
building, Cob was awake and breakfast was cooking. The way Berry
and Sam said their good mornings to me, I don’t think either one
had the least idea I’d seen them.

So I ate my breakfast and thanked Cob for his
hospitality, said my goodbyes to Berry, and loaded up my bags and
left. I could have stayed. The whole time I was there, I knew that
if I asked Cob if he wanted another pair of hands to help with the
ruins, he’d welcome me, and I could get back to the work I knew how
to do, breaking down a ruin bit by bit and selling the metal. I
could have stayed, and left dreams about Star’s Reach to somebody
else.

That’s not what I did, though. I climbed back
up the trail to the road, and started walking toward Lebna. The
journey wasn’t over, I knew that right down in my bones, and I had
to follow it out to the end even if there was nothing at all
waiting for me there.

The funny thing was, I wasn’t brooding over
it, not any more. When I was walking from Memfis up to Ensul,
before I met Plummer again, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything but
what I was going to do if nothing turned up at Sisnaddi, and then
on the way from Madsen to Cob’s camp I didn’t think of much else,
either. Now that Sisnaddi was just a few days away, it was like the
last few days at a ruin before the rains come in or the work runs
out. You don’t worry or argue or complain, you just figure out the
thing that still needs doing, and then you do it.

So I walked north and a little east,
following the roads through farm country that got richer and more
thickly settled the further I went. The fifth day after I left
Cob’s ruin, toward the middle of the afternoon, the road I was on
bent around a low hill, and ahead of me I could see the gray and
brown patchwork of a city, a big one, off at the edge of the
northern sky. It was a clear day, and if I’d known what I was
looking for I could have made out the presden’s palace and the big
gray building of the archives next to it, but I didn’t know that
yet. I drew in a breath, and started down the last part of my
journey to Sisnaddi.

Twenty-Five: At a Table of Stars

Berry and I were in the radio room last
night, listening to the broadcast from Sanloo. There wasn’t much
new, just a speech by somebody important in Congrus who said
nothing at all in the most graceful way you can imagine, and some
guessing about how soon the funeral’s going to be. Berry was there
because Tashel Ban taught him how to run the radio, and because he
had even more reason to listen than the rest of us. I was there
with him partly because I wanted to know what was happening back
home in Meriga, partly because Berry’s my prentice and my friend
and I figured he could use the company. Tashel Ban and Eleen were
still working on the computer, trying to get the last file on it to
make some kind of sense; Anna never listened to the radio, and I
have no idea where Thu was just then.

So it was Berry and I, sitting there
listening. He didn’t say a thing until the broadcast was over and
the last of the music faded back into hisses and crackles. Then,
suddenly, he turned toward me. “Trey,” he said, “do you know the
thing I’m sorriest about? It’s all the nonsense I told you about
who I am and why I ended up as a ruinman’s prentice.”

It took me a moment to remember what he was
talking about. “The business about your mother being an Old
Believer and all that.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you had to say something.”