Star's Reach (8 page)

The camp was mostly awake by then. Off in the
middle distance I could hear Mister Calwel’s voice, high and sharp,
yelling at his prentices. Chickens clucked and scratched in the
grass, and one of their wild cousins crowed off in the forest
somewhere. I was about to get in line at the cook’s tent when Berry
cleared his throat and gave me a look that he must have learnt from
Garman, reminding me that I was a mister now and it was prentice
duty to go fetch food for me. So I sat down at an empty table and
watched the mists burn off the river for a bit, until he came back
with bread and chicory-brew and two big bowls of soup. I don’t
think either of us said a word until most of that was gone.

“Have you been to Melumi before?” Berry asked
then.

“Not me.” I considered him. “You?”

He grinned. “No, but I always wanted to. You
think they can figure out the letter?”

It’s a funny thing, how once you make a
decision, it’s easy to think up reasons for it. I nodded, as though
the trip to Melumi had been my idea all along. “They ought to be
able to tell us what a potus is, and the rest of those words. I
figure it’s the best first step.”

And of course it was, and I’d agreed to do
courier duty for Garman as well, but right then the thought of
going to Melumi didn’t need anything practical to recommend it to
me. That’s common enough; I’ve met farmer folk who couldn’t read
their own names if you helped spell it out for them, who daydreamed
about going to Melumi just to look through glass at the books and
the scholars, and ask some question that didn’t matter to anyone so
that a scholar in a gray robe could look up the answer and tell
them.

Ask most people and they’ll tell you that the
scholars know everything. Ask people who read and write, and know a
little bit about the world, and they’ll tell you that the scholars
know most everything that matters. They’re as wrong as the first
bunch, but compared to what most of us know nowadays, they might as
well be right. Meriga’s come down a long ways since the days when
Deesee was above water, and there are countries in the world that
are bigger and richer, but the Versty at Melumi, with its shelves
and shelves and shelves of books from the old world, is one thing
we can still be proud of.

Berry was still grinning. “I’m ready.”

“I bet.” We finished up the food, and then he
ran to get his things and I went to my tent and started packing.
Not that I had that much to pack; prentices don’t have much chance
to load themselves down, and the only thing I’d had time to collect
in the day I’d been a mister was a hangover. So one leather pack
was enough for clothes and tools and all, with a little bag of
keepsakes down in the bottom of the pack: a ring that had been my
mother’s; a bit of wood carved to look like a horse’s head that I
got from Toby, who was my best friend among the prentices for most
of four years and got reborn when a building fell on him; the
little star of yellow metal the government gave my mother after my
father died in the war; and a butterfly of the same yellow metal
that was a parting gift from Tam—and I’m going to have to write
about her one of these days, since she’s part of my story and part
of what got me to this bare concrete room here under the desert at
Star’s Reach.

By the time I’d gotten everything packed,
Berry showed up with his pack over one shoulder. He was just about
hopping, he was so excited, and I couldn’t fault him for that. Me,
I was stuck halfway between being just as excited, and worried that
I’d just pitched myself into something way too deep and dangerous
for me. Gray Garman’s words about people who might kill to get the
letter I carried were on my mind; so was the fact that I had no
notion what I might do if we got to Melumi and the scholars
couldn’t tell me what the letter meant.

Still, I swung my pack up onto my back, got
it settled, and tried to chase the worries out of my head. I tied
the tent door open to let Garman’s prentices know I was gone, and
Berry and I turned our backs on the ruins and started walking. The
day was turning clear and, thank the four winds, not too hot for a
change; a couple of buzzards circled way up in the sky, which is
supposed to be a good sign for travelers, though nobody’s ever told
me why.

Just north of camp we went over to the
riverbank and walked along it until a ferryman got close enough
that we could wave him in. I handed over a few bits, Berry and I
climbed into his little boat, and we sat and watched green water
roll past as he puffed and hauled on the oars and got us to the
other side. We got off the boat there and scrambled up the bank,
and a few minutes later we were walking north on the road to
Melumi.

One of the roads to Melumi, I suppose I
should say, because there’s more than one. From Shanuga, you can go
on the main road east of the river up to Noksul, or you can go west
of the river on what’s not much more than a farm track most of the
same way, and then cross the ridges at the first good place you can
find and head west to Nashul or north into Tucki. Berry and I took
that second route, partly because Gray Garman said we ought to stay
off of the main roads, and partly because Noksul’s a soldier’s
town. That’s where my father went when he was called up for the
war; it’s where the Army of Tenisi is, when it’s not playing tag in
the mountains with raiders from the coastal allegiancies; and a
town full of soldiers is not a place where you want to take
something people might kill to get their hands on.

I was nervous about that last bit. As soon as
we found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins, I knew that
even a copy of it would be worth a mother of a lot of money, and I
realized not that much later that a lot of people would want it for
reasons that didn’t have a thing to do with how many marks they
could get for it, but it took Gray Garman’s words to make it sink
in that one ruinman and his prentice might be fair game if the
wrong people figured out what we were carrying. With luck and Mam
Gaia’s blessing we could get ahead of the news and stay there, but
we’d need both the luck and the blessing. The radio message to
Melumi about our find would have come to many ears, even if it was
in code, and of course one rider on a fast horse could spread the
news way ahead of us.

We talked about that a little, while we
walked; talked about the route we’d settled on, too, straight up
through Tucki to Luwul and from there straight to Melumi; but
mostly talked about nothing in particular, when we talked at all.
More often we just walked. The day was clear and cool, the sort of
dry season weather you long for when the rains set in and it’s one
big sea of mud from wherever you are to wherever you wish you could
get to; the sky was blue with a few puffy white clouds in it, and
the road was from the old world. It was rutted and cracked and big
chunks of the old paving were gone, but it still ran mostly
straight and level, and here and there you’d walk on big gray slabs
of concrete, like pictures in a storybook about the old world,
except the paint that made a line down the middle of the road got
weathered away long ago.

All that country was full of farms. With
Shanuga so close, there’s plenty of money to be made selling garden
stuff and eggs and the like to the city markets, and the land’s
rich enough that you can do that and still grow plenty for a family
on a pretty modest plot. Ox carts rolling into the city came by so
often that Berry and I took to walking along one side of the road
to stay out of their way. Other than that we mostly saw people
working in the fields, and most of them took one look at our
ruinmen’s gear and looked away.

We walked north until it was nearly full
dark, and found a farm where the people were willing to give us a
meal on the kitchen steps and a place to sleep in the barn for a
couple of bits. Berry dropped off to sleep as soon as we finished
getting settled in the hayloft. I envied him that, as I lay there
staring into the darkness, thinking about Star’s Reach and how on
Mam Gaia’s round belly I was going to figure out where it was if
the scholars at Melumi couldn’t help me.

Still, I managed to get to sleep after a
while, and then the noises of farmhands going about the first
chores in the gray morning woke me up. Berry and I washed our hands
and faces at the pump in the farmyard, got some breakfast from the
farm folk, and started north before the sun was fairly up over the
mountains off east of us.

That second day might as well have been the
first, except that the farms were bigger, and grew less garden
stuff and more corn. The day after that was sister to the first
two, except that the fields started spreading themselves out and
left patches of empty land between them. We passed places where low
gray ragged shapes heaved up through the grass: foundations from
the old world that nobody had gotten around to digging out and
breaking up for building material. A good bit of the poorer ground
had been left in pasture, too, and herds of loms watched Berry and
me incuriously as we walked by.

The loms reminded me of the hill country
where I’d grown up. My father and most everyone else had some for
wool, and for hauling loads to and from market; I’d been carried on
a lom’s back often enough when I was too young to walk far, and
fell in love a bit with the smell of their long straight wool and
the way their heads swivel around on top of their long, long necks,
as they taste the wind and listen and look.

They didn’t have loms in Meriga in the old
world. I heard that from some traveling folk once, though I’m still
not sure whether to believe it or not; farmers in Tenisi have been
raising loms as long as anyone remembers. What I heard, though, is
that in the old world, people got wool from a different kind of
animal. They called it a cheap, and the people who told me the
story swore that that was because it didn’t cost as much as a lom
does. Cheap weren’t as big as loms, and they had short necks and
wool that curled.

When the old world was dying, though, a
disease came through and killed most of the cheap, and the scholars
they had back then couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the
disease, so most of the new cheap that got born every year died of
it. That meant you couldn’t make a living raising cheap, so the
farmers just got rid of the last of them and took to raising loms
instead, and that’s why we don’t have cheap any more. Of course the
same sort of thing happened to a lot of other things back then, and
it nearly happened to people, too. We were lucky, I guess, that
nobody had to make a living raising us.

We managed to find a farmhouse to stay at
that night, but the next morning, even the pastures and the loms
got scarce, and from noon on there were no more farmhouses in
sight. We talked a little about that, Berry and I, the morning we
left the Shanuga ruins, and brought blankets and fire gear and the
like with us for sleeping rough; we both knew perfectly well that
there’d be plenty of that on the way to Star’s Reach. Still, I was
nervous. You might think that somebody who’d go crawling down a
hole in the ground that nobody had been down for four hundred years
wouldn’t blink at the thought of sleeping under a tree, but the
fact was that I’d never actually spent a night out in the
forest.

That’s what it came to, though. By the time
the sun got near the top of the ridge to the west of us, we hadn’t
seen another human being aside from each other in many hours, and
there weren’t even any loms in sight. So we kept on going until the
sun was down, and then left the road and worked our way about
halfway from the road to the river. We found a bit of an old ruin
there, a couple of low walls that came together in a corner and
went up about as high as Berry was tall. The point of the corner
faced toward the road, too, so we could build a small fire and not
be seen if anyone was looking.

So I gathered some dry wood and Berry got
water from the river, and by the time it was all the way dark we
had a nice little camp in the corner of the ruin. We didn’t have a
lot of food, just a bit of bread the farm wife had given us that
morning and a couple of cakes of dried soup Berry begged from the
kitchen at Mister Garman’s camp back at the Shanuga ruins, but we’d
eaten well enough until then. Once we got a fire started, Berry
tossed one of the cakes of soup into a tin pail of water on top,
and it turned into something not half bad in short order.

So we ate some of the bread and drank the
soup, and the night got darker. Wind made noise in the branches
above us, and other things made their own little noises lower down.
I tried not to show it, but I was on edge, and when a wild dog
barked somewhere off in the middle distance, Berry and I both just
about jumped out of our skins.

“Nervous?” I asked him.

“Yes.” Then: “I’ve never spent a night out in
the forest.”

“Me neither.”

Even in the dim flickering light from what
was left of the fire, I could see his eyebrows go up. “I heard you
were a farm boy from the hill country.”

“True enough. Doesn’t mean we slept under
trees, you know.”

That got me a quick glance, to make sure I
wasn’t angry, which I wasn’t. “I was born in Nashul,” he said after
a moment. “Inside the walls.”

I let out a whistle. “No kidding. How’d you
end up a ruinman’s prentice?”

“I—I’m a tween, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“Is that—” He didn’t finish the sentence, not
that he needed to.

I didn’t give him time, either. “Garman ever
give you trouble over that?”

“Not once.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

His face said “thank you” better than words
could have. I put a couple of sticks onto the fire, so neither of
us had to say anything for a moment.

I don’t think they had tweens in the old
world, either, or if they did I’ve never read anything about them.
The priestesses say that they’re one of the things that happened to
us because of all the poisons the people of the old world dumped
everywhere they could think of. Some of those were fast poisons,
and that’s part of why so many people died during the years just
after the old world ended, and some of them were slow poisons, and
that’s part of why there still aren’t a twentieth as many people as
there were back then. Some of them, though, were the kind of poison
that gets inside you and messes things up, not for you, but for
your children and their children, and of course that’s another part
of the reason why there are so few people nowadays compared to how
many there were back then.