Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (42 page)

“He didn’t have the power,” said Param. “And look what he
did
die for!”

“He died to try to cross the Wall,” said Olivenko. “And now we’ve done it. His dream, and we’ve fulfilled it.”

“Turns out not to be so much a dream as a nightmare,” said Param.

“Nightmare?” said Olivenko. “All those people—including
your mother the queen, and General Citizen the dictator of Ramfold—they’re all
nothing
compared to us! We’re the walkers-through-walls, the world-striders! The rest of them don’t even
know
the world is about to be destroyed, but we’re working to try to prevent it. We’re the gods that the whole world will sing about one day.”

“They’ll get three notes into the song and the Destroyers will incinerate them,” said Param.

“Well, we only get the song if we succeed.”

“If the mice succeed, you mean,” said Param.

“Whoever,” said Olivenko. “We’ll mention the mice, of course. We’ll tell how the magical mice helped us save the world.”

Param laughed at his joke. “Yes, that’s what the People’s Revolutionary Council taught us—whoever controls the history gets to be the hero!”

“Param, I honor your office as daughter of the Queen-in-the-Tent, I can’t help that, it’s my whole upbringing. And I like you because you’re charming and when you’re not feeling sorry for yourself you’re even funny and happy and smart. But I respect you because you have had the hardest life of any of us, a life so lonely it breaks my heart to imagine it, and you lived it. Your mother was your whole world and she betrayed you—Rigg had only known her for a few months, he hardly knew her. But you thought you did.”

“Oh, I knew her,” said Param. “I wasn’t as surprised as you seem to think.”

“Not surprised, but still betrayed,” said Olivenko.

“I’m glad you respect me,” said Param. “And I’m glad you
took the time to talk to me. Because I do see your point. I spoke so harshly to Umbo, not because he deserved it, but because by putting him down as a peasant, I could cling to the only value I thought I had—my royal blood. But thanks to you, I now see how worthless that is.”

“I wasn’t saying that it—”

“‘Worthless’ was my word, not yours,” said Param, putting her hand on his wrist so they both stopped walking. “But it’s the right word. And I see your point. I am who I am. Even though my time-slicing is a pretty pathetic talent, since it makes me so vulnerable to anybody who knows how it works, and it makes me so
slow
, I’m a shifter. And I’m trying to learn how to be somewhat useful, and you respect me for my efforts, and I appreciate it. That’s what I’m saying. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, my lady,” said Olivenko. Then he bowed over her hand like a courtier, and kissed it.

It was a gesture that had always been done by people who were only trying to suck up to Mother. But because Olivenko actually meant it for her, and because he was a good and wise man, and because she was, in fact, still desperately in love with him, Param was overwhelmed by it, and she burst into tears.

They walked the rest of the way through the Wall with his arm around her.

“Took you long enough,” said Rigg when they finally reached him.

“So take us back in time so we don’t waste a moment of this precious experience of Larfold,” said Olivenko. “Though as far
as I can see, it looks suspiciously similar to Odinfold. Complete with the mice.”

“They’re dispersing,” said Rigg.

Umbo was striding down the slope toward them. Apparently he had had time to crest the rise and see what lay on the other side.

“Pristine wilderness as far as I can see,” Umbo reported, when he was near enough for anyone but Loaf to hear him. “But you’ll tell us if there are any human paths.” Clearly Umbo was talking only to Rigg, though Param and Olivenko stood beside him.

“No paths,” said Rigg. “Not even in the early days of the colony.”

“They took to the sea right away,” said Param. “And then they stopped talking to Larex, and we have no more of their history.”

Umbo didn’t exactly ignore her. He waited for her to finish talking, and he was listening. But he didn’t look at her once. And when she was done, he said, “There’s one thing we
should
be seeing, and we’re not.”

For a moment Param didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he pulled out his jeweled knife, and she realized. “No expendable to greet us.”

“There wasn’t one in Odinfold, either,” said Umbo. “But the way I see it, Larex has been without a job for eleven thousand years. He’s too busy to come chat us up when we come into his wallfold?”

“The ways of expendables are inscrutable,” said Rigg.

“Scrute them,” said Umbo. “If you think it’s a good idea, I’m going to call for the flyer. Do you want me to ask Larex to come with it?”

“Maybe later,” said Rigg. “At some point we might want to see what the local mechanical man has to say for himself. At least his people aren’t all dead, like Vadesh’s.”

“We assume,” said Umbo.

“If we can still call them people,” said Param.

Loaf spoke up. “Oh, my definition of ‘people’ is definitely broader than it used to be. The mice have decided to take my advice and
not
accompany us. We’re weird-looking enough, what with this thing on my face and Olivenko being so butt-ugly by nature, without tipping off the locals about this smirky-smarty mouse invasion.”

“In other words, they want time to get established before the Larfolders find out they’re here,” said Olivenko.

“They’re already mating their little brains out,” said Loaf. “They won’t want to meet any Larfolders until their babies are having babies.”

“Which should be in about an hour and a half,” said Rigg.

“Gestation’s a little longer than that,” said Loaf.

“So?” asked Umbo, holding up the knife.

“Call for the flyer,” said Rigg. “I’m trying to figure out how I used to get around. I vaguely remembered that I used my legs somehow.”

“Yes, legs,” said Umbo. “I try never to use mine.”

Param chuckled. But the banter between the boys stung her. Olivenko was right. By blood, she was Rigg’s sister. But by love
and loyalty, Rigg’s only sibling was Umbo. That was why Rigg had been so angry with her. He didn’t want to have to choose between them. But if push came to shove, quite literally, he would choose Umbo. Had chosen him.

And he was right, thought Param. I haven’t earned my place with them yet. Damsel in distress, even a talented disappearing damsel who’s also your closest living kin, isn’t automatically a dear and trusted friend. That will take time. And more strength and courage and self-control than I’ve shown up to now.

CHAPTER 20

Larfold

The flyer carried them over pristine landscape, but because Rigg saw with the eyes of a pathfinder, he was struck by how empty it was. Like Vadeshfold, only even more devoid of paths. Though Odinfold had billions of paths, they were all faded by the thousands of years that had passed, and in recent years the paths had been few, and clustered up against the Wall.

How different they all were from Ramfold, full of life, the webs of paths still weaving themselves afresh with every day’s activity.

Odinfold was carpeted with ruins; Vadeshfold had its one empty city; but Larfold had nothing at all in this vast sweep of forested land, the hills and cliffs and mountains. Only the wispy trails of the colonists from eleven thousand years before, heading northward to the sea, and then nothing on land that was more than a few hundred meters from the shore.

Yet this land was similar in climate and terrain to the land the Sessamids had come from, the barbarian forests that had spawned invasions of the great valley of the Stashik River again and again through history. The land was the same, but untorn by slash-and-burn farming, unscarred by roads, ungraced by bridges and buildings.

It was not more beautiful than lands that human beings had shaped, thought Rigg. He remembered the ruins of the old arches that had once spanned the Stashi Falls, broken in ancient storms or earthquakes. He remembered the stairs cut into stone that led up in a breath-robbing highway to the crest of the falls; he remembered running up those stairs, and also staggering down them carrying bundles of pelts. Was the mountain somehow ruined because humans had cut away stone to make a stairway for themselves? Or was it made more beautiful as well as more useful?

What comes into being naturally is pleasing to the eye, yes, Rigg thought. There is a beauty to the wildness of it. But there was also beauty in the Great North Road that wound along beside the Stashik River, and beauty in the patchwork of farms, and in the rough raw buildings of Leaky’s Landing, which was such a new place, and in the ancient buildings of O, so many of them built of stone barged down the river, as if humans had moved a mountain to make O. There was beauty in Aressa Sessamo, too, by nature a shifting swampland, but made by humans into a huge island of raised earth on which a city ablaze with life had been raised, a forest of wooden buildings where an empire was governed and people lived their lives of joy and misery, of boredom
and excitement, leaving paths behind them in a tangle that to Rigg seemed the very tapestry of life.

The natural land is beautiful, and it is beautiful again when it reclaims the ruins of humans who are gone. But when humans are there, that is the beauty I love the most, because it’s a web I’m part of, it’s the fabric that my own life, my own path, is helping to create. What humans make is not less beautiful than what comes into being out of wildness alone.

“We’re wild, too,” said Rigg aloud, because he needed to hear the words, and so he had to say them.

Olivenko was the only one near enough to him in the flyer to look up at the sound of his voice.

“We’re wild,” said Rigg. “We humans. We shape nature, but our shapes are also natural. We shouldn’t say that because humans shaped a place, it’s therefore unnatural.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t say it,” said Olivenko, “but I think that if you look at the meanings of the words, whatever humans do is unnatural.”

“But that’s the mistake, for us to think that humans aren’t also a part of nature.”

Olivenko looked out of the flyer at the ground they were passing over, the high thick cushion of leaves only beginning to turn color in preparation for winter. “Not a particularly prominent part of it
here
,” he said.

“No. We’ve never touched this place.” Then he laughed with a little bitterness. “Except, of course, when the starships crashed so hard they blew rocks into the sky to make the Ring, and raised great circling cliffs like Upsheer, and killed almost all the natural
life of Garden, and replaced it with the plants and animals of Earth. Except for that, which means that all of Garden is so vastly shaped by human hands that nothing we’re seeing here is ‘natural.’”

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” said Olivenko. “Except to say that when humans leave it alone, nature comes back and closes the gaps the way the sea fills in behind each passing fish. What we’re seeing down there is natural now, even if it was once reshaped by human action.”

“But now it’ll be reshaped by mice,” said Rigg.

“Humans masquerading as mice,” said Olivenko. “But I don’t think they’ll be cutting down the trees.”

“If they wanted to cut them down,” said Rigg, “they’d find a way. That’s what humans do.”

“And if they wanted to build them up?”

“They’d plant them like an orchard.”

“Or slaughter each other as they did in Vadeshfold,” said Olivenko, “and let the trees come back and plant themselves.”

“I really hate philosophy,” murmured Loaf. “You talk and talk, and in the end, you don’t know any more than you did.”

“Maybe less,” said Rigg, “because I thought I had an idea, and now Olivenko makes me wonder whether I did or not.”

“One idea is as worthless as another,” said Loaf. “Until you actually do something about it, and then it’s the action, not the word, that matters.”

“Who’s philosophizing now?” asked Olivenko. “We take action because of the words we believe in, the stories that we think are true, or intend to make true.”

“I don’t think so,” said Loaf. “I think we do what we do because we desire it. And then we make up stories about why the thing we did was right, and the thing that other people did was wrong.”

“Or both,” said Rigg. “It works both ways, all the time. We act because of our stories; we make up stories to explain or excuse the way we acted.”

But the trees don’t do that, or the squirrels, thought Rigg. They just do what they do. And they can’t change what they do, because they don’t have any of this philosophy.

“Our destination is the shore where humans are most often seen,” said the flyer. “Far in the north.”

“When we get closer,” said Rigg, “skim the coast. I’ll tell you then where to set this flyer down.”

“What will you look for, to decide?” asked Olivenko.

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wherever the paths are thickest and most recent, so we have the best chance of meeting people.”

“Of getting killed in our sleep on the first night there,” said Olivenko.

“We didn’t come here to
avoid
the people,” said Rigg.

“Can’t save ’em if we can’t see ’em,” said Loaf.

Probably can’t save them even if we do see them. “If it turns out I picked a bad spot, we can go back and pick another,” said Rigg.

“But you can’t appear to us here in this flyer,” said Olivenko. “Right? Unless you took the flyer up to exactly the same path and matched the flight perfectly, because the path remains behind us in the air.”

Rigg turned and saw their paths stretch back along the route they had just flown. “That’s right.”

“I wonder how far you have to go upward,” said Olivenko, “until our paths stop being part of the sky of Garden, and remain inside a ship.”

“Every starship when it crashed here had human beings aboard,” said Rigg. “I should have looked for the paths, the incoming trajectories.”

“You should have looked to see if their paths during the voyage stayed with the ship,” said Umbo, who was finally joining in the conversation.