Star's Reach (23 page)

The stars were coming out as I crossed the
brick courtyard, and I wondered if someday I’d have the chance to
hear whatever it was that someone out there among them was trying
to say to us. That’s happened now, and Eleen and Tashel Ban are
trying to figure out if there’s a way to turn the rows of numbers
into whatever the aliens are trying to say with them. I wonder how
many more things that I never expected to see might just end up
becoming real before we leave Star’s Reach.

Fifteen: The View from Troy Tower

Berry and I talked things over that night and
decided to go on to Troy and Skeega first anyway, since we were
closer, and for all we knew there was just as much chance of
finding the way to Star’s Reach there as in Arksa. The next
morning, we opened our eyes about the time the stars were shutting
theirs, shouldered our packs, and headed north out of Melumi about
the time the sun came up. We’d said our goodbyes the night before
and didn’t have a bill to pay at the guest dorm, so there wasn’t
anything between us and Troy but a long walk.

We had a fair bit of money this time, though,
partly from what Gray Garman gave me back in Shanuga that I hadn’t
had to spend yet, and partly from a plump little sack of coins
Jennel Cobey had one of his people run down to us before we left.
Since the letter was safe in the jennel’s hands and the copy was
safe in Melumi, I figured nobody would be following us and we
didn’t need to run and hide the way we’d done on the road north
from Shanuga. I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet, and so we
went by the main road north to Naplis and then northeast by Fowain
and Leedo to Troy. Most nights we stayed at taverns or farmhouses
that put out a sign to let travelers know they could get a bed and
a breakfast, and there are ruinmen’s guild halls at Naplis, Fowain
and Leedo, so all in all we had an easy time of it.

We also had a chance to see a bit of the
fellowship you get on the main roads all over Meriga, which we
missed on the backroads we’d used to get to Melumi in the first
place. There are plenty of people who live on the road. More than
half the people in Meriga are farm folk who hardly ever go more
than a few kloms from where they were born, and most of the rest
work in crafts that don’t cover a lot more ground than that, but
Plummer told me once that maybe one person in twenty makes a living
by traveling, and most of them take to the road just as soon as the
mud isn’t too bad and stay on it until the rains come down. Before
we’d gone more than a day or two, certainly, we had plenty of
company on the road—farmers and traders with oxcarts loaded with
goods, pilgrims on their way to one or another of the famous
shrines, messengers on horseback with ribbons tied around their
right arms to show which jennel or cunnel they served, players with
their instruments and actors with their costumes and props on the
way from one town to another, drifters and grifters and people who
had no particular reason to be on the road but just couldn’t stand
the thought of staying put one more day.

For all that they’re on the road for every
reason you can think of and some you probably can’t, travelers on
the main roads more often than not treat each other like ruinmen
treat each other, which is to say, pretty well. Oh, there are
exceptions now and then, but if an oxcart gets a wheel stuck in the
mud you can bet that anybody who’s nearby will come help give it a
shove. If the sun goes down and there isn’t an inn or a farmhouse
in sight, in the same way, whoever finds a good place to camp first
builds a fire and waves to anyone else nearby to come on over, and
before long there’ll be twenty or thirty people sharing whatever
food or drink they happen to have with them, and keeping watch by
turns through the night.

Not that there’s much to worry about on the
roads nowadays. There are plenty of stories about the bad times
after the Third Civil War, when gangs of soldiers who got turned
loose after the fighting used to wait near the roads and kill
anyone they could catch, but one of the presdens in my
great-grandfathers’ time, I think it was, made it her job to hunt
them all down. There were troops of cavalry galloping all over
Meriga until the roads were safe again. These days the worst thing
that’s likely to happen to you is getting cheated by a dishonest
innkeeper or beaten up in a tavern fight. There are some pretty
doubtful characters on the roads, people you wouldn’t want to trust
around your henhouse or your pretty daughter, but I only saw one
time that somebody on the road stole something from somebody else
who was traveling, and the thief got stripped naked and tossed into
a patch of poison ivy for his pains. That was a couple of years
later, though, and halfway across Meriga.

From Melumi to Naplis, Berry and I mostly
walked alongside farm carts hauling grain from last season’s
harvest to the Naplis grain markets, and the farmers were good
honest folk, about as likely to steal something as they were to
sprout wings. After Naplis, we got onto the main road from Sanloo
up to Troy and the Genda border, and that meant a livelier crowd,
but I can’t say they were less honest, and they were a good bit
more friendly. Farm folk are no more comfortable around ruinmen
than most people are, but plenty of road folk get the same
treatment, and to them, ruinmen are just like anyone else.

A day out of Naplis, we ended up walking with
an elwus named Cash and his motor, a quick little man named Morey.
Cash was a quiet, lanky sort with mud-colored hair, though you
wouldn’t know that when he put on his white elwus costume and his
black wig and glasses and went up on stage, wiggling and singing
songs and cracking jokes in that funny voice all the elwuses use.
Berry and I got to see his act maybe twenty times, since that’s
about how many farm towns we went through between Naplis and Leedo,
and putting on a show at every farm town is how elwuses make a
living.

Cash was good, better than most of the
elwuses we used to see in the Tenisi hill country where I grew up.
He’d dance around and make like he was singing into the short black
stick elwuses carry in one hand while Morey pedaled away at the
mechanical box that played the music. Cash would always finish the
show by saying, “And Ah’d like to thank Morey, mah motor,” and
Morey would always say “Pro-motor,” drawing out the “pro.” I think
it was a joke of theirs, though I never did learn the point of
it.

They were good company on the road; they knew
which inns were honest and which farmhouses had the best
breakfasts, and you knew you could trust them. After a drink or
two, Cash used to tell stories about his travels, and Berry and I
would tell ruinmen’s stories, and Morey would sit back and sip his
whiskey and say nothing at all. They were Old Believers, the first
two I’d ever met; I never did learn why they didn’t stay in one of
the villages or the cramped little quarters in cities where most
Old Believers live, but they both wore the Old Believer sign around
their necks, like a letter T with a line going up a bit from the
middle of the top. They went off by themselves to talk to their god
for a little while each morning, and Berry and I knew better than
to wish blessings on their dreams.

Now and then as we walked together, we’d fall
in with a bunch of players or actors who were going from farm town
to farm town the way Cash and Morey were, though the next morning
either they’d take a different route or we would. It happened once,
at a little town called Poyen about halfway between Fowain and
Leedo, that we arrived by one road just as a bunch of players
showed up by another. It turned out they knew a bunch of
elwus-tunes, so for once Cash got to do his singing and dancing
with a band and a couple of other singers to back him, and it was
quite a show. The farm folk loved it, and tossed a lot more money
into Morey’s hat than usual, but split two ways it wasn’t as much
as Cash or the players would have made on their own, so the next
morning they left on their road and we left on ours, and it was
back to Morey and the mechanical box.

When we got to Leedo, though, their road led
east along the lakeshore and ours led north to Troy, so we said our
goodbyes. I hated to see them go, but the way things turned out, it
was probably just as well.

North of Leedo the main road runs a ways
inland from the lakeshore, past farms and little towns with big
magnolia trees growing here and there. Berry and I got to a town
one afternoon fairly late, and were just starting to talk about
finding someplace there to stay the night, when we came up to a
crowd around the town hall. Somebody turned and looked at us, and
called out, “Hey! A ruinman!”

The whole crowd went silent and turned to
look at us. For a moment I was wondering whether Berry and I were
going to have to dodge a riot, but nobody moved. Then somebody went
into the town hall, and somebody else came out of it. The crowd let
him past, and he walked right up to us: a soldier with a ribbon on
his sleeve. “Sir and Mister?” he said. “Cunnel Darr wants to talk
to you.”

We followed him through the crowd and into
the town hall, which was big and plain and echoed like the inside
of a drum. It took a bit for my eyes to get used to the dim light,
and so I ended up bowing to somebody I couldn’t see while the
soldier said, “Sir and Cunnel.”

“Good,” said the cunnel. I straightened up
from the bow, and more or less saw him, a gray hard-faced man in
green clothing. “Your name, ruinman?”

“Trey sunna Gwen, Sir and Cunnel,” I told
him. “Mister of the Shanuga ruinmen’s guild.”

One of the old man’s eyebrows went up.
“Well.” Then: “You’ve come at a useful time. This man—” He motioned
to one side with his head. “—was caught drilling a gas well.”

“Sir and Cunnel!” shouted the man, who was
bald and burly and had shackles on his hands and feet. “I swear to
you it’s not anything of the—” The cunnel moved one hand in a short
sharp gesture, like a knife cutting meat, and one of the soldiers
next to the shackled man cuffed him into silence.

“A gas well,” the cunnel repeated, “or
something that looks very much like one. I suppose you can tell one
way or the other, ruinman.”

Of course I could, and I said so. Toward the
end of the old world, when people were trying anything they could
think of to keep their machines running, underground gas was one of
the things a lot of them tried. Some of it went into pipes that ran
across the countryside, and it’s a lucky ruinman who finds what’s
left of one of those, since the metal and the machinery are usually
worth plenty. Some of it went into tanks on trucks, and those are
worth finding, too, but some of it, especially toward the end, went
straight from the ground into machinery in a building built right
there on the spot. If the pipes are still there and the gas hasn’t
all leaked away, one of those can blow you from here to the other
side of Mam Gaia’s round belly if you get careless or just plain
unlucky, so any ruinman with a brain in his head knows how to test
for gas and how to deal with a gas well that’s still got gas in
it.

That’s how Berry and I ended up following the
cunnel and his soldiers, a priestess, the prisoner, and most of the
people who were milling around the town hall when we got there, out
of town a mile or so to a rundown barn not far from a glassblower’s
shop at the end of a road. Inside the barn, next to a heap of gear
of the sort you’d use to drill a well for water, an iron pipe with
a heavy valve on the top of it stuck out of the ground.

The cunnel waved me over toward the pipe, and
I nodded, got what I needed from my pack, and tested it. It’s an
easy thing if you know where the gas might be. There are little
strips of paper the chemists make that turn blue if you get them
wet and put them where there’s gas, and I had a little bottle of
the strips; I took one out, spat on it, used it to make sure the
thing wasn’t leaking gas with the valve closed, and then nudged the
valve just a bit, to get the little faint hiss that tells you
you’re not far from risking your life. As soon as it hissed I
tapped it shut, and by the time the hiss stopped the paper was
bright blue.

“Sir and Cunnel,” I said, “it’s gas, all
right.”

“It was an accident!” the prisoner shouted
then. “We didn’t know we were going to hit gas. I was drilling for
water—”

The cunnel gestured again, and a soldier
cuffed the man across the face. “Of course,” said the cunnel in a
bored voice. “Everyone drills for water inside a barn, and then
just happens to forget that a well that finds gas has to be
reported to the local magistrate. On pain of death. You do know
that, of course.”

The prisoner fell to his knees. “Please, Sir
and Cunnel, you must—”

Again the gesture and the cuff across the
face. “Must,” said the cunnel, “is not a word I am used to
hearing.” He turned to the crowd. “Does anyone have any doubt of
his guilt?”

It wasn’t a pointless question. If even one
person had said yes the cunnel would have had to call up a jury on
the spot and hold a trial; that’s the law in Meriga; but nobody
said a word. After a moment, the old man nodded once and said, “You
know the penalty. Get some shovels, now.” He turned to me then and
said, “Thank you, ruinman.”

It was as clear a dismissal as I’ve ever
heard. “Sir and Cunnel,” I said, bowing, and left the barn as
quickly as I could, so fast that Berry had to trot to keep up.
Behind me I could hear the shovels biting into the ground, the
priestess chanting a litany, and the man sobbing as they dug a pit
to bury him alive.

I heard the details later, after we got to
Troy. The man was a glassblower, and one of his prentices had gone
to the cunnel with word of the secret gas well. Maybe he was tired
of paying for compost-gas, or maybe the farms in that part of
Mishga don’t have enough pigs and loms to keep a local digester fed
with manure, and the man was having trouble getting enough gas for
his work. The story I heard didn’t say, but it was probably one or
the other; it usually is when they catch someone in one of the
crafts using fossil fuels, which happens somewhere in Meriga every
few years or so.