Star's Reach (38 page)

“It seems almost unfair," said Eleen then.
She hadn’t laughed with the rest of us. "The first king of Yami
simply did what most rulers in those days were doing, salvaging
whatever technologies they could find, and if I recall right, his
grandson didn’t even do that much.”

“That is true,” said Thu. “By then the last
of the fossil fuels in the kingdom were gone, and so were the
technologies they used to find more underground. Still, that is the
way of it.”

“Very much so,” Jennel Cobey said. He was
sitting next to me, with Banyon behind him like a shadow, and he’d
spent the whole story with his chin on his hands, watching Thu.
“The balance of the world is always exact but it’s never fair.
That’s true in politics, in war—“ He shrugged, glanced at me.
“Anything else you care to name. One person gets the benefit,
another pays the price, and there’s no justice to who does
which—but the price still gets paid.”

There was a little more talk, I forget about
what, and then all of us but Thu wrapped ourselves in our blankets
and went to sleep, or tried to. It took me a while, because I was
thinking about what the jennel said. It wasn’t until we got to
Star’s Reach that I realized that he was giving me a warning, and
by then it was too late for things to end any other way but the way
they did. Looking back on it now, though, I’m sure it was a
warning, and not the only one he gave me, either. That was his way,
because I was a friend, or as near to a friend as a jennel with
ambitions can let himself have.

I began to find out just how near to a friend
he considered me when we were at Memfis, right after I met Thu for
the first time. I think it was the next afternoon, when I was going
over the contracts I’d drafted with the misters of the Memfis
ruinmen, that a prentice I didn’t know came pelting into the room,
out of breath. “Mister Trey,” he said, “it’s the jennel—Jennel
Cobey. He’s here—“

Up the stairs behind him came quick
footsteps, and then Jennel Cobey was there in the room. I got up,
partly because that’s what you do when a jennel comes into the
room, and partly because I was about as surprised as you can get. I
was expecting a letter from him, and maybe a visit from one of his
men, but not the man himself.

His face lit up when he saw me. “On your feet
already! That’s a welcome thing. The reports I got made me think
you were badly hurt.”

“More or less, Sir and Jennel,” I said.
“Still, it’s mostly healed. I hope you didn’t come all the way down
here just to check on me, though.”

“I have business in Memfis that has to be
done before the rains.” A little fast gesture brushed them aside.
"I also wanted to talk to you and find out how your plans are
shaping up.”

I knew him well enough already to know that
he meant I should tell him that right away, in detail, so I sent
the prentice down to get him some wine, and started handing the
jennel contracts and papers, explaining what was what as he
peppered me with questions. By the time the prentice got back with
the wine we were deep into the details: which misters and their
prentices would be working for him, which provision merchants would
be selling us the food and gear we’d need, plans for the first
year’s digging, and the rest. He wanted to know all of it; that was
his way, then and always. I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who was
curious about so many things so much of the time.

So we went over all the preparations I’d
made, and he nodded, said he’d have the money to me in two weeks,
and started to get up. Then he stopped and sat back down. “I was
told the ruinmen caught the man who attacked you. What happened to
him?”

“He’s in the basement,” I said.

He gave me a startled look. “Alive or—“

“Alive.”

“Why?”

I hadn’t wanted to tell him, but I knew by
that point that he’d get the whole story out of me or someone else
quickly enough. “Because of who he is, Sir and Jennel. You’ve heard
of Thu, the king of Yami.”

He took that in, and whistled after a long
moment. “Plenty of people would pay good money to have him in their
hands.”

“I know.” Then, though I hadn’t meant to say
anything of the kind: “But damn if it’s going to be me who puts an
end to all those stories.”

The jennel just stopped, stared at me for a
while, and then started laughing: a quiet unwilling laugh like
nothing I’d ever heard from him before. “Good,” he said. “Very
good. You want to see him go free, even though he tried to rob and
kill you.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it
for a couple of days now,” I admitted. “Haven’t been able to come
up with a plan.”

“Very good,” he said again. “I may be able to
arrange something. No promises, you understand.”

I heard later that he went to the misters the
next day and asked them how much they wanted for Thu. They set a
good high price, though to be fair to them it was no higher than
they could have gotten from some of the dons from Meyco who wanted
him dead. Jennel Cobey paid it, and a bunch of his soldiers came
over at night and hauled Thu away, took him out of the city, and
let him go. I never did hear the details. Still, about a month
later, when I was doing the rounds of the provision merchants again
one evening, a shadow moved in the shadows of an alley and said,
“Ruinman Trey.”

I would have recognized the voice anywhere. I
stopped and turned to face him, and Berry backed away in case he
had to run for the guild hall again.

“Your prentice need not worry,” said Thu. “I
owe your friend the jennel a great favor, and you a greater one.
What I wish to say, though, is this. When you find Star’s Reach—for
I think you will find it—consider sending for me. I may be useful
to you.”

That startled me, but I had enough of my wits
about me to think of the obvious problem. “If I want to do that,
how do I send for you?”

His laugh set echoes running down the alley.
“Speak to the night air,” he said. “I will hear of it.” Then he was
gone.

The odd thing was, that’s pretty much what
happened. After I found my way back to Sisnaddi with the secret I
learned in the ruins of Deesee, if that’s really where I learned
it, I got to thinking about who I wanted with me when I went to
Star’s Reach. I knew Berry had to be there, and Eleen would be our
scholar, and I wrote to Tashel Ban because I knew we’d need a
radioman and to Jennel Cobey because he was the one person who
never stopped trusting in me to find it; and then one night I stood
at the narrow little window of the rickety little room Eleen and I
shared during those weeks, and called out into the darkness, “Thu,
I’m going to Star’s Reach and I want you in the party.”

It was the only thing I could think of to do,
and I felt about as stupid as you can imagine when I did it, but a
week later a knock rattled our door and there he was. The three of
us, Thu and Eleen and me, sat up late into the night talking about
the journey. We all agreed that if there was anything at Star’s
Reach that would put Mam Gaia at risk, we would destroy it or put
it in the hands of the priestesses, but that nobody was going to
destroy anything until all of us agreed to it. Once he agreed to
that, I was glad to have him, since I knew we might have to fight,
and of course I was right about that.

Still, the one thing I never did learn was
how he knew to come looking for me. Did some friend of his outside
the gates of Sisnaddi hear a rumor from the ruinmen and send for
him, or did the night air actually tell him somehow? If it was
anyone else, I’d laugh at that last notion, but Thu is, well, Thu,
and I’d have laughed at the notion that somebody could have had his
genes changed so he never has to sleep again, if I hadn’t seen the
results. It’s easy enough to say that this belongs to stories and
that belongs to everyday life, but what do you say when you’re
washing dishes in Star’s Reach and the person who’s drying them has
more stories about him than a dog has fleas?

Twenty-Two: Memfis Nights, Arksa Days

We got bad news over the radio tonight. I
mentioned earlier that we agreed to let Tashel Ban get his radio
receiver working so we could start listening to broadcasts from the
station in Sanloo. He spent that evening getting the thing working
and hooking it up to one of the big radio antennas built into the
roof of Star’s Reach, and at least one of us listens to it every
night once radio waves start bouncing off whatever it is that
bounces them back from the high thin air.

Until now, we could have spared ourselves the
trouble. All we got was the same things I used to hear when I
listened to the little crystal radio my father had, the one that
could pick up signals from Sisnaddi sometimes: an hour of music,
though it wasn’t always the patriotic stuff they always play on the
Sisnaddi station, and a few minutes of news. The one thing we got
from that was that nobody had started fighting yet, but then we all
knew that nobody would, not so long as Sheren still lived.

That was before tonight. Most of the news
bulletins were the usual stuff, a band of Jinya raiders caught and
driven off by our soldiers in Wesfa Jinya, a namee that washed away
parts of three towns in Nuwinga, negotiations with Meyco over a
trade treaty, that sort of thing. Then, at the end: “The presden’s
staff in Sisnaddi said yesterday that because of the presden’s
illness, this year’s meeting of Congrus has been called off. We
don’t have any other details at this time.”

Tashel Ban and I were in the radio
room—that’s what we call the little room, probably somebody’s
sleeping room back before Star’s Reach was abandoned, where he set
up the receiver—when that came over the loudspeaker. When we heard
the last little bit of music the Sanloo station plays before it
goes off the air, Tashel Ban let out a whistle. “Cancelled,” he
said. “Not postponed. That’s bad.”

“I heard she was sick again,” I said; people
had been talking about it in Sanloo.

“It’s been on and off for years. Cancer, or
that’s what they say in Lebnan.”

That was no surprise—that she had cancer, I
mean, and also that Tashel Ban’s family in the Nuwinga capital
would know about it. Something like half the people in Meriga who
live past childhood die of it. You can be as careful as you want,
but there are so many poisons still left over from the old world
that the odds are pretty good that sooner or later you’ll get
enough in you to start something growing that shouldn’t. Ruinmen
know a lot about that, more than most people, because if you’re a
ruinman and the ruins don’t take you, it’s a pretty safe bet that
that’s how you’re going to get reborn.

We’ll tell the others tomorrow morning, but
Berry was another matter. I went and tapped on his door as soon as
the radio was shut down. He was still awake, doing something that
left paper scattered all over the table in his room; I told him
about the bulletin and what Tashel Ban said, and he gave me a
dismayed look and thanked me in a way that told me he really didn’t
want to talk. I wished him good dreams, and came back here to the
room Eleen and I share.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about
that will happen once Sheren is gone, but that’s not what I want to
write about, not tonight. We’ve still got enough food left to stay
here for a month, or maybe a little longer. Eleen and Tashel Ban
are chasing down everything the people here found out during the
last years before they killed themselves, and that probably won’t
take all of a month; then we have some decisions to make, and so do
I, and one way or another I’ll have plenty to do after that. That
means I have a month or less to finish writing down my story, or as
much of it as I have time to tell.

Most of what’s left to tell happened in
Memfis, or on the dig just west of it near Wanrij in Arksa. I spent
the better part of three years going back and forth between those
two places, and a lot of things happened there—a lot of things in
one sense, and not much in another, since most of it was just doing
what ruinmen do when they have a ruin to dig up. Thinking about my
story today, while I sprayed resin over another alien-book, I spent
a while wishing I could write about everything that happened in
those two and a half years, day by day, and then half decided to
skip the whole thing and pick up the day I left Memfis, walking
alone up the road beside the Misipi, knowing right down to my bones
that I’d failed and been an utter fool besides.

Still, now that the pen’s in my hand, I know
that neither of those is really what I want to do, or maybe it’s
that neither of them is how the story wants to be told. What I
want, or the story wants, is to write about Memfis, because that’s
where the trip that brought me to Star’s Reach swung around the way
a door swings on its hinges, where I could have succeeded and lost
any chance of getting here, and failed instead in the one way that
got me where I needed to be.

I’ve written already about how I got to
Memfis and what happened right after I got there. I haven’t written
much about Memfis itself, though, and that’s something that needs
doing, because Memfis is the biggest city in Meriga and one of the
biggest in the world, and it’s not like anywhere else. By that I
don’t just mean that it’s not like anywhere else I’ve ever been,
though that’s true enough; it’s got fifteen neighborhoods by most
counts, though some people say seventeen, every one of them bigger
than Shanuga and as different from the next one as Shanuga is from
Troy or Cago. What I mean is that people who’ve sailed around the
world and visited a hundred ports—and I met some of those in
Memfis—will tell you that Memfis isn’t like any other place they’ve
ever been, either.

Part of it is the river trade, which I wrote
about earlier, and which runs through Genda and Meyco but doesn’t
stop on either end. The Meycan Empire goes a long ways south, but
there are other countries even further south, all the way down to
Nardiga, which used to be covered with ice and now is all trees and
grass and cattle. Genda goes up to the North Ocean, and on the far
side of that there’s a bunch of countries, Norj and Rosh and half a
dozen others, that didn’t fall to the Arabs when so many countries
on that side of the Lannic did.