Star's Reach (44 page)

So I was almost as excited as I’d been when I
was six or seven years old and would have gladly sold my teeth for
a ticket. Plummer paid for both our tickets, if he paid anything at
all. He said something in a low voice to the woman at the ticket
booth, and I wouldn’t be too shocked to find out that the coin he
gave her was every bit as real as the one I gave him in Ensul. Then
there we were, inside the tent, going up the wooden steps to seats
where we could see the whole thing.

It was as good as I hoped. We bought
hoddogs—I don’t know anywhere they sell those now but sirks; it’s a
little loaf of bread slit open the long way, with a sausage plopped
down inside—and cups of pink lemonade, and then waited while the
lights changed and the ringmaster came out. He had old world
clothes on, a big fancy coat and a hat that looked like somebody
took a piece of stovepipe, put a brim on it and fancied it up in
green and gold, and a voice that covered even more ground than the
man outside the tent could manage. He welcomed everyone and called
out the first act, and from then on it was one thing after
another.

There was a strongman who had the six
heaviest men in the place pile onto a table, then hefted the thing
onto his back and walked it around the ring. There were a couple of
jugglers who tossed cavalry swords back and forth between them so
fast you were sure somebody was going to get split open like a
hoddog loaf, but they never missed a one. There were people who
climbed on top of each other into a triangle—four on the ground,
three on their shoulders, two on theirs and one on top—and then did
it the other way, with only one on the ground and four up at the
top with their arms thrown out at the sides. There was a woman who
did rope dancing, way up in the air, without a safety net to catch
her if she fell. I’m used to high places, being a ruinman, but the
thought of trying to walk along that rope, much less dancing out
there in the middle, was enough to make my blood run cold.

All the while, of course, there were clowns
scampering around. One of them, toward the later part of the show,
was a ruinman clown. He had a pick that was bigger than he was, and
was trying to crack open this big concrete shape that seemed to be
half buried in the ground and had old world writing on it, but
every time he tried to take a swing at it, it moved away from him.
Finally, when he was winding up for one more swing, it sneaked up
behind him and pushed him over. I laughed so hard I had tears
running down my face. The words on the box didn’t say STAR’S REACH,
but they might as well have.

There was a pause not long after that, while
the rope dancer was climbing the ladder, and right then Plummer
leaned over to me and whispered, “There was a time when sirks had
animal acts. People would make animals do any number of surprising
things.”

I gave him a startled look. The first thing
that went through my mind was why anybody would want to watch
people bullying animals; then I noticed that he was watching me the
way he did, waiting to see what I would say; and then I realized
what he was trying to tell me. “Back in the old world,” I whispered
back, “didn’t they like to think they could make everything do what
people wanted?”

He smiled. It wasn’t just his
you-said-the-right-thing look, either; it looked like a door
swinging open. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

Then the rope dancer started out onto the
rope, and we were both staring upwards, like everyone else in the
tent. That was the big act, and after that things wound up pretty
quickly; a few more clowns, someone who could eat fire, and then
all the performers and the clowns and all were out in the middle of
the ring, bowing, as we roared and clapped and let them know how
much fun we had.

Then the lights went down, the performers
left, and the audience started filing out. Plummer motioned me to
follow him, though, and zigzagged down through the crowds to the
edge of the ring. The ringmaster spotted him and came right over,
and before long I was being introduced. The man’s name was Ellis,
and his voice sounded like anybody else’s when he wasn’t out there
being the ringmaster. He and Plummer knew each other from a long
time back, or so I gathered, and the outcome of it all was that the
two of us got invited back to another, smaller tent back behind the
big tent, where everybody in the sirk was having a late meal.

There were about fifty of them all told, from
the ringmaster and the rope dancer down to the big burly men who
handled the oxcarts and hauled things around. We got introduced and
then sat down at the one big plank table with everybody else. They
were tired, all of them; there were two shows that day, and two the
day before, and the next morning they’d be packing everything up
and heading on to the next town they were going to play, a place
called Clums that was about halfway between Madsen and Naplis; so
they were friendly enough but not too talkative. I was fine with
that. I was still trying to figure out why Plummer said what he
did, and what the door was that had just opened for me, if I wasn’t
just imagining it.

I wasn’t. After the meal was over, Plummer
and Ellis talked for a bit, while everyone else headed off to the
wagons or wherever else they were sleeping that night, which for
most of them was a couple of blankets and a straw pallet on the
ground right there in the tent where we were sitting. Then Ellis
got up, made a tired little gesture that said “blessings on your
dreams” better than words could have done, and headed out into the
night. Plummer came over, gave me one of his long considering
looks, and said, “Are you possibly still up for conversation? There
are, I think, some things we should talk about.”

“I’m still awake,” I said. “Here, or—”

“A little more privacy would be useful.” He
motioned toward the tent door.

Outside it was a clear cool night, with stars
splashed across the sky and the lights of Madsen flickering off one
by one not far away. A few quiet sounds came from the circus tents
and wagons, and I could hear night birds calling from the banks of
the river close by. We walked far enough from the tents that nobody
could hear us, and then Plummer motioned: here?

I sat down, and so did he; he pulled out his
bottle of whiskey and took a drink from it, then offered it to me,
and I took it and downed a swallow before handing it back. Then,
there under the stars, he started to talk.

“Do you recall,” Plummer asked me, “the
children’s book we talked about that evening at Altan, the one
about the little toy boat that the boy sent all the way to the
Lannic?”

I did, and said so.

“That was written most of a century before
the end of the old world, and there were hundreds of thousands of
copies printed, maybe more, before things got so bad that books
stopped being printed at all. As far as we can tell, only three
copies survived. Two were in Meriga and one in Nuwinga, all three
in our collections.”

Plummer paused then, watching me, waiting for
a question. What I wanted to know most just then was who “we” and
“our” meant, but I knew him well enough to guess that that wasn’t
the question I needed to ask. “Did they get there before the old
world ended?”

It must have been the right question; I could
barely see his face in the darkness, but the stars mirrored in his
glasses shifted in the way they did when he smiled. “We don’t know.
The collections existed in the drought years, that much we know,
and there were people keeping them in much the same way we do now.
They had the three copies, and a decision was made just over a
hundred years ago to take one copy out of the collections and put
it back into circulation.” He gestured, palms up. “A simple thing,
really. A farmer found it in an old chest in the attic, and brought
it to the local priestess, who saw nothing harmful in it and much
that was good. Word got to the printer’s guild in a town not far
away, and the printers bought it from the farmer, set it in type
and made woodcuts of the pictures. Copies found their way to a
Circle elder here, a priestess there, always to those who could see
to it that the book would find its way to children. It made the
printers a very nice sum of money in the end, and so people went
searching in their attics and basements and found four more books,
one of which was unknown to us.”

“And all of that was planned,” I said.

“Except for the four books. That was a happy
accident.”

He waited again, and after a moment I asked,
“Why that book, just then?”

Again the glasses moved, echoing the smile I
couldn’t see. “Good. The Third Civil War was past, and we wanted
something that would remind people in Meriga and elsewhere that
their lives are woven together by something more than muskets and
cavalry swords.”

“How often do you put a book—” I had to pause
to remember the words. “Back into circulation.”

“It varies,” Plummer said. “Once in ten
years, maybe. Some of us would like it to happen more often, others
are worried that too much might be given out too fast. There are
risks either way.”

Another silence went by. The night birds were
calling to each other down by the river. I tried to think of any
other way to find out what I most wanted to know, and couldn’t, so
finally I asked, “You say we and us and our. Does that mean your
friends with no names?”

That got me one of his dry soft laughs.
“You’ve met a few of us, but only a few.”

“How many are there?”

“No one knows,” Plummer said. “It would be
far too great a risk for any one person to know more than a small
number of us—or more than a few of the collections.”

“Or how many collections there are?”

“Exactly. Or where they are, or what is in
them, or who tends them and guards them.”

That made sudden sense to me. “Of course.
They’d have to be guarded.”

“Guarded, studied, tended, and hidden, by
Swords, Rods, Cups, and Shields respectively; and then the Cords
link circle to circle and tie the whole together. It’s an old
symbolism, useful for our purposes.”

“You’re a Cord,” I said.

“The Cord of the eastern Hiyo valley.”

“Do you know other Cords?”

“No, though I have my suspicions about a
couple of travelers I’ve met.”

I thought about that for another long moment.
“What would happen if the priestesses found out about all of
this?”

“Oh, they know that we exist.” Even in the
darkness, he must have been able to see my face, because he laughed
his dry laugh again. “We have, shall we say, a working agreement.
That’s why the farmer took the book he found straight to the local
priestess. Who was, I might add, expecting something of the kind.
Part of the agreement is that we don’t surprise them.”

“There are stories,” I told him. “Stories and
rumors about people who have books they shouldn’t have. That’s the
way people say it, you know.”

“Of course. The rumors are deliberate, some
of them, and some of them are a side effect of the way we recruit
new members.”

That was when it finally dawned on me why
Plummer was telling me all of this. Maybe I’m just slow to catch
on, but I stared at him for what seemed like a long time.

“It’s a lengthy process,” he said then,
looking off toward the river. “Sometimes it starts by chance, when
it’s necessary to allow someone from outside the circles to know a
secret of ours, such as where a safe place happens to be hidden.
Sometimes it’s more deliberate. In either case, a Cord begins the
process, and then Shields listen for any evidence that the
potential candidate has betrayed the secret.”

“You said something about throats being cut,”
I reminded him. “The Swords do that?”

“It’s one of their skills.” The way he said
it, as though he was talking about any other trade, put a cold wind
down my back. “That’s rarely necessary, though it does happen. If
the candidate keeps silence, there will be another conversation
later on, and another, and still another, while Shields wait and
watch. Rods make the final decision, but the Cord must concur, and
it’s the Cord’s task to choose the right time for the conversation
in which the point of the process will be discussed, and an offer
made.”

“Like this one.”

“Like this one.” Stars shifted in his
glasses.

My mouth was dry, and my tongue felt like it
was two sizes too big for my mouth. I knew what I wanted to say,
and I knew what I had to say, and it was a good long moment before
I managed to force out, “There’s a job I have to finish first.”

“Of course there is. That’s part of the
process.”

He was waiting for a question again, but I
thought I already knew the answer. “You wait until the candidate
has something else to do, so nothing happens in a rush.”

“And so any final risk of betrayal can be
forestalled.” He turned to face me. “Everything I’ve told you so
far is already known to the priestesses, and to a few other people
outside the circles. You could tell it to anyone, and we would be
in no more danger than we were before. I would be at some risk, to
be sure, but that could be managed easily enough by my
disappearance or my death, and once my time as a Cord is over, it’s
simply another story. You could tell it to anyone, but we require
you not to do so—not to speak a word of this to anyone for any
reason, until and unless your Cord or the senior Rod of your circle
gives you permission to do so.”

“Ruinman’s bond,” I said then, and he laughed
again. “Good,” he said, “very good. We have people in a number of
guilds, and for good reason. Prentices and misters alike, they know
how to keep secrets. We may be a guild ourselves someday, for that
matter.” I stared at him for another long moment, and he said, “The
Rememberers’ Guild.”

I don’t think I’ll ever forget those words,
or the way he said them. His voice had barely changed enough to
notice, but all at once I could feel right down in my belly what it
was like to have all those books from the old world hidden away,
some that might bring good things to our world and some that might
bring more evil than I want to think about; and to wish that the
work of guarding and studying and tending and hiding them could be
done the way the scholars at Melumi take care of the books they
have, out there in front of everybody; and to know that it couldn’t
be that way, and why it couldn’t be that way, not now, not until
our world changes into something else and people don’t have to
think every day about the time when the wrong knowledge used for
the wrong things in the wrong ways left poisons and ruins and heaps
of dead bodies all over Mam Gaia’s round belly.