Star's Reach (52 page)

There’s a ruinmen’s lodge in Pisba, and it’s
the only ruinmen’s lodge anywhere I know of that’s inside the city
walls. Everything in Pisba is inside the city walls. Even the
farmers who work the fields around Pisba live inside, because
raiders come from further east so often. The guards on the bridge I
crossed seemed to be used to traveling ruinmen, and let me past
with only a couple of questions; the ruinmen in the guildhall were
friendly as ruinmen usually are, but they wanted to know where I
was headed, and when I told them—I didn’t say anything about the
place where every question has an answer, just that I wanted to go
look at Deesee and the Spire—they got very quiet.

“You ever been out east of here?” one of the
misters asked me, and when I said I hadn’t, he gave me a long look
and said, “Let me show you something.”

He was back a moment later with a paper map.
“You see this highway? You keep on it and you might just stay
alive. You know what’s out there?

I did, or at least I’d heard stories about
it. “That’s the burning land, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

It was evening when I got to Pisba, and I
planned on leaving the next morning, so I talked with him and some
of the misters after dinner, and found out everything I could about
the road east and south toward Deesee. Still, when I left the next
morning, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that the ruinmen there
didn’t expect to see me again.

I bought a bunch of food at a shop before I
went out through the gates of the city, and it was a good thing,
because nobody lives further east, not until you get to the coastal
allegiancies. Everything was green and quiet at first. I think it
was three days out of Pisba when I saw the first plume of smoke
coming out of a hill off to one side, and not much more than a day
after that it was all over the place, filling the air with haze and
the stink of sulfur.

Everyone in Meriga knows about the burning
land, but not too many of them know what happened and why. I
didn’t, not until I went that way. This is the way the ruinmen in
the Pisba guild hall explained it to me.

Wes Pen used to be just Pen, and it was a big
state running east almost all the way to the Lannic. It had a lot
of coal, oil, and gas under it, and since it was close to the big
cities of the Lannic shore, all of those got dug up pretty
thoroughly. First they put in mines and dug as much coal out of
them as they could, until that ran out, then they drilled for oil
and pumped it until that ran out, and then they drilled some more
and pumped chemicals down into the ground to get more of the oil
and gas, until those ran out.

Then somebody figured out how to pump more
chemicals into the coal, down where the mines couldn’t get, to turn
the coal into gas they could pump out. This was toward the end of
the old world, when they were desperate for fossil fuels even
though the weather was going crazy from all the fossil fuels they’d
already burned, and seemingly nobody asked enough hard questions.
Different parts of the country had different laws about what you
could pump into the ground, and the laws in Pen basically didn’t
stop anybody from doing anything, so people started drilling wells
and pumping the chemicals down and pumping gas out. For a while
they were happy, or as happy as you can get when the weather’s
going crazy and everything around you is right on the edge of
falling apart.

Then the coal down underground started
catching fire. Nobody’s quite sure why, but something happened
whenever the chemicals and the coal got to old mine tunnels that
brought them into contact with air, and the coal underground
started burning. At first they tried to hush it up, and then they
claimed that it was just some kind of rare accident, but eventually
every place they put those chemicals down wells caught fire,
because the chemicals spread in the groundwater until they got to
an old mine shaft and started another fire. Of course then they had
to stop the drilling, but before then they’d drilled a lot of holes
all over Pen and pumped a lot of the chemicals down them.

So there were underground fires burning under
most of Pen. They’re still burning today, and they’ll still be
burning for a long time to come, because there’s a lot of coal down
there still, and you’ve got sinkholes opening up here and there to
let more air get down and keep the fires going. If you want to get
through the burning land, you’ve got to know where the fires are
and where the smoke collects, and that changes from one year from
the next. If you want to get metal from ruins there, you can do it,
but it’s risky, because you never know when the place where you are
will suddenly start smoking under your feet. If you want to live
there or farm there, you’re just plain out of luck.

I just wanted to get through, and enough
other people want to get through for one reason or another that the
ruinmen in Pisba and a few other places keep track of which roads
might be safe. Even so, you never know when the ground’s suddenly
going to start smoking under the road, or just collapse from a
sinkhole without any warning at all. If you’re lucky, that doesn’t
happen; if you’re not, nobody ever hears from you again, and that’s
the end of it.

I was lucky. There were times the highway I
was on had sinkholes and smoking ground close by, and there was one
long stretch where the smoke was so thick that I just had to keep
walking, a day and a night and most of the next day, because I knew
if I lay down and tried to sleep it was a pretty safe bet I’d never
wake up again. Still, there were other parts of the countryside
that were green and beautiful, with the last scraps of ruined farms
and farm towns here and there to remind you what it was like before
people got greedy and careless and messed it up for hundreds of
years to come.

Finally I came down out of the hills and saw
the bright silver line of a river looping and curving through
woodland. From the map I saw in Pisba, I knew that it was the
Tomic, the river that ran by Deesee in the old world.

I knew something else, too, from the ruins
down by the river. Even from there I could see that they’d been
shoveled up all anyhow by people who didn’t know how to do a proper
dig, and just wanted whatever metal they could get. I was outside
of Meriga, and if I met anyone at all between there and Deesee, it
would be Jinyans—the people who killed my father. I drew in a
breath, and started down the road.

The days I spent after that, walking along
the Tomic, were the strangest part of the whole strange journey
that brought me here to Star’s Reach. I had no idea what I was
looking for or where I might find it, and it was sinking in by then
that following a story I heard from a harlot in a little town in
Ilanoy might not be the brightest idea, especially since it took me
all the way outside of Meriga and into the nobody’s-land between us
and the coastal allegiancies. Still, it felt like walking over the
trapped floor in the Shanuga ruins, where the whole journey
started: not something you necessarily want to do, but once you
start, there’s nothing to do but finish.

So I followed the old crumbling road
alongside the Tomic, watched the water rush past me toward the
Lannic, and got used to water in the river, wind in the leaves, and
my own boots crunching on the old road being the only sounds there
were. I’ve been in plenty of places where you could walk for a day
and not see any sign that people had been there since the old world
ended, but this seemed emptier still, and of course I knew why.
Every few years raiders from the coastal allegiancies come through
here trying to push their way into Wesfa Jinya. Every few years the
Merigan army marches the other way to return the favor, and there
are plenty of safer places to start a farm if you want to do that
or, well, anything else. It must have been full of towns and farms
before the old world ended, and maybe someday it will be full of
both again, but as long as we’re at war with the allegiancies, the
Tomic valley is going to stay empty.

Day followed day, and I followed the river.
After I forget how long—it must have been a week or so, maybe a
little more—the mountains turned into hills and the hills spread
out and hid their feet in the forest, and when the breeze blew in
my face I started to catch a hint of the salt smell I’d gotten to
know so well when I was living in Memfis. That’s the way the breeze
was blowing one sunny morning when I heard hooves on the road
ahead.

That was in a place where the road ran
straight for a while, and by the time I’d thought of running into
the woods to hide, the riders were in sight. There were four of
them, coming straight up the road, and I knew that if I tried to
run they’d chase me down like a deer, so I just kept walking.

They slowed their horses and stopped maybe
twenty paces ahead, waited while I walked up: four men, three of
them younger than I was and the fourth a good bit older. They were
wearing brown homespun clothes and big floppy hats, and they all
had long hair, long beards, and a couple of pistols each stuck into
leather holsters that had seen a lot of hard wear. Their horses,
though, were big and strong and skittish, the kind that jennels and
cunnels ride in Meriga.

I walked up to within a couple of paces of
them and stopped. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and the
oldest one finally said, “Who the hell are you?”

I told him my name.

“You out of Meriga?”

“Yes.”

“Ruinman?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell you doin’ here?”

I knew that if they thought I was lying
they’d kill me without a second thought, and I couldn’t think of
anything to say that wouldn’t sound like a lie, except the truth.
“I’ve been looking for Star’s Reach for getting on five years now,”
I told them. “I hear there’s a place down by the Deesee ruins
where—where every question has an answer. Nothing else worked, so I
figured I’d try that.”

They looked at each other, then back at me.
“Where’d you hear that?” the oldest one asked.

“From a harlot in Ilanoy,” I told him.

They looked at each other again, this time
for a good long while. Finally the oldest one leaned forward in his
saddle. “There’s a place like that,” he said. “You go straight down
this road all the way to the sea, and then turn to your left hand
and walk along the water a good bit until you see a chair made of
chunks of concrete. That’s where it is; you sit down there before
the sun sets and you don’t get up again until it rises. Got
that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good.” He leaned forward a little more. “Now
if you go straight there and come straight back and go home, and
don’t stick your nose into anyplace it shouldn’t get, you’re gonna
be okay. And if you don’t—well, then you better pray real hard,
because you’re gonna wish you never got born. Got that?”

“Yessir,” I said, the way that soldiers do,
and he nodded, and the four of them snapped their reins and rode
right past me at a trot, two on each side. When they were past, one
of the younger ones turned around in the saddle and called back,
“You find Star’s Reach, you tell the aliens hi for us, you
hear?”

I promised I would, and they trotted on up
the road. After a bit, I turned and started walking the other way.
For a while I wondered if they would come back after me and see
where I went, but the hoofbeats faded out and from then on it was
just my boots crunching on what was left of the road, and the
sounds of the river and the wind. The sun rose up in the sky ahead
of me, and moved past to my right side, and sank toward the hills
behind me, and all the while the salt smell on the wind became
stronger and stronger, until finally the forest fell away into
scrub pines and beachgrass, sand and pieces of driftwood covered
what was left of the old road, and I went up and over a dune and
stood looking out at the sea.

There were waves rolling up to the beach in
lines of foam and sweeping out again in flat sheets of water, and
big gray masses of concrete rising up here and there, with waves
crashing into them and seaweed and things growing all over them. It
was a long moment before I noticed them, though, because I was
looking at the Spire. It was just like the pictures I saw when I
was little, a tall white shape rising up straight out of the water
well out to sea, and the light of the afternoon sun shone on it and
made it blaze like a still and silent flame.

I have no idea how long I stood there looking
at it. Finally, though, I remembered the directions I’d been given,
turned left, and walked north along the beach.

I’ve written more than once about the times
along the way from Shanuga to Star’s Reach when I saw how much
bigger and more crowded everything was in the old world, and how
small and sparsely peopled Meriga is nowadays. As I write this, I’m
thinking of the ruins of Cago, and how they stretch for kloms and
kloms along the shores of Lake Mishga. I’m thinking of the towns
and cities that used to be on the banks of the Ilanoy and Misipi
Rivers and aren’t there any more. I’m thinking of the view from
Troy Tower—and none of them, not even all of them put together,
were like walking along that beach.

Ahead there were rounded masses of concrete
rising up out of the water and the sand as far as I could see, and
further, and I knew that the same thing went pretty much without a
break all the way up into Nuwinga, and I also knew that all of that
was just the western edge of the drowned cities of the coast, which
used to go a hundred kloms or more further east before the sea rose
up and swallowed them all. I thought of the millions and millions
of people who used to live there, more people than there are in all
of Meriga nowadays, and now there was just one stray ruinman a long
way from home, wandering past the little that was left of it all.
The wind went whispering past me, picking up sand and tossing it
against my boots and my legs, and I wondered whether the dust of
old bones was mixed in with it.