Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  “What did it say?”

  “Mostly that the jennel wants to talk to you as soon as you get to Luwul. I’ll let you see it, if you like.” He motioned to one of the prentices who were hanging back, listening but trying not to look like that was what they were doing. “Frey, get the letter from Marsh, will you?”

  The prentice hurried off. Berry gave me a worried look, though it wasn’t half so worried as I was feeling right then. “What do you figure he means by that?” I asked.

  “That’s what we don’t know,” said Bron.

  I thought about that for a long moment. People don’t trouble the guilds often, and they trouble ruinmen even less than they do the other guilds. Annoy the gunsmiths or the doctors or the radiomen, and they turn away your business from then on, which can be bad enough; annoy the ruinmen, though, and you might just find out what kind of nasty things hang around in old ruins. I heard of two people who thought they could rob ruinmen and get away with it, and both of them had their hair fall out, took sick, and died a couple of months later. Not that anything ever got proved, you understand. Still, not even ruinmen could get away with doing that to a jennel, and especially to a jennel who had connections at the presden’s court.

  I knew that part of what Bron was telling me was that if this Jennel Cobey sent for me, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Even if Berry and I left the guild hall and tried to make a run for it out of Luwul, once it came out that we’d stopped at the hall, there would be six kinds of trouble to pay for; ruinmen are supposed to protect each other no matter what, but “no matter what” in this case could be soldiers battering down the doors of the guild hall and sticking the misters’ heads on spikes over Luwul’s gates. There are times when you can ask for people to make good on their promises, and there are times when you know better.

  The prentice came back with the jennel’s letter, then, and Bron told him to go wash up and get a clean shirt on. I didn’t listen too closely, because the letter took some reading; it was written in the long curving letters the presden’s court uses these days, and used all the old names of towns, which I didn’t know too well then. I made sure Berry could see it, in case he had to help me with it, and started reading. This is what it said:

  To the misters of the Ruinmens’ Guild of Louisville, my greetings. A ruinman of Chattanooga, Trey son of Gwen, is traveling through this part of the country on his way to the scholars at Bloomington. If he comes to your guildhall, I will consider it a personal favor if you contact my people here in town at once. I want to talk with him.

  — General Cobey Taggert

  I looked up from the letter.

  “You’d better send somebody to the jennel’s house,” I told him.

  He nodded. “I don’t know anything else we can do.”

  “As for the letter, I’ve got two copies, one for Melumi and one that’s mine. I’d like to leave one here.”

  Bron nodded again. “I see. Good. Yes, and we can get it to Melumi, in case.” In case you don’t come back was what he was too polite to say, of course.

  So the prentice Bron sent to wash up went trotting off to Jennel Cobey’s house as fast as he could. I got out one of the two copies of the dead man’s letter I had with me, and handed it to Bron, then took the other one and handed it to Berry. He gave me a startled look, and gulped, but took it. We sat there and talked a bit about the ruins in Luwul and Shanuga, the way you find something to talk about when the thing everybody is thinking about is the thing nobody wants to mention, and Bron mentioned in passing that he had room for an extra prentice or two in his end of the ruins, which was his way of saying that Berry would have someplace to go if something happened to me.

  By the time the prentice came back I was almost relieved. “Mister Trey,” he told me, “The jennel sent two of his servants and wants you to go with them.” I got up, shook Bron’s hand and Berry’s as well, and went down the stairs to the guildhall door.

  I was half expecting soldiers, but the two men waiting outside the door were ordinary servants in the sleeveless shirts and knee-length trousers people wear in the Hiyo valley, and they had three horses with them. “Trey sunna Gwen?” one of them asked.

  “That’s me.”

  They both bowed, just a little, and the one who’d spoken motioned at one of the horses and said, “If you’ll come with us, Sir and Mister.”

  That’s the proper title for a guild mister, but nobody on Mam Gaia’s round belly had ever used it for me before then. I was pleased, in an odd sort of way. The horse was another matter, for I’d never ridden one and only had the sketchiest idea how. Horses aren’t common nowadays; they like a drier climate than Meriga has now, and the old world left us with some diseases that kill two foals out of three every year, so if you’re not a cavalryman in the army or a servant or soldier of a jennel, or just plain rich, you don’t usually get much of a chance to ride one.

  I certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance this time, especially not if my head was going to be on a spike sometime soon. I walked over to the side of the horse, grabbed whatever you call the thing on the front of the saddle that you’re supposed to grab, got one foot into the stirrup and swung myself up. I had no idea what I’d do if the horse objected to the proceedings, but it just shifted its feet a bit and let me mount. Once I got myself settled, it swung its head around to glance at me with one eye, as though it wanted to ask if I was done yet.

  The two servants popped up into their saddles with a mother of a lot more grace than I must have had, grabbed the reins and started down the street. I wasn’t sure what to do, but my horse started off right away without bothering for me to guide it. I picked up the reins, too, and the horse gave me a second glance; I think it was wondering if I was going to do something stupid. I wasn’t. I figured the horse was probably smarter than I was, and let it do whatever it was going to do.

  That’s how I rode through the streets of Luwul that morning: sitting in the saddle holding the reins as though I knew what I was doing, without the smallest baby kitten of an idea where we were going or what was going to happen to me when we got there. Luwul’s a bigger town than Shanuga, but it’s still got the big gray town walls made of old concrete chunks mortared together, the gate with a pair of tired guards looking down from their windows, the narrow muddy streets inside with tall narrow buildings rising up on either side, pigs and dogs and people all busy with their own affairs in the streets and the dim little alleys, smoke and smells and a hundred different noises all tumbling over each other in the sultry air.

  I got to see plenty of Luwul, too, for the ruinmen’s hall was outside the south side of the walls and Jennel Cobey’s house was on the river, which runs along the northern edge of town. Plenty of Luwul got to see me, too; a lot of people in the streets looked up at me as I rode past them on the horse and then turned to watch me go. I wondered whether they’d heard about the letter from Shanuga, or if the thought of a ruinman on a horse was just strange enough to catch their interest.

  Still, as we got close to the jennel’s house, the people thinned out. The houses got bigger, and more of them were made of stone, with big gates and courtyards, and towers up above where men with guns could keep watch over the street and the river if they had to.

  Jennel Cobey’s house was one of those, as big as any and bigger than most. We rode up to his gate, where a couple of his soldiers glanced at us and hauled the gate open, and then into his courtyard, where the servants swung down from their horses and waited patiently while I did the same thing. “This way, Sir and Mister,” said the same one who had spoken to me earlier, and motioned toward a door. I followed him through the door, up a stair, and along a corridor with tall windows along the one side looking out toward the river, and paintings on the other side of faces of men I didn’t recognize. The second servant was right behind me; I never heard him say a word then or later, but I could feel his gaze on my back the whole time.

  Finally we stopped at a door. “Please to wait here, Sir and Miste
r,” said the servant who did all the talking, and went inside. I could hear his voice, though not the words, and then another voice; and then the servant came back through the door. “If you’ll follow me, Sir and Mister.” I followed him into the room, and that’s how I met Cobey Taggart.

  Thinking back on that first meeting now, after everything that’s happened, it’s hard for me to be sure how much of what I think I remember got changed around to fit what happened afterwards. For most of five years, I would have said that Cobey was one of the best friends I had on Mam Gaia’s round belly, and I still thought that right up until the moment at the door to Star’s Reach when I realized that one of us was going to kill the other. I traveled with him, shared hopes and finds with him, told him some of my secrets and guessed at a few of his, saw how he lived and watched him die. It’s hard to set that aside and reach back to the memory of our first meeting, untouched by anything else, but I’ll try.

  He was younger than I expected, not ten years older than I was, with a mop of sand-colored hair and a narrow beard along the edge of his jaw, the sort of thing that was fashionable that year at the presden’s court. He was dressed all in green, the way jennels usually are, but the only sign of rank he had anywhere on him was the bone-handled gun that showed at his hip.

  “Trey sunna Gwen,” the servant said, and ducked back out through the door; I heard it click behind me. “Sir and Jennel,” I said; if he was going to have his servants use my title, damn if I wasn’t going to use his.

  “Mister Trey,” he said, and crossed the room to shake my hand. That startled me, though I tried not to show it. “Thank you for coming. I suspect you’re wondering why I sent for you.”

  “That I am, Sir and Jennel.”

  That got a sudden bright smile, which startled me even more than the handshake. “The simplest explanation is right over here. If you’ll follow?”

  He set off across the room. It was a big room, nearly as big as the main room of the ruinmen’s hall I’d just left, with tall narrow windows along two sides and bookshelves along a third. Heavy timbers framed the ceiling above, and the carpet that covered the floor was nice enough that I was sorry to be walking on it with dusty boots. In the corner where the walls with the windows met, there was a table, and on the table was a flat box as big as a sheet of paper.

  He got to the table first, and lifted the lid off the box. “I think you’ll recognize this.”

  I did, too. I bent over to give it a close look, and he motioned to me to pick it up, then stood back, watching me, as I examined front and back, the bits of gray dust stuck to it, the hint of fingerprints where I must have held the thing before the resin I’d sprayed on it had time to dry. The single word on the back was there, too, in the pale gray writing nobody nowadays knows how to make. I set the thing back in its box and turned to face the jennel, wondering how he’d gotten the letter I’d found beneath the dead man’s hand in the Shanuga ruins.

  Ten: Dell’s Bargain

  Looking back over what I wrote last night, I realized that I’ve gone and talked about all kinds of things that people won’t know about unless they grew up in Meriga or spent a good long time there. Jennels, for instance. They don’t have those in Nuwinga or Genda, and Mam Gaia only knows whether they’ve got anything of the kind over in the Neeonjin country way off past the mountains and the dead lands of the west. In Meyco they’ve got dons, who are like jennels with attitude, but then Meyco’s an empire and that comes with extra bragging rights.

  Anyway, Meriga has jennels. We’ve got a couple of hundred of them, maybe, and a couple of thousand cunnels, who would have been jennels if somebody back along the line of their grandfathers had been firstborn sons and not second or third or whatever. Most of the jennels are heads of families that have been famous names in Meriga since the old world ended; they own a lot of land and a lot of other things, they have soldiers and servants, and when the presden names somebody to take one of her armies off to the borders to fight, it pretty much has to be one of the jennels.

  One of the archivists at Sisnaddi told me that that’s all the jennels used to be, leaders of the Merigan armies back before the old world ended, and all the rest of it came later. That would explain why they don’t have them in Genda or Nuwinga, since I don’t think either of those countries had a big army back then. Meriga did, which is why ruinmen here know the look of the stiff heavy clothing soldiers wore in Meriga before the old world ended; you find a lot of bones in what’s left of that clothing, tucked away here and there in the old ruins.

  The man looking over my shoulder as I examined the letter I’d found down deep in the ruins at Shanuga wasn’t wearing that kind of clothing, of course, but some of his grandfathers’ grandfathers back more than four hundred years had worn it. The plain green clothes he was wearing might as well have been the same thing; you only see that on jennels, and then only on jennels who know that they don’t need to announce who they are to everybody, just as the really big names in Circle aren’t the women in the fancy gowns and pearls but the ones in the plain dresses and the plain red hats, who don’t talk much and don’t have to.

  Jennel Cobey didn’t have to talk much, either. He stood there while I examined the letter I’d found down inside the Shanuga ruins, watching me as though he had all the time in the world.

  “I’m curious how you came by this, Sir and Jennel,” I said finally.

  He laughed; it was a louder laugh than I expected, and it sent echoes scurrying all over the room like mice. “I imagine so. Still, no mystery there; one of my people in Noksul heard about the letter as soon as word got out and contacted me by radio, and so I was able to get someone to Shanuga in time for the auction. That was good and lively; your Mister Garman did very well out of it.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “The man I sent to Shanuga mentioned that you had the finder’s rights for it.”

  “That’s right.”

  He was still watching me, of course. “I hope you won’t feel insulted, Sir and Mister, if I say that you’ve taken on quite a task there.”

  He meant, of course, that I was a brand new mister who probably didn’t even look my twenty years just at that moment. “If you’d had a chance at something like that, Sir and Jennel,” I said, “would you have turned it down?”

  A moment later I knew I might just have said the worst possible thing, since of course he did have a chance at something like that, and could take it by nothing more difficult than having one of his people cut my throat. He smiled, though, a broad smile as though what I’d said came close to making him laugh. “Of course not,” he said. “Good. I think we have the basis for an understanding, then.”

  He reached for the letter, and I handed it to him. “You want to find Star’s Reach,” he went on then. “So do I, badly. Still, finding it and digging down to it are your line of business, not mine. If I recall correctly, your guild sometimes does contract digs.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “And in this case?”

  I considered that long and hard. In a contract dig, the ruinmen are paid out of somebody else’s pocket, instead of getting by each season on whatever they made on finds from the season before. That’s not something most ruinmen will do unless the dig’s really worth it, because whoever pays the costs gets their money back before anyone else gets paid, and after that a share of the profits goes to the contract holder as well. On the other hand, a dig at Star’s Reach would cover almost any contract I could imagine with plenty to spare; having someone else foot the bill for the digging would make it one mother of a lot easier for a brand new mister and his prentice to get a good crew together, too, and do the thing the way it ought to be done.

  “In this case, Sir and Jennel,” I said, “it’s a possibility.”

  He nodded, then: “If you’re worried about your profits, don’t be. I’m perfectly willing to see the salvage go to the ruinmen and whatever records are there go to Melumi. That’s your business and theirs.” Seeing
my expression: “You’re wondering why. I don’t need the money. Partly I want to find Star’s Reach for the same reason everyone else in Meriga dreams of finding it; partly—” He leaned a senamee or so toward me. “Partly, whoever finds Star’s Reach is going to become the most famous person in Meriga as fast as word can spread. That could be a real advantage to me in Sisnaddi.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, though I didn’t have the least idea just then why it would be an advantage to him, or to anyone else.

  “Then would it be fair to say that we have a bargain?”

  I agreed, and we shook hands. “By the way,” he said then, “do you have any idea yet where Star’s Reach is?”

  “Not yet, Sir and Jennel. That’s why I’m headed to Melumi.”

  “Sensible. That was my destination as well. Would you be willing to ride with my party? I think I can promise you a faster trip and better accommodations than you’d have on your own.”

  I agreed to that gratefully enough, and he said, “Good. We were planning on leaving tomorrow, if that’s suitable. I’ll have a horse sent—do you have prentices?”

  “Just one.”

  “Two horses, then, to the guild hall tomorrow morning.” He said a few more pleasantries, which I don’t remember just now, and then without ever having to say a word about it he dismissed me and I turned to find his servant waiting for me just inside the door.

  All the way back to the ruinmen’s guild hall, I thought about what had just happened. Just about every ruinman I’d ever met would have called that the best bit of luck I could have had, and more than half of me thought the same thing, but the rest of me wasn’t so sure, because the bargain I’d made with Jennel Cobey felt a little too much like a Dell’s bargain.

  That’s something else I ought to explain, because I know for a fact that people from outside of Meriga don’t say that or know what it means; I used the phrase once in front of Tashel Ban, and he gave me the look he always gives when whatever somebody says doesn’t make the least bit of sense to him. Dell—well, you don’t mention him around the priestesses, because they don’t believe in him and don’t like it when other people do, either.