Over the next couple of days there at Melumi, as the rains finally stopped and the sun got a chance at last to take a good look down through the clouds and find out what had gotten itself washed away this time, it didn’t feel like a long strange road ahead at all; it felt as though Star’s Reach was right around the next corner. Berry and I still went over to the library most days, since there wasn’t much else for us to do until the roads dried out enough to be fit for travel, but I’m pretty sure he spent a lot of time staring past the books and thinking about Troy, Skeega, and the transport base we hoped to find there, and I know I did.
We spent a couple of evenings with Jennel Cobey talking over what we’d found and what our plans were. He’d mentioned early on that he and his men would be riding to Sisnaddi as soon as the roads allowed, because of something political, but he wanted to know everything we’d found out about the base near Skeega. I told him, too; that was part of our Dell’s bargain, and I guessed—and guessed right, as it turned out—that he was going to toss some money our way to make the trip easier.
Finally we had two weeks of clear weather, and one of the jennel’s riders came galloping back to the Versty late one afternoon to say that the roads were open and people were starting to move again. Berry and I had dinner with the jennel that evening, since we both planned on leaving first thing in the morning and of course we’d be taking different roads. “This is all very promising,” Cobey said as we finished up the meal. “I know it may turn out to be a dead end, but if you find anything...”
“We’ll let you know soonest, Sir and Jennel,” I said.
“Thank you, Sir and Mister.” The titles had become a bit of a running joke between us. He leaned back in his chair, glanced from me to Berry and back again. “I wish I could come with you. Digging for clues to Star’s Reach sounds a great deal more useful just now than tackling another round of political nonsense, but...” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, it can’t be helped.” Then, to one of his servants: “Creel, this glass is getting empty. You’ll fix that, I trust.”
By the time Berry and I got downstairs to our room in the guest’s dorm, quite a few empty glasses had gotten filled, and I was a bit less steady on my feet than I like. Still, we had packing to do, and got to work trying to fit too much gear and clothes into a couple of packs that didn’t have room for it all. We’d been at it for maybe half an hour, and I was starting to wonder if clothes breed when they’re left in a chest for too long, when somebody knocked at the door.
It was a messenger from the Versty, the same thin scared-looking girl who’d come to bring us to the library when Eleen finished with the dead man’s letter, back before the rains began. “Mister Trey,” she said with a nervous little curtsey, “if you’ll come with me. They’ve found something.”
That startled me. I turned to Berry and said, “I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
He looked as surprised as I probably did, but nodded and said, “I can finish up here, Mister Trey.”
So I followed the messenger down the stairs, across the brick courtyard, and into the library. That late in the evening, it was dark inside, with an electric light here and there glowing pale the way fireflies do before night finishes settling in. One of the little rooms off the corridor had the door half open and a light on inside, and that’s where the messenger took me; it was empty when I got there, but not much more than a minute after the messenger left me there, the door swung wide again and Eleen came in.
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” she said: a question, though it didn’t sound like one.
I nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“Then we were doubly lucky. One of the scholars happened across a stack of old government records from just before the end of the old world, and there was a reference in it.” She handed me a slip of paper. This is what it said:
Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility
“It’s west of Memfis,” she said, “in Arksa.” Then: “The records we found mention radio gear, a lot of it, being shipped there about two years before the date on the letter.”
I stared at her. “Radio gear. So that might be Star’s Reach.”
“It might, or it might not. But I thought you’d want to know.”
I glanced down at the slip of paper again, trying to fit a second WRTF into the plans Berry and I had made. “Yes. And thank you. You’ve been a good bit of help in all this, and I’m starting to think we may actually find the thing.”
She smiled, then all at once startled the hay out of me by throwing her arms around me and kissing me good and hard. “That was for luck,” she said then, “and this—” She kissed me again.
If she’d stayed up close against me much longer I might have tried to take things a good bit further than a kiss, but she pulled away then, and hurried out of the room without saying another word. I listened to her footsteps as they whispered down the corridor into silence, then looked at the slip of paper one more time, and walked slowly out of the library.
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 litt
le 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.”
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