The announcement was all in the sort of formal language you never hear unless the presden’s court is involved somehow, and I won’t try to repeat all of that word for word. The important thing was that Sheren darra Emeli, Presden of Meriga, died this morning of having too much cancer in her. Now of course he said some other things, mostly that there will be a funeral in a week to send her back into the circle, and that the Baspresden, who usually just bangs the gavel when Congrus meets and whose name I can’t even remember, will run the country until the succession gets sorted out. All that is probably important for people who live in Sisnaddi or have to deal with the government. What matters for most of us here at Star’s Reach and across most of Meriga, though, is that for more than forty years the country’s been mostly at peace and mostly prosperous, and all of that could stop between now and the next rains.
That matters for Berry, too, but he had something else to think about as well. He stood there in the doorway, listening, not saying anything at all. I thought just then of the child who’d helped me stagger to my tent in Shanuga after I became a mister, but he didn’t look like a child any more, and the look on his face wasn’t a child’s look, not by a good long walk. The announcer went on for a while, talking about what there was in the way of other news, and then he stopped talking, the slow sad music started again, and Berry turned without saying a thing and went back to the kitchen.
I think everyone else was looking at him by the time he left, and then they were all looking at me. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I followed Berry down the hall to the kitchen. He’d gone back to washing the dishes, though his face was all twisted up trying not to cry, and his eyes weren’t looking at anything at all. I found a towel, stood next to him and started drying the plates as he washed them.
“My mother died about six months after Gray Garman took me as a prentice,” I said after a little while. “So I know there’s nothing anybody can say.”
He stopped, and looked at me for a long moment. Finally: “When did you find out?”
He wasn’t talking about my mother, of course. “I started wondering after you said you couldn’t go to Sisnaddi, but Jennel Cobey took me to see her in Sisnaddi. That did it.”
Berry started washing again. “Do you suppose Jennel Cobey knew?”
“I’m pretty sure of it.”
“And the others here?”
“If they didn’t, they do now.” I took the last plate from him, dried it.
“I suppose it was stupid to think nobody would ever figure it out.” He started in on the bowls. “I hope they keep their mouths shut, or I’ll end up dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“Or Presden,” I said.
He snorted. “Not as a tween. If I’d been born one way or the other I’d be in Sisnaddi right now taking the oath of office, but—” He handed me a bowl. “She couldn’t even admit I existed. Can you imagine what the Circle elders would have said? No, I’ll get offered the presdency the day after a dozen false stars turn up drunk in a Memfis whorehouse.”
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, and he didn’t say anything else for a while. We finished up the dishes, and then he said, “Trey—thank you.”
“Sure.”
He nodded, and then turned and went to his room. I knew better than to follow.
I’ve been thinking since then of the one time I saw the presden. It was a little more complicated than I told Berry, because Jennel Cobey didn’t just up and decide to take me to see her. What happened was that Sheren found out about his plans to go looking for Star’s Reach, and whoever told her about it gave her more details than the jennel wanted her to know.
This was after I’d come back from Deesee and started making arrangements for the journey here. Everyone in our party but Berry, who was still in Tucki, and Anna, who we didn’t know about yet, was already there, and in the middle of everything one of the jennel’s servants brought a note telling me to dress up as well as a ruinman could and meet him that evening at the presden’s palace inside the walls in Sisnaddi.
The jennel sent somebody to get me through the city gates, and so I turned up at the palace doors all scrubbed and in the nicest clothes I could find. I was as nervous as I’ve ever been, and it didn’t help any to see that Cobey looked nearly as nervous as I felt. “Trey,” he said in a low voice, “Don’t say any more than you have to. I don’t know what this is about.” That was all the time he had to talk, since the guards in their fancy uniforms came out of the big front door of the palace just then, and I followed him in the door and through more huge rooms and long corridors than I’ve seen anywhere this side of a really big ruin. At first there were people everywhere, guards and courtiers and servants all bustling about, but the further we went the more the crowd thinned, until finally we came to a door with two guards standing outside it and no one else anywhere in sight except the servant who was guiding us.
The door opened, we went through, and the guards and the servant stayed outside. Inside were shelves of books and a big map on the wall, ancient or copied from some ancient book, showing Meriga as it was before the old world ended. That caught my eye, and so it was a moment or two before I noticed the woman over in one corner, facing mostly away from us, turning the pages of a book.
She was smaller than I expected, and she didn’t look well; her face was drawn and her hair was mostly gray, though you could see traces of the red it had been when I was still a boy. She looked up after a moment, glanced at the two of us, and then put down the book and came over and started peppering the two of us with questions: where we thought Star’s Reach was and how long the jennel thought he’d be gone and who we’d be taking with us, and other things like that. All the while I was looking at her and wondering why it seemed like I knew her from somewhere, because something in her face and voice reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t think of who it was.
We were probably there for half an hour before she thanked us and turned back to her book, and we went to the door to find the servant opening it for us. So we went back the way we came, following the servant, and my thoughts wouldn’t stop circling around why the presden made me think of someone and who that someone might be. I barely noticed all the other people around me, I was that deep in thought, but just before we got to the big room just inside the outer doors of the palace I happened to see someone I knew.
I have no idea to this day why I looked up just then. All I know is that there was a man walking toward me, and I recognized him at once. This time he was dressed in the loose jacket and tight trousers and boots that people at the presden’s court wear these days, rather than the traveler’s clothes he’d had on before, but that bland face was one I wasn’t likely to forget. It was the man who had followed Berry and me all the way from Troy to Cago.
I don’t think he saw me. If he did, his face didn’t show it. A moment later he was past me, and I was following Jennel Cobey out the doors, and that was when I realized whose face the presden’s kept almost calling to mind. It was Berry’s, of course.
It all made plenty of sense once I thought of it—the way Berry talked, the things he knew, the way Jennel Cobey reacted the first time he saw Berry, all of it, except for the simple fact that a ruinman from Shanuga ended up with a presden’s child as his prentice. Of course then I remembered that it was Berry who chose me, not the other way around, and gambling everything on the chance of finding Star’s Reach was pretty much what you might expect from someone who had a presden’s blood and instincts but no chance at the succession.
To this day I remember only one thing about the rest of that evening. I must have said my goodbyes to Cobey, gone back to the cheap little room I shared with Eleen, told her everything about what had happened except the one thing that mattered, and gone to bed with her, but none of that left the least trace in my mind. All I recall now is lying awake late at night next to Eleen, watching the stars through the one little window we had next to our bed and wondering what a farm boy from the Tenisi hills like me w
as doing, getting ready to go to Star’s Reach with a jennel, a king, and the presden’s secret child. If the stars knew, they weren’t telling.
I didn’t even know that much when I was doing what I want to write about next, which was walking up the long slow road from Memfis to Sisnaddi more than a year before. I left Conda, where I left off telling my story earlier, after saying goodbye to Lu and promising that I’d look her up if I ever got to Sanloo. The last stars were setting as I got up; it was a clear cool morning, but there were clouds coming out of the south that promised rain within a few days, the sort of thing you get now and then during the otherwise dry months. Farmers cheer when they see those clouds, and ruinmen groan; me, I just kept walking.
I had plenty of thinking to do, and plenty of time to do it. Further east, when you get into Inyana and Hiyo, the roads along the north shore of the Hiyo River are as busy as anything, but there on the bottom end of Ilanoy it’s mostly forest with a few scattered farms, and here and there a levee on the bank where one of the smaller riverboats will stop if somebody flags it down. I watched more than a few of them heading the same I was, but I didn’t want to spend money if I didn’t have to, so I didn’t stand there and wave. That meant there were nights I spent in taverns in little towns, and nights I spent in barns and farmhouses, and now and then nights where the sun went down and there wasn’t anybody or anything in sight, and I found a place to curl up under a tree and slept there.
One way or another it must have taken me most of two weeks to get to Ensul, which is the first town of any size north of the river as you go upstream from Dooca. That was partly because I had to go almost a day’s walk north to find a ferry across the Wobbish, where Ilanoy and Inyana come together. It was also because the rain I’d seen coming showed up more than once, and a muddy road’s a lot slower going than a dry one, even when part of the road’s still paved with old chunks of concrete. Still, the rain stopped the day I crossed the Wobbish, the road on the other side was well tended and mostly dry, and two days after I got off the ferry I was in Ensul.
Like every other town in Meriga, Ensul used to be much bigger than it is now. If you have a ruinman’s eyes, you can see where the old streets and buildings used to run long before you get to the town. There used to be a ruinmen’s hall there, years back, but they ran out of ruins and sold the hall for scrap metal before heading elsewhere. Now it’s just another market town with riverboats at the levee, three or four streets full of shops, and a big open space where farmers and crafters and traveling shows set up and sell whatever it is they have to sell.
The way the road comes into Ensul, the marketplace is to your left and a row of taverns to your right. I probably would have headed straight for the nearest tavern, since I’d been on the road since first light and was thinking comfortable thoughts about a meal and a bed, but it was late afternoon, the market was winding down, and through a pause in the noise and talking came a voice I knew. I almost stopped right there in the middle of the street, which would have been a bad idea, since there was an oxcart not too far behind me and I wouldn’t want to risk my life on the common sense of a couple of oxen. Instead, I got over to the side of the street closest to the market, and looked, and there he was.
He was up on a wooden platform, the sort of thing that players and actors use when there aren’t too many of them, and a cloth banner along the front of it yelled GENUINE HERBAL MEDICINE in bright red letters. He had a black coat and a black hat and a bottle of something black and more or less liquid in one hand, but I wouldn’t have mistaken the voice or the face or the round glasses like moons in a thousand years of trying. It was Plummer, all right.
So I walked over toward the platform, toward the outer edge of the small crowd he had around him. Of course he spotted me well before I got there. “Here,” he said, “is one who could benefit from the very best of my medicines. A ruinman, mams and misters, no doubt come straight from some dangerous ruin, where he has been risking his life to keep the rest of us safe from toxic wastes and well supplied with metals. Come up here, sir and mister.”
The crowd made room for me, and I went to the platform and climbed up the three creaking steps onto it, doing my level best not to grin. Plummer checked my pulse and whispered to me, “Pretend to pay me when I ask for money.” Then, in a voice they could probably hear in the taverns across the way: “A slow and heavy pulse. Aching muscles?” I nodded. “Unusual thirst?” I nodded again. “I thought as much,” he said, and rattled off a string of words that probably meant something, though I don’t pretend to know what. He asked some other questions, and I guessed at the right answers, and before he’d finished everyone there, including me, was half convinced that I must be six senamees from death on a slick muddy slope.
Then, of course, he sold me the medicine, and I reached into my pocket and pretended to hand him a coin. He took it, checked it, and pocketed it so convincingly that I just about saw the thing glint in the sunlight. By then, of course, half the people in the crowd had noticed that their muscles were aching and they were pretty thirsty, too, and he got busy answering their questions and selling bottles: this one for tiredness and that one for colds, and this other one if your gums bleed and your teeth get loose. He had at least a dozen different medicines for sale, and by the time he was finished most of the people in the crowd had at least one bottle to take home.
“A profitable day,” he said later on. We were facing each other across a table in one of the taverns, with a big glass of beer on my side of the table and a smaller glass of Tucki whiskey on his. “And partly your doing. Something about an earnest young ruinman inspires confidence. And particularly—” He leaned forward, considered me. “An earnest young ruinman who looks rather the worse for wear. I gather the site near Memfis didn’t fulfill your hopes.”
I met his look, shook my head. “It was worth a try.”
“Of course. And your prentice—I trust nothing untoward...”
“Berry? He’s fine—I sent him to work on a dig in Tucki to make some money while I search the archives at Sisnaddi. I figure that’s the last chance I’ve got.”
He considered that. “An interesting coincidence, and possibly a useful one. I’m also headed east, though not quite to Sisnaddi. It also occurs to me that we may have some things to talk about.”
That’s how it happened that we left Ensul the next morning on the road east toward Luwul. I was in good spirits for the first time in longer than I wanted to think about. That was partly because I knew Plummer would be good company on the road, partly because wondering about him spared me from wondering about whether Star’s Reach was ever going to be more than a dream for me, and partly—well, I was no more sure what Plummer had been not-quite-offering me, there on the riverboat just upstream from Altan, than I’d been the morning I went and found him gone, and I wanted to know. Not that I was going to push the issue; I knew Plummer well enough already to be certain that he’d talk about that when he chose to, and not a heartbeat sooner.
So we took the road, or maybe the road took us, and pretty soon it was as if we’d been traveling together since the first time we’d met back there in the ruin in Tucki. He didn’t have much medicine left to sell after Ensul, but a little ways upstream was a little town named Nuber, and he had a friend there—it was another one of his nameless friends—who kept plenty of it stored in bottles down in the cellar. After that, he worked every town we passed.
We still made fairly good time up the north bank of the Hiyo until we got past Nuwabnee, which is right across the river from Luwul and brought back some memories. While we were there, the clouds started coming up out of the south again, and a few days later the rain came following it. It was good and heavy, too, and we ended up finding a ruin with a bit of roof left to it and waiting it out. That’s where we were when Plummer started talking about stories, and that’s when he said the thing I wrote back at the beginning of this, about how all stories were scraps of one big story, and I decided he was drunk. Looking back on it,
I think he was, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. It’s occurred to me more than once since then that he may have been so fond of whiskey because he was right.
But the clouds finally cleared away, and on we went. It wasn’t more than a few days after that when we went through a little place called Bellem—not big enough to be a town, really, just a couple of buildings and a levee for the boats—and there on the side of one of the buildings was a big poster. You don’t see those too often, because there aren’t that many trades that have need of them, but this was the exception: it said, in big fancy red and black letters, that the Baraboo Sirk was going to be twenty kloms up the river in Madsen for a couple of days, which happened to be that day and the next.
I laughed, remembering all the times I’d wanted to see a sirk back when I was a boy, and we didn’t have the money. Plummer, though, stopped and considered the poster and said, “Excellent. We’ll have to stop for that.”
I closed my mouth after a moment, and then said, “Friends of yours?”
“Exactly.” He gave me the look I’ve mentioned before, the one that made me think I’d said the right thing or something close to it. Then, without another word, he turned and set off along the road, and I followed.
We got to Madsen late the next afternoon, which was soon enough for the evening show. I honestly can’t say I remember the town at all, just the big tent off in a big pasture just outside of town, red and white in stripes, with big solar panels on the grass nearby to power the lights and a couple of smaller tents close by. There were oxen grazing not far away, and wagons painted in bright colors, red and blue and green, with BARABOO SIRK on them in big gold letters. People were already lining up in front of the tent, and a man in fancy clothes outside the tent was telling everyone about the show in a voice I bet they heard on the other side of the river.
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