Star's Reach (12 page)

Cob drove the wagon straight to one corner of
the market. There were a bunch of men sitting there playing cards,
but they put the cards away and got up as soon as they saw Cob
coming. Two of them were blacksmiths by the leather aprons they
wore; I couldn’t place the rest, but I guessed they were
craftworkers of some sort, looking for metal for their trades.

“Well now,” one of the blacksmiths said to
Cob. “Got yourself some help, I see.”

He meant Berry and me, of course. “Nah,” Cob
told him, “just a couple of ruinmen from Shanuga heading
north.”

The whole bunch of them got very quiet, and I
knew that word must have gotten out. The blacksmith who’d spoken
turned to me, and said exactly what I thought he was about to say.
“From Shanuga, eh? They say the ruinmen down there found something
out o’ the usual.”

“News to me,” I told him. “What was it?”

“Some kind o’ paper about Star’s Reach.”

I used some hot language, then: “Come
on.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Nothing like that turned up when I was
there, but it’s been most of a month. Some folks have all the luck,
I guess.”

I could see that the blacksmith didn’t
believe a word of it, but he nodded after a moment, and went to
look at Cob’s metal. Berry and I said our goodbyes to Cob and left
him to his customers. There was a fair crowd there for the market,
and plenty of sellers pitching everything from vegetables and
ironwork to bolts of cloth and bottles of whiskey, but we pushed
through the crowd and got out of there just as fast as we could
without seeming to hurry.

Lebna wasn’t that big of a town in the old
days, and it’s a lot smaller now than it was; I spotted plenty of
old concrete foundations in the pastures and open country we passed
through on the way in. Still, the houses seemed to go on forever as
Berry and I took a dirt road north out of town. It didn’t help that
my mind was running full out the whole way. Word of the discovery
couldn’t have gotten to Lebna without running down the Hiyo valley
first. That meant that Luwul, where we’d hoped to cross the Hiyo
River, would be full of the news, and so a likely place for
trouble. We could go west or east and miss it, but I had no way of
knowing which would be best, or whether either one might land us in
an even worse place. That’s what ran through my mind, over and over
again, while we kept walking and I tried not to imagine watchful
eyes peeking out at us between the curtains of the houses we
passed.

Finally we got into the farm country north of
town, the houses got sparse, and loms out in the pastures turned
their heads on their long necks to watch us go by. Forest lined the
edge of the distant fields like a green haze, and the green hills
beyond that rose up one crest after another toward the sky’s edge.
Once we got in among the trees, I knew, we’d have an easier time
dodging anyone who wanted to follow us, but the forest was still
quite a ways off, and the road we were on wound from side to side
as though it wasn’t in any hurry to get where I wanted to go.

“Do you think—” Berry started, and then
stopped; he’d seen the man up ahead just a moment after I did.

A farmer, for certain, or at least he looked
like one; shirt and trousers of homespun, bare feet, straw hat, and
a lazy look that could have had anything at all behind it. He could
have been standing just like that, leaning up against a fence post,
in the Tenisi hills where I was born. What got my hackles up,
though, is that he just happened to be standing right where the
road split into two, one branch going a little west of north, the
other a little bit east.

“Afternoon,” I said to him as we came up to
the fork.

“Afternoon,” he replied.

“D’you happen to know which road goes to
Luwul?”

He nodded to the left hand fork. “That’s the
one.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing. You two have a good day,
now.”

We passed him by, and headed along the road
to the left. Pretty soon it veered further left, then swung
straight again on the far side of a clump of trees. I glanced back
to make sure we were out of sight of the ford, and then around to
make sure nobody else was watching. “Now,” I said to Berry, “we
figure out how to cut back across to the other road without being
spotted.”

That’s what we did, too. A little further on
a creek cut across the road; it had willows growing along the bank,
all thick with leaves, and there weren’t any farmhouses or people
in sight beyond it. As soon as we were past it, we ducked into the
field and hurried across, staying close to the willows. It got mud
on our boots, but a quarter of an hour later we were on the other
road. Mam Gaia’s blessing was with us; there was nobody else on the
road just then, and the forest was close by.

As soon as we got under the trees, I said,
“Now we find a place to hole up for the rest of the day, someplace
where we can see the road and not get seen.”

Berry took this in. “You think somebody’s
going to come after us.”

“Those people at the Lebna market guessed who
we are. Bet you a mark to a mud-turtle, too, that that farmer
wasn’t just standing there to hold up the fencepost.”

He thought about that, then grinned. “If
you’re right, he’ll send them down the road to Luwul. Still, I’m
not convinced we’ve got anyone after us at all, Mister Trey.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I said.

Rumble from up ahead warned us, and we ducked
off the road and hid in the bushes until the wagon rolled past. By
the time it was gone, both of us had spotted a bit of gray concrete
ruin on a low hill not far from the road, and once it was safe to
move, we scrambled through the underbrush and climbed up to it. It
wasn’t much, part of two walls rising out of four hundred years of
dirt and fallen leaves, but there wasn’t any sign that other people
were in the habit of going there, and it had a good view of the
road down below. I went to take a look, saw the wagon rolling out
of sight toward Lebna and a couple of farm folk heading toward a
distant house.

“Look at that,” Berry said from the other
side of the ruin. I went over and looked where he was pointing, and
damn if the other road wasn’t right out in plain sight away in the
middle distance. Something was moving along the other road, the one
to Luwul the farmer sent us down. Trees got in the way, and then
all of a sudden they came out into a clear patch: five riders on
horses, riding hard. Farmers don’t ride that way, and I didn’t know
of any reason why soldiers would be in the middle of Tucki when the
nearest fighting was off in the mountains where Meriga runs cheek
by jowl with the coastal allegiancies. That didn’t leave a lot of
options.

“There’s your answer,” I said to Berry. We
watched them until they were out of sight.

We kept watch turn and turn about all the
rest of that day, and got what sleep we could. Once the sun was
down, we used the last bit of light in the sky to get back down to
the road, and then got moving quick and quiet. We’d talked it over,
and neither of us could think of a better plan than traveling by
night and not by day, and staying off the road when there was
anybody else likely to be on it. By the time we got going on the
road, the moon was up; it wasn’t much past the new, a thin crescent
up against the first stars, but it gave us a little help finding
our way.

I’d spent more than a little of the day we
hid in the ruin wondering what to do if we came to another fork in
the road, but as it turned out I needn’t have worried; a few muddy
tracks veered off one way and the other, but even by the little
light the moon gave us, it didn’t take much more than a look to
tell which way the main road went. Once we went past a farmhouse
where one flickering light still showed in a window. Another time a
dog somewhere off in the distance started barking, and that had my
hackles up, because wild dogs are not something you really want to
risk facing out in the open. Still, it must have been a farm dog
yapping at the night wind; there was never more than the one dog
barking, and the sound came from the same place, ahead of us,
beside us, behind us, until we couldn’t hear it any more.

That was a long night, as long as the first
one Berry and I spent out in the forest, and Berry and I didn’t say
more than a handful of words to each other from dusk to dawn.
Partly we both wanted to hear hoofbeats or footsteps as soon as we
could, but there was more to it than that. In the old world they
used to shine bright lights all night long, so that people didn’t
have to see the stars and feel small by comparison. Nowadays nobody
has enough electricity to do that, and the priestesses would forbid
such a thing even if we did; they say that we need to be reminded
now and then of just how small and unimportant people are, and how
big the universe is, so we don’t make the same mistakes the
ancients did. If they’re right, Berry and I got a good double
helping of Mam Gaia’s favorite lesson that night.

The sky was clear, and we were a long way
from the nearest city; the moon was thin enough that it didn’t
drown out more than a few small stars, so we got to see the Milky
Way just as bright as it gets, and more stars than anyone this side
of the old world could ever count. The moon crept across the sky,
and all the true stars moved with it; a couple of false stars, the
ones the ancients put up in the sky, cut across the sky following
their own angled paths; and once one of them fell out of the sky in
a sudden line of light that ended somewhere off to the east.

When I was small and my father was still
alive, the priestess who ran the little temple down in the village
where I got my schooling used to say that when the very last false
star finally dropped back to Mam Gaia, that would be the sign that
people had worked off the debt we owed to the rest of life for what
the old world did. That’s not anywhere in the holy books, but even
now that I know that, and know what the false stars are and why
they got put up there in the first place, I still feel a little
better whenever I watch one burn up in the air.

Anna was the one who told me about the false
stars. That happened much later in my story, just a few months ago,
after the whole band of us left Cansiddi and crossed the Suri River
and left settled country behind for Mam Gaia alone knew what. We
were maybe a week out of Cansiddi on the night I’m thinking of, and
none of us really knew Anna very well yet, since Cansiddi was where
she joined us; but that night I couldn’t sleep, and she was sitting
up by the fire, and right about the time we got to talking, one of
the false stars fell out of the sky, good and bright, off to the
west of us.

“What is it your priestesses call them?” she
asked me, meaning by that, or so I guessed, that they weren’t her
priestesses.

“False stars.”

“That’s hardly a proper name for a satellite.
They’re nothing like stars, you know.”

“I don’t,” I told her. “Where I grew up, we
didn’t learn a lot about them.”

Anna nodded, after a moment, and gave me one
of her sidelong glances. “No, I imagine not.” Then, when I thought
she wasn’t going to say anything else: “They’re just machines, put
up above the air so they can do their job better. The ancients put
thousands of them up there for one reason or another. There were
still a few in working order when I was a girl.”

“What sort of things did they do?”

She didn’t usually talk much, but for some
reason this night was different. “Some of them looked down at the
earth and sent back pictures. Some of them listened for radio
signals from the ground and sent them down somewhere else. A lot of
them were put there to learn something about space, or the sun, or
the stars, and send that back down to people on the ground. And
then there were some that were part of the Star’s Reach project:
long gone by my grandparents’ time, for they weren’t needed by
then.”

I was looking up at the sky as she talked,
and another false star came past, this one still following its path
across the sky. I pointed to it. “There’s one.”

“Probably,” she said, with a thin smile I
couldn’t read at all. “It might be something else.” She wouldn’t
say anything else, so I never did find out what else it might have
been.

Still, the night when Berry and I walked
under the stars toward Melumi, I didn’t spend much time thinking
about the false stars, and by the time the first whisper of gray
showed up over the hills to the east I was tired enough that I
wasn’t thinking about much of anything. We were well away from
farmland at that point; the road wound through low hills thick with
trees, and so we started looking for a place to spend the daylight
hours as soon as we could see anything at all. Being ruinmen, of
course the first thing we looked for was a glimpse of old concrete,
partly because a sturdy ruin offers a bit of shelter and more than
a bit of concealment, and partly because most people nowadays won’t
go anywhere near a ruin unless they have to.

We both spotted the same rough gray shape at
about the same moment, maybe half an hour before sunrise, when
everything was getting light enough that I was starting to worry
about being seen. It was maybe half a klom from the road, partway
up a shallow slope; that was enough for us, and after a brief
muttered conversation we left the road and picked our way through
the forest, trying to leave as little trace and make as little
sound as possible in case somebody came along the road just then.
That took some time, and so it was nearly full light when we
reached the ruin and ducked in through an empty doorway half full
of earth and leaf-litter. We were both inside before we found out
that we weren’t alone in the ruin.

Something rustled and moved in the dim light,
and something else flashed like steel. I grabbed my pry bar and
jumped to one side, a trick I’d learned in the fighting circle.
Berry flattened himself against the nearest wall and drew his own
bar. For a moment, while I tried to get the shadows behind the
knife facing me to turn into a human shape, nobody moved.