Star's Reach (13 page)

“Well, now,” said a voice with just a bit of
waver in it. “And what do two ruinmen want with an old man minding
his own business?”

I found my own voice after a moment. “Nothing
at all. We were looking for shelter.”

“At sunrise, in the middle of the Tucki
woods?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I pointed
out.

He allowed a dry laugh. “I suppose you
could.” Another long moment passed as he sized us up, and we tried
to do the same with him. Then: “If you’ll put those very
threatening pieces of iron away, this—” The knife blade twitched in
his hand. “—will also go away. It occurs to me that we may have
interests in common.”

I guessed at what he meant. “Like not being
seen.”

“Among other things.”

I lowered my pry bar; he lowered his knife;
we both put our weapons away; out of the corner of my eye I saw
Berry do the same thing, though his face was still tense with
mistrust.

“I may have the advantage of knowing
something about you,” the old man said then. The sun was coming up
and putting light in through holes in the ruin, and so I could just
about see him by that point, a lean figure with a mostly bald head
and eyeglasses round as moons. “Or I think I might. There’s
certainly been quite a bit of talk about a ruinman and his prentice
going to Melumi with a very important letter.” He waved a hand.
“No, you don’t have to tell me if that’s you or not. Do you have
anything in the way of food, by the way? I can contribute some very
respectable ham and part of a loaf of bread. Also whiskey, if
that’s of interest.”

It wasn’t, but the food was, and we’d been
given some things by Cob the day before, so we managed to have a
creditable meal there inside the ruin.

“My name’s Plummer,” the old man said as we
ate, answering a question I hadn’t quite asked. “Or one of my
names. In my line of work, a man sometimes needs more than
one.”

“Must be some line of work.”

By way of answer he pulled a glass bottle out
of his pack and set it on the concrete between us. I didn’t have
the least idea what it was, but Berry did. “Medicine?”

“Exactly,” Plummer said. “I make it and sell
it. Entirely natural ingredients, of course, but these days half
the people in Meriga think that anything other than plain dried
herbs is an affront to Mam Gaia, and now and then some of them are
rather too fond of expressing that opinion with sticks and
stones.”

“Which is why you’re hiding here,” Berry
said.

“A regrettable fact.” Plummer shook his head.
“I had to leave Dannul in something of a hurry several days ago.
Two of the farmers there took exception to my presence at the
market, and went to gather their friends and a selection of
weapons. I had reason to think they might try to follow me past
Lebna. So you find me here.”

I thought about that while I chewed on a
piece of ham. “This is pretty far past Lebna,” I said when I’d
swallowed. “Did you know there was a safe place here?”

Plummer gave me a long careful glance through
those glasses of his. “I can answer that question,” he said
finally, “but there’s an inconvenient detail attached. If you
communicate that answer to someone who shouldn’t know it, someone
will cut your throat. I don’t mean that as a threat, not at all;
merely an observation of fact.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was
saying. “Ruinman’s bond.”

He smiled. “Good. You take my meaning.”

So Berry and I bound ourselves by the old
words of the bond, and Plummer nodded once, as though that settled
everything. “This is one of, shall we say, several places of the
same kind,” he said then. “They change from time to time, for
safety, but they can be recognized by those who know how. There are
two more on this road between here and Luwul.”

Berry and I glanced at each other. “This road
goes to Luwul?”

“You were told otherwise, I gather.”

I told Plummer about the farmer at the fork
in the road, and he let out a little sharp laugh. “Had you taken
the other road, it would have led you in a circle back to Lebna.
No, we are three days from Luwul by the road down there.” His
gesture pointed back to the road Berry and I had followed all
night. “I cannot recommend going back to Lebna. If you happen to be
minded to go through Luwul, though, and don’t object to company, I
can point out the safe places on the way.”

Looking back on it, it’s clear enough that
Plummer had planned on making that offer as soon as he’d sized us
up. I didn’t guess that at the time, though; I didn’t know him yet,
though that would change. Still, I was wary. “And you wouldn’t mind
company, I would guess.”

Again, the long careful glance. “There are
men, I’m sorry to say, who would beat and rob a solitary old man
without a qualm,” he said. “Most of them would think twice about
it, however, if the old man was accompanied by two sturdy young
ruinmen equipped with those iron bars of yours. So if you happen to
be going my way...”

I glanced at Berry again; his look said
“Whatever you decide, Mister Trey” as clearly as if he’d spoken it
out loud. “We’ll go your way,” I said then. “For now.”

“Excellent.” Plummer gestured at the remains
of the meal. “More ham? It really is quite good, I think.”

Nine: Jennel Cobey’s Letter

That’s how I met Plummer. Of all the people
who didn’t join me on the journey to Star’s Reach, he’s the one who
put the most into the story I’m trying to tell in this notebook,
and to this day I’m not sure why. I’m not sure of a lot of things
about Plummer. Most people you meet, you get to know them and a lot
of the things about them that seemed funny or puzzling early on
look like plain common sense as soon as you’ve been around them a
while, but Plummer isn’t like that. The more I learned about him,
the more puzzled I got.

All that came later, though, and I didn’t
guess any of it when I first met Plummer there in the ruin beside
the road to Luwul. About the time we finished eating that first
meal with him, the sun came up, and he settled down in a corner of
the ruin and wrapped himself in an old shabby coat and went right
to sleep. Berry and I weren’t anything like so confident of him as
he seemed to be of us, and so we kept watches, turn and turn again,
while the sun was up.

Still, nothing happened. We were far enough
off the road that if anybody went riding past, looking for us or
otherwise, neither of us saw or heard it. Mam Gaia took her sweet
time turning that part of her belly away from the sun, but finally
dusk came rising up out of the east and the first stars came out,
and Plummer woke up.

He’d hardly moved the whole time, but all of
a sudden he was dead awake. “I suppose wishing you a good morning
is a little untimely,” he said. “I trust you both managed to find
some sleep, though.”

“Enough to get by,” I said. I’d taken the
last watch and so was wide awake; Berry was still rubbing his eyes
and blinking.

“Good. The next safe place I know of is
perhaps twenty kil—kloms away from here; there should be food, and
friends, but of course it will be necessary for us to get
there.”

The comment about friends got my hackles up a
bit, since we still didn’t have any way of knowing whether Plummer
could be trusted. Still, we’d stayed with him and shared his food,
and unless we hit him over the head and left him there in the ruin
there wasn’t an easy way to go somewhere besides where he was
going. So Berry and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything.
As soon as we’d all had a little food, we shouldered our bags, and
the three of us made our way through the dusk back down to the road
to Luwul.

I’d worried as well that Plummer might talk
on the way, and make it harder to listen for the people who might
be following us, but once we left the ruin he didn’t say a word
more than he had to. If you’ve ever watched an old fox come up to
the edge of a road, listen and sniff until he was sure it was safe
for him to cross, and then trot across it, no faster than he had to
but no slower either, that was Plummer. Even in the faint light I
could see his eyeglasses glint as he looked here and there or
canted his head to catch a sound.

That night didn’t seem quite as long as the
one before, though it was still a long slow journey down empty
roads. For the first half of it we might as well have been a
hundred kloms from anyplace; the road wound its way through forest,
and even with the moon up we didn’t have a lot of light to go by.
Later on, past midnight by where the moon was, we got back into
farm country and had an easier time of it. Nothing but us moved
anywhere on the road, and the scattered farmhouses we could see
were dark as old ruins; even the wind hushed, the way it does
sometimes in the hours before dawn, so that every sound our feet
made on the road, no matter how quiet, seemed to hang there for a
moment.

About the time the first bit of gray showed
up off to the east of us, we got to a place where a narrow little
farm track headed off to one side of the road. Plummer looked at
it, tilted his head, then motioned down the track and said in a low
voice, “This way. They are expecting me.” It took a moment for that
to sink in, and when it did I looked around and tried to see
whatever sign must have been left for him.

I know what it was now, or at least I think I
can guess, but right then I couldn’t see a thing. I nodded anyway,
and Berry and I followed him down the track.

We were both more than half expecting him to
lead us to another ruin, even though that didn’t square with what
he’d said about food and friends. The track led right up to a
little farmhouse well back from the road, though, rather than a
ruin. Plummer motioned for us to wait by the gate, saying, “They
will need to know that I’m not alone, or—well, not to worry about
that. A moment, please.”

He disappeared into the night, and a few
minutes later I heard a door open and close. Berry gave me a
worried look, and I could tell his hand wasn’t too far from his pry
bar. I was too busy thinking to do the same thing, though I could
have gotten mine out in a hurry if I’d had to. What Plummer had
said about friends, and safe places, and throats being cut if the
wrong things got said to the wrong people had me wondering just
what Berry and I had stumbled across, and whether we’d been meant
to stumble across it, and why. Certainly Plummer had figured out
who we were quickly enough.

After a few minutes, the door opened and
closed again, and a bit after that Plummer came out of the
darkness. “All’s well,” he said. “If you’d care to come this
way?”

So we followed him, to a meal and a place to
sleep or a club across the back of the head, I didn’t know which.
It probably would have served me right to get the latter, but
that’s not what happened. Instead, Plummer led us into the
farmhouse, through one door into a dark place, and then through
another into a big comfortable room that didn’t have any windows to
let the light of a lamp out into the night. There was a table in
the middle of the room and some solid wooden benches, and a couple
old enough to make Plummer look young, who were putting food on the
table. The woman, who was plump and sturdy and had her white hair
tied back with a scrap of rag, nodded and smiled at us and went
back out through another door into what I guessed was the kitchen;
the man, who was lean and bent and walked with a limp, put the
platter he was carrying down on the table and then shook our hands,
saying, “Pleased to meet you. Nobody uses names here; I hope you
don’t mind.”

“Not a bit,” I said. “I hope it’s not a
problem if I say thank you.”

“Of course not.” Pointing to a third door:
“Washroom’s there if you need it.”

I did. When I got back there was a meal on
the table and everyone else was sitting down to it, so I joined
them, and noticed only after plates were being filled that nobody
had called for Mam Gaia’s blessing first. I stuck that bit of
knowledge away with the rest of what I’d noticed about Plummer, and
wondered what it meant, with the very small part of my mind that
wasn’t thinking about pork sausage, potatoes, squash, and the
unmistakable smell of pie coming in through the kitchen door.

There was talk around the table, the sort of
thing you’d hear in any household, but it had a very odd feeling to
it. I got the same feeling later on when I was searching the
archives in Sisnaddi, and eating lunch every day with the
archivists. Until I got to know them and learned something about
their lives and their work, it was as if most of the conversation
was happening somewhere I couldn’t hear, and the part of it that I
could hear had big holes in it full of things I didn’t understand,
people I’d never met, and words I didn’t know. The archivists
didn’t mean to hide anything, they’d just been working and sharing
meals together for so long that it never occurred to them that
everybody else in the world didn’t spend their time talking about
how to keep old high-acid paper from turning back into the wood
pulp it was made of, say, or the games the jennels and cunnels of
the presden’s court played for blood and money and power that
sometimes made the archivists work extra hours for a week or
two.

There in the room without windows, though, I
was sharing food with people who knew how to hide things, and had
plenty of practice doing it. That’s the sense I had, clear as
midnight stars, by the time we finally finished up the meal and the
old woman showed Berry and me to the little room on the second
floor where we slept through the next day. It wasn’t just that
Plummer and the old couple were used to talking to each other and
not to Berry or me; I guessed that Plummer and the old couple knew
each other only just a little, if at all. It was that they had
something to hide and were used to hiding it in the most graceful
way, and so they talked back and forth about whatever it was in a
way that they understood and Berry and I didn’t. It didn’t occur to
me then that they might have wanted me to notice that, and to
wonder about it.