Star's Reach (20 page)

I figured that was the last I’d see of Tam,
but it didn’t work out that way. A week later, I think it was, I
was back at that same tavern, and damn if she didn’t walk in the
door, spot me, and come right over to the table where I was
sitting. She was alone this time, and we talked again for what must
have been a couple of hours; she had someplace she had to be at
sunset, and I made good and sure she left the tavern in plenty of
time, because I’d started to get hopeful and didn’t want to make it
any harder for her to get outside the gate again. That time, before
she left, we’d already settled when and where we’d meet next.

I think it was the fourth time we met, or it
may have been the fifth, before one of us worked up the courage to
suggest going somewhere less crowded than a tavern, and I honestly
can’t remember which of us made the suggestion first. There were
places outside the gate where you could take a girl, or a girl
could take you, and a mark or two would buy a bed that wasn’t too
dirty and a couple of hours of privacy. That’s what we did, and
things proceeded from there. Afterwards, though, she nuzzled her
face into my shoulder and suddenly started to cry, and after she’d
finished crying I asked why; we talked, and I began to figure out
what she was doing in a cheap rented bed with a ruinman’s
prentice.

She was from one of Shanuga’s important
families, as I’d guessed, with a mother who was a big name in
Circle, and grandmothers and great-aunts who wore the red hats that
only Circle elders get to wear. Of course they’d expected her to
follow after them, and let her know once she’d gotten old enough
that she needed to get a baby started, and she’d gone out and found
a likely boy and done the thing, except that there wasn’t a baby.
Of course that meant she had to keep at it, and she’d done that
until every boy in Shanuga’s wealthy families got to thinking of
her as free for the taking, and there still wasn’t a baby on the
way.

That was when she realized that she wasn’t
going to follow her mother into Circle. She told them so, and there
was a big fight with the grandmothers and great-aunts and everybody
involved, and at the end of it all Tam’s mother told her that if
she didn’t have enough sense and pride to do the right thing by her
family, then she might as well go off to the ruinmen. “She used to
scare my brothers when they were little and misbehaved,” she told
me, laughing through the tears, “by telling them she was going to
send them to be ruinmen’s prentices. I couldn’t believe that she’d
say that to me, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed at her.” Then,
three days later, the rains came and she teased and bullied Shen
into coming with her to the nameless street where the ruinmen live,
where she met me.

“I can’t exactly get you into the ruinmen’s
guild, you know,” I told her.

That got another laugh. “I know that.
Still—Trey, I’ve got just over three years before my twenty, and
then I’ll have to find a life for myself, you know. I need to know
what it’s like out here, outside the gate where you live. And—” She
pressed her face into my shoulder again and said something that I
couldn’t figure out at all; so I eased her back from me a bit and
she said it again, and we did some kissing and then pretty soon we
were going at it again.

“I want to be a butterfly,” she said later. I
made a wing-flapping motion with my hands, and she laughed. “No, I
mean it. You know how butterflies start out as little green worms,
and spend all their time on one tree, until finally they turn into
a whatsit and then hatch out and go fluttering off into the
world?”

I’d learned that much from the priestesses.
“Yes.”

“When I have my twenty, I’ll hatch out, and
then I want to fly.”

It was late by the time she left to go back
into the city, and later still before I got back to Mister Garman’s
house, but nobody made a point of it this time and I made sure to
get my share of the work done and then a bit for the next few days.
I had a lot of thinking to do. Even then I wasn’t quite slow enough
to think that Tam had met me and fallen giddy in love, and that was
all there was to it. Partly, I guessed, she was getting back at her
mother and grandmothers and great-aunts by doing something that
would make them yell like panthers if they ever found out, and
partly she was right about finding something else to do with her
life.

Once she had her twenty—her twentieth
birthday, that is—if there hadn’t yet been a baby or any sign of
one on the way, the door to Circle would swing gently shut and her
family would close up around itself with her on the outside. That’s
the way Circle works, and if you want to know why, I’m not the
person to ask. One of the old women in red hats might be able to
tell you, but probably won’t, because Circle has its secrets and
holds onto them good and tight.

Still, after thinking all that through a
couple of times on a couple of nights where I didn’t get much
sleep, I decided that none of it mattered, because whether or not
she was in love, I was, and I’d just take my chances. We’d arranged
to meet again a week later, and a day or so before then I went up
to one of the little shops outside the gate where they sell little
trinkets and things. I knew what I wanted to find, and found it
after most of an hour of looking through little bins and cases of
bright bits of cheap metal, the sort of thing that boys give to
girls and girls to boys.

There’s an alley back behind the tavern where
we first met, and the grubby little place with rooms and beds for
rent has a door that opens onto it. That’s where we met, with rain
pelting down from a sky the color of cold iron, and we laughed and
kissed, scampered inside and hurried up the stairs to the room I’d
already rented; we’d settled on that as much to have a quiet place
to talk as for the obvious reason. We were both soaked, as
everybody is during the rains, and so of course we had to get our
wet clothes off and hanging on the pegs next to the door; she sat
on the bed, brown and plump and glowing in the dim light, and
smiled up at me.

“Close your eyes,” I told her, “and hold out
a hand.” I put what I’d found into her palm. “Go ahead and
look.”

She looked at her hand and then at me, and
her eyes were round and wet. “Trey,” she said. “Oh, Trey.”

There wasn’t much I could say in response,
and we didn’t do much talking for a while after that. Later, when
she was lying on her back and I was propped up on one elbow,
looking at her, I took the gift and perched it on her nose: a
little butterfly of yellow metal. “That’s your butterfly,” I said,
“and it’ll take you someplace you can’t even imagine.”

She laughed, moved the butterfly to her lips
and kissed it, and then set it on the bedside stand and pulled me
down to her.

All that first rainy season we got together
once or maybe twice a week, and when the rains stopped and it was
time to head back out to the Shanuga ruins we said our goodbyes
with plenty of tears and laughter. I missed her like anything the
first month or so, but I was one of Gray Garman’s senior prentices
by that time, as I said, and so I didn’t have any great amount of
time to sit and fret.

For all that, I didn’t know what to expect
when the clouds piled up again over Shanuga at the end of that dry
season and we hauled our gear back to the house on the street with
no name and got ready for the rains. Half of me was sure she’d come
to the tavern where we used to meet once the rains came pouring
down, and half of me was sure that I’d never see her again, and
between the one and the other, I must have been a mother of a mess
to deal with those last few days of work.

When the rains finally came, I made myself
stay away from the tavern for an hour or so, just to try to prove
to myself that I wasn’t as tied in knots about it all as I knew I
was, and then headed for it when I couldn’t stand not knowing any
longer. I turned the corner and just about bumped into Tam and Shen
as they splashed across from the street outside the gate. We stood
there laughing and kissing in the pouring rain while Shen blushed
and tried to find something else to look at, and about the time she
gave up Tam and I drew back out of one more long kiss and headed
into the tavern with Shen right behind us.

Over three glasses of small beer we talked
and caught up on eight months away from each other, and I did my
level best to make room for Shen in the conversation, but it wasn’t
easy; all I wanted to do was look at Tam and hear her voice and,
well, I could go on but don’t really need to. They’d both filled
out more than a bit, Tam more than Shen, and weren’t half so
coltish as they’d looked the year before, so there was plenty for
me to look at, too. Finally they went back inside the walls and I
went out into the rain, feeling quite a bit giddier than the beer
would explain, and got into a good rousing fight with some burners’
prentices, but we’d made plans to meet again within a few days, and
it was straight to the little rented rooms that time.

Not much had changed in her life, though her
family had finally gotten around to noticing that she’d done her
best to get a baby started, and gone from being angry at her to
being sad and pitying, which irritated her even more. All through
the rains that year, when we weren’t busy with each other’s bodies,
she asked me questions about the ruinmen and what I knew about the
people and the trades outside the walls, or spun fine stories about
what she might do after she had her twenty, when her life would be
her own to make. Me, I had my own ideas about that; I knew that
some of the misters in the ruinmen’s guild had women they lived
with, with everything to make a marriage except the blessing from
the priestesses you don’t get without children, and I’d begun to
think about becoming a guild mister someday and sharing that life
with Tam.

Her stories weren’t anything like so
ordinary. She liked to daydream about adventures, going to Genda or
Nuwinga, sailing on the sea, and yes, one time she told a story
about the two of us finding Star’s Reach and learning what it was
that the people from other worlds wanted to say to us, although for
the life of me I don’t remember what she decided that was. I
thought they were fine stories, and I was still young and silly
enough that it didn’t occur to me that there wasn’t a bit of
reality in any of them. I knew, because she’d told me, that she
wanted a baby, wanted the place in Circle that would have been hers
if she could have a healthy child, but it hadn’t occurred to me
that her stories were one of the ways she was consoling herself for
the life she wasn’t going to get, though I knew perfectly well that
I was one of the others.

But the rains ended, as of course they had to
sooner or later, and we said our goodbyes with more tears and more
laughter, and I went off to the Shanuga ruins again and spent eight
more months digging and hauling metal and tracing cables. We worked
hard that season, harder than usual, for Gray Garman’s luck landed
us with a big heavy windowless building of concrete and steel, and
we tore it right down to its roots to get the metal that ran all
through it. Night after night I went to bed aching in every muscle,
but we all ended the season with plenty of money, and when the
clouds piled up and we hauled our tools back home I couldn’t have
been happier.

So when the rains came, I went to the tavern
sooner rather than later, and waited for Tam. I was still waiting a
couple of hours later, and finally I couldn’t stand it and went
outside and there was Shen, all by herself, huddled and miserable
in the rain, trying to work up the courage to come inside.

I knew right away that something was up, but
I took her into the tavern and got her a beer. She wouldn’t meet my
eyes at all, just looked at the table and sipped the beer, and
finally said, “Trey, Tam’s about to have a baby.”

I stared at her for a long time, tried to say
something, and had it come out sounding a lot like a pipe gurgling.
I guessed right away what had happened, of course, and Shen
confirmed it: “They think it’ll come in a week or two.”

“Did she—” I wanted to ask if she’d had any
other lovers, and couldn’t, but Shen caught what I was trying to
say, and finally met my eyes. “Just you.”

Of course I understood what kind of a mess
Tam was in. If word ever got out that the baby was fathered by a
ruinman’s prentice, the old women in red hats would get together
and quietly agree that Tam wasn’t going to get into Circle no
matter how many healthy babies she had, and there would be sixteen
kinds of trouble for her from every side as well. So I swallowed
and nodded, and promised I’d say nothing to anybody. Shen told me a
few more things, none of which I remember now, and then scurried
back to the gate with a promise that she’d come in two weeks if
there was news.

Those were the longest two weeks I’ve ever
had. When they were over, Shen showed up looking even more huddled
and miserable than before. I met her outside the tavern, and was
startled out of my skin when she looked up at me with red wet eyes
and asked if we could go someplace private instead of the tavern.
That pretty much meant one of the little rented rooms, so there we
went. Since there was nowhere else to sit we sat down on the narrow
little bed, and then all at once Shen burst into tears. I put an
arm around her to comfort her, and she tensed for just a moment and
then went limp against me, clinging to me while she cried.

It took a while before she could say much of
anything, but finally she told me that Tam had had her baby, and it
was a fine healthy little boy. So Tam was in Circle, paraded
through the streets to the Circle hall with her mother and all the
other women in the family beaming and laughing along with her.
Whenever she mentioned Circle she started crying again, and I held
her and stroked her hair and only then realized what she was trying
not to say.