Star's Reach (24 page)

Sometimes it’s not for craft work, and the
people involved have their own reasons, but those don’t matter; if
they get caught, they get buried alive. I know the reasons for that
as well as anyone, but knowing it isn’t the same thing as
remembering the way the glassblower’s voice sobbed and babbled as
the scrape of the shovels and the slow patient drone of the litany
marked the last minutes he’d ever have on the outside of Mam Gaia’s
round belly.

About the time we got far enough away that we
couldn’t hear any of those, Berry and I looked at each other, and
decided that we weren’t going to stay the night in that town after
all. We kept walking until the sun went down, and just about the
time we were about to start looking for a camping place, Berry
spotted a bright flash through the pines up ahead. We hurried up
the road by the day’s last light and found a dozen travelers
sitting around a fire and starting to share out dinner. They
welcomed us cheerily enough, and we sat around the fire with a
couple of traders up from Naplis and a troupe of actors who saw
what was going on in the town we’d just passed and decided,
sensibly enough, that there’d be no one interested in their play
that day. We had a pleasant night and a good breakfast the next
morning, and started toward Troy as soon as it was light enough to
see the road.

It took us another day to get there. The road
was busy; there’s a ferry across from Genda at Troy, and a lot of
trade crosses there, and so Berry and I had plenty of company on
the way. The day was clear and cool, with a few stray clouds and a
sharp wind blowing out of the west, and the road veered down slowly
toward the water. Before long we got close enough to see the white
sails of the lake schooners heading up to Troy or down to Leedo and
the ports further east. From where we were, in among farm wagons
and a herd of loms on their way to market, the thought of sitting
on board a schooner and letting the wind do all the work was
pleasant enough, but thinking that didn’t keep us from making good
time.

There’s a place where the road to Troy tops a
low hill, and I heard later that people who travel that road a good
deal get used to travelers stopping dead in their tracks right at
the crest. That’s certainly what Berry and I did, at least until a
lom bumped into me from behind and reminded me that getting out of
the way was probably a good idea. I did, and so did Berry, and then
we stood there for a long moment and stared at the distant gray
shape, taller than anything else in Meriga, that jutted up above
the trees off in the distance.

That was Troy Tower. It used to have another
name, back in the old world, but I don’t think even the ruinmen who
tend it remember what that was. There used to be a couple of dozen
like it, too, just in Troy, and dozens more in every city in
Meriga, and the drowned cities of the coast used to be one of them
right next to another for kloms on end, or that’s what people say.
Now there’s just one of them, and it belongs to the ruinmen.

Troy is where the first ruinmen’s guild got
started, as I wrote a while back. All the other towers and
factories and buildings in Troy and around it got stripped right
down to bare dirt by those first ruinmen, but they left Troy Tower
alone at first, and later on started using it as a guildhall and a
place for records and the like. Nowadays there aren’t many ruinmen
there, just the few who keep the Tower standing and take care of
what’s in it, but as I wrote earlier, it’s still a place that every
ruinman wants to visit if he hasn’t been there already.

Pilgrims come there all through the dry
season, too. Troy Tower isn’t a holy place, pretty much the
opposite in fact, but the pilgrims come and look at it and say
their prayers and plant a tree somewhere in the space where Troy
used to be, back in the old world, before the ruinmen rooted every
scrap of the city out of the ground. There’s something in one of
the priestesses’ litanies about how we water the trees with our
tears, and some of the pilgrims do just that, though I don’t know
that it does the trees any more good than plain water.

The pilgrims haul plenty of that up from the
shore, too. There are racks of wooden buckets down near the water
north of the town, and all through the dry season, so I was told,
you can pretty much count on seeing pilgrims: fetching buckets,
filling them, and going around to water any young tree that doesn’t
look as though its roots got wet that day, murmuring a prayer for
blessings or forgiveness or something all the while. How many of
them get their prayers answered I’m not about to try to guess, but
there are certainly a lot of healthy young trees around Troy, and
that’s something.

We certainly saw a lot of trees, at any rate,
as Berry and I got moving again and followed the road right up to
Troy. It’s not a big city these days. Maybe a few thousand people
live inside the walls, and there’s maybe a hundred soldiers in the
fort next to the ferry, which faces across the water toward the
bigger Gendan fort on the other side. We didn’t have any reason to
go inside the walls, and so we turned off the road right outside
the gate and found the path that went straight to Troy Tower.

From the hill on the road the Tower looks too
big to be real. From right up underneath, it looks even bigger, but
it’s as real as a building can get, all gray and brown stone and
windows, soaring up to bump against the bottom of the clouds. When
we got there, Berry and I both stood there staring up for what
seemed like a long time, and then walked up to the door at the foot
of it.

There was a big archway there, and back in
the old world there had been a row of doors beneath it, but most of
them had been walled up, and the one that was still open was a
plain wooden door with a little window in it, like the ones you’d
find down at Troy town in buildings two stories tall and twenty
years old. I almost laughed when I saw the door. Imagine a horse
with an ant’s feet or a jennel wearing the kind of straw hat poor
farmers teach their children how to weave, and that’s about how
that little piece of our world looked, there at the foot of the old
world’s last big tower.

We knocked on the door and waited, wondering
about the people wearing feathers who were carved into the stone
here and there. After a little while, the door opened and an old
man in ruinman’s clothes looked out. He brightened up when he saw
us, and after we’d given him the words and signs ruinmen use to
test each other, he wanted to know all about who we were and where
we’d come from. Once I said my name, of course, he knew exactly who
we were and what we were there for, but we could have been on our
way to crack concrete in Cago for all he seemed to care. His name
was Jorey; he showed us around, introduced us to the dozen or so
old ruinmen who lived there, and found us a room.

The guild hall and sleeping rooms were all on
the first six floors, it turned out. The records were above that,
and then above that it was empty all the way up to the top. At the
top, Jorey said, there was a place where you could see everything
for kloms around, and the elevator would get there if the wind
turbines had charged the batteries enough. That sounded worth
seeing, so after we’d stowed our gear in our room on the third
floor and had a meal, I asked about the elevator.

It was the only one of a whole row of
elevators that was still working. The wind had been blowing pretty
well, Jorey told us, well enough that it would get the two of us to
the top, but he wasn’t prepared to bet on a third. So he showed us
how the thing worked, and we went inside, pushed the button, and
waited. A moment later the thing lurched and started up; Berry
looked as calm as though he’d been standing on solid ground, and
though I didn’t feel half so confident—the jerks and rattles as the
elevator climbed were enough to frighten anybody—I wasn’t going to
let on that I was nervous.

Finally, after I don’t know how long, the
elevator sighed to a stop and let us out. There was almost nothing
on that level. The ruinmen had stripped away everything that wasn’t
actually holding the tower up to lighten the burden on the girders
further down, so we stepped out onto a bare metal floor that boomed
like a drum beneath our feet, and the only thing there, except for
bare metal walls, was a stair going up. We went up, and came out
into a little room of glass and iron beams at the very top of
Troy.

From there, you could see just how huge the
city used to be. Even though every other building was gone, the
pattern of the old streets was still there, reaching out to the
edge of sight in every direction but south, where the water broke
the pattern. On the far side of the water was Genda, and the
streets started right back up there too, wherever the Gendan town
and fort didn’t cover them. I stood there and tried to imagine what
it had been like in the days when Troy Tower was just one of the
towers at the center of town, and the Troy within the walls now was
a little corner of town beside the water, next to a ferry that they
probably didn’t need in those days. The Shanuga ruins were big, or
I’d thought so, and I’d climbed up on some of the tallest ruins
still standing to get a look at them more than once, but Troy was
bigger than big. Like the tower, it was so big it was hard for me
to remember that it was real.

Troy was an important town in the old world.
It wasn’t as big as Cago, which is the biggest ruin above water
anywhere in Meriga, or the drowned cities of the coast, which would
be one big ruin reaching from halfway up Nuwinga all the way down
to Deesee if the seas hadn’t risen, but it’s where the ancients
built their cars, and built them by the million. There was even a
war fought over it, or so I heard once from a storyteller in
Ilanoy. An army from somewhere else in Meriga spent ten years
trying to capture it, and they finally did, by some trick or other.
The man who thought up the trick was called Dizzy, if I remember
right, and after the war was over it took him ten more years to get
back to his home in some town up in Nyork, I forget which one.

Later on, when we were digging in the wrong
place in Arksa and spending the rains in Memfis, I heard some other
stories about Dizzy. They said that he played one of the brass
horns the players use down in Memfis and Sanloo, and that he was
one of the best ever, right up there with another player called
Sashmo. Some of the players knew tunes he’d come up with, and even
though I don’t know the first thing about that kind of music, I
could tell they were good. I figure Dizzy must have been to Memfis
before the war, and learned to play the horn there.

One time when Plummer and I were traveling
together, I said something about Dizzy, and Plummer told me that
there were two different people with the same name. Maybe so, but I
still wonder sometimes. After spending so much time on the roads
myself, walking alongside elwuses and traders and puppet-actors and
all, it’s just too easy to imagine Dizzy wandering the same way I
did, stopping at every village to play his horn and catch coins in
an old battered hat as he made his long slow way back home.

I didn’t know about Dizzy yet when Berry and
I stood there at the top of Troy Tower and watched afternoon turn
to evening, and I don’t know that I’d have thought of him if I had
known. All I could think of was how big Troy used to be and how
little it was now. Berry went around the room a bit at a time,
leaning on the rail and staring outward with an expression on his
face I couldn’t read at all. Me, I just stared. I don’t think
either of us said five words to the other all the time we were up
there, but finally the sun got close to setting and we looked at
each other and decided to go back down. So we went down the stair
to the little room with the metal floor and got onto the elevator,
and it clanked and rattled downward and finally let us out on the
fourth floor where we’d started. We had dinner with the other
ruinmen, and made an early night of it.

The next morning we got up about the time the
sun did, got some breakfast, and I asked Jorey about the records.
“Skeega?” he said. “Yes, those’ll be here. Every ruin that used to
be in Mishga, plus most of the states all around. If there isn’t a
guildhall any more, the records are here.” He turned to one of the
other old ruinmen. “Shor, where’s the records from Skeega?”

“Ninth floor,” said Shor, without even
looking up from his breakfast. “Northeast part, over against the
light well.” I’d already learned that each floor in Troy Tower was
shaped like a letter H, so the rooms in the middle could get some
light and air, so I knew what he meant.

“Ninth floor,” Jorey repeated. “You’ll have
some company there, I think. Isn’t that fellow from Nuwinga working
on that floor?”

“That’s right,” said Shor, and went back to
work on his breakfast.

That had my curiosity up, no question.
Nuwinga used to be part of Meriga back before the Second Civil War,
and these days it’s about as close as Meriga has to a friend among
countries, but I’d never met anyone from there. Nuwingans are great
sailors but they don’t travel by land a lot, and Shanuga’s kind of
hard to reach by ship.

So I had more than one thing in mind as we
trudged up the stairs to the ninth floor—it had to be the stairs,
because the wind had died down overnight and there wasn’t enough
electricity to work the elevator. The ninth floor, it turned out,
was about a dozen big rooms that were full of old metal cabinets,
and the cabinets were full of papers and records and journals from
something like three hundred years of digs all over one side of
Mishga. We didn’t have too much trouble finding the papers from
Skeega, but when we found them it turned out they weren’t arranged
in any order we could figure out, just lined up in the cabinets,
drawer after drawer and row after row of them.