Star's Reach (37 page)

“That’s him,” said Ran. “Maybe you can get
him to talk.”

“Maybe I can,” I said, and faced the man
behind the door. “You wanted a dead man’s letter from me,” I said
to him. “I want to know some things from you. I thought maybe we
could make a bargain.”

He looked up at me, considered. “Let me read
the letter,” he answered, “and I will answer your questions.” He
had a deep voice, with just a bit of an accent I couldn’t
place.

“And if I show you the letter and you won’t
talk?”

Another glance. “I do not break my word.”

The funny thing was that I believed him.
People are odd that way; there are men who will kill you in a
heartbeat for no reason at all but won’t tell a lie, women who will
whore their bodies for a handful of coins but won’t break a
promise; well, we all have things we do and things we won’t, and
which is which doesn’t always make a lot of sense. I pulled the
letter out of my pocket—it was the copy I got from Mam Kelsey back
in Shanuga—and started to move toward the door, but Berry took it
from my hand, carried it the rest of the way, and tossed it through
the bars with a quick little motion that didn’t get any part of him
close enough to the bars to be in range of whatever the man might
do.

The man didn’t do much of anything, except
reach a hand up so fast I couldn’t follow the motion and catch the
letter as it flew. He unfolded it, angled it to catch the light,
and read it. After a good long moment I said, “Make much
sense?”

He glanced up at me again. “I assume it does
to you.”

“I’ve got some guesses. But I’ve also got
some questions.”

“Of course.” He folded the letter again and
with a snap of his wrist sent it flying back out through the bars,
where Berry caught it. “I will answer any question you ask except
one.”

“Who are you?”

That got me just the faintest bit of a smile.
“That is the one.”

One of Ran’s prentices started laughing, a
sudden loud laugh like a donkey braying, and stopped all at once
when Ran gave him a hard look. I wasn’t too surprised, though. “Who
paid you to get the letter from me?”

The thought seemed to startle him. “No one
paid me.”

“Why did you want the letter, then?”

“To find Star’s Reach, of course.”

“Why?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “If it
exists,” he said then, “and if the stories about it are true, and
if the people there did manage to speak to beings from some other
world—so many ifs. Grant that it is all true. If the beings from
some other world told them some way to do the same things to this
world that our ancestors did in the past, that knowledge must be
destroyed.”

“And you want to go there to destroy it.”

“Tell me this.” He leaned forward and stared
at me, as though he was the one on the outside of the bars. “If you
discover Star’s Reach, and you find knowledge of that kind, what
will you do?”

“Hand it over to the priestesses,” I told
him.

He considered that. “And those with you?”

“It’s the ruinmen’s way,” I said, but of
course he had a point, and I knew it. That’s one of the things
ruinmen ought to think about more than they usually do, because we
deal with what’s left over from the old world. The priestesses say
that the old world couldn’t survive once it burnt through most of
Mam Gaia’s oil and coal and gas, and it’s going to be millions and
millions of years before she can store enough carbon underground to
let anyone do anything like that again. Still, nobody knows that
for sure, and the idea that the aliens might have passed on
something that would give people too much energy again, and do the
same kind of harm to Mam Gaia a second time, hadn’t occurred to
me.

The man who’d tried to kill me was still
watching me. “I hope it is so. If you find something of the sort I
have named, you may have a fight with those whose ways are
different.”

“I think we can handle that,” I told him, but
there again he had a point, one that I hadn’t considered anything
like enough.

“Perhaps so. I grant that you were better
with that iron bar than I expected.”

That startled me. “I couldn’t land a solid
hit on you for anything.”

“You did so several times. I am—” He
shrugged. “—difficult to hurt.”

All at once Berry let out a long low whistle.
“Sir and Mister,” he said to me, “I know who he is.” I nodded,
answering the question he hadn’t said out loud, and Berry turned to
the man on the other side of the bars. “You’re Thu,” he said.
“You’re the last king of Yami. Am I right?”

Ran’s prentice laughed his donkey-laugh
again, and stopped when Ran glanced at him.

The man gave Berry a long slow look, and then
nodded once. “That is correct.”

Ran blinked, and muttered a bit of hot
language under his breath. I stared at Berry, then back at the man
who’d tried to kill me. “That explains a few things,” I said, for
want of anything better.

“I suppose it does.” There was something new
in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. I could guess
why: if he was who he said he was, there were a lot of people in
Meriga, Meyco and the coastal allegiancies who wanted his guts in a
bucket and would pay good money for the chance to see them
there.

Ran cleared his throat then. “Mister’s lodge
is going to have to sort this out,” he said. “Unless there’s
something else you want to ask him?”

There wasn’t, so we left him there in the
little room with the barred door. Ran turned off the light and
locked the door to the basement behind us. As we started up the
stairs, he asked Berry, “How did you guess that, prentice?”

“I’ve heard a lot of stories about him, Sir
and Mister. There really wasn’t anybody else he could be.”

Ran gave him a long steady look, and then
nodded. “Clever.”

Of course there was a lot more to it than
that, more even than Berry explained to me once we got back up to
my room. Still, I wasn’t paying too much attention. Part of me was
trying to figure out what to say to the mister’s lodge when it met,
and part of me was more or less stumbling around in shock that
somebody who was nearly as much of a legend as Star’s Reach had
come jumping out of the shadows on a Memfis street and tried to gut
me, but a good part had something else to think about.

I knew I was stupid even to consider it. I
knew that the man had done his best to kill me and that the misters
would be making a good choice if they either killed him or sold him
to somebody who wanted to kill him, but damn if I wanted the last
king of Yami to die because of me. As we climbed the stair—slowly,
because the cut in my side wasn’t too happy just then—I started
trying to figure out if there was a way I could get him out of
there.

There was a reason for that, and most people
in Meriga could probably guess it. Still, as I wrote a while back,
the next person who comes here to Star’s Reach might be from the
Neeyonjin country over on the far side of the dead lands, and won’t
have the least idea of how things are over on this side of the dead
lands. If you grew up in Meriga any time in the last thirty years
or so, it’s a safe bet that you’ve heard of the last king of Yami,
and before then it was his father or his grandfather or someone
else in his family, back to the days when Yami was drowned by the
rising oceans, but nobody from Meriga has gone to the Neeyonjin
country since before that happened. I probably need to tell Thu’s
story, then, and it so happens that I got to hear Thu tell his
story himself.

That happened about a week before we got to
Star’s Reach, on the road west out of Cansiddi. We left the last
few scraggly trees behind us by the time we were out of sight of
the Suri River, and from then on it was grass: tall grass at first,
tall as I am, whipping in the wind off the desert, and then shorter
and shorter as you go further west, until finally it’s low and
sparse and as brown as the ground itself, just before the grass
goes away and you’re in the desert. We weren’t that far, but the
grass was no taller than my knees and the wind muttered and wheezed
through it like an old man who’s drunk too much whiskey for too
many years. We found a place where a building had been in the old
world, and part of a concrete wall still stood shoulder-high at the
right angle to screen us from the wind; it was late enough in the
day to camp, and our chances of finding anything better up ahead
didn’t look too good, so we staked the pack horses where the grass
looked decent and settled in for the night.

There were eight of us, me and Berry and
Eleen, Tashel Ban and Thu, Anna, Jennel Cobey, and his man Banyon;
eight when we left Cansiddi and eight when we got to the door of
Star’s Reach, though there were just six left not too many minutes
after that. Once we got a fire going and some food cooked, we sat
and talked, as we usually did, and somehow the talk wound its way
around to Thu and the lost kingdom of Yami, and he told his
story.

“It began with the three voyages,” he said in
that deep musical voice of his, motioning with his hands; the
firelight turned their shadows into big looming shapes on the
crumbling wall behind him. “First, the voyage of grief, from Affiga
across the sea to Meriga. That was long ago, when men were first
beginning to dig their way into Mam Gaia’s flesh to get the fossil
fuels they craved. They still needed strong muscles in those days,
and so the people of Meriga enslaved my people and brought them
here to labor for them.

“Then there was war, and my people won their
freedom. Many stayed here in Meriga, but some took ship back to
Affiga, to a country whose name meant the place of freedom. That
was the second voyage, the voyage of hope from Meriga back across
the sea to Affiga, though the hope was a long time seeking its
fulfillment. It was not in Affiga as it was in Meriga; the power
and the wealth and the technologies were here and not there. There,
there was bitter poverty and much war, until the old world began to
break apart.

“It happened then that a strong ruler took
power in the country called the place of freedom, and seized
countries near it to make a larger kingdom, and because the land
was rich and had things the rest of the world needed, the kingdom
grew strong as the old world grew weak. He lived long and left
behind two sons, and when he died there was war between them. The
younger had not so many followers as the elder, and when he knew he
could not win he and his followers took ships and sailed west
across the ocean, to Meriga. That was the third voyage, the voyage
of power, from Affiga back across the sea to Meriga again.

“Meriga the rich, Meriga that had ruled the
world, was then torn by war, crushed by drought, and broken into
many quarreling parts, and an army that was not strong enough to
win a kingdom in Affiga was still strong enough to take what it
wanted here. So the prince of the place of freedom landed in a
country that is now beneath the ocean, the country called Florda,
and took it for his own, and much of the country along the shores
of the Lannic that the allegiancies now hold, and many other lands
that now lie under the waves.

“Those became his kingdom, and he ruled it
from the city of Yami; and because he was heedless, and did not
learn from the mistakes that brought Meriga and the old world low,
he gathered as many of the old technologies as he could and made
use of them to add to his power. That was when he and all his line
lost the need for sleep; it was something that could be done with
the old technologies, some trick of genetic engineering that
someone still remembered; it was one of many things he claimed for
himself out of the heritage of old Meriga.

“What he did not remember, and should have
remembered, is that Mam Gaia does not care why we do what we do.
The best of reasons and the worst are all one to her. All that
matters to her is what we do, and all that mattered to her just
then was that the king of Yami gathered and used the old
technologies, and burnt what fuel he could find to power them, and
the smoke added carbon to the carbon that had already been sent up
into the sky in years past—just enough, or more than enough, to
stir her to wrath. So the high cliffs of ice in the place called
Nardiga broke and plunged into the sea, and the seas rose.

“Mam Gaia’s wrath is not quick. It was in the
time of the third king of Yami that the cliffs of ice fell and the
seas began to rise, and it was most of a lifetime before the seas
reached where they are today. Long before they stopped, though,
Yami was deep below the waves. Many died and many more lost all
they had, and even though the king of Yami tried to rescue as much
as he could, a crowd came upon him and tore his body to pieces with
their hands.

“That was long ago. He who would have been
the fourth king was taken by friends to a place of safety in the
mountains of Joja, and when he came to manhood he swore a great
oath, that he and his sons and his son’s sons until the ending of
his line would make amends for what had been done. Since then it
has been our purpose to make it so that the technologies that
ravaged this world shall not do so a second time. I say we, for I
am the heir of Yami, the eleventh king of the kingdom that is gone;
the eleventh and the last, for Mam Gaia has not chosen to give me a
son.”

He shrugged, and the shadows on the wall
behind him rose and fell like waves. “So that is my story, or part
of it. If you want to know every place I have gone and everything I
have done since I first went out to fight with those who would
reawaken those technologies that should sleep forever, well, we
will be here a long time.”

That got a laugh, not least because he was
right and we knew it. As I wrote a bit earlier, most people in
Meriga know about Thu, and a fair number of them can tell stories
about some of the things he’s done. The priestesses don’t like to
hear people tell those stories, because they think we ought to keep
clear of the bad old technologies because they’re bad, not because
someone who never sleeps and can’t be bribed or bullied will come
out of nowhere and mess with anybody who dabbles in them; and they
don’t like fighting for any reason, and of course Thu has done a
lot of that. Still, the stories get told, because most people in
Meriga have their own reasons to want the old technologies to stay
buried, and because someone who never sleeps and can’t be bribed or
bullied is better than most of us at doing things that make for
good stories.