Star's Reach (43 page)

The door opened, we went through, and the
guards and the servant stayed outside. Inside were shelves of books
and a big map on the wall, ancient or copied from some ancient
book, showing Meriga as it was before the old world ended. That
caught my eye, and so it was a moment or two before I noticed the
woman over in one corner, facing mostly away from us, turning the
pages of a book.

She was smaller than I expected, and she
didn’t look well; her face was drawn and her hair was mostly gray,
though you could see traces of the red it had been when I was still
a boy. She looked up after a moment, glanced at the two of us, and
then put down the book and came over and started peppering the two
of us with questions: where we thought Star’s Reach was and how
long the jennel thought he’d be gone and who we’d be taking with
us, and other things like that. All the while I was looking at her
and wondering why it seemed like I knew her from somewhere, because
something in her face and voice reminded me of somebody, but I
couldn’t think of who it was.

We were probably there for half an hour
before she thanked us and turned back to her book, and we went to
the door to find the servant opening it for us. So we went back the
way we came, following the servant, and my thoughts wouldn’t stop
circling around why the presden made me think of someone and who
that someone might be. I barely noticed all the other people around
me, I was that deep in thought, but just before we got to the big
room just inside the outer doors of the palace I happened to see
someone I knew.

I have no idea to this day why I looked up
just then. All I know is that there was a man walking toward me,
and I recognized him at once. This time he was dressed in the loose
jacket and tight trousers and boots that people at the presden’s
court wear these days, rather than the traveler’s clothes he’d had
on before, but that bland face was one I wasn’t likely to forget.
It was the man who had followed Berry and me all the way from Troy
to Cago.

I don’t think he saw me. If he did, his face
didn’t show it. A moment later he was past me, and I was following
Jennel Cobey out the doors, and that was when I realized whose face
the presden’s kept almost calling to mind. It was Berry’s, of
course.

It all made plenty of sense once I thought of
it—the way Berry talked, the things he knew, the way Jennel Cobey
reacted the first time he saw Berry, all of it, except for the
simple fact that a ruinman from Shanuga ended up with a presden’s
child as his prentice. Of course then I remembered that it was
Berry who chose me, not the other way around, and gambling
everything on the chance of finding Star’s Reach was pretty much
what you might expect from someone who had a presden’s blood and
instincts but no chance at the succession.

To this day I remember only one thing about
the rest of that evening. I must have said my goodbyes to Cobey,
gone back to the cheap little room I shared with Eleen, told her
everything about what had happened except the one thing that
mattered, and gone to bed with her, but none of that left the least
trace in my mind. All I recall now is lying awake late at night
next to Eleen, watching the stars through the one little window we
had next to our bed and wondering what a farm boy from the Tenisi
hills like me was doing, getting ready to go to Star’s Reach with a
jennel, a king, and the presden’s secret child. If the stars knew,
they weren’t telling.

I didn’t even know that much when I was doing
what I want to write about next, which was walking up the long slow
road from Memfis to Sisnaddi more than a year before. I left Conda,
where I left off telling my story earlier, after saying goodbye to
Lu and promising that I’d look her up if I ever got to Sanloo. The
last stars were setting as I got up; it was a clear cool morning,
but there were clouds coming out of the south that promised rain
within a few days, the sort of thing you get now and then during
the otherwise dry months. Farmers cheer when they see those clouds,
and ruinmen groan; me, I just kept walking.

I had plenty of thinking to do, and plenty of
time to do it. Further east, when you get into Inyana and Hiyo, the
roads along the north shore of the Hiyo River are as busy as
anything, but there on the bottom end of Ilanoy it’s mostly forest
with a few scattered farms, and here and there a levee on the bank
where one of the smaller riverboats will stop if somebody flags it
down. I watched more than a few of them heading the same I was, but
I didn’t want to spend money if I didn’t have to, so I didn’t stand
there and wave. That meant there were nights I spent in taverns in
little towns, and nights I spent in barns and farmhouses, and now
and then nights where the sun went down and there wasn’t anybody or
anything in sight, and I found a place to curl up under a tree and
slept there.

One way or another it must have taken me most
of two weeks to get to Ensul, which is the first town of any size
north of the river as you go upstream from Dooca. That was partly
because I had to go almost a day’s walk north to find a ferry
across the Wobbish, where Ilanoy and Inyana come together. It was
also because the rain I’d seen coming showed up more than once, and
a muddy road’s a lot slower going than a dry one, even when part of
the road’s still paved with old chunks of concrete. Still, the rain
stopped the day I crossed the Wobbish, the road on the other side
was well tended and mostly dry, and two days after I got off the
ferry I was in Ensul.

Like every other town in Meriga, Ensul used
to be much bigger than it is now. If you have a ruinman’s eyes, you
can see where the old streets and buildings used to run long before
you get to the town. There used to be a ruinmen’s hall there, years
back, but they ran out of ruins and sold the hall for scrap metal
before heading elsewhere. Now it’s just another market town with
riverboats at the levee, three or four streets full of shops, and a
big open space where farmers and crafters and traveling shows set
up and sell whatever it is they have to sell.

The way the road comes into Ensul, the
marketplace is to your left and a row of taverns to your right. I
probably would have headed straight for the nearest tavern, since
I’d been on the road since first light and was thinking comfortable
thoughts about a meal and a bed, but it was late afternoon, the
market was winding down, and through a pause in the noise and
talking came a voice I knew. I almost stopped right there in the
middle of the street, which would have been a bad idea, since there
was an oxcart not too far behind me and I wouldn’t want to risk my
life on the common sense of a couple of oxen. Instead, I got over
to the side of the street closest to the market, and looked, and
there he was.

He was up on a wooden platform, the sort of
thing that players and actors use when there aren’t too many of
them, and a cloth banner along the front of it yelled GENUINE
HERBAL MEDICINE in bright red letters. He had a black coat and a
black hat and a bottle of something black and more or less liquid
in one hand, but I wouldn’t have mistaken the voice or the face or
the round glasses like moons in a thousand years of trying. It was
Plummer, all right.

So I walked over toward the platform, toward
the outer edge of the small crowd he had around him. Of course he
spotted me well before I got there. “Here,” he said, “is one who
could benefit from the very best of my medicines. A ruinman, mams
and misters, no doubt come straight from some dangerous ruin, where
he has been risking his life to keep the rest of us safe from toxic
wastes and well supplied with metals. Come up here, sir and
mister.”

The crowd made room for me, and I went to the
platform and climbed up the three creaking steps onto it, doing my
level best not to grin. Plummer checked my pulse and whispered to
me, “Pretend to pay me when I ask for money.” Then, in a voice they
could probably hear in the taverns across the way: “A slow and
heavy pulse. Aching muscles?” I nodded. “Unusual thirst?” I nodded
again. “I thought as much,” he said, and rattled off a string of
words that probably meant something, though I don’t pretend to know
what. He asked some other questions, and I guessed at the right
answers, and before he’d finished everyone there, including me, was
half convinced that I must be six senamees from death on a slick
muddy slope.

Then, of course, he sold me the medicine, and
I reached into my pocket and pretended to hand him a coin. He took
it, checked it, and pocketed it so convincingly that I just about
saw the thing glint in the sunlight. By then, of course, half the
people in the crowd had noticed that their muscles were aching and
they were pretty thirsty, too, and he got busy answering their
questions and selling bottles: this one for tiredness and that one
for colds, and this other one if your gums bleed and your teeth get
loose. He had at least a dozen different medicines for sale, and by
the time he was finished most of the people in the crowd had at
least one bottle to take home.

“A profitable day,” he said later on. We were
facing each other across a table in one of the taverns, with a big
glass of beer on my side of the table and a smaller glass of Tucki
whiskey on his. “And partly your doing. Something about an earnest
young ruinman inspires confidence. And particularly—” He leaned
forward, considered me. “An earnest young ruinman who looks rather
the worse for wear. I gather the site near Memfis didn’t fulfill
your hopes.”

I met his look, shook my head. “It was worth
a try.”

“Of course. And your prentice—I trust nothing
untoward...”

“Berry? He’s fine—I sent him to work on a dig
in Tucki to make some money while I search the archives at
Sisnaddi. I figure that’s the last chance I’ve got.”

He considered that. “An interesting
coincidence, and possibly a useful one. I’m also headed east,
though not quite to Sisnaddi. It also occurs to me that we may have
some things to talk about.”

That’s how it happened that we left Ensul the
next morning on the road east toward Luwul. I was in good spirits
for the first time in longer than I wanted to think about. That was
partly because I knew Plummer would be good company on the road,
partly because wondering about him spared me from wondering about
whether Star’s Reach was ever going to be more than a dream for me,
and partly—well, I was no more sure what Plummer had been
not-quite-offering me, there on the riverboat just upstream from
Altan, than I’d been the morning I went and found him gone, and I
wanted to know. Not that I was going to push the issue; I knew
Plummer well enough already to be certain that he’d talk about that
when he chose to, and not a heartbeat sooner.

So we took the road, or maybe the road took
us, and pretty soon it was as if we’d been traveling together since
the first time we’d met back there in the ruin in Tucki. He didn’t
have much medicine left to sell after Ensul, but a little ways
upstream was a little town named Nuber, and he had a friend
there—it was another one of his nameless friends—who kept plenty of
it stored in bottles down in the cellar. After that, he worked
every town we passed.

We still made fairly good time up the north
bank of the Hiyo until we got past Nuwabnee, which is right across
the river from Luwul and brought back some memories. While we were
there, the clouds started coming up out of the south again, and a
few days later the rain came following it. It was good and heavy,
too, and we ended up finding a ruin with a bit of roof left to it
and waiting it out. That’s where we were when Plummer started
talking about stories, and that’s when he said the thing I wrote
back at the beginning of this, about how all stories were scraps of
one big story, and I decided he was drunk. Looking back on it, I
think he was, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. It’s occurred to
me more than once since then that he may have been so fond of
whiskey because he was right.

But the clouds finally cleared away, and on
we went. It wasn’t more than a few days after that when we went
through a little place called Bellem—not big enough to be a town,
really, just a couple of buildings and a levee for the boats—and
there on the side of one of the buildings was a big poster. You
don’t see those too often, because there aren’t that many trades
that have need of them, but this was the exception: it said, in big
fancy red and black letters, that the Baraboo Sirk was going to be
twenty kloms up the river in Madsen for a couple of days, which
happened to be that day and the next.

I laughed, remembering all the times I’d
wanted to see a sirk back when I was a boy, and we didn’t have the
money. Plummer, though, stopped and considered the poster and said,
“Excellent. We’ll have to stop for that.”

I closed my mouth after a moment, and then
said, “Friends of yours?”

“Exactly.” He gave me the look I’ve mentioned
before, the one that made me think I’d said the right thing or
something close to it. Then, without another word, he turned and
set off along the road, and I followed.

We got to Madsen late the next afternoon,
which was soon enough for the evening show. I honestly can’t say I
remember the town at all, just the big tent off in a big pasture
just outside of town, red and white in stripes, with big solar
panels on the grass nearby to power the lights and a couple of
smaller tents close by. There were oxen grazing not far away, and
wagons painted in bright colors, red and blue and green, with
BARABOO SIRK on them in big gold letters. People were already
lining up in front of the tent, and a man in fancy clothes outside
the tent was telling everyone about the show in a voice I bet they
heard on the other side of the river.

I should probably say something about sirks,
just in case whoever reads this is from the Neeonjin country or
somewhere else that doesn’t have them. A sirk is a show in a tent,
or rather it’s a whole bunch of shows one after the other in the
same tent, and it’s not like any other show there is. Part of it’s
people doing things nobody else can do, like eating fire and
lifting big weights and dancing on a rope way up in the air, and
part of it’s clowns making fun of everything and everybody, and
there’s music and all kinds of other things jumbled in together
with it. There are, I think, three of them now, though the Baraboo
Sirk is the oldest of them, the only one that’s been around since
before the old world ended, and not that long ago there was just
the one.