Star's Reach (6 page)

We got down to Shanuga toward evening three
days later. There are bigger cities in Meriga, and I knew that even
then, but I’d never seen any settlement bigger than the couple of
market towns you could reach from our farm in a day’s walk, and
they had maybe two hundred people each. Shanuga has twenty
thousand. It has buildings seven and eight stories tall, with
windows of glass salvaged from the ruins, and wind turbines turning
slow and silent on top of them; it has walls around it, big and
gray and sturdy, with gates going through here and there.

I learned later, after I became a ruinman’s
prentice, that the walls were made of chunks of old freeways, cut
up more or less square and mortared together. That’s what gets used
for city walls all over Meriga, since there are plenty of freeways
to tear down and not much point in using them when the fastest
thing we’ve got to move on them is an oxcart or a messenger’s
horse. I didn’t know that then; all I knew was that the walls were
the biggest things made by people that I’d ever seen.

The guards at the city gates watch the people
passing by through narrow windows. They looked down at my mother
and me, saw a couple of harmless poor folk from the hills heading
into the city like a hundred others must have done that day, and
probably forgot all about us in the time it takes to blink. Me, I
was staring openmouthed at everything around us, and my mother had
to speak to me twice to get me to pay attention and follow her into
the shadow of the narrow streets. She’d been to Shanuga to visit
her family a few times since she married my father, and so the city
wasn’t anything like as unfamiliar to her as it was to me.

Her older sister had a tavern inside the
walls of the city. I don’t remember it well; I lived there for only
a few weeks and visited only a couple of times after my mother
died, which wasn’t that many months after I prenticed with Gray
Garman. Most of what I remember is the narrow stairway in back
going up and up and up, five floors to the little room they could
spare for my mother and me. One floor down was where Aunt Kell
lived, with two daughters and whoever she had as her good time boy
that week; two and three floors down were rooms that people could
hire for the night, or longer if they wanted; four floors down, on
the street level, was the public room, and below that was a
basement full of barrels of beer, some aging, some brewing, some
with a spigot stuck in them and a mark drawn with charcoal to tell
the barmaids whether it was good enough to drink sober or bad
enough not to give to anyone who still had wits enough to
notice.

My mother went to work right away, cooking
and cleaning for the tavern guests. There wasn’t much I could do
just then, so I mostly stayed out of the way. Once the rains
stopped for good, I knew, the crafts would be taking prentices, and
my mother and Aunt Kell meant to find me a place with one; that
seemed like a good idea to me, too, though I hadn’t yet gotten past
the shock of having my life tossed into the compost by some Jinya
cavalryman I’d never know. Still, as the rains finished and the
first bits of clear weather started to show up, it happened more
than once that I came down for a meal with my mother and Aunt Kell
and her daughters and her good time boy, and Aunt Kell and my
mother would stop talking and look at me, and then there would be
one of those busy silences where it seemed like all the words that
weren’t being said kept chattering to themselves off where you
can’t hear them.

It was the night after one of those times
that I dreamed my first dream about Deesee. Now of course I learned
growing up to pay attention to my dreams and watch for the ones Mam
Gaia sends, but up to then I’d never dreamed anything that would
make a priestess pay the least attention. This one was different. I
don’t think it came from Mam Gaia, though; damn if I know who or
what sent it to me, but if it hadn’t come to me I can tell you for
certain that I wouldn’t be writing these words by lamplight in
Star’s Reach now.

Like so many dreams, it didn’t so much start
as unroll from something else too dim to recall. The first thing I
remember was that I was walking down a city street so wide you
could have built a block of Shanuga houses in the middle of it with
room to pass on both sides. There were buildings to either side of
the street, too, high and pale, with windows lined up in ranks like
soldiers in a parade, except all the same size and all the same
color. I was the only person I could see anywhere in the city, but
not the only thing living; there were schools of fish swimming here
and there between the high pale buildings, and when I breathed out
my breath turned into bubbles and went rising up toward the silvery
sky maybe fifty meedas above me.

None of that seemed strange to me, and I kept
on walking. I was supposed to meet somebody in the drowned city,
and I turned a corner to get to where I knew I was supposed to go.
Ahead of me was what looked like a big grassy meadow with trees,
except the grass and the trees were all seaweed that moved back and
forth as the water took it. That meant I was getting close, and I
hurried a bit more as I walked.

Finally I reached the seaweed meadow, and
looked up and to my right, and that was when I figured out where I
was.

People call it the Spire nowadays; it had a
longer name in ancient times, but I don’t remember it just now.
Until the night that it fell, you could see it for kloms along the
Lannic coast, rising up pale and stark from the sea, a square shaft
of white stone with a pointed top. I had never seen it back when I
had this first dream, nor for many years later, but I knew what it
was and what it looked like; back when my father was alive, I
played with other boys whose families kept pictures of it in their
homes. There was an old story that as long as it stood there,
sparkling in the mist off beyond the breakers, the drowned city
beneath it might still someday rise up from the sea, and the old
world and all its treasures would come back again. I never met
anyone who admitted they believed the story, but I never met anyone
but a priestess who insisted it was just a story, either.

But that was what I was looking at: the
Spire, or the lowest part of it, rising up from its hill to pierce
what I’d thought was the sky, and I knew then was the surface of
the sea. The one I was supposed to meet would be waiting there, I
knew, and I started up the hill toward the base of the Spire. Just
then the world began to shake all around me, and the Spire
shuddered and swayed; and all of a sudden I was in my bed in the
little room on the fifth floor of Aunt Kell’s tavern, being shaken
awake by one of Aunt Kell’s daughters so I’d be up in time for
breakfast.

I thought about that dream all day, while
sitting up in the little room and watching the clouds clear and the
last few flurries of rain blow past. I thought about Deesee, the
dead drowned city where the presdens of Meriga used to live before
the lights went off and the seas rose up and the old world toppled
into ruin like so many of the old towers I’ve helped salvage since
I became a ruinman’s prentice. I thought about the old world
itself, and all the scraps and pieces of itself that lie scattered
all over Mam Gaia’s round belly, so that you can hardly dig in the
ground anywhere in Meriga and not find something made back then.
Finally, after a good long while, I thought I knew what the dream
was trying to tell me.

We ate dinner early in the tavern, so that
everyone got fed and the dishes cleaned up before the evening got
too lively downstairs. It wasn’t that many hours after breakfast,
then, that I came down for dinner, and again my mother and Aunt
Kell suddenly stopped talking and looked at me. I knew what they
were talking about, and right then I knew what I had to say.

“Momma, I want to prentice with a ruinman, if
one’ll take me.” That’s what I put into the silence they’d made.
“Aunt Kell, do you know any?”

Aunt Kell glanced at my mother, then back at
me. “Happens I do,” she said.

“Would you write a letter to him, if Momma
gives her leave?”

Aunt Kell looked at my mother again, and my
mother looked at her. “It’s an honest trade,” Aunt Kell said, “and
if he makes mister he’ll never want for money.”

“And it’s Mam Gaia’s work,” my mother said.
Then, to me: “Trey, if that’s what you wish, you’ve got my
leave.”

I whooped and grinned, but there was
something in her voice that left me feeling cold as metal,
somewhere down deep where I couldn’t quite figure it out. There’s a
kind of peace that you see when somebody’s gotten past something
and can go on with life, and then there’s a kind of peace you see
when somebody’s gotten past something and just wants to be done
with living; I didn’t know that difference yet, but I think I must
have sensed it. My mother smiled, but there was next to nothing
behind the smile: a little relief, maybe, that she had done the
last thing she needed to do and could let herself fall into the
hollow place where her heart had been.

Thinking of it now, I’m not even sure how
much of that I sensed then, how much of it I put into the memory
after she caught a coughing disease six months later and died, and
how much of it got tangled up after that, when I thought about what
had happened and tried to piece together the pattern of my life.
Memory’s a tricky thing; I think I remember that first dream of
Deesee as though I was still having it right now, but sometimes I
wonder how much of that memory comes from later dreams, or from
what I saw from the Lannic shore when I went to the place by Deesee
where every question has an answer, and saw the Spire rising out of
the sea beyond the breakers, a few hours before it fell. If my life
got caught up in the one big story old Plummer talked about, that
day on the road to Sisnaddi, how much of what happened before then
got rewritten by the storyteller so it would fit the tale he wanted
to tell?

Still, there’s no doubt about what happened
next. A few days after I had the dream, when the rains finally
stopped for good, Aunt Kell wrote a letter to the ruinman she knew
and had one of her daughters run it over. I never did hear whether
the ruinman wrote back or just sent word, but seemingly he had room
for a new prentice and was willing to have a look at me. My mother
got me dressed up and combed my hair till it hurt, and then the two
of us walked the dozen blocks or so from Aunt Kell’s house to the
street with no name where the ruinmen live.

Everybody in Shanuga knows where that street
is, and most of them would shave between their legs with a broken
rock before they’d go there. It’s on the south end of town, just
outside the walls through a gate most other people won’t use, and
the street turns into a muddy road after a bit and heads straight
toward where the old ruins loom up out of the river mists, tall and
gray and stark like bones against the round green shapes of the
hills beyond. The ruinmen’s houses are like every other house in
Shanuga, narrow and close together as though they were drunk and
leaning on each other’s shoulders to keep from falling over, and
they have signs hanging in front of them like the shops of any of
the other guilds in town.

Just before the houses end and the street
turns into a road, though, the ruinmen’s guild hall stands there,
and it looks like a bad dream. Other guilds have halls that look
like houses, only twice or three times as wide and a couple of
stories taller. The ruinmen are, well, ruinmen, and don’t do
anything the same way as anybody else. Their guild hall in Shanuga
is a big gray round thing made of metal that stands way up in the
air like a ball perched on a stick. I learned later that the
ruinmen a century ago took one of the huge water tanks the ancients
put up on the hills here and there, hauled it down to the edge of
town, put it up on its base and used scrap steel from the ruins to
reinforce it and put floors into it. It really is one of the
scariest things in town, unless you’re a ruinman, in which case
it’s your second home.

We didn’t go there, though I stared at the
thing looming up above the end of the street all the way from the
gate to the front door of the house where we were headed. My mother
knocked on the door; a prentice answered; they exchanged a few
words, and then he let my mother and me in and left us in a couple
of chairs in the little front parlor.

A little while later Mister Garman came down
the stairs from above. He wasn’t Gray Garman yet, or at least there
wasn’t more than a little bit of gray in his hair back then, but he
had the same frown as always and the same habit of saying little
and listening a lot. I know he had some questions for my mother,
and a few for me, but I honestly don’t remember a word of what was
said. For all that I’d been jumping up and down at the thought of
becoming a ruinman’s prentice, I was as scared at that moment as
I’ve ever been since. Mister Garman was big and muscled and
scarred, and I guessed even then that trying to wheedle or coax him
the way I could my mother or Aunt Kell was a waste of breath.

Finally Mister Garman was satisfied, and sent
the prentice for the papers. My mother couldn’t read or write, but
she was used to making her mark on papers and taking it on faith
that they said what they were supposed to say; I could just about
spell my own name and the easier words of the litanies, so I wasn’t
much help figuring out the papers, but I signed my own name on the
line where it was supposed to go, and that made me one of Garman’s
prentices until I made mister, got reborn, or quit and walked away,
whichever happened first.

My mother hugged me and left. Mister Garman
told the prentice to take care of me, and went somewhere else, and
the prentice—his name was Jo; he got reborn when a floor dropped
out from underneath him two years later—took me upstairs to the big
room where the prentices slept, showed me the pallet where I’d be
sleeping and the chest where I got to put my things, and then led
me back down two flights to the workshop where the rest of the
prentices were busy getting tools ready for the season that was
about to begin. I got introduced to all of them, and then right
away got put to work rubbing oil into somebody’s leather coat, with
an older prentice keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn’t skimp
on the rubbing.