Five: The Youngest Mister

By the time we finished getting the letter copied, work had come to a halt all over the ruin. That happens most times a big find turns up, since most misters are smart enough to take their prentices off the job when they can’t concentrate enough to be safe. Since that was the one break we usually got from work between the time the ruins dried out enough to dig and the time the rains came back, it gave the prentices another good reason to keep an eye open for signs that might lead to something.

We had a few misters in Shanuga who balked now and then at letting their prentices go when a find turned up, but even Mister Calwel knew better than to hold them back this time, since nobody had an eye open for anything but Star’s Reach. It didn’t matter that none of us could make head or tail of the message in the letter, or had the least notion what a potus or a nrao might be. That would be tomorrow’s problem, for as many tomorrows as it took somebody to go to Melumi and ask the scholars. For the moment, as Garman and I walked back into camp from Mam Kelsey’s tent, we passed clusters of prentices talking low and fast, and every time they were talking about Star’s Reach.

Most of them jumped up and came over to ask for another look at the letter. Even the ones who’d been bitter rivals of mine a day before called me “Mister Trey” and were as polite as you could ask. Garman, who had both the copy and the original, let them read the copy. He gave me a sidelong glance every time he handed it over, and I knew he was wondering when I’d tell him whether I wanted the letter itself or the finder’s rights. I couldn’t have told him if I wanted to. I knew which one I should choose if I had the brains Mam Gaia gave geese, and I knew which one every senamee of me wanted to choose, and unfortunately they weren’t the same one.

So we proceeded across the camp to the big tent in the middle of everything that served as the misters’ lodge seven months of the year. The other misters had hauled one of the big wooden chairs right outside the entrance to the lodge and left it there for me to haul back inside. Of course they’d tied a bunch of scrap iron to the thing so it weighed close to fifty keels, just to add to the welcome. Still, I counted myself lucky. A couple of years before there had been one prentice just turned mister that a lot of people disliked, and whoever loaded up his chair drove a stake into the ground and chained the chair to the stake, then draped a bunch more chain all around it so it took him a dozen tries and some of the hottest language I’ve ever heard before he figured out why the thing just wouldn’t budge.

I had an easier time than that, but the chair was still a mother to lift, and a mother with babies to carry into the lodge. Most of the other misters were already in the tent, sitting in their chairs or gathered in twos and threes around the walls, so I had an approving audience as I staggered a quarter of the way around the lodge to the open place they’d left for me, and set down the chair with a crash like a building falling over. The misters laughed and applauded, and then the circle got quiet as I sat down for the first time in a mister’s chair.

“Well,” said Mister Jonus then, taking his seat. Of the twenty misters beside me who worked the Chanuga ruins that season, he was the oldest, and that gave him first and last voice any time the misters made a decision in circle. “Unless anyone objects, we’ve got a new mister among us.”

No one objected. Garman gave me one of his rare fractional smiles and went to his chair. Jonus nodded once, and that was settled.

The rest of the meeting was as slow and plodding as a misters’ lodge usually turns out to be. A couple of younger misters who were working claims next to each other on the west side of the ruins had gotten into a quarrel about who had the right to a little building right on the line between them, and had the common sense to bring it to the lodge instead of going to the circle to settle it with knives. A couple of senior misters working the underplaces close to the river warned of water getting into the deep places. Jonus passed the bucket for money to pay Mam Kelsey’s wages, and I panicked a bit before I remembered that she wouldn’t cost me anything yet since I didn’t have a claim of my own. The bucket went round a second time for money for the families of ruinmen who’d died or been crippled in the ruins, and I found a few coins for that, and then the meeting was over.

By the time we filed out of the tent, Jonus first as the oldest mister and me dead last as the youngest, the sun was well west of noon and the clouds had started to break up after raining somewhere else. By then the prentices had gone from talking low to arguing at the top of their lungs, and somebody had dragged out a barrel of the small beer the misters let prentices drink in the ruins. You couldn’t get away with giving beer to boys of ten back in Shanuga city, but nobody came out to the ruins but ruinmen, their prentices and failed scholars, and the few priestesses who were willing to get that close to the leavings of the old world, and none of them made a fuss about it. It’s true enough that they had little reason to worry, for you had to drink one mighty lot of the stuff to get noticeably tip-overish from it.

Still, the prentices did their level best to get lively with what they had, and once the rest of the misters headed off to their tents or wherever, I was surrounded by a fair-sized mob. Until a few hours before I’d been their equal, and they weren’t ready to let me forget that just yet. So I got dragged over to the barrel and handed a big wooden mug of beer, and had to repeat the story of how I’d blundered my way into the hidden room in the underplaces, and nearly gotten reborn, and dodged past that to find something that everybody in Meriga had been looking for one way or another since about an hour and a half after the last of the old towers went dark and the last airplanes fell out of the sky. Then I had to repeat it again, and again, with more beer, as more prentices joined the crowd and more barrels followed them.

Then somebody who hadn’t seen it wanted to know what the letter said. I remembered about half of it, and some of the others remembered more, but neither the beer nor the excitement helped us get it straight, and the potuses and the nraos got mixed up with a lot of nonsense, and none of us could say any of the odd words without sounding like we were talking backwards. Before long we were all laughing too hard to stand up. Conn topped it off by guessing what a potus might be, and I’d be lying if I said his guess was anything clean. Before long we were discussing the difference between an ornl and a ceti, or some equally clear and important point, while clutching our sides and rolling on the ground.

Things went on like that for quite a while. Some of the younger prentices finally got bullied into fixing food for everyone before the misters got too tired of waiting, and I got handed a big bowl of bean soup and a wedge of hard bread almost as large. That might have helped steady me a little, except that it came with another big wooden mug of beer, and there were more after that.

Night got close and dark around us, and we got quieter, though it took a while. Most of the younger prentices went off to their tents, and one or two of them got noisily sick on the way. A little later, the prentices who worked for other misters asked blessings on our dreams and headed off to their parts of the camp; I’m pretty sure some of them got sick, too, from the way they were weaving as they walked, but if so they weren’t so loud about it. Then it was just me and Mister Garman’s prentices in a circle lit by little lamps, with the stars peeking down through great torn gaps in the clouds above us and the stink of spilled beer around us, talking about other times and the ones who’d been there with us and weren’t with us now, the ones who quit their prenticeship and the ones who got reborn.

Finally we ran out of things to say. A gap like the ones in the clouds was opening between me and the others, and it wouldn’t close again, I knew, even if they all lived to become misters themselves. I’d seen the same thing happen from the other side often enough, but even so it wasn’t easy to sit there in the pale lamplight and know that something that had been the nearest thing to a family I had after my father and mother died was gone now, at least for me.

When the silences had gotten long enough to be uncomfortable, I tried to stand up. That wasn’t the best move, it turned out, for it landed me on the ground with a thump. You have to drink a mighty lot of small beer to get tip-overish, as I said, but I must have drunk a mighty lot that day and then a bit. I tried to stand up again, without much more luck.

The others laughed and teased me, which broke the silence for the moment. Berry, who was the only one of the younger prentices still there, came over and helped me stand up. I wished the rest of them good dreams and, leaning on Berry, managed to walk the thirty meedas or so to my tent without ever quite falling over.

When we got to the tent, he more or less poured me into a sitting position on my cot and then stood there facing me for a long moment. “I’m the one who went and got Mister Garman when the floor fell in,” he told me then, saying it in the way that lets you know a favor is going to be asked before too much longer.

“I’m grateful,” I managed in response.

“You’re going to take finder’s rights to the letter.” Then, all in a rush: “You get to take one of Gray Garman’s prentices as your first prentice. I want you to pick me.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to get my brain to work. “I haven’t settled what I’m going to choose,” I protested, but he just grinned, and said, “You’re not gutless enough to turn down finder’s rights to Star’s Reach.”

He was right, of course, though he could have said not smart enough with equal truth. “If I do,” I tried again, “I’m not going to have more than half a dozen marks to my name. How do you think I’m going to feed a prentice? I’ll have to hire out at other mister’s sites, for certain.”

“Then you can hire me out too.” The grin faltered. “Trey—Mister Trey—for a chance at Star’s Reach I’ll eat dirt and run naked and sleep under a bush for the rest of my life. Anyone would. I bet you have twenty prentices sitting in front of this tent when you get up tomorrow.” The grin was gone, and he swallowed visibly. “But I want you to pick me. I—I know I’m not even your best choice. But I had to ask.”

I sat there looking at him for what seemed like a long while, thinking about the one time I’d wanted something impossible, and asked for it, and gotten it. Anyone else would probably have turned him down flat, or put off the decision until morning and turned him down that way, and I tried to talk myself into doing either one, and failed. “You’ll do,” I said.

Berry’s face lit up like a lamp. “You mean it?”

“I mean it. I’ll tell Garman first thing tomorrow.”

He put out his hand, and I clasped it, sealing the deal. He grinned, then, and said, “Just like the Robot’s Hand. Mister Trey, you have the best dreams anyone ever had. I’ll be here with my things first thing tomorrow.”

A moment later he was gone. I went to the door of the tent, thinking about the Robot’s Hand, and then fell to my knees and got very sick with as little noise as I could manage.