Six: Dreaming of Deesee

Eleen and Tashel Ban both told me, when I asked them last night, that the way to write something is to start at the beginning and go on step by step until you get to the end. She’s a scholar from Melumi and he’s what they have in Nuwinga in place of scholars from Melumi, and they both know a lot more about writing than I do, but try as I might this thing I’m writing won’t follow their advice. If old Plummer was right, and my story is part of his one story, it got started a long time before I did, and there’s no way to keep the earlier parts of it out of the part I’d meant to tell.

So I’m going to have to take some pages here to write about the Robot’s Hand, even though that part of the story happened to me more than ten years before Gray Garman and I found the letter in the Shanuga underplaces. If other people ever read this, they might be able to understand the rest of the story I want to tell without knowing about the Hand, but they won’t understand me or Berry or the ruinmen, and I’m not sure at all that they’ll be able to figure out why Berry and I turned our backs on the life we’d been living among the Shanuga ruinmen and went looking for a place nobody had been able to find for more than four hundred years. To explain the Hand, though, I’ll have to go a bit further back, to a gray rainy morning when I was nine years old and the world I thought I knew had just fallen apart around me.

That was the year after my father was called up to fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. My mother spent almost the whole rainy season that year hoping that the news was wrong, but the men who straggled back from the Kerline coast had little hope to offer her. My father had been in the front ranks at Durrem, they said, when the Jinya cavalry broke through our lines and those who didn’t run fast ended up getting reborn in a hurry. My father was not the kind of man to turn and run. About the time the rains slowed down, when there wasn’t any use in hoping further, my mother sent for a priestess to say the litany for him, and then set about selling our farm. If ours had been a bigger family she might have been able to keep it, but it was just the two of us, and I wasn’t old enough for the heavy work. With the war and all, there were enough empty farms that she couldn’t get much money for it, but she got enough to get us to her family in Shanuga and maybe enough to find me a place as a prentice there.

So we gave away everything we couldn’t take and hadn’t been bought by the farm’s new owners, loaded up the rest in a couple of packs, and started walking one cool wet morning down out of the hills toward Shanuga. I don’t remember much of anything about the journey, though it took us two days and I’d never been anything like that far from home. I’d cried when we first heard my father wasn’t coming home, and cried again when it became pretty much clear that was true, and then again when my mother told me we had to leave the farm, but somehow none of that was quite real to me until I shouldered the pack and followed her out through a gate I’d known since I was born, and that I suddenly knew I’d never see any more. There were no tears bitter enough for that, and I simply trudged along through the rain and mud behind my mother, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing but a huge cold empty space where my life had been.

We got down to Shanuga late the next day. There are bigger cities in Meriga, and I knew that even then, but I’d never seen any settlement bigger than the couple of little market towns you could reach from our farm in a day’s walk, and they had maybe two hundred people each. Shanuga had twenty thousand. It had buildings seven and eight stories tall, made of steel and glass salvaged from the ruins just down the river, with wind turbines turning slow and silent on top of them; it had walls around it, big and gray and massive, pierced with gates here and there, where guards looked down at you from narrow windows as you passed through.

They looked down at my mother and me, saw a couple of harmless poor folk from the hills heading into the city like so many 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 in one of the poorer parts 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 left. Most of what I remember was 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 winding down 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 all the words that weren’t being said seemed to keep on chattering to themselves off where you couldn’t hear them.

It was the night after one of those times that I dreamed my first dream about Deesee. Like everyone else, I’d learned growing up to pay attention to 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 a fact 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. Some things happened, and then 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 and still talk about it, though of course it’s only a memory nowadays; it had a longer name in ancient times that I don’t remember just now. Not that long ago you could see it for klomees along the 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, of course, but I knew what it was and what it looked like; back when my father was alive, I’d 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 ancient times and all their treasures would come back again. I never met anyone who admitted they believed the story, but I never met anyone 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 crashed into ruin; and I thought about the old world itself, and all the scraps and masses of itself it left scattered all over the countryside, so that in more places than not you could hardly dig in the ground and not find something made back then; and after a 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 face and 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 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 the vision I had at Mam Cassee’s house on the seashore the time I went looking for Deesee myself, and saw the Spire as it fell. If my life has been drawn into the one great story old Plummer talked about, that day on the road to Sisnaddi, how much of what happened before then had to be rewritten by the storyteller so it would fit what he had to say? I stare into the shadows here at Star’s Reach and wonder that sometimes.