Nine: A Night In The Forest

North out of Shanuga, you can go on the main road east of the river up to Noksul, or you can go west of the river on what’s not much more than a farm track most of the same way, and then jump through the first good place the ridges will let you and head west to Nashul or north into Tucki. Berry and I took that second route, partly because Gray Garman said we ought to stay off of the main roads, and partly because Noksul’s a soldier’s town. That’s where my father went when he was called up for the war; it’s where the Army of Tenisi is, when it’s not playing tag in the mountains with raiders from the coastal allegiancies; and a town full of soldiers is not a place where you want to take something people might kill to get their hands on.

I was nervous about that last bit, I admit. I’d known since we found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins that even a copy of it would be worth a lot of money, and I realized not that much later that a lot of people would want it for reasons that didn’t have a thing to do with how many marks they could get for it, but it took a bit for it to sink in that one ruinman and his prentice might be fair game if the wrong people figured out what we were carrying. With luck and Mam Gaia’s blessing we could get ahead of the news and stay there, but it would take luck; the radio message to Melumi about our find would have been in code, but I knew as well as anyone that codes get broken, and of course one rider on a fast horse could spread the news far ahead of us.

We talked about that a little, while we walked; talked about the route we’d settled on, too, straight up through Tucki to Luwul and from there straight to Melumi; but mostly about nothing in particular, when we talked at all. More often we just walked. The day was clear and cool, the sort of dry season weather you long for when the rains set in and it’s one big sea of mud from wherever you are to wherever you want to get to, and the road was from the old world; it was rutted and cracked and most of the old paving was gone, but it still ran mostly straight and level, and here and there you’d walk on big gray slabs with just the last little trace of a broken yellow line down the middle.

All that country was full of farms. With Shanuga so close, there’s plenty of money to be made selling garden stuff and eggs and the like to the city markets, and the land’s rich enough you can do that and still grow plenty for a family on a pretty modest plot. Ox carts rolling into the city came by so often that Berry and I took to walking along one side of the road to stay out of their way. Other than that we mostly saw people working in the fields, and most of them took one look at our ruinmen’s gear and looked away.

We walked north until it was nearly full dark, and found a farm where the people were willing to give us a meal on the kitchen steps and a place to sleep in the barn in exchange for a couple of coins. Berry dropped off to sleep about as soon as we finished getting settled in the hayloft. I envied him that, as I lay there staring up into the darkness, thinking about Star’s Reach and how on Mam Gaia’s face I was going to figure out where it was if the scholars at Melumi couldn’t help me.

Still, I managed to get to sleep after a bit, and then the talk of farmhands going about the first chores in the gray morning woke me up. Berry and I washed our hands and faces at the pump in the farmyard, got some breakfast from the farmer’s wife, and started north before the sun was fairly up over the mountains off east of us.

That second day might as well have been the first, except that the farms were bigger, and grew less garden stuff and more corn. The one after that was sister to the first two, except that the fields started spreading themselves out and left patches of empty land between them. We passed places where low gray ragged shapes heaved up through the grass: foundations from the old world that nobody had bothered to dig out and break up for building material. A good bit of the poorer ground had been left in pasture, too, and herds of loms watched Berry and me incuriously as we walked by.

The loms reminded me of the hill country where I’d grown up. My father and most everyone else had some for wool, and for hauling loads to and from market; I’d been carried on a lom’s back often enough when I was too young to walk far, and fell in love a bit with the smell of their long straight wool and the way their heads swivel around on top of their long, long necks, as they taste the wind and listen and look.

They didn’t have loms in the old world. I read that in a book in Sisnaddi once, though I’m still not sure whether to believe it or not; farmers in Tenisi have been raising loms as long as anyone remembers, and they had to get them from somewhere. What the book said, though, is that in the old world, people got wool from a different kind of animal. They called it a cheap, I think it was, probably because there were so many of them they didn’t cost much. Cheap weren’t as big as loms, and they had short necks and wool that curled.

When the old world was dying, though, a disease came through and killed most of the cheap, and the scientists couldn’t get rid of the disease, so most of the new cheap that got born every year died of it. That meant you couldn’t make a living raising cheap, so the farmers just got rid of the last of them and raised something else, and that’s why we don’t have cheap any more. Of course the same sort of thing happened to a lot of other things back then, and it nearly happened to people, too. We were lucky, I guess, that nobody had to make a living raising us.

We managed to find a farmhouse to stay at that night, but the next morning, even the pastures and the loms got scarce, and from noon on there were no more farmhouses in sight. We’d talked a little about that, Berry and I, the morning we left the Shanuga ruins, and brought blankets and fire gear and the like with us for sleeping rough; we both knew perfectly well that there’d be plenty of that on the way to Star’s Reach. Still, I was nervous. You’d think that somebody who’d go crawling down a hole in the ground that nobody had been down for four hundred years wouldn’t blink at the thought of sleeping under a tree, but the fact was that I’d never actually spent a night out in the forest.

That’s what it came to, though. By the time the sun got near the top of the ridge to the west of us, we hadn’t seen another human being aside from each other in many hours, and there weren’t even any loms in sight. So we kept on going until the light started to fade, and then left the road and worked our way about halfway down from the road to the river. We found a bit of an old ruin there, a couple of low walls that came together in a corner and went up about as high as Berry was tall. The point of the corner faced toward the road, too, so we could build a small fire and not be seen if anyone was looking.

So I gathered some dry wood and Berry got water from the river, and by the time it was all the way dark we had a nice little camp in the corner of the ruin. We didn’t have a lot of food, just a bit of bread the farm wife had given us that morning and a couple of cakes of dried soup I’d begged from the kitchen at Mister Garman’s camp back at the Shanuga ruins, but we’d eaten well enough until then. Once we got a fire started, Berry tossed one of the cakes of soup into a tin pail of water on top, and it turned into something not half bad in short order.

So we ate some of the bread and drank the soup, and the night got darker. Wind made noise in the branches above us, and other things made their own little noises lower down. I tried not to show it, but I was on edge, and when a wild dog barked somewhere off in the middle distance, Berry and I both just about jumped out of our skins.

“Nervous?” I asked him.

“Yes.” Then: “I’ve never spent a night out in the forest.”

“Me neither.”

Even in the dim flickering light from what was left of the fire, I could see his eyebrows go up. “I heard you were a farm boy from the hill country.”

“True enough. Doesn’t mean we slept under trees, you know.”

That got me a quick glance, to make sure I wasn’t angry, which I wasn’t. “I grew up in Nashul,” he said after a moment. “In City Core.”

I let out a whistle. “No kidding. How’d you end up a ruinman’s prentice?”

“I – I’m a tween, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“Is that – ” He didn’t finish the sentence, not that he needed to.

I didn’t give him time, either. “Garman ever give you trouble over that?”

“Not once.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

His face said “thank you” better than words could have. I put a couple of sticks onto the fire, so neither of us had to say anything for a moment.

I don’t think they had tweens in the old world, either, or if they did I’ve never read anything about them. The priestesses say that they’re one of the things that happened to us because of the poisons that the people of the old world dumped everywhere they could think of. Some of those were fast poisons, and that’s part of why so many people died during the years just before the old world ended, and some of them were slow poisons, and that’s part of why there still aren’t a twentieth as many people as there were back then. Some of them, though, were the kind of poison that gets inside you and messes things up, not for you, but for your children and their children, and of course that’s another part of the reason why there are so few people nowadays compared to how many there were back then.

It’s because of that third kind of poison, the priestesses say, that so many women can’t have babies and so many men can’t father them, and that’s also why so many of the babies that do get born are sick from birth and die young. Still, you also get babies who are born different rather than sick. You get green children, for one. When they’re young, there’s something in their skin that feeds the little green one-celled plants the priestesses talk about so much, and so they turn a nice grass green a few weeks after they’re born and stay that way until they get into their teen years, and then the little plants go away and their skin turns brown again. Up in Mishga and Skonsa and Aiwa you get a lot of people with a coat of hair all over them like bears; down in the border country near Misipi you get a lot of women with four breasts instead of two: there’s a lot of that sort of thing.

Then there are tweens. There are more of them than the others, and they’re called tweens because they’re not really men or women but something in between. The two of them I’ve ever seen with their clothes off had something like a set of each kind between their legs, and little breasts you’d never notice under a shirt. The priestesses say that tweens count as men, meaning they can’t be priestesses or belong to Circle; most other people aren’t too sure what to make of them, and there are some places where they’re not always welcome. Even before Berry and I traveled together, that last seemed stupid to me, but then people do nearly as many stupid things nowadays as they did back in the old world.

I got the fire fed, and saw that Berry was watching me. “You know,” he said, “I should probably tell you my story – about where I came from and how I got to be Garman’s prentice.” He looked down. “Since I’m your prentice now, and there are some things you ought to know.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m listening.”

He drew in a breath, just a bit raggedly, and began.

(to be continued...)