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...)

Eight: The Road to Melumi

The morning after the day I found the letter came way too early. I dragged myself off of my cot about the time first light came up in the east, found some cold water to wash with, and made myself about as presentable as somebody who hasn’t had time to sleep off one mother of a lot of beer is likely to get. The face that looked back at me from the little tin mirror over the washbasin wasn’t much different from the one that blinked back the morning before, but I felt different. At the time, I thought that was a matter of becoming a ruinman and a mister of the guild, or maybe squeaking past getting reborn by a senamee or two. Looking back, though, I think it was probably the beer.

Finally I got dressed in ruinman’s leathers and left my tent, and damn if Berry wasn’t right: there must have been twenty prentices waiting for me with hopeful looks. Some were just about as old as I was, and some were so young they must have signed on with their misters just before that season, but it took all of one look to tell me that every one of them was hoping I’d pick him and nobody else to be my first prentice. I had just about enough wits in my head to raise a hand before they all started talking at once. “Already chose my prentice,” I told them. “Sorry.” A couple of the youngest ones burst into tears, and all of them gave me the kind of look that makes you feel like you just stomped their puppy or something.

That didn’t trouble me much, to be honest, and I waited until they were leaving and walked a bit unsteadily over to Gray Garman’s tent. I’m sure the man slept sometime, but in all the years I worked for him I never saw him sleeping or washing up or anything. This morning was no different. He had his tent flap open, and waved me in when I stopped just outside. Berry was there already, clean and bright-eyed and doing his level best not to jump out of his skin with excitement, but Garman just looked me up and down the way he always did, waved me to a chair, and said, “You decided?”

He meant the letter or the finder’s rights to Star’s Reach: one a big chunk of easy money but nothing more, the other nothing more than a hope, maybe, but a hope of finding the thing every ruinman used to dream of finding. I sat down on the chair, looked at him, and said, “I keep on telling myself that I ought to have some brains.”

For once, Garman laughed. It was as dry as an old granny’s whatnot and as short as a dumb ruinman’s life, but it was still a laugh. If he’d suddenly sprouted feathers I don’t think I’d have been more surprised. “If I was twenty years younger,” he said, “I’d be telling myself that.” Then: “Berry says you picked him.”

“That’s right.”

Garman nodded once. “Good choice. He’ll be of use.” Berry lit up like a lamp; Garman didn’t say that sort of thing lightly. “The original’s going to Shanuga today for auction,” Garman went on, “but a copy needs to go to Melumi right quick; Mam Kelsey’s talked with them by radio and they want it. You headed that way?”

I hadn’t even begun to make plans yet, but it suddenly seemed like the best possible idea, not least because I guessed what Garman had in mind. “I was thinking that,” I lied.

“Good.” He pulled two copies of the letter off a table next to his chair, handed them to me. “One for you and one for the scholars. And here—” He tossed me a leather bag that landed in my hand with a clink. “Ought to be about a fifth of what they’ll pay. That’ll keep the two of you in food on the way.”

A fifth of the price was courier’s wages, but from the hard plump shape of the bag, he’d rounded up a good bit. I pretended not to notice, and thanked him.

“Don’t mention it.” He leaned forward, then, and gave me one of his looks. “Now listen. You two go fast, keep mum, and stay off the main roads. Some people might kill to get this before Melumi does.” He handed me another sheet of paper. “This might help.”

I read the paper. It was a letter from him to some ruinman in the Caga ruins, up north on the lakes, saying the Shanuga ruins didn’t have room for a new mister and asking the Caga ruinman to find a place for me. “If anyone asks, that’s why we’re traveling.”

“That’s right.” Then: “And it’s close enough to true, anyway.”

I knew what he was talking about, of course. The Shanuga ruins still had a lot of metal in them, but raw metal doesn’t pay a ruinman much, and the good finds—the old machines and rare metals and documents—had been getting scarcer since before I was born. I’d already heard of towns where the guild only allowed a certain number of misters, and a prentice couldn’t make mister unless he was ready to go somewhere else. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that there might not always be somewhere else to go. That came to mind later, after I’d worked in a dozen different ruins and learned just how close the ruinmen’s guilds had gotten to digging themselves out of business.

After that we had some papers to sign for Berry, so the laws would treat him as my prentice and not Garman’s runaway. Garman put his name on the lines and I put mine, and then Berry surprised the hay out of me by reading the papers and signing his own name nice and neat in the right place. Then we said our goodbyes and Garman cuffed me on the shoulder, one mister to another, and Berry and I left the tent and went to get some food before we started.

The camp was mostly awake by then. Off in the middle distance I could hear Mister Calwel’s voice, high and sharp, yelling at his crew; chickens clucked and scratched in the grass, and one of their wild cousins crowed off in the forest somewhere. I was about to get in line at the cook’s tent when Berry cleared his throat and gave me a look that he must have learnt from Garman, reminding me that I was a mister now and it was prentice duty to go fetch food for me. So I sat down at an empty table and watched the mists burn off the river for a bit, until he came back with bread and chicory-brew and two big bowls of soup. I don’t think either of us said a word until most of that was gone.

“You been to Melumi before?” Berry asked then.

“Not me.” I considered him. “You?”

He grinned. “No, but I always wanted to. You think they can figure out the letter?”

It’s a funny thing, how once you make a decision, it’s easy to think up reasons for it. I nodded, as though the trip to Melumi had been my idea all along. “They ought to be able to tell us what a potus is, and the rest of those words. I figure it’s the best first step.”

And of course it was, and I’d agreed to do courier duty for Garman as well, but right then the thought of going to Melumi sparkled in my mind with something that wasn’t practical at all. I’ve met farmer folk who couldn’t have read their own names if you helped spell it out for them, who daydreamed about going to Melumi just to look through glass at the books and the scholars, and ask some question that didn’t matter to anyone so that a scholar in a gray robe could look up the answer for them and spell it out. Ask most people and they’ll tell you that the scholars know everything. Ask people who read and write, and know a little bit about the world, and they’ll tell you that the scholars know most everything that matters.

They’re as wrong as the first bunch, but compared to what knowledge most of us nowadays have handy, they might as well be right. Meriga’s come down a long ways since the days when Deesee was above water, and there are countries in the world that are bigger and richer, but the college at Melumi, with its shelves and shelves and shelves of books from the old world, is one thing we can still be proud of.

Berry was still grinning. “I’m ready.”

“I bet.” We finished up the food, and then he ran to get his things and I went to my tent and started packing. Not that I had that much to pack; prentices don’t have much chance to load themselves down, and the only thing I’d had time to collect in the day I’d been a mister was a hangover. So one leather pack was enough for clothes and tools and all, with a little bag of keepsakes down in the bottom: a ring that had been my mother’s; a bit of wood carved to look like a horse’s head that I got from Toby, who was my best friend among the prentices for most of four years and got reborn when a building fell on him; the little star of yellow metal the government gave my mother after my father died in the war; and a butterfly of the same yellow metal, or something as close to it as doesn’t matter, that was a parting gift from Tam – and that reminds me, I’m going to have to write about her one of these days.

By the time I’d gotten everything packed, Berry showed up with his pack over one shoulder. He was just about hopping, he was so excited, and I couldn’t fault him for that. Me, I was stuck halfway between being just as excited, and worried as anything that I’d just pitched myself into something way too deep and dangerous for me. Gray Garman’s words about people who might kill to get the letter I carried were on my mind, and so was the fact that I had no notion what I might do if we got to Melumi and the scholars couldn’t tell me what the letter meant.

Still, I swung my pack up onto my back, got it settled, and tried to chase the worries out of my head. I tied the tent door open to let Garman’s prentices know I was gone, and Berry and I turned our backs on the ruins and started walking. The day was turning clear and, thank the four winds, not too hot for a change; a couple of buzzards circled way up in the sky, which is supposed to be a good sign for travelers, though nobody’s ever told me why. Just north of camp we went over to the riverbank and walked along it until a ferryman got close enough to wave in; I handed over a few bits, Berry and I climbed into his little boat, and we sat and watched green water roll past as he puffed and hauled on the oars and got us to the other side. We got off the boat there and scrambled up the bank, and a few minutes later we were walking north on the road to Melumi.