Ten: Berry's Story

I’ve been trying for two days now to figure out the best way to write about what Berry told me that night in the forest, and tore half a dozen pages out of the notebook before I realized I’d better work it out before I wrote another word. Part of the problem is that I don’t know who’s going to read this, if anyone ever does. For all I know we might die here at Star’s Reach, and Meriga could go under the way Sheren said it probably will as soon as she dies, and the next people to come this way might be from the Neeonjin country, or someplace even farther away that nobody on this side of the world has heard about for four hundred years. What can I write that they’ll understand?

Take Nashul City Core, where Berry said he’d been born and grew up. As far as anybody knows there were only eight of those ever built anywhere this side of the oceans. Four of them went under water when the old world died, and one of the others got blown from here to glow-in-the-dark in a war nobody even remembers any more, so there are just three of them left, Sisnaddi and Nashul and Pisba. Until I went to Sisnaddi for the first time, I didn’t have much of a notion of what they’re like, and most of the motion I did have was wrong as it could be.

The problem is that it’s just too easy for me to picture somebody who’s walked all the way over the mountains and the deserts from the Neeonjin country, with straw sandals on his feet and a couple of swords at his belt, like the Neeonjin man in a picture book I had when I was little. He turns on a light and sits down here at this steel desk, and opens this notebook all anyhow, and the first thing he reads is me going on about a gray thing big as a hill, twenty stories tall, with thousands of people living in it, and windows all over the sides, and wind turbines sticking up taller than the clouds in a ring around the top. He’d probably decide I was drunk or dreaming, and use the rest of the notebook to light a fire to cook his dinner with.

But the Cores are there, all three of them, and that’s what Berry started talking about first, that first dark night in the forest where the two of us sat and tried to pretend we weren’t scared of what might be moving around out there in the darkness.

“I was born in Nashul City Core,” he said. He was facing our little fire, turned half away from me, with his arms folded around his knees. “Born up high, they used to say, but raised down deep. My mother lived in one of the top levels. Her mother was a big name in Circle, big enough that whether my mother got into Circle mattered a lot to her and her allies. So my mother went playing, once she got to the age that girls do that.”

There’s another thing: Circle. You find Circle everywhere in Meriga and Nuwinga; they’ve got it in Genda and the coastal allegiancies, too, except it’s not quite the same, and nothing like as powerful; down in the Meycan Empire they don’t have it at all, and I don’t suppose anybody knows what mothers do or don’t do in the Neeonjin country, or anywhere else further off. Ask anybody who’s in Circle and they’ll tell you that it’s as old as the world, that women got together in Circle long before the old world, in the days when everyone lived in caves and made their tools out of rocks, if that ever actually happened. Maybe that’s so, but I never saw a word about Circle in anything from the old world, not even when I was in Sisnaddi for the best part of a year searching the archives in what I thought was the last chance I had to find Star’s Reach.

Now if I could sit down with that Neeonjin traveler over a meal and a couple of beers, I could tell him about Circle, or as much about it as a man is ever going to know. I’d tell him what I learned from Plummer, and talk about how back in the days after the old world died and ours was born, maybe one woman in a dozen was able to have healthy babies, and the ones who could banded together to help each other, when there was no other help from anywhere else. I’d tell him how those circles of women spread and linked up with each other, and linked up with the priestesses, too, until pretty soon every town and city had Circle, and if you wanted to make something happen, even if you were the presden, you pretty much had to hope that Circle wasn’t against it. There’s a reason why every presden Meriga’s had for the last two hundred years has been a woman.

“And you were what happened,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

I let out a whistle. “That must have caused a flutter or two.”

“That’s what they told me.” With a little laugh: “They were all set to bring my mother into Circle as soon as I was born, with the big ceremony and everything, and then I came out tween and the whole thing had to be hushed up in a hurry. They’d probably just have pressed a pillow over my face and solved the problem that way, except my mother’s family were Old Believers and she wouldn’t let the birth women do that.”

And then there are the Old Believers. I’d never yet met one of them, that night when Berry told me his story, though of course I’ve met them since. They don’t worship Mam Gaia and they don’t watch their dreams for messages from Her; they’ve got a god of their own who’s dead, except he’s not really dead, and they talk to him most of the time instead of listening for what he has to say. They say that in the old world most everyone believed the way they do, and one of them told me that what happened to the old world was their god’s doing and not Mam Gaia’s, or just what happens when you do enough dumb things for long enough and the results finally gang up and clobber you.

But the Old Believers won’t kill newborns, even those that are born horribly sick and won’t live for more than a couple of hours anyway, and there’s all kinds of other things they won’t do, and some things that we won’t do don’t bother them a bit. There are a few Old Believer families who are big names in Circle or in the army, but they mostly keep to themselves, in their own villages and their own cramped little quarters in cities, where they make and sell things that the priestesses say are wrong but people want anyway.

“So I ended up in the Warrens,” said Berry. “You know about those?”

“Just the name.”

“It’s where most people in City Core live, down inside. They found a woman who’d had a dead child and was willing to nurse me instead, and paid her to go live off by herself in a corner of the Warrens where nobody went much. So that’s where I grew up, and that’s most of what I remember of Nashul.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, so I said, “She was the one who taught you to read?”

That got me a quick glance, assessing. “Nah, I had a teacher who came down three times a week for a while. When she stopped coming, I was old enough to go into one of the Warren schools – they have them, to give the children something to do while their mothers and fathers are at work. I was seven by then, and Ranna – that’s her name – she told me that my mother had a healthy baby and had gotten into Circle after all, and so I’d better get used to living in the Warrens with everyone else.”

It took me a moment to catch what Berry meant. “If she hadn’t –”

“There’d be no reason to pretend I didn’t exist.” A shrug. “So she had her healthy baby and for all I know she’s a big name in Circle now.”

“Ouch.”

He went on as though he hadn’t heard. “So I went to Warren school for a while, and then it came time for me to prentice with somebody, and I got told that I could go into any trade I wanted, but it wasn’t going to be in Nashul. So I said I wanted to be a ruinman, and about six weeks later some men came and got me and everything I had and put it all in a wagon and drove halfway across Tenisi to Gray Garman’s house on the ruinmen’s street in Shanuga.”

I waited until I was pretty sure he was finished, and said, “I remember when you showed up and we had you shake the robot’s hand.”

That got me another glance, and then a sudden grin. “When we all went back upstairs and met Mister Garman, that was the first time I can think of when I really felt that somebody was happy to have me around.” Then: “Garman knew I was a tween, and a couple of prentices found out – when you sleep in a tent with somebody, it’s not too easy to keep your middle covered up all the time. But nobody made any kind of fuss about it. I was just another prentice.”

“And now you’re the prentice of somebody dumb enough he thinks he can find Star’s Reach.”

“And still pinching myself sometimes to make sure I’m not just dreaming that.” Then, suddenly serious: “But if you ever wondered why I can read and do numbers and talk like a jennel, when I’m Berry sunna nobody, Mister Trey, now you know.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. I’m glad you can read; that might just be a mother of a lot of help.”

He grinned again. “I’m hoping.”

We talked about some other things after that, though I don’t remember a word of it, and finally got sleepy enough that the night around our little camp didn’t seem half so threatening. So we wrapped up in our blankets, and I went to sleep thinking about Berry’s story, and Tam, who I haven’t written about yet and need to.

That might have had something to do with the dream I had. I was in Deesee again, walking down the wide empty streets with the fish swimming down them and the surface of the water all silver and rolling fifty meedas overhead. This time Tam was with me; she had her blue dress on, the one I tore once when we were playing, and her hair was tied up in a scarf, the way she used to do when she wanted to annoy her family. Sometimes as we walked, though, it wasn’t Tam but a woman I didn’t know, old and dark and wrapped up in clothes made of patches of every color you could think of. We walked down the street and turned to see the Spire soaring up from its low hill. Tam tried to say something to me, but all that came out of her mouth was bubbles of air that drifted up between us, so she pressed her body up against mine.

Right then I woke up. The first gray cold light of dawn was starting to filter down through the forest. Berry was sound asleep and still wrapped up in his blanket, but he’d moved up against me, no doubt for the warmth. I lay there and thought about Tam, wondering what she’d made of her life since she had her baby and got into Circle. I didn’t know then, and I’ll certainly never know now, but I still wonder about it sometimes.

(To be continued...)