Thirteen: Hunted

The next morning we all got up a little before the sun did, and I lent Cob a hand with the last pieces of metal that had to be loaded on the wagon while Sam and Berry got breakfast ready. It was a bright, clear day, good for travel. After we ate – it was good familiar ruinman’s fare, bread and bean soup and big mugs of chicory brew – Berry and I climbed on board the wagon and found places for our bags in among the metal, while Cob gave Sam instructions for the day and then swung up onto the seat in front and took the reins.

“Be a bit rough at first here,” Cob said over his shoulder as the horses started up the trail toward the road. “Hope you don’t mind.” He wasn’t lying, either. The wagon lurched and jolted its way up to the road, and Berry and I hung on as best we could. Finally we got onto the old road, and from then on it was pretty smooth going as wagons go. They say that the old roads used to be so smooth you could ride down one of them in one of their cars, faster than a horse can gallop, and not have to hang on to much of anything. I’m not sure I believe that; I’ve helped dig plenty of cars out of old ruins, and they all had handles on the inside for you to grab, and belts to keep you from being thrown out of your seat. Still, that’s what people say.

These days, of course, if a road’s still good enough to drive a wagon on it, that means either you’re very lucky or you’re on a road that’s been fixed up for the army not too long ago. We were lucky, or rather Cob was, because he had to get the metal from the old empty nuke out to buyers, and it would have been a mother to get done if there hadn’t been the road. As it was, Berry and I had to jump off a couple of times and help get the wagon across some difficult place or other.

Finally, though, we started passing farms, a few at first and then a lot of them, and the road got better in the rough sort of way that happens when country folk do it themselves. Some of the people in the fields waved to Cob, and he waved back, which surprised me; around Shanuga nobody but another ruinman will greet a ruinman, or give him the time of day. Then the fields gave way to houses and a scattering of shops around a big central market square, and we were in Lebna.

Cob drove the wagon straight to one corner of the market. There were a bunch of men sitting there playing cards, but they got up and put the cards away as soon as they saw Cob coming. Two of them were blacksmiths by the leather aprons they wore; I couldn’t place the rest, but I guessed they were craftworkers of one kind or another, looking for metal for their trades.

“Well now,” one of the blacksmiths said to Cob. “Got yourself some help, I see.”

He meant Berry and me, of course. “Nah,” Cob told him, “just a couple of ruinmen from Shanuga heading north.”

The whole bunch of them got very quiet, and I knew right then that word must have gotten out. The blacksmith who’d spoken turned to me, and said exactly what I thought he was about to say. “From Shanuga, eh? They say the ruinmen down there found something out o’ the usual.”

“News to me,” I told him. “What was it?”

“Some kind o’ paper about Star’s Reach.”

I used some hot language, then: “Come on.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Nothing like that turned up when I was there, but it’s been most of a month. Some folks have all the luck, I guess.”

I could see that the blacksmith didn’t believe a word of it, but he nodded after a moment, and went to look at Cob’s metal. Berry and I said our goodbyes to Cob and left him to his customers. There was a fair crowd there for the market, and plenty of sellers pitching everything from vegetables and ironwork to bolts of cloth and bottles of medicine, but we wove through the crowd got out of there just as fast as we could without seeming to hurry.

Lebna wasn’t that big of a town in the old days, and it’s a lot smaller now than it was; I’d spotted plenty of old concrete foundations in the pastures and open country we’d passed through on the way in. Still, the houses seemed to go on forever as Berry and I took a dirt road north out of town. It didn’t help that my mind was running full out the whole way. Word of the discovery couldn’t have gotten to Lebna without running down the Hiyo valley first. That meant that Luwul, where we’d hoped to cross the Hiyo River, would be full of the news, and so a likely place for trouble. We could go west or east and miss it, but I had no way of knowing which would be best, or whether either one might land us in an even worse place. That’s what ran through my mind, over and over again, while we kept walking and I tried not to imagine watchful eyes peeking out at us between the curtains of the houses we passed.

Finally we got into the farm country north of town, the houses got sparse, and loms out in the pastures turned their heads on their long necks to watch us go by. Forest filled the horizon like a green haze. once we got in among the trees, I knew, we’d have an easier time staying away from anyone who might decide to follow us, but they were still quite a ways off, and the road we were on wound from side to side as though it wasn’t in any kind of hurry to get where I wanted to go.

“Do you think—” Berry started, and then stopped; he’d seen the man up ahead just a moment after I did.

A farmer, for certain, or at least he looked like one; shirt and trousers of homespun, bare feet, straw hat, and a lazy look that could have had anything at all behind it. He could have been standing just like that, leaning up against a fence post, in the Tenisi hills where I was born. What got my hackles up, though, is that he just happened to be standing right where the road split into two, one branch going a little west of north, the other a little bit east.

“Afternoon,” I said to him as we came up to the fork.

“Afternoon,” he replied.

“D’you happen to know which road goes to Luwul?”

He nodded to the left hand fork. “That’s the one.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing. You two have a good day, now.”

We passed him by, and headed along the road to the left. Pretty soon it veered further left, then swung straight again on the far side of a clump of trees. I glanced back to make sure we were out of sight of the ford, and then around to make sure nobody else might be watching. “Now,” I said to Berry, “we figure out the fastest way to cut back across to the other road without being spotted.”

That’s what we did, too. A little further on a creek cut across the road; it had willows growing along the bank, all thick with leaves, and there weren’t any farmhouses or people in sight beyond it. As soon as we were past it, we ducked into the field and hurried across, staying close to the willows. It got us some mud on our boots, but a quarter of an hour later we were on the other road, and luck or Mam Gaia or something was with us; there was nobody else on the road just then, and the forest was close by.

As soon as we got under the trees, I said, “Okay, now we find a place to hole up for the rest of the day, someplace where we can see the road and not get seen.”

Berry took this in. “You think somebody’s after us.”

“I think there’s too good a chance of it. Those people at the Lebna market guessed what we’ve got with us. Bet you a mark to a mud-turtle, too, that that farmer wasn’t just standing there to hold up the fencepost.”

He thought about that, then grinned. “And he’ll send them down the road to Luwul.”

“If we’re lucky,” I said.

Rumble from the road ahead warned us, and we ducked off the road and hid in the bushes until the wagon rolled past. By the time it was gone, both of us had spotted a bit of gray concrete ruin on a low hill not far from the road, and once it was safe to move, we scrambled through the underbrush and climbed up to it. It wasn’t much, part of two walls rising out of four hundred years of dirt and fallen leaves, but there wasn’t any sign that other people were in the habit of going there, and it had a good view of the road down below. I went to take a look, saw the wagon rolling out of sight toward Lebna and a couple of farm folk heading toward a distant house

“Look at that,” Berry said from the other side of the ruin. I went over and looked where he was pointing, and damn if the other road wasn’t right out in plain sight away in the middle distance.

“You know,” he said after a moment, “I bet this is what Freddy felt like.”

Now of course I knew what he was talking about, but if anybody ever reads this, what’s the chance they’ll know the first thing about Freddy and Sam, and all the other people in the stories we tell in Meriga? Maybe they will, for all that. Plummer told me that all those stories came out of a big book that was written back in the old world, over on the other side of the ocean where the Arabs live now, and somebody whose name I don’t remember thought that whole book up out of his own head. Maybe he was right about that, but it seems like an awful lot for one person to think up.

Nobody I know ever got any of the stories out of a book, either, and no two storytellers tell them quite the same way. Of course there’s always the ring, and Goll and the black riders chasing Freddy all over the countryside, and the war and Doom Mountain and all, and then Ergon gets elected presden and everybody settles down happily; none of that changes. Still, I knew one storyteller who told it so that Ergon marries Erin the elf-woman, who he was in love with since he was a boy, and another who told it so that Ergon falls in love with Eywin and marries her, so Erin ends up getting together with Ferrem. To this day I can’t decide which version I like better, and if one of them’s in the book and the other isn’t, I’m not sure I’d want to know.

But Berry was right. No matter who tells it, one of the best parts of the story is when Freddy and his friends are ducking and running through the woods with the black riders hot after them, and he was right, too, that we might be doing the same thing before long.

It was right about then that I saw something moving along the other road, the one to Luwul the farmer sent us down. Trees got in the way, and then all of a sudden they came out into a clear patch: five riders on horses, riding hard. Farmers don’t ride that way, and I didn’t know of any reason why soldiers would be in the middle of Tucki when there was no fighting anywhere nearby. That didn’t leave a lot of options.

“There’s your black riders,” I said to Berry. He’d seen them, too, and watched them with wide scared eyes until they were out of sight.