Twenty-Five: Ripples from an Old Stone

We decided to go on to Troy and Skeega first anyway, since we were closer, and for all we knew there was just as much chance of finding the way to Star’s Reach there as in Arksa. Berry and I opened our eyes about the time the stars were shutting theirs, shouldered our packs, and headed north out of Melumi about the time the sun came up. We’d said our goodbyes the night before and didn’t have a bill to pay at the guest dorm, so there wasn’t anything between us and Troy but a long walk.

We had a fair bit of money this time, though, partly from what Gray Garman gave me back in Shanuga that I hadn’t had to spend yet, and partly from a plump little sack of coins Jennel Cobey had one of his people run down to us before we left. Since the letter was safe in the jennel’s hands and the copy was safe in Melumi, I figured nobody would be following us and we didn’t need to run and hide the way we’d done on the road north from Shanuga. I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet, and so we went by the main road north to Naplis and then northeast by Fowain and Leedo to Troy. Most nights we stayed at inns or farmhouses that put out a sign to let travelers know they could get a bed and a breakfast, and there are ruinmen’s guild halls at Naplis, Fowain and Leedo, so all in all we had an easy time of it.

We also had a chance to ses a bit of the fellowship that you get on the main roads all over Meriga, which we missed on the backroads we’d used to get to Melumi in the first place. There are a lot of people who live on the road. Probably half the people in Meriga are farm folk who hardly ever go more than a few kloms from where they were born, and most of the rest work in crafts that don’t cover a lot more ground than that, but Plummer told me once that maybe one person in twenty makes a living by traveling, and most of them take to the road just as soon as the mud isn’t too bad and stay on it until the rains come down. Before we’d gone more than a day or two, certainly, the road we were on had plenty of travelers – farmers and traders with oxcarts loaded with goods, pilgrims on their way to one or another of the famous local shrines, messengers on horseback with ribbons tied around their right arms to show which jennel or cunnel they served, players with their instruments and actors with their costumes and props on the way from one town to another, drifters and grifters and people who had no particular reason to be on the road but just couldn’t stand the thought of staying put one more day.

For all that they’re on the road for every reason you can think of and some you probably can’t, travelers on the main roads more often than not treat each other like ruinmen treat each other, which is to say, pretty well. Oh, there are exceptions now and then, but if an oxcart gets a wheel stuck in the mud you can bet that anybody who’s nearby will come help give it a shove, and if the sun goes down and there isn’t an inn or a farmhouse in sight, whoever finds a good place to camp first builds a fire and waves to anyone else nearby to come on over, and before long there’ll be twenty or thirty people sharing whatever food or drink they happen to have with them, and keeping watch by turns through the night.

Not that there’s much to worry about on the roads nowadays. There are plenty of stories about the bad times after the Third Civil War, when gangs of soldiers who’d been turned loose after the fighting used to wait near the roads and kill anyone they could catch, but one of the presdens in my grandfathers’ time, I think it was, made it his job to hunt them all down and had troops of cavalry galloping all over Meriga until the roads were safe again. These days the worst thing that’s likely to happen to you is getting cheated by a dishonest innkeeper or beaten up in a tavern fight. There are some pretty doubtful characters on the roads, people you wouldn’t want to trust around your henhouse or your pretty daughter, but I only saw one time that somebody on the road stole something from somebody else who was traveling, and he got stripped naked and tossed into a patch of poison ivy for his pains.

That was a couple of years later, though, and halfway across Meriga. On the way north to Troy that year, I didn’t see anything like that. From Melumi to Naplis, Berry and I mostly walked alongside farm carts hauling grain from last season’s harvest to the Naplis grain markets, and the farmers were good honest folk, about as likely to steal something as they were to sprout wings. After Naplis, we got onto the main road from Sanloo up to Troy and the Genda border, and that meant a livelier crowd, but I can’t say they were less honest, and they were a good bit more friendly. Farm folk are no more comfortable around ruinmen than most people are, but plenty of road folk get the same treatment, and to them, ruinmen are just like anyone else on the road.

A day out of Naplis, we ended up walking with an elwus named Cash and his motor, a quick little man named Morey. Cash was was a quiet, lanky sort with sandy hair, though you wouldn’t know that when he put on his white elwus costume and his black wig and glasses and went up on stage, wiggling and singing songs and cracking jokes in that funny voice all the elwuses use. Berry and I got to see his act maybe twenty times, since that’s about how many farm towns we went through between Naplis and Leedo, and putting on a show at every farm town is how elwuses make a living. Cash was good, better than most of the elwuses we used to see in the Tenisi hill country where I grew up; he’d dance around and make like he was singing into the short black stick elwuses carry in one hand while Morey pedaled away at the mechanical box that played the music. Cash would always finish the show by saying, “And Ah’d like to thank Morey, mah motor,” and Morey would always say “Pro-motor,” drawing out the “pro.” I think it was a joke of theirs, though I never did learn the point of it.

They were good company on the road; they knew which inns were honest and which farmhouses had the best breakfasts, and when we camped together and Morey showed up first thing in the morning with a bunch of eggs from nowhere in particular, Berry and I didn’t ask any questions. After a drink or two, Cash used to tell stories about his travels, and Berry and I would tell ruinmen’s stories, and Morey would sit back and sip his whiskey and say nothing at all. Now and then we’d fall in with a bunch of players or actors who were going from farm town to farm town the way Cash and Morey were, though the next morning either they’d take a different route or we would. It happened once, at a little town called Poyen about halfway between Fowain and Leedo, that we arrived by one road just as a bunch of players showed up by another. It turned out they knew a bunch of elwus-tunes, so for once Cash got to do his singing and dancing with a band and a couple of other singers to back him, and it was quite a show. The farm folk loved it, and tossed a lot more money into Morey’s hat than usual, but split two ways it wasn’t as much as Cash or the players would have made on their own, so the next morning they left on their road and we left on ours, and it was back to Morey and the mechanical box.

When we got to Leedo, though, their road led east along the lakeshore and ours led north to Troy, so we said our goodbyes. I hated to see them go, but the way things turned out, it was probably just as well.

North of Leedo the main road runs a ways inland from the lakeshore, past pine woods and little farms and the very occasional town. Berry and I got to a town one afternoon fairly late, and had just decided to stop there for the night, when we came up to a crowd around the town hall. Somebody turned and looked at us, and called out, “Hey! A ruinman!”

The whole crowd went silent and turned to look at us. For a moment I was wondering whether Berry and I were going to have to dodge a riot, but nobody moved . Then somebody went into the town hall, and somebody else came out of it. The crowd let him past, and he walked right up to us: a soldier with a ribbon on his sleeve. “Sir and Mister?” he said. “Cunnel Darr wants to talk to you.”

We followed him through the crowd and into the town hall, which was big and plain and echoed like the inside of a drum. It took a bit for my eyes to get used to the dim light, and so I ended up bowing to somebody I couldn’t see while the soldier said, “Sir and Cunnel.”

“Good,” said the cunnel. I straightened up from the bow, and more or less saw him, a gray hard-faced man half bent from old age. “Your name, ruinman?”

“Trey sunna Gwen, Sir and Cunnel,” I told him. “Mister of the Shanuga ruinmen’s guild.”

One of the old man’s eyebrows went up. “Well.” Then: “You’ve come at a useful time. This man—” He motioned to one side of the hall with his head. “—was caught drilling a gas well.”

“Sir and Cunnel!” shouted the man, who was bald and burly and had shackles on his hands and feet. “I swear to you it’s not anything of the—” The cunnel moved one hand in a short sharp gesture like a knife cutting meat, and one of the soldiers next to the shackled man cuffed him into silence.

“A gas well,” the cunnel repeated, “or something that looks very much like one. I suppose you can tell one way or the other, ruinman.”

Of course I could, and I said so. Toward the end of the old world, when people were trying anything they could think of to keep their machines running, underground gas was one of the things a lot of them tried. Some of it went into pipes that ran across the countryside, and it’s a lucky ruinman who finds what’s left of one of them, for the metal and the machinery are usually worth plenty; some of it went into tanks on trucks, and those are worth finding, too; and some of it, especially toward the end, went straight from the ground into machinery in a building built right there on the spot. If the pipes are still there and the gas hasn’t all leaked away, one of those can blow you from here to Mam Gaia’s other side if you get careless or just plain unlucky, so any ruinman with a brain in his head knows how to test for gas and how to deal with a gas well that’s still got gas in it.

That’s how Berry and I ended up following the cunnel and his soldiers, a priestess, the prisoner, and most of the people who were milling around the town hall when we got there, out of town a mile or so to a rundown barn not far from a blacksmith’s shop at the end of a road. Inside the barn, next to a heap of gear of the sort you’d use to drill a well for water, an iron pipe with a heavy valve on the top of it stuck out of the ground.

The cunnel waved me over toward the pipe, and I nodded, got what I needed from my bag, and tested it. It’s an easy thing if you know where the gas might be. There are little strips of paper that turn blue if you get them wet and put them where there’s gas, and I had a little bottle of the strips; I took one out, spat on it, used it to make sure the thing wasn’t leaking gas with the valve closed, and then nudged the valve just a bit, to get the little faint hiss that tells you you’re not far from risking your life, then tapped it shut. By the time the hiss stopped the paper was bright blue.

“Sir and Cunnel,” I said, “it’s gas, all right.”

“It was an accident!” the prisoner shouted then. “We didn’t know we were going to hit gas. I was drilling for water—”

The cunnel gestured again, and a soldier cuffed the man across the face. “Of course,” said the cunnel in a bored voice. “Everyone drills for water inside a barn, and then just happens to forget that a well that finds gas has to be reported to the local magistrate. On pain of death. You do know that, of course.”

The prisoner fell to his knees. “Please, Sir and Cunnel, you must—”

Again the quick, bored gesture and the cuff across the face. “Must,” said the cunnel, “is not a word I am used to hearing.” He turned to the crowd. “Does anyone have any doubt of his guilt?

It wasn’t a pointless question. If anybody had said yes the cunnel would have had to call up a jury on the spot and hold a trial; that’s the law in Meriga; but nobody said a word. After a moment, the old man nodded once and said, “You know the penalty. Get some shovels, now.” He turned to me then and said, “Thank you, ruinman.”

It was as clear a dismissal as I’ve ever heard. “Sir and Cunnel,” I said, bowing, and left the barn as quickly as I could, so fast that Berry had to trot to keep up. Behind me I could hear the shovels biting into the ground, the priestess chanting a litany, and the man sobbing as they dug a pit to bury him alive.

I heard the details later, after we got to Troy. The man was a blacksmith, and one of his helpers had gone to the cunnel with word of the secret gas well. Maybe it was the price of charcoal for his forge, or maybe he wanted to be able to smelt alloys that a charcoal furnace won’t touch and add them to the iron in his tools to get a reputation. The helper didn’t say, but it was probably one or the other of those; it usually is when they catch a blacksmith using fossil fuels, which they do somewhere in Meriga every few years or so. Sometimes it’s someone from another craft, and they’ve got their own reasons, but those don’t matter; if they get caught, they get buried alive. I know the reasons for that as well as anyone, but knowing it isn’t the same thing as remembering the way the blacksmith’s voice sobbed and babbled as the scrape of the shovels and the slow patient drone of the litany marked the last minutes he’d ever have on the outside of Mam Gaia’s round belly.

We didn’t stay the night in that town after all; we kept walking until the sun went down, and just about the time we started looking for a camping place, Berry spotted a bright flash through the pines up ahead, and we hurried up the road by the day’s last light and found a dozen travelers sitting around a fire and starting to share out dinner. They welcomed us cheerily enough, and we settled into a place around the fire with a couple of traders up from Naplis and a troupe of actors who saw what was going on in the town we’d just passed and decided, sensibly enough, that there’d be no one interested in their play that day. We had a pleasant night and a good breakfast the next morning, and started toward Troy as soon as it was light enough to see the road.

It occurred to me as I was writing all this, here in my little room at Star’s Reach, that Cash the elwus and the blacksmith whose name I never did find out were both copying something from the old world. There were elwuses back before the old world ended, or at least that’s what I’ve always heard, just as there were plenty of people who used fossil fuels, back when there was more of them than little pockets of gas or little stripes of coal hidden away in the rock here and there.

There’s a difference, of course. Copy the elwuses and if you’re good at it, you get enough coins tossed into your motor’s hat that you can keep yourself comfortable; copy the people who used fossil fuels, and odds are you get buried alive. Here at Star’s Reach, we’re copying something else from the old world – I sometimes wonder if anybody ever does anything in Meriga nowadays that isn’t just ripples in a pond from some stone the ancients tossed into it – but whether it’s going to get us a hatful of coins or a shovelful of earth across our faces is hard to say.