Thirty-One: Mule's Pace

I’d decided not to tell Plummer that Berry and I had someone following us, but we got to talking about the trip west from Troy, and the moment I mentioned the road we’d taken along the northern edge of Inyana he gave me one of his sidelong looks and said, “I take it you had unwelcome company.”

“More or less,” I admitted.

“Riders? I recall some difficulty with them on the road to Luwul.”

“No, just one man on foot.”

Plummer considered that for a moment. “If you would like to lose him, there might be a way. Still, all in good time. Where are you going next?” I told him, and he nodded once. “If the two of you have any interest in company on the trip, there might indeed be a way. Sanloo’s the next place I need to be.”

“How’s the medicine business?” Berry asked him then.

“Oh, prosperous as always. I’m pleased to report that the good folk of Hiyo and Inyana are less hostile to fine natural elixirs than their Tucki equivalents.” He sat back, glanced past me just for a moment, and then smiled. “We should talk about that later, however,” he said, and his hand moved: one finger on the edge of the table, and then four. “Tomorrow, perhaps?”

We said our goodnights, and he got up and went to the stairs out front. Berry and I finished our dinners and got up, and I made sure to turn around a little more quickly than usual. Sure enough, somebody was leaving through a door at the back of the common room, and I couldn’t be sure but it certainly looked like our black rider.

Up in our room, Berry and I looked at each other for a long moment. “The only question I’ve got,” Berry said finally, “is whether Plummer’s showed up by chance or not.”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I’m inclined to trust him, though I know that might be a big mistake.”

“I know.” Then: “But it probably wouldn’t hurt to have that conversation.”

We waited a while, until the hall outside our room was dead silent, and then I went to the door and opened it as casually as I could, as though I was headed to the washroom. No one was watching. One, four meant room fourteen, and that wasn’t too far away from our room; the trick was to make sure nobody realized both of us were going someplace, and that’s something every ruinman’s prentice knows how to do. Whenever two or three or half a dozen prentices want to go somewhere in their mister’s house where only one was supposed to go: you walk soft and match your footsteps to the others who are with you, so the mister and the senior prentices only hear one set of footsteps. Now of course they did the same thing when they were younger, so it’s a bit of a game; if you do it well enough to fool them, you can usually get away with whatever it is, even if they find out about it later on.

This was no game, but Berry and I both knew the way of it, and went down the hall right in step with each other, past Plummer’s door as far as the washroom, then went back to the door slow and soft as air so nobody would hear us. I tapped on the door—one, four—and a moment later Plummer opened it, beamed, and waved us silently in.

We made plans in a whisper; Plummer left the room to get the things we were going to need, and came back most of an hour later with a big cloth bag. Berry went to get our gear, making less noise than your ordinary mouse; the two of us changed our clothes, and then we climbed out Plummer’s window into the stableyard behind the inn and followed him into the night. After that most of what I remember was hurrying through dark alleys, trying to keep close to Plummer, as he led us on a zigzag path that seemed to go on for kloms and kloms.

Finally we stopped. I could see next to nothing but stars sparkling above us; the moon was down, and a dim light came from a little window in what looked like a low flat-roofed shack just ahead. Plummer whispered to Berry and me to wait, and then went to the shack and tapped on what must have been a door. The light vanished; I heard the door creak open and then shut again. In the silence that followed I heard an odd faint sound that finally turned into the murmur of moving water.

The door creaked again, and then Plummer was motioning us forward. I found my way through it by feel, and let myself be guided to a bench by someone I couldn’t see. Berry came through the door, black against the dim starlight, and then whoever it was pulled the door shut again. A moment later, light: a dim lamp in the middle of the ceiling, revealing a tidy little room with a stove in one corner, shelves and cupboards here and there, a table in the middle and a little window in each wall.

“Well,” said the fourth person in the little room, a stocky gray-haired man in rough work clothes. “You’ll do, no question. You’ve all eaten? Fair enough. Get some sleep while you can; we’ll be going at first light.” He made a gesture toward a low door like a hatch. I thanked him—I was pretty tired by then—and stooped to get through the door; on the other side was an even smaller room with four bunks, stacked two to a side, with a straw-filled mattress and a blanket on each. That was enough for me; I found a place for my gear, got settled in one of the bunks, and fell asleep right away.

When I woke up, it took me a long moment to remember why I was sleeping in clothes that weren’t ruinman’s leathers. About the time I got awake enough to figure that out, I noticed that there was a good bit of light coming in around the sides of the door, and remembered what the man had said about starting before the sun was up. The other three bunks were empty, and I wondered for a moment whether Berry and Plummer had somehow managed to leave me behind.

Then I noticed that the room was moving—rolling just a bit from side to side. I rubbed my eyes and laughed, and went to the door. The room on the other side was empty and the door to the outside was open, but that didn’t worry me; I could see the green bank of a canal sliding slowly past a few meedas from the door.

Outside the cabin, the sun was splashing its light down on the canalboat, the water of the canal, and the banks and farms to either side. The man who’d welcomed us last night was on the towpath up ahead, next to a gray mule who plodded along the way as patient as only mules can be; the towrope ran back from the mule’s collar to the front end of the boat—the bow, I should say; I learned that word and half a dozen other bits of boat talk over the days that followed. The cabin I’d taken for a shack the night before was right up near the aft end, a little stable for whichever mule wasn’t working was just behind the bow, and between them was the long low body of the boat, lined with hatches that let into the hold.

Plummer was sitting on the roof of the cabin when I came out, saw me, and slid down from his place with a grace you don’t expect from an old man. “Good morning!” he said. “If you’re considering food, there’s bread and soup in the kitchen—the galley, I should say—and some quite acceptable apples.”

I thanked him and said, “Where are we?”

“Our captain,” and he motioned with his head at the man beside the mule up ahead of us, “calls it the Calsag channel. If I gather correctly, it runs from Lake Mishga south of Cago out to the main Cago Canal west of here, which will take us to the Ilanoy River and the first steamboat south.”

“Good,” I said. “Thank you again—this is pretty clever.”

“Most people react to being followed by hurrying.” Plummer gestured ahead, to where the mule and the captain plodded slowly on. “Most people who follow others, if they lose their target, count on that, and hurry to catch up. Fall behind, and most of the time you won’t be found.”

Even though he was looking away from me, it felt like he was watching me as he said that. I had no idea why, or what he wanted me to say or not say. “You do that a lot?”

“Now and again.”

“I guess selling medicine’s a risky business.”

That got me a quick unreadable look back over his shoulder. “It can be.”

The conversation didn’t go anywhere else, so I went back inside and had some of the bread and soup and one of the apples, and washed up. Afterwards, I went out again just as we got to a lock. There was a line of canal boats waiting there, so we joined it, and sat there while two boats at a time went up and two more going the other way came down.

The captain came aft as soon as he’d gotten the mules settled in the stalls up front. “Morning,” he said. “You ever handle a mule?”

“You find me anybody from the Tenisi hills who didn’t,” I told him, “and I’ll buy you a drink.”

That got me a nod and the kind of quick half-smile one working man gives to another. “Fair enough. When we get going again, I’d like you to spell me; your boy hasn’t worked with mules, but he’s good on the rudder—and so’s our other passenger.”

I remembered just in time that Plummer’s friends didn’t use names. “Sure. Anything I ought to know?”

“Just keep Sal on the towpath and we’ll be fine.”

By the time we were in the lock, I’d gone forward, gotten introduced to Sal the mule, sorted out which of us was boss, and got her harnessed up. Once we were ready to move again, Sal and I headed down the towpath, and pretty quick she settled into the same steady plod as the other mule, whose name was Josey. I got to know both of them pretty well over the days that followed, because that’s how I paid my way down the Cago Canal. Night and day, the boat kept moving at mule speed, a couple of boatlengths behind the boat ahead and in front of the boat behind, and night and day the captain and I spelled each other, four hours on and four hours off.

The only breaks in that slow pace were when we lined up at a lock, on the one hand, and when we pulled into a wide place to load or unload something at one of the little towns that lined the canal, on the other. That was a break only in a manner of speaking, because it was me and Berry who did the loading and unloading, and none of it was particularly light. We hauled out kegs of nails and wood screws, crates of shovel and hoe and rake heads, all the metal parts and machinery for a wind turbine some farm family had saved up their marks to buy, and boxes that had stocky brown jugs of Genda whiskey in them; we replaced it all with barrels of apples, bottles of cider, and sacks of grain from Ilanoy farms. Still, what ruinmen haul on the job is no lighter.

All considered, it was a pretty good time, and the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about canal boats before I’d started the trip gave it a bit of interest, too. There aren’t a lot of canals down in Tenisi, but they’re all over the northern part of Meriga, from Neyork west all the way to the Misipi River. I asked Plummer about that once, when we were sitting on the roof of the cabin and Berry and the captain were doing their half of the work.

“The canals” They’re quite old,” he said. “They came before the old world, or what most people remember as the old world. Most of them were abandoned when fossil fuels came to power everything, and had to be dug out and fitted with locks again. That started after the Third Civil War, and it’s still going on; if I recall correctly, there are two canals being reopened in Hiyo as we speak.”

“That was generous of them,” I said. “The ancients, I mean.”

He glanced at me, took a long swig from his whiskey bottle. “As far as anyone knows, they never thought twice about it. They no longer needed the canals, and—” A shrug. “That was that.”

“No, I meant it. At least they dug the things out in the first place.”

“I suppose that’s—“ Plummer stopped halfway through the sentence, and a moment later I saw why. There were soldiers, a long line of them, crossing a big stone bridge up ahead of us. We got off the roof—you have to get down most times when a canal boat goes under a bridge—and watched the soldiers march past as we got closer to the bridge.

We were almost under it when the end of the line came past, and there was a captin on horseback right at the back. He glanced at us, looked up and down the boat, then looked straight at me. “You with the hat,” he said. (I was wearing one, a cheap straw hat I’d bought for a couple of coins in one of the little towns along the way.) “Care to make a better wage than you’re getting now? The jennel’s looking for soldiers.”

We had enough soldiers in Tenisi that I knew what to say. “Born with a bad foot, sir and captin. I can just about keep up with a mule.”

He considered that. “Too bad. If you have any friends who might be interested, tell them Jennel Tarl’s hiring, a hundred marks for signing even if they’ve never touched a gun before.”

“I’ll tell ‘em, sir and captin,” I said, and the man nodded and spurred his horse after the line of marching men.

The damp black shadows under the bridge slid over us then. After we came out the other side, I got back onto the roof of the cabin and looked over my shoulder. “I wonder what that was about.”

“Something we’ll see quite often in the next few years, I fear,” Plummer said. He drank more whiskey. “An aging Presden and no heir in sight is a recipe for trouble, and that means soldiers: for the loyal, for the ambitious, for those who simply hope to survive. And when she dies...”

He wasn’t looking at me that time, either, but I had the same feeling again as though he was watching me, seeing how I would react. I didn’t have the least idea what to say, and I didn’t really want to say much of anything, either. What Plummer had said a bit earlier about the Third Civil War suddenly made me notice that my time was a lot better than fifty or a hundred years ago or, well, pretty much any time since the old world started to come crashing down; not that far back, there hadn’t been long lines of canal boats moving iron and apples and grain from one side of Meriga to the other, and for that matter there hadn’t been enough iron and apples and grain, or much of anything else, for a lot of people all through that time. When Sheren died and left the Presden’s office for others to fight over, I wondered, would it be back to that? I didn’t want to think about it just then, but the idea was hard to chase from my mind. As I write all this, here at Star’s Reach, it still is.