Thirty-Five: The Ghost Beneath The Spire

South of Sanloo, the Misipi winds its way toward the sea in big sweeping arcs, as though it knows where it’s going but isn’t in any kind of hurry to get there. The riverboats do the hurrying, or try to, but there’s only so fast you can go upstream breasting the current, and on the way downstream you’re going to be stopping at every little town anyway, so there’s only so much hurrying you can do. That’s the way it felt to me, certainly, as the Jennel Mornay paddled its way toward Memfis and the last part of our trip down the river went past.

That’s not to say there was any lack of things to look at and think about on the way. For one thing, the Misipi has little gray whales in it—little, at least, by whale standards, or so I’ve been told, though the one that came up for air a few dozen meedas from the Jennel Mornay didn’t look that small to me. Back in the old world, there weren’t any whales in the Misipi; there weren’t many left anywhere in Mam Gaia’s waters, of course, and the Misipi had so many poisons in it toward the end that there wasn’t much living in it at all; but after the old world ended and the seas rose, some gray whales that managed to hide from the hunters through the last dark days of the old world found their way to the mouths of the Misipi and liked the scenery or something, and they or their children’s children got used to fresh water and found places to live upriver, and so there they are. The boatmen say it’s good luck to see one, and not even a Jinya pirate will hurt one—there are some things the priestesses don’t even need to preach about, you just don’t do—and so they get along pretty well.

It was the third day after we left Altan, I think, that we saw the whale. I was still mulling over what Plummer had said, about knowledge and the places it was kept that he wasn’t willing to name; I was wondering when I’d see him again, and whether he’d intended us to meet somewhere near Cago, and if that was so, why; and the brown water splashing around the hull of the Jennel Mornay and the green of the riverbanks way off to either side didn’t seem particularly interested in giving me any answers just then. I thought about Star’s Reach and the hope Berry and I were chasing down the river to Memfis, but there weren’t any answers for me there, either.

That evening, about the time the sun went down and the Jennel Mornay tied up for the night—it was in a riverside town named Jirido, I think—I got to talking with Slane about Memfis. I don’t remember whether he brought it up or I did, but it was probably me; I knew we weren’t that many days away from it, and I remembered what Slane said about it when we first met. Not that I needed the warning; Memfis has a reputation and then some.

“Not to worry,” Slane said. He had a glass of whiskey in one hand, and was leaning up against the rail on the cabin deck with nothing on the other side but dark water and the lights of Jirido. “I promised Plummer I’d make sure you and the boy get to the ruinmen’s hall in one piece, and I’ll do that.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he laughed and punched me on the shoulder with his free hand. “You just follow me, you’ll stay safe. You been through Cago?”

“Not to speak of. We got a canal boat south of town.”

He nodded. “Smart. Cago’s near as big as Memfis, and near as rough. Both of ‘em have too many people and too much money, but in Cago it’s all Genda money and in Memfis it’s all from Meyco. You know about the river trade?” I didn’t, and he gestured at me with his whiskey. “Well, that’s about half of what keeps Meriga going these days. Genda’s got stuff to sell to Meyco and the countries down south, Meyco’s got stuff to sell Genda and the countries across the Lannic and the North Ocean, and shipping it up and down the Misipi is a lot safer than sending it around by the Gulf and the Lannic and letting the Jinya pirates have a shot at it. So Cago gets one end of the trade and Memfis gets the other, and a lot of people make money off the deal. Me, for example.”

“What do you do?”

“Buy and sell. Bunch of stuff down there on the cargo deck is mine, and it’ll be going to Meyco pretty much as soon as we hit Memfis and I find a buyer. Pick up some Meycan goods then, something with a market up in Ilanoy or what have you, and it’s back up the river.” He smiled, or half his mouth did; the other half didn’t move much, ever. “Beats the stuffing out of pushing a plow through Aiwa mud, which is what I’d be doing if I’d followed my daddy’s footsteps.”

“Can’t argue there,” I said. “I’d have been doing the same thing in Tenisi.”

“There you go. But Dell had other ideas for me.” He laughed. “Dell and Plummer. Not sure which one’s the stranger.”

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. I’d gotten used to thinking that nobody anywhere would talk about Plummer. “You’ve known Plummer a long time?”

“Half my life. He got me out of a scrape in Sanloo—I was a dumb kid. We’ve been friends since then. I see him every couple of years.”

“He’s got a lot of friends.”

“You ever met the ones that don’t have names?” He was watching me with that look of his that seemed casual and wasn’t.

I don’t think he could have said anything else that would have startled me more. “A few of them,” I said after a good long moment.

He took a swig of his whiskey. “He ever tell you anything about ‘em?”

“Not a word.”

“Me neither.” Maybe he was dodging the question, but I didn’t think so just then. “I just wondered. How’d you meet him?”

So I told Slane the story about how Berry and I met Plummer on the road north to Luwul, and we got to talking about something else from there, I don’t remember what. Finally we went back inside, and I headed for my cabin while he headed for another drink.

Berry was sound asleep in his bunk when I came into the cabin, and didn’t show any sign of waking up, so I sat on one of the little folding chairs at the little table up against the little window that showed me the night and the river. I thought about Plummer, and about Slane, and about Star’s Reach, and after a while when I was sure Berry wasn’t going to wake up I turned on the little lamp over the table and spent a while writing a letter to Jennel Cobey. I thought he’d probably want to know where we were and how the search for Star’s Reach was coming. I didn’t yet know that we were going to become friends, or that we were going to travel to Star’s Reach together, or how that journey was going to end; there was a mother of a lot I didn’t know yet, and though it was just a few years ago I can’t remember that trip down the Misipi without thinking about how foolish I was, and how little I guessed about all the things that were going on all around me.

Still, I had a hint, and it came that night. After I’d gotten the letter more or less finished and the ink was dry, I turned out the light and got undressed and went to bed. I thought I’d have trouble sleeping, but the slow rocking of the riverboat and the sound of Berry’s quiet breathing and I don’t know what else put me to sleep right away, and somewhere toward the end of the night I dreamed about Deesee.

It was like the other dreams I’ve written about already. I was walking through the streets that were as wide as rivers, between the tall pale buildings with windows that were all the same size and shape and color, with fish swimming past me and my breath going up in bubbles and the surface of the water like a silver sky high above. I knew I had to meet someone at the Spire, and I knew it was important, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. I went down one street after another, turned this way and that, but all I found was more tall pale buildings. Then, when I’d just about given up, I saw a little passage between two of the buildings, and went through it onto green grass, and the Spire stood tall and pale as a ghost on a low grassy hill in front of me.

I hurried up the hill and got to the foot of the spire. The person I was supposed to meet was waiting there for me. He wore the heavy stiff clothes that soldiers wore in the old world, and the funny hat with a flat top and a black bill above the eyes that jennels and cunnels wore back then; his hair was cut short, and his face was long and hard and tense with worry. As soon as he caught sight of me, he hurried across the grass and took hold of both my hands, and said two words, but I couldn’t hear them; all that came out of his mouth was bubbles that floated up toward the surface of the water above us.

He said them again, and all of a sudden I realized what they were: he was trying to say “Star’s Reach.” It was then that I recognized him. I’d seen his face once before, after all, or what was left of it after better than four hundred years buried in the Shanuga ruins. He was the man whose corpse was there with the letter I’d found, the one that sent me on my journey.

I must have screamed then, because all at once it was morning, and Berry was shaking me. “Trey? Are you all right?”

I blinked and stared at him, and then the dream let go of me and I realized where I was. “Just a dream,” I said. “Dreaming about a ghost.”

He gave me a horrified look, and right away I wished I hadn’t said anything. Maybe it’s just a Tenisi thing; I’ve never heard anybody mention it away from Shanuga or the hill country where I grew up, but there it’s said that if you dream about a ghost, it means that somebody’s going to try to kill you. “Well, not really a ghost,” I said after a moment. “That soldier we found down in the ruins with the letter.”

Berry nodded, as though that made it less of a bad sign. We got dressed and went to breakfast, and I tried to put the dream out of my mind.

The days after that all pretty much run together in my mind. We went past the place where the Hiyo river flows into the Misipi, where there used to be a fair sized town and isn’t one any more because of the flooding ever year when the rains come. After that the Misipi got even wider than it was before, and as often as not we could see the sun flashing on lakes and marshes to either side, sometimes a good long distance away. Towns got few and we stopped less often, though Slane told me over dinner one night that there were houses aplenty wherever the ground was high enough that they wouldn’t be washed out to sea by floodwaters. It was rich country away from the river, he said, and the farmers grew rice and rubber trees and all kinds of fruit you don’t see further north. Come harvest they’d bring their crops down to the Misipi and the Jennel Mornay would spend a month or so nosing up to the shore, loading up as much as would fit on the cargo deck, and taking it all down to Memfis or up to Sanloo, depending on where the price was better that week. I sat back and sipped my beer and listened, and found myself thinking about what it would be like to live that kind of life, the way I’d thought about working a canal boat when we’d been on our way from Cago to Proo.

Still, I had a place to find first, if I could. I rewrote my letter to Jennel Cobey that night and sealed it up, so it could be mailed to him as soon as we got to Memfis, and after that all I could do was wait until the Jennel Mornay got where it was going.

That happened finally late one afternoon. We’d been warned, so Berry and I were out on the front of the cabin deck along with most of the other cabin passengers. It was as good a day as you could ask for, with clouds drifting past, the sun slanting down, and the Misipi wide and smooth and brown, and there off in the distance was Memfis: a blur along the edge of the sky at first, and then a city so big you could have dropped Shanuga into it a dozen times over and not noticed; and off beyond it, the Misipi spread and opened into a line of silver that had to be the Gulf. We got closer, and the air smelled of salt and tar and a hundred other things I’d never smelled before; and finally the Jennel Mornay blew its whistle, right behind us, loud enough to make me put my hands over my ears, and we came up to the Memfis levee.

Slane was as good as his word, too. He had some business to do with a buyer from Meyco, as he’d said, but once that was done he got me and Berry and took us to the Memfis ruinmen’s hall, which was just north of town. I lived there off and on for the next two years and a bit, so my memories of that first trip there have a lot of others laid down over the top of them. As best I remember, the trip there was mostly a blur of narrow streets and crowds, and the quarter around the ruinmen’s hall was practically big and bustling enough to be a city all its own, with the houses of the ruinmen and the burners and the other trades nobody wants inside the city walls all cheek by jowl with each other and with the taverns and shops and markets that sell to them.

The Memfis ruinmen’s hall is one huge dome made of triangles, most of them metal but some of them glass to let light get in or let ruinmen look out. When we got there, Slane gave it a long dubious look, then laughed and said, “Damn if I’d stay in a place like that, but it looks about right for you two. You see Plummer any time soon, tell him he owes me a favor.”

We promised we would, and thanked him, and said our goodbyes, and he strolled out of my life. For all I know he’s still working the riverboats, buying and selling and making a few spare marks now and then with crooked dice, but I’ve never seen him since. I wonder if he’d be surprised to know that I’m sitting here right now at Star’s Reach, as the night settles in, and writing about him.

He got us safely to the ruinmen’s hall, as I said, and once Berry and I went in and identified ourselves and got a proper ruinman’s welcome, with maybe a bit thrown in because they knew perfectly well who we were and why we were there, I felt safe. I hadn’t quite forgotten about the dream, but I didn’t think much about what that kind of dream’s supposed to mean, and I went about my first couple of days in Memfis as though nothing of the sort had happened. That might have brought the story I’m telling to a very sudden end, because the dream was right: someone was going to try to kill me, right there in Memfis, and it was only a few days after I got there that it happened.