It took Berry and I a couple of weeks, as I wrote earlier, to finish going through the papers from the Skeega ruinmen. Every couple of days we found something that mentioned the White River Transport Facility, but it wasn’t until we’d read most of what they’d left at Troy Tower that we got the records from the seasons when the Skeega ruinmen worked on it.
It was late in the afternoon, and I’d spent nearly the whole day reading the dullest kind of report a ruinman can file with the guild: here’s where it was, here’s when we worked on it, and all we found was concrete we cracked to get the iron inside. That’s what you find more often than not in the ruins of small towns and suburbs, because a lot of people kept living in those straight through the end of the old world; the small towns stayed small towns and bits and pieces of the suburbs turned into small towns themselves, and the people who lived there stripped old buildings for anything they could use long before ruinmen got to work there. So that’s what I’d been reading, one report after another from the small towns near Skeega, and then I pulled out another stack and nearly dropped it, because it said WHITE RIVER TRANSPORT FACILITY right across the top.
That was the most exciting thing about that stack of paper, though. The place was a truck depot in the years before the Second Civil War, when there were lots of little rebellions catching fire here and there all over Meriga and there weren’t enough soldiers or fuel to stomp on all of them. That’s all it was: lots of trucks, big round fuel tanks to keep them fed, and a bunch of long low bulletproof buildings for the clerks who managed the trucks and the soldiers who guarded the fuel. Most of it got burned by rebels toward the end of the Second Civil War, and it was abandoned and used by squatters afterwards, so the papers that might have sent us on our way were long gone. The ruinmen who dug the place up found a whole mess of buried pipes, and made a lot of money selling the metal, but that didn’t do Berry and me any good.
After we’d finished reading all of it, we sat there for a little while, and neither one of us said a thing. “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess we go to Memfis, then.”
Berry grinned. “I was hoping.”
I thought about routes, and added up the money I had. It would be a long walk, unless—
“You know,” I said then, “we could go from here to Cago.”
His eyebrows went up. “And from Cago?”
“Across to the Misipi, and down by riverboat from there.”
That got me an open mouth, and then another grin. “I always wanted to ride a riverboat someday.”
“Get ready,” I told him. “We can get out of here tomorrow, and get to the Misipi in a couple of weeks.”
That’s pretty much what we did, too. We said our goodbyes to the old ruinmen who lived at Troy Tower at dinner, shared another glass of Genda whiskey with Tashel Ban that night, got up before the sun did and headed west down the Skeega road.
We weren’t quite alone on the road, but it seemed close to that sometimes. The lake schooners go around the north end of Mishga from Troy to Cago, and when the winds are good it’s at least as fast as walking there and a lot more comfortable. All the cargo goes by boat, too, because it’s cheaper and safer than loading it on a wagon and hoping for the best. So most of what you get on the Mishga roads are farmers heading to market, with a few players or an elwus walking with them just to add a bit of color to it all. That made for less trouble finding places to stay the night, and it was also the reason we figured out that we were being followed.
That happened just west of Ipsee. We took the wrong fork of the road there, and got most of the way to Anarba before we had the chance to ask a local farmer for directions and found out that we’d made a mistake. That meant a couple of hours on rough farm roads going south, but we finally made it back to the straight road to Cago and got to a little town, a place called Leen, just before sunset. Leen has all of one place where travelers can spend the night, a big farmhouse that’s probably going to give it up and become a tavern in a few more years. It’s already got a big sign out front, and the front room and dining room have been knocked together into a space big enough to feed a pretty large party; it’s just a matter of time before the bar goes in and the fields get sold or leased to somebody else.
I hired a room there, we got the road dust off us, and then we went down to the big room out front and saw about some dinner. The place was still enough of a farmhouse to cook up a meal that would make a fieldhand comfortable after a long harvest day, and so the two of us were sitting back and feeling very full when the door banged open and a man came in: just a plain traveler in dusty clothes, with the kind of bland ordinary face you’d have a hard time remembering from one day to the next. The woman who ran the place went over to him, and I could hear about every third word as he hired a room and got a meal ordered. All the while he was talking to her, though, he kept looking past her, across the room, at Berry and me.
That’s when I realized that I’d seen his face before, though I couldn’t remember where. He might have noticed that I was watching him, because he stopped looking at me, and then a minute or two later he was on his way up the stairs to his room. The woman who ran the farmhouse went back to the kitchen. I turned to Berry, and his face had that blank look he gets when he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s noticed something.
“Sir and Mister,” he said very quietly. By that time, as I mentioned earlier, he only used my title for other people’s benefit, or for a joke, or when he wanted to say something important.
I figured I knew this time which it was. “The man who just came in.”
A quick nod. “He’s following us. We passed him on the road to Anarba today.”
I considered that for a while, and couldn’t think of any good reason why somebody else would make the same double-back we did, and end up at the same place. I nodded and said, “We can talk in a bit,” and he nodded back and put his attention into finishing up the last of his dinner.
Once we got up to our room and the door was locked, Berry said, “I don’t think he was following us before Troy, but I can’t say for sure.”
“The roads from Melumi were pretty crowded, but I don’t think I saw him,” I said.
“If he wasn’t—” He didn’t go on, but I knew what he was thinking. The roads in Meriga are about as safe these days as they’ve been since the end of the old world, but every so often you hear of someone with valuables being robbed or worse, and noticing that you’re being trailed by some member of a gang who simply makes sure you’re where they want you to be is supposed to be one of the few warnings you’re likely to get.
All of a sudden, I thought of the riders who had followed us north to Luwul. It didn’t seem likely at first that there was a connection, but as I thought about it there in the farmhouse in Leen, the idea was hard to shake.
“Then we’ll dodge him the way we dodged the riders,” I said.
Berry looked up at me with a grin. “Any idea where we can find Plummer? He’d know what to do.”
We both laughed, and didn’t think anything more of it.
We might have gone ahead as we did in Tucki and travel by night, but that end of Mishga is too thickly settled for that; we’d have been spotted in no time, and the whole countryside would be talking about the two ruinmen who were hiding in the dark. Instead, we left the farmhouse early the next morning, and got in among farmers from a little town nearby who were on their way to the market at another small town whose name I forget, twenty kloms or so down the road. We stuck with them right to the market town, and didn’t leave the town the next morning until we’d found another group of travelers who were going the way we were.
That’s more or less how we traveled all the way to Cago. The first few days we didn’t see any trace of the man we’d spotted at Leen, and I’d just about begun to wonder whether the whole thing was a mistake, when Berry caught sight of him on the edge of the crowd at the market at Jonsul, and let me know where to look. He was turning away by the time I found him, but it was the same man, I was certain of that.
We caught sight of him again every two or three days from there to Cago. Once we got near the Inyana border, just to be sure, we veered off on a side road when we were sure no one was looking and crossed down to another road running the same way across the very northern edge of Inyana. Sure enough, by the time we got to Sowben, there he was again, watching as we got into town at the end of a long day walking alongside a wagonload of metal from an old airport outside of Elcart that the ruinmen there had sold to a local metal merchant.
By that time we were close enough to Cago that there wasn’t much point in making any more detours. Berry and I kept on the Inyana road, staying with the metal merchant’s wagon and talking shop with him and his prentices, partly because there’s safety in numbers and partly because they were good company and it was pleasant to spend time with people who knew most of the same things we did and shared in another part of the same work. Still, that meant that the man with the bland face had no trouble at all keeping track of us.
We spotted him a couple of times in the days that followed, never more than a glimpse here and there. To this day I don’t know if he hadn’t realized that we were onto him, or if he knew it, and showed himself to us now and then just to keep us on our toes. We kept waiting for a gang to show up, but none ever did.
Finally one morning we got to the edge of the Cago ruins, and the road veered south a bit to stay clear of them. Cago was a big city in the old world, the biggest still above water anywhere in Meriga, and even though ruinmen had been digging into the ruins there about as long as they’d been busy anywhere but Troy, there are still plenty of buildings standing, most of them close up against the shore of Lake Mishga. It’s the only place I know where you can get an idea of what the drowned cities of the coast must have been like before the seas rose, just ruin after ruin as far as your eyes will reach.
Most places in Meriga, the roads stay as far away from the ruins as they can, but south and east of Cago you don’t have much choice unless you want to go deep into Ilanoy farm country, so the road runs right up under the ruins. Berry and I and the metal merchant and his prentices had a fine time talking about the buildings we passed and what the local ruinmen found the last season and all. Most of the other people on the road hurried along past us and gave the ruins nervous looks over their shoulders, as though a robot was about to come lurching out from between two heaps of brick that used to be factories and butter us all across the pavement. Most people nowadays are like that; they’re glad to buy the metal we salvage and even gladder to have somebody taking the risks you run when you’re cleaning up what the old world left behind, but they don’t like to think about it much, and when you walk alongside what’s left of Cago you pretty much have to think about it.
We walked most of a day alongside those ruins, and weren’t to Cago yet by the time the sun went down. We’d just about gotten to a town called Munsa then; the metal merchant had friends in the business a little further on and wanted to get to their place that night, but Berry and I were tired, and so we said our goodbyes and went to find a place to stay in Munsa. There was only one, a big comfortable inn, and it still had rooms to hire, so I handed over some coins and we did the usual, upstairs to our room to wash off the road dust, downstairs to the big room to get a meal. The room was a cramped little place without a window and the food wasn’t half so good as you get in Inyana farmhouses along the road, but I didn’t mind; I was tired, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of bread and bean soup and a place to sleep on the ground.
The common room was mostly empty when we got there. We sat down and called for our dinners, and I was about halfway through mine when all at once Berry nudged me hard in the side with one of his elbows. I tried not to let anything show on my face, which wasn’t too easy, since Berry has sharp elbows; still, nobody seemed to have noticed when I looked up from my food and gave the room a lazy glance. I expected to see the man who’d been following us, and didn’t. It took a moment before I realized that the only face in the room that was turned toward me was one I recognized.
By then he had seen me as well, and came over to the table where Berry and I were sitting: an old man with just a trace of white hair around his ears and eyeglasses as round as moons. “A very good evening to you both,” he said. “I hope you won’t mind if I join you?”
“Not at all,” I told him. “It’s a long way from the road to Luwul, Plummer.”
That got me a smile I couldn’t read at all. “True indeed,” he said, and sat down across the table from me. “A very long way.”
I’d half 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 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 the man who was following us.
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 tend to trust him, though I know that might be a 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. Berry went to get our gear, making less noise than your ordinary mouse; Plummer went and got something that I later figured out was clothing, 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 curtained 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 pallet 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 where I was. 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, and 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 body of the boat, with hatches here and there that let into the hold. Berry was aft, handling the rudder, when I came out, and Plummer was sitting on the roof of the cabin. Both of them were dressed in the sort of cheap work clothes you expect to see on a boatman.
Plummer slid down from his place with a grace you don’t expect from an old man. “Good morning!” he said. “There are clothes a little more suitable than your leathers back in the cabin, and I recommend you try them on. 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 quite often 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, washed up, and got out of my ruinman’s leathers into the same kind of coarse cotton clothes Plummer was wearing. 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 hill country who didn’t,” I told him, “and I’ll buy you a drink.”
That got me a nod and the kind of ready 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’s pace, 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, or when we pulled into a wide place to load or unload something at one of the little towns that lined the canal. That latter 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 a couple of years of profits to buy, and boxes that had stocky brown jugs of Genda whiskey in them; we replaced it all with barrels of oranges and molasses, bottles of rum, and twenty-keelo sacks of corn and millet 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 Nyork west all the way to the Misipi. 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 afterwards. 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. Once they had their cars and planes, 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’ve got 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 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 is a recipe for trouble, and that means soldiers: for the loyal, the ambitious, 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 apart.
Not that long ago, there hadn’t been long lines of canal boats moving iron and oranges and grain from one side of Meriga to the other, and for that matter there hadn’t been enough iron and oranges 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.