Twenty-Two: Memfis Nights, Arksa Days

 

 

We got bad news over the radio tonight. I mentioned earlier that we agreed to let Tashel Ban get his radio receiver working so we could start listening to broadcasts from the station in Sanloo. He spent that evening getting the thing working and hooking it up to one of the big radio antennas built into the roof of Star’s Reach, and at least one of us listens to it every night once radio waves start bouncing off whatever it is that bounces them back from the high thin air.

Until now, we could have spared ourselves the trouble. All we got was the same things I used to hear when I listened to the little crystal radio my father had, the one that could pick up signals from Sisnaddi sometimes: an hour of music, though it wasn’t always the patriotic stuff they always play on the Sisnaddi station, and a few minutes of news. The one thing we got from that was that nobody had started fighting yet, but then we all knew that nobody would, not so long as Sheren still lived.

That was before tonight. Most of the news bulletins were the usual stuff, a band of Jinya raiders caught and driven off by our soldiers in Wesfa Jinya, a namee that washed away parts of three towns in Nuwinga, negotiations with Meyco over a trade treaty, that sort of thing. Then, at the end: “The presden’s staff in Sisnaddi said yesterday that because of the presden’s illness, this year’s meeting of Congrus has been called off. We don’t have any other details at this time.”

Tashel Ban and I were in the radio room—that’s what we call the little room, probably somebody’s sleeping room back before Star’s Reach was abandoned, where he set up the receiver—when that came over the loudspeaker. When we heard the last little bit of music the Sanloo station plays before it goes off the air, Tashel Ban let out a whistle. “Cancelled,” he said. “Not postponed. That’s bad.”

“I heard she was sick again,” I said; people had been talking about it in Sanloo.

“It’s been on and off for years. Cancer, or that’s what they say in Lebnan.”

That was no surprise—that she had cancer, I mean, and also that Tashel Ban’s family in the Nuwinga capital would know about it. Something like half the people in Meriga who live past childhood die of it. You can be as careful as you want, but there are so many poisons still left over from the old world that the odds are pretty good that sooner or later you’ll get enough in you to start something growing that shouldn’t. Ruinmen know a lot about that, more than most people, because if you’re a ruinman and the ruins don’t take you, it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s how you’re going to get reborn.

We’ll tell the others tomorrow morning, but Berry was another matter. I went and tapped on his door as soon as the radio was shut down. He was still awake, doing something that left paper scattered all over the table in his room; I told him about the bulletin and what Tashel Ban said, and he gave me a dismayed look and thanked me in a way that told me he really didn’t want to talk. I wished him good dreams, and came back here to the room Eleen and I share.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about that will happen once Sheren is gone, but that’s not what I want to write about, not tonight. We’ve still got enough food left to stay here for a month, or maybe a little longer. Eleen and Tashel Ban are chasing down everything the people here found out during the last years before they killed themselves, and that probably won’t take all of a month; then we have some decisions to make, and so do I, and one way or another I’ll have plenty to do after that. That means I have a month or less to finish writing down my story, or as much of it as I have time to tell.

Most of what’s left to tell happened in Memfis, or on the dig just west of it near Wanrij in Arksa. I spent the better part of three years going back and forth between those two places, and a lot of things happened there—a lot of things in one sense, and not much in another, since most of it was just doing what ruinmen do when they have a ruin to dig up. Thinking about my story today, while I sprayed resin over another alien-book, I spent a while wishing I could write about everything that happened in those two and a half years, day by day, and then half decided to skip the whole thing and pick up the day I left Memfis, walking alone up the road beside the Misipi, knowing right down to my bones that I’d failed and been an utter fool besides.

Still, now that the pen’s in my hand, I know that neither of those is really what I want to do, or maybe it’s that neither of them is how the story wants to be told. What I want, or the story wants, is to write about Memfis, because that’s where the trip that brought me to Star’s Reach swung around the way a door swings on its hinges, where I could have succeeded and lost any chance of getting here, and failed instead in the one way that got me where I needed to be.

I’ve written already about how I got to Memfis and what happened right after I got there. I haven’t written much about Memfis itself, though, and that’s something that needs doing, because Memfis is the biggest city in Meriga and one of the biggest in the world, and it’s not like anywhere else. By that I don’t just mean that it’s not like anywhere else I’ve ever been, though that’s true enough; it’s got fifteen neighborhoods by most counts, though some people say seventeen, every one of them bigger than Shanuga and as different from the next one as Shanuga is from Troy or Cago. What I mean is that people who’ve sailed around the world and visited a hundred ports—and I met some of those in Memfis—will tell you that Memfis isn’t like any other place they’ve ever been, either.

Part of it is the river trade, which I wrote about earlier, and which runs through Genda and Meyco but doesn’t stop on either end. The Meycan Empire goes a long ways south, but there are other countries even further south, all the way down to Nardiga, which used to be covered with ice and now is all trees and grass and cattle. Genda goes up to the North Ocean, and on the far side of that there’s a bunch of countries, Norj and Rosh and half a dozen others, that didn’t fall to the Arabs when so many countries on that side of the Lannic did.

You can sail from Nardiga straight up the Lannic to the North Ocean and get to Rosh that way, but as Slane said on board the Jennel Mornay, you’ll have to take your chances with Jinya pirates on our side of the ocean and Arab pirates on the other. Since the Arabs are still fighting with Norj and Rosh and the others over who’s going to follow what religion, and Jinya pirates are, well, Jinya pirates, your chances of getting through into the North Ocean that way aren’t so good. That’s why, after our Third Civil War was over and the river trade started up, so much freight started coming up from the South to Memfis along routes Meyco’s navy keeps good and safe, and so much started coming across the North Ocean under the guns of Genda’s navy, and then down through Genda to Cago. Memfis was already a big city by then, but it was the river trade that turned it into one of Mam Gaia’s biggest.

It was already a big city because there aren’t many places anywhere in the world that you can get so much to eat out of the water. That’s one of the first things I learned once Berry and I got there. From Memfis south for well over a hundred kloms, the Misipi widens out into something that’s almost ocean but not quite, wide enough from east to west that when you stand on one shore you can’t see to the other. The priestesses call it an estuary; people in Memfis just call it Banroo Bay, after a city that’s down under the water toward the mouth of it, and depend on it for a good half or more of what they eat.

Back before the Third Civil War there were still places in Banroo Bay where there were too many poisons left over from the old world to risk eating anything. Now you can just about dip a net into the water anywhere and pull up something good. There are villages and towns all around Banroo Bay where people keep themselves fed and make their money doing something not too different from that, and a lot of people in Memfis make their living from the water the same way. I used to look out from my window high up in the Memfis guild hall toward the end of the rains, when it was safe to sail but the roads weren’t dry yet, and watch the little boats heading out before dawn to bing back fish, crabs, shrimp, seaweed, and just about anything else that lives in the water and is good to eat.

They don’t bring back whales, of course, nor seals or porps or any of the other mammals, who are too high on the food chain. The priestesses say the mouth of the Misipi is probably clean now, but nobody really wants to find out the hard way that it’s not quite clean enough. Go to the markets in Memfis, though, and you can get just about anything else that anybody on Mam Gaia’s round belly likes to eat, and some things I’m amazed that anybody eats at all, but most of the time when you sit down to dinner at a Memfis table you’re going to get rice, which grows like weeds in the low country to either side of the Misipi’s mouth, and fruit, which grows in the hill country further back so well it puts weeds to shame, but also a mother of a lot of seafood.

Well, really, there’s a mother of a lot of everything, because Memfis is rich—rich from the river trade, rich from the ships that come there from all over Mam Gaia’s round belly, rich from the seafood out of Banroo Bay, rich from the farms and orchards, and rich from plenty of other things, too, including good unstripped ruins within reach of the Memfis ruinmen. It’s rich even compared to other rich towns in Meriga, and let’s not even talk about what it looks like to a farmer’s child like me from the Tenisi hill country. I figured out pretty soon after Berry and I got to Memfis that it was a good long ways past anything I was used to, but I didn’t realize just how far until the rains came rolling up off the Gulf of Meyco.

That was after I finished healing up from the knife wound Thu gave me, and after I finished making all the arrangements with Jennel Cobey and the Memfis ruinmen for the next season’s dig. That took a lot of time and a lot of work, and I spent more days than I like to remember going over the papers and making sure nothing got missed. Then I took them to a couple of misters from the Memfis guild who were making a point of helping me out and had them go over the same papers with me. All of that paid off when we started digging, but I didn’t know that at the time; all I knew when the clouds started piling up blue-black in the southern sky was that I was tired of all the papers and negotiations, really tired, and wanted to relax for a bit.

Then the rains started, and I got my wish and then some.

The rains in Memfis aren’t like the rains we get inland in Shanuga or Melumi. There you get plain heavy rain, enough to soak you to your skin if you stay out in it for a while, and boats have to pull up to the shore and get covered with tarps or they end up flooded after a bit. In Memfis the rain comes down like an ocean that somebody poured on your head. The clouds aren’t just the blue-black you get elsewhere, they’re literally dark as night, and if you’re caught out on the water in a boat you might as well just start swimming because the boat’s going to be full of water and heading toward the bottom long before you have any chance to get it to land. The small boats they use to bring in fish and everything else get hauled out of the water as soon as the clouds come in sight, and get stacked upside down in the big indoor fish markets close to the water; the riverboats take their smokestacks down and go into big sheds; and any sailing vessels that get caught in Memfis by the rains—most of them are far away over the ocean by the time the rains come—batten down their hatches and hope for the best.

You don’t just go anywhere when the rains come, though, the way you do in most other places. Every one of Memfis’ fifteen or seventeen neighborhoods has its own way of dividing itself up and its own rules about who goes where; none of it’s written down or official, but you can end up dead in a gutter if you ignore it and somebody decides to get upset. The ruinmen at the Memfis guild hall explained all of that to Berry and me, and once the clouds started rolling in I made some plans about where to go once the rains started.

It turned out that I could have spared the trouble, because I’d made some good friends among the youngest Memfis misters by the time that happened, and the evening that the thunder rolled and the lightning snaked across the black sky, a couple of them came pelting up the stairs, laughing, and pulled me with them back down the stairs and out into the street.

That was my first time meeting the Memfis rains, and I gasped and spluttered and laughed pretty much the way I would have if they’d tossed me into Banroo Bay, which couldn’t have made me any wetter. The two misters who’d come to get me were as drenched as I was, of course, and so were all the other misters and prentices who were spilling out of the guild hall and the tall narrow houses on either side. Everyone was laughing and whooping and splashing each other with water, but they were also drifting down the street toward the big covered market where the ruinmen and the chemists and a few other guilds buy their groceries. Light was pouring out of the market’s windows and doors, and a kind of music I’d never heard before was blaring out over the pounding rain.

Inside all the stalls had been cleared away from the middle, leaving plenty of bare tile floor. The musicians were up at one end on a platform, with instruments you don’t see in other towns. The kind of music they play in Memfis isn’t something you hear in most other parts of Meriga, either, though I’ve heard that Sanloo and some of the other river towns have bands that play it too. It’s got its own rhythms and notes that bend and slide and wail, and a lot of it gets played on horns, which nobody else but the army uses these days. I never did learn much about it, other than that it’s what Dizzy played when he was on his way home to Nyork after the fight over Troy, and that it’s the best dancing music I’ve ever heard, but most people in Memfis know a lot about it, and there must be more than a hundred bands that play it there.

So the musicians had their place, and they were starting to play. Around the other three sides of the building, all the stalls had their usual signs taken down. The ruinmen had most of one side, the chemists had half of another, and each of the other guilds had their places, which I learned later they’d had since the market was built more than a hundred years ago. There were big fancy banners hanging from the ceiling where the signs for the stalls usually go, and down below on the tables was more food and drink than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time. Prentices from all the guilds were hauling in covered pans and kettles and barrels and tarp-covered boxes, and when they ran out of room to put anything more on the tables they stacked things up in the spaces behind. I’d already figured out that there was going to be a mother of a party, a mother with babies and a grandchild or two, but it was when one of the misters I was with told me that all the food and drink was free that I started to realize just how rich Memfis is.

I was right, though; it was a mother of a party. There must have been more than a thousand people inside the market by the time the dancing started, and we were all wet and happy and, before long, pretty thoroughly drunk as well. Most of the women were wearing thin little dresses that didn’t hide much at the best of times, and given a good dousing with rain—well, let’s just say you didn’t have to wonder what they’d look like if things got friendly enough that the dresses came off. Me, I did my share of dancing and drinking, and I must have had something to eat, though I don’t remember the details too clearly, and I ended the night by stumbling back out into the rain with a couple of women from the picker’s guild, laughing and kissing all the way to the place where they lived, which might have been all of six doors down from the market. Things were very friendly by then, and the dresses came off pretty quick once we got someplace private; from the sounds I heard through the walls to either side, we weren’t the only people being friendly there, either.

I woke up with the kind of pounding head that’s practically welcome, since it reminds you of what kind of night you had the night before. Things got lively again, and finally I kissed them both and stumbled back to the ruinmen’s guild hall. I bathed and got something to eat and slept for a while, and then damn if we didn’t head on down to the market and do it all again.

That’s Memfis in the season of the rains, one party after another, night after night, until the skies dry out and everyone gets back to doing the work that pays for all that food and drink. By the time a couple of weeks have gone by it’s not quite so crowded or so wild as it is when the rain first comes down, but every night until the rain stops there’s food and drink and music for everyone who happens to come by, so long as they’re where they should be. That’s Memfis, too; the burners and smelters and a couple of other guilds have their own parties in another covered market about a klom from the ruinmen’s guild hall, and ruinmen don’t go there if they don’t want to get beaten or worse, and of course nobody from the guilds outside the Memfis city walls is going to get past the guards and wander into one of the parties inside the walls.

I didn’t mind that the first year, when I was half drunk on Memfis and the other half on pretty Memfis women. I minded it even less the second year, when I was more than half drunk on running my own dig for a successful season, and still thought that Star’s Reach might be one shovelful of dirt away. The third year, when I knew for certain that the dig was a failure, dancing and drinking and spending the nights with pretty Memfis women beat the stuffing out of sitting in my little room in the Memfis guildhall, and facing the fact that everything I’d done since I fell through the floor in Shanuga and found the dead man’s letter had brought me to a bare blank wall with no way forward. Not that sitting in the little room would have gotten me any closer to Star’s Reach, or to anything else but misery. There are times when getting drunk and falling into bed with someone you’ve just met is as reasonable as anything else you can do.

But the other side of my story, or this part of my story, is the two seasons I spent digging in the Arksa jungle, hoping that I was going to find Star’s Reach or at least some clue of how to get there. If I had all the time in the world I could tell that in some kind of order, from the day we first broke ground a month after the rains to the day we packed up the last of the tools and went back to Memfis, but we’re not that many weeks from running out of food, and I still have other things I want to write down for—well, for whoever reads this, if anyone ever does. It’s my part of the one big story Plummer talked about all those days and kloms ago on the road to Sisnaddi, and if nobody ever reads it, at least I had the chance to tell it.

The Arksa jungle—that’s part of the story the way Memfis is, and for most of the same reasons. The Tenisi hill country where I grew up has woodland here and there, but it’s too far inland, too high up, and too dry in the dry season to get the kind of jungle you get down close to the Gulf of Meyco. There are parts of Arksa that are like the Tenisi hills, or so I was told, but the part where we were digging was close enough to Banroo Bay that the best way to get there from Memfis was to hire one of the steamboats that work up and down the bay and go across to a little town on the far side of the Misipi called Url, and then hire wagons and go from there. The old Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility was a couple of days north and west of there.

The first time I went there was a few weeks before the rains set in, that first year I was in Memfis, a week or so after Jennel Cobey’s men took Thu and let him go. We took a boat across to Url, hired some horses with the jennel’s money, and took the main road up out of the soggy land near the river to Josbro. That’s a fair sized town, and if you go past it a ways you get to Wanrij, which is just a road house, a shrine, and a once a week market. We stayed the night at the road house, and then hired a guide and went into the jungle to find the place called WRTF.

It might as well have been any other patch of jungle, green and dark, full of huge tree trunks rising up from the ground, birds yelling at each other up where you can’t see them, and a million different bugs flying around, most of which took at least one nip out of me. We did some searching, and found what was left of concrete walls here and there, overgrown with tree roots or sticking out of the undergrowth all anyhow like an old man’s teeth. We poked the ground with metal rods here and there, and got a rough sense of how far the buildings went, then tied red cords around the trees that would have to go.

That’s something I’d never done before, since the ruins in Shanuga had been cleared long before I was born, and it’s something most people in Meriga won’t do at all, since cutting down trees is one sure way to get Mam Gaia good and mad at you. Still, ruinmen do it when they have to, and we had to. That meant getting priestesses to come out and do the ceremony, paying to have ten times as many trees planted and tended somewhere else, and dealing with lumbermen, which nobody wants to do.

As soon as the rains were over and the ground was dry enough, we were back with the priestesses, and we stood around and looked respectful as the priestesses asked forgiveness for each of the trees that had to come down. They finished around noon, and the lumbermen came about an hour later, men with big dirty beards and shabby leather clothes and old rattletrap wagons drawn by oxen. Most of the ruinmen made themselves scarce, but I was in charge and that meant I had to go around with them and make sure they knew which trees to take.

You don’t pay lumbermen. They mill the trees they take, sell the useful wood to carpenters and turn the rest into charcoal for the blacksmiths, and they’ll take more than they’re supposed to if they can make it look like a mistake, or at least that’s what people say. When I got back to the site after they finished, the only trees they had taken out were the ones we’d marked, but maybe that was because they knew we were keeping track. Still, the site was cleared and ready to dig, and that was what mattered.

We used to joke back in Shanuga about the old habit of calling a place where ruinmen work a dig, because the Shanuga ruins don’t take much digging. The Wanrij dig, which is what everyone ended up calling ours, was another matter. The whole thing was covered with four hundred years of fallen leaves and mud, and that had to be dug up and hauled away before we could get to the ruins themselves. It was a big installation, big as a town, and before long we found mud-filled stairs heading downward, rough concrete poured into gaps in good concrete, and all the other signs that tell you that somewhere down below are underground shelters from the last days of the old world.

That was an exciting time, and it took some work to keep everyone working in their own sections when somebody found a promising stairway, but I wanted the dig to be done right. That was partly because I knew Jennel Cobey was paying good money for it, and partly because I knew that the Memfis misters were watching me to see what kind of ruinman I was, but more than anything else it was because this was my dig, my very first dig, and damn if I was going to let anyone mess it up. So all the misters and prentices kept busy in their own sections, and we got it cleared one shovel of mud at a time.

I didn’t get to do much of the shoveling, though. Back when I was Gray Garman’s senior prentice, I did a lot of the work of running his section of each year’s dig in the Shanuga ruins, but I’d never had charge of a dig, much less a brand new dig in a ruin that nobody had touched since the old world ended. That meant a lot of time in my tent over to one side of the ruin, ordering supplies and tools, coping with squabbles, settling accounts with the metal merchants who came out to buy scrap once we started turning it up, and much more. Berry was my senior prentice—well, of course, he was my only prentice, but the custom still held, and that meant that he ran a mother of a lot of errands for me, and sat in at the end of each day when all the misters and their senior prentices met to discuss how things were going and what needed to be done.

That usually happened in my tent, but not always. Once a week we had a mister’s lodge, the way ruinmen always do, and of course Berry couldn’t come to that. Once or twice a week we’d walk up the rough little road we’d made through the jungle from Wanrij to the roadhouse, and the misters and senior prentices would meet there.

The cook at the roadhouse was named Maddy, and she was a failed scholar, though we didn’t know that at first. She’d come out with our meals when we met there, and ask how the dig was going; we didn’t find out that she’d been to Melumi until the failed scholar we had at the dig happened to mention that the two of them had been friends at the Versty. We teased Maddy about that afterwards, but we also asked her advice when it came to the kind of questions scholars can answer, and we all got along wonderfully after that.

I just never knew what was going to happen. One morning the prentices started yelling over on the eastern side of the dig, and it turned out that a snake had come crawling out of the jungle during the night and was sleeping in one of the old stairwells. It was a big one, almost ten meedas long, which is bigger than they usually get even in the jungle. I asked the Memfis misters what they did with snakes like that, and that’s how we ended up having snake chops for dinner the next two nights, which saved a good bit of money on our food that month. One week it was a fever that came through and put half the misters and prentices flat on their backs, another week it was a shipment of tools I ordered back before the rains that didn’t arrive on time—it never did show up, in fact—and the next week it was something else again.

One week, it was Jennel Cobey. He came to see the site late in the first season, on his way from Memfis to Sanloo: political business, he told me, so I didn’t ask any more questions. He was as curious as always, wanting to know everything we were doing at the dig, and the prentices stared and whispered as I took him all over the site and he talked to me as though I was a jennel too. He stayed for three days and then rode away with his soldiers and servants first thing in the morning.

When the misters and I met at the roadhouse in Wanrij that night, some of them talked about other jennels who were hurrying around the country with their soldiers. There was a cold feeling down in the pit of my stomach as we talked. I knew, we all knew, that all those jennels and soldiers meant six kinds of trouble sometime soon.

By the end of that first season, we’d cleared the whole site and gotten down to the first basement level of all the buildings. We had to stop there, because we were too far from Memfis to risk staying at the dig until just before the rains; instead, tools and gear had to be packed up and hauled back down the road to Url, and parties of prentices went with them, heading home to Memfis. By the time everything was shut down, clouds were rolling in from the Gulf, and we left the site in a hurry and beat the rains by two days. Then it was Memfis parties and pretty Memfis women, and days spent at the ruinmen’s guild hall sleeping off rum and whiskey and planning the next season’s work. We knew by then where there were stairways going further down and where the underground shelters probably were, and if Star’s Reach or anything connected to it was still at WRTF, that’s where it would be.

Finally the rain stopped, and the parties stopped, and as soon as the roads were dry I was on my way to Wanrij with Berry and the first party of misters and prentices. A mother of a lot of mud had washed into the ruins during the rainy season, and once we had the camp up and running again, that had to be dug out again. There were snakes—no more of the really big ones, luckily—and other things that thought the ruins we’d dug up made good homes, and they had to be chased back out into the jungle.

Then there was a little lake not far away from the dig, where we sent prentices to get water the year before, and it somehow got a resident gator, a big one. You don’t kill gators unless you have to, and we didn’t have to, so the prentices hauled water from a different lake that second year, and we got used to the way our gator would roar most evenings, calling for a mate or just letting everybody else on that part of Mam Gaia’s round belly know that he was alive and minded to stay that way.

Since we’d cleared the site and knew where to look, the work went faster that season. One shovelful of mud and basket of concrete chips at a time, we got the deep stairways cleared and the rough concrete broken, and started getting into underground places where nobody had been since the old world ended. One afternoon, I was in my tent writing out orders for the next month’s food, and Berry came at a run: they’d smelled the sour lightning smell deep in the ruin, behind a concrete plug that had just been cleared away. The orders could wait. I went back with him, fast.

It was two levels down, and would have been dark as midnight except that we’d spent the extra money to get plenty of electric lamps. As it was, the prentices and misters were a crowd of shadows around a rough doorway in the concrete. Beyond the doorway was darkness, and a very faint point of red light off in the middle distance. I knew exactly what I was seeing, and so did everyone there, even though none of them had nearly fallen onto a trapped floor the way I did.

There was some talking, and then the senior prentice of one of the Memfis misters walked into the room. He knew what he was doing, too; he stepped from safe spot to safe spot all the way to the little red dot, found the switch, and turned it green. The rest of us followed, and for a moment I was sure that the door on the other side of the room was going to lead us straight into Star’s Reach.

It didn’t. What was on the other side was a shelter, pretty much like the one I’d found in the Shanuga ruins. It had plenty of metal in it, a radio, and some guns, and that was all. The prentice who’d crossed the floor was made a mister on the spot, and we all cheered and congratulated him, but all the same it was a bleak moment, and not just for me.

The days and weeks and months went on. W found and emptied every underground room in the ruin; we found nearly enough metal to make the dig pay for itself even if it hadn’t been a contract dig, and a few real prizes like the radio; we even found a room with a row of old metal filing cabinets in it, full of the moldering scraps of what used to be paper, just enough of it still readable that the failed scholar I’d hired for the dig was able to tell us that it was what the ancients called “human resources records,” which was their phrase for all the papers they needed to tell them who got hired and who got fired from a job.

What we didn’t find was one single scrap of anything that had to do with Star’s Reach or with messages from other worlds. If it had been any other dig, it would have been a success, but it wasn’t any other dig, and as the season wound up and the ruin was stripped down to the rebar in the concrete, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had wasted years of my life on a daydream.

We finished the dig a month before the rains came. The prentices and the misters packed everything up, one party at a time, and hauled tools and tents and cooking pots back home to Memfis. The last wagon from the metal merchants came and went. We filled in all the holes we’d dug and sent a letter to the priestesses, letting them know the site was clean and that we’d be most grateful if they could tell people who wanted to get right with Mam Gaia that they could come plant trees there. Then, last of all, I sat down in my tent and wrote a letter to Jennel Cobey, telling him that we hadn’t found Star’s Reach.

That kept me busy until late that night. The next morning Berry and a few of the other prentices folded and packed my tent and the few other things that were left at the dig, and loaded them on a wagon. I took one more walk around the site, made sure everything was in order, and then went to join them. We hadn’t hired any horses this time, since it was clear that the jennel wasn’t going to get what he hoped he was paying for. The teamster tapped the oxen with his stick, the wagon started to roll, and the rest of us—me and Berry and half a dozen prentices who were more or less friends of his, and had been lent to me by their misters—started walking up the dusty road to Wanrij.