“And it’s Mam Gaia’s work,” my mother said. Then, to me: “Trey, if that’s what you wish, you’ve got my leave.”
I whooped and grinned, but there was something in her voice that left me feeling cold as metal, somewhere down deep where I couldn’t quite figure it out. There’s a kind of peace that you see when somebody’s gotten past something and can go on with life, and then there’s a kind of peace you see when somebody’s gotten past something and just wants to be done with living; I didn’t know that difference yet, but I think I must have sensed it. My mother smiled, but there was next to nothing behind the smile: a little relief, maybe, that she had done the last thing she needed to do and could let herself fall into the hollow place where her heart had been.
Thinking of it now, I’m not even sure how much of that I sensed then, how much of it I put into the memory after she caught a coughing disease six months later and died, and how much of it got tangled up after that, when I thought about what had happened and tried to piece together the pattern of my life. Memory’s a tricky thing; I think I remember that first dream of Deesee as though I was still having it right now, but sometimes I wonder how much of that memory comes from later dreams, or from what I saw from the Lannic shore when I went to the place by Deesee where every question has an answer, and saw the Spire rising out of the sea beyond the breakers, a few hours before it fell. If my life got caught up in the one big story old Plummer talked about, that day on the road to Sisnaddi, how much of what happened before then got rewritten by the storyteller so it would fit the tale he wanted to tell?
Still, there’s no doubt about what happened next. A few days after I had the dream, when the rains finally stopped for good, Aunt Kell wrote a letter to the ruinman she knew and had one of her daughters run it over. I never did hear whether the ruinman wrote back or just sent word, but seemingly he had room for a new prentice and was willing to have a look at me. My mother got me dressed up and combed my hair till it hurt, and then the two of us walked the dozen blocks or so from Aunt Kell’s house to the street with no name where the ruinmen live.
Everybody in Shanuga knows where that street is, and most of them would shave between their legs with a broken rock before they’d go there. It’s on the south end of town, just outside the walls through a gate most other people won’t use, and the street turns into a muddy road after a bit and heads straight toward where the old ruins loom up out of the river mists, tall and gray and stark like bones against the round green shapes of the hills beyond. The ruinmen’s houses are like every other house in Shanuga, narrow and close together as though they were drunk and leaning on each other’s shoulders to keep from falling over, and they have signs hanging in front of them like the shops of any of the other guilds in town.
Just before the houses end and the street turns into a road, though, the ruinmen’s guild hall stands there, and it looks like a bad dream. Other guilds have halls that look like houses, only twice or three times as wide and a couple of stories taller. The ruinmen are, well, ruinmen, and don’t do anything the same way as anybody else. Their guild hall in Shanuga is a big gray round thing made of metal that stands way up in the air like a ball perched on a stick. I learned later that the ruinmen a century ago took one of the huge water tanks the ancients put up on the hills here and there, hauled it down to the edge of town, put it up on its base and used scrap steel from the ruins to reinforce it and put floors into it. It really is one of the scariest things in town, unless you’re a ruinman, in which case it’s your second home.
We didn’t go there, though I stared at the thing looming up above the end of the street all the way from the gate to the front door of the house where we were headed. My mother knocked on the door; a prentice answered; they exchanged a few words, and then he let my mother and me in and left us in a couple of chairs in the little front parlor.
A little while later Mister Garman came down the stairs from above. He wasn’t Gray Garman yet, or at least there wasn’t more than a little bit of gray in his hair back then, but he had the same frown as always and the same habit of saying little and listening a lot. I know he had some questions for my mother, and a few for me, but I honestly don’t remember a word of what was said. For all that I’d been jumping up and down at the thought of becoming a ruinman’s prentice, I was as scared at that moment as I’ve ever been since. Mister Garman was big and muscled and scarred, and I guessed even then that trying to wheedle or coax him the way I could my mother or Aunt Kell was a waste of breath.
Finally Mister Garman was satisfied, and sent the prentice for the papers. My mother couldn’t read or write, but she was used to making her mark on papers and taking it on faith that they said what they were supposed to say; I could just about spell my own name and the easier words of the litanies, so I wasn’t much help figuring out the papers, but I signed my own name on the line where it was supposed to go, and that made me one of Garman’s prentices until I made mister, got reborn, or quit and walked away, whichever happened first.
My mother hugged me and left. Mister Garman told the prentice to take care of me, and went somewhere else, and the prentice—his name was Jo; he got reborn when a floor dropped out from underneath him two years later—took me upstairs to the big room where the prentices slept, showed me the pallet where I’d be sleeping and the chest where I got to put my things, and then led me back down two flights to the workshop where the rest of the prentices were busy getting tools ready for the season that was about to begin. I got introduced to all of them, and then right away got put to work rubbing oil into somebody’s leather coat, with an older prentice keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn’t skimp on the rubbing.
That’s how I spent the rest of the day, except for a spare little meal of bread and thin soup around noon and another meal, even scantier, come sunset. I worried a bit about whether I’d get enough to eat as a prentice, but I didn’t have a lot of other choices just then, and I knew it; my name was already on the papers, and it wasn’t as though I had anywhere else to go. Then it was up to the sleeping room. I thought it was early for sleep, and of course it was, but everyone but me knew what was about to happen.
As soon as the door closed I realized that everyone was looking at me. “Trey,” said the senior prentice, a big redhead nineteen years old named Bil, “You ever had anybody in your family who was a ruinman or a ruinman’s prentice?”
“No,” I admitted.
Bill considered me for a moment. “Then you didn’t know that putting your name on a bit of paper isn’t all there is to becoming a prentice here.” He waited for an answer. Finally I said, “What do I have to do?”
He leaned toward me, and in a loud whisper said, “We’ve got a robot in the cellar. If you’re going to be a prentice here, you’ve got to meet the robot.”
For all I know, it’s only in Meriga and Nuwinga that people like to scare each other silly by telling robot stories late at night, and if anybody ever reads these words, it’s as likely they’ll come to Star’s Reach from Genda, or Meyco, or the Neeonjin country past the dead lands on the far side of the mountains, as from our little piece of Mam Gaia’s belly. My father could tell a robot story in a way that would make the chairs shiver. He had a way of making robot sounds, too, so when the robot finally showed up, you didn’t have to imagine the clanking and buzzing it made as it headed toward whoever was about to be buttered all over the walls.
So the half of me that believed what Bil was saying was terrified, and the half of me that figured he was telling a story was fascinated. “Okay,” I said, and my voice shook enough to make the story sound pretty convincing, even to me.
“Good,” said Bil. In a quieter whisper: “We’ve got to go all the way down the stairs, and not wake Mister Garman. Not a sound.”
A moment later we were all trooping down the stairs, barefoot and silent, down floor by floor until we finally got to the cold damp silence of the cellar. Nobody brought a light, so it was blacker than black. Bil took my arm and led me s
omewhere, then had me sit down on something flat that I guessed was a wooden box. “Wait here,” he whispered. “The robot’s on its way.”
I sat there for a while, and had just about decided that the joke was to leave me in the cellar and slip back upstairs to sleep, when I heard something somewhere in the darkness ahead of me: a faint cold clank, like metal landing on stone.
“You hear it?” Bil was still close by, though I hadn’t known it.
“Yes,” I said, and this time my voice was shaking for real.
Another clank followed, a little louder. Then there was a long silence, and then more clanks, a slow steady beat of them, as though something was walking on metal feet: something that was getting closer to me in the cellar. After a bit I could hear a faint buzzing and beeping that would be the machinery inside it.
“Here it comes,” Bil hissed at me. I didn’t answer, because I’d seen two tiny red lights ahead of me. They turned this way and that, as if they were looking for me. I knew that that was exactly what they were doing; I knew they were the robot’s eyes.
The clanking and buzzing got louder, and louder, and the little red dots of its eyes got closer and loomed up above me. I could just about see a darker shape against the darkness, and imagined its glinting metal and wires.
“Put out your hand,” Bill whispered to me then. “You’ve got to shake the robot’s hand.”
I don’t think more than a tiny sliver of me still thought that it was all just a joke by then, but there was still only one thing I could do. I bit my lip and drew in a breath and put out my hand, and felt cold metal touch it, then suddenly clamp hard around it and move it up and down in quick mechanical jerks.
Then, blinding, light: a dozen electric lamps turned on all at once, and along with it laughter and whoops that rang off the cellar walls. It took a moment before I could see anything, and only then did I see the robot: another of the senior prentices, of course, with a glove covered with pieces of metal on his right hand, and a hat on top of his head with two little red lamps on it. All the other prentices were gathered around him, and some of them had noisemakers in their hands: pieces of metal to tap on the stone floor, little toothed wheels that made a buzzing sound when you turned them, and reed whistles to make the beeps.
“You see that?” Bil said to the others. “He reached right out. Come on.”
Still laughing and whooping, the whole lot of them more than half dragged me back up the stairs to the dining room on the fourth floor. Mister Garman was sitting in a big chair at the head of the table, dressed in the formal clothes of a guild mister, and straight in a line down the table in front of him was as much food as I’d ever seen in one place.
The prentices lined up on the other side of the room, and got as silent as they could. Bil pushed me a step out in front, and then said in a voice that could have passed for a jennel of the presden’s court in Sisnaddi, “Sir and Mister, the newest apprentice, Trey sunna Gwen.”
“Has he shaken the robot’s hand?” Mister Garman asked in the same oh-so-formal tone.
“He has, Sir and Mister.” Then, grinning: “Put his hand right out. And we didn’t have to drag him down the stairs.”
“Then let the feasting begin,” said Mister Garman. He got up from his chair, with the closest thing to a genuine smile on his face that I ever remember seeing there, and walked to the door. He turned to me and said, “You’ll do well, Trey.” Then, to the others: “Don’t make him do all the cleaning—but this room and the kitchen had better be spotless tomorrow morning.”
The moment he left the room, everyone made for the food, but there was more than enough to go around, meat pies and sweetcakes and just about anything else good you care to think about, and birch punch to drink, which I’d never had before. I gathered from the talk that the scant meals and the hard work were parts of whatever test I’d taken and passed, for some of the prentices laughed about how they’d all but had to be dragged down to the cellar, and others how they’d just about decided to give up and go back to their families, and there were a few who mentioned boys who did just that, up and quit after two bleak meals and a lot of hard work, or who bolted out the door into the night because they were too afraid of meeting the robot.
I didn’t mention that I’d had my share of hard work and scant meals as a farmer’s only child up in the hills, though that was mostly because I was too well fed and comfortable by the time the point seemed worth making. Still, I did my share of the cleaning when it came to that, and the dining room and kitchen were close to spotless when we got up the next morning.
It’s a funny thing, the robot’s hand. Every ruinman’s prentice, not just Garman’s, gets to shake the robot’s hand, and ever after that there’s a line between you and everyone who hasn’t gone to meet the robot. The old world is a little less distant, maybe, and the things that people outside the ruinmen’s guild think and say seem a little less important. Certainly, as I lay in bed and tried to quiet my mind enough to sleep, the night after I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga underplaces and got started on the road to Star’s Reach, the robot’s hand was what kept coming to mind; I imagined myself going down some other stair, in some vast ruin I could barely imagine, and shaking a hand that didn’t have another prentice on the other side of it.
Maybe that’s what the ancients who built Star’s Reach were trying to do, in their own way. I know it’s one of the things that sends ruinmen down into the underplaces of the old world’s dead cities, when the pay’s so often poor these days and so many of us get reborn in the doing of it. To touch something that thinks but isn’t human, or isn’t the kind of human we are nowadays: it’s a heady thing, and it makes my head spin to think that I’m as close to doing that as I write these words as anyone has been since the old world ended.
Five: The Road to Melumi
The morning after the day I found the letter came way too early. I dragged myself off of my cot about the time first light came up in the east, found some cold water to wash with, and made myself about as presentable as somebody who hasn’t had time to sleep off one mother of a lot of beer is likely to get. The face that looked back at me from the little tin mirror over the washbasin wasn’t much different from the one that blinked back the morning before, barring the cut on my cheek, but I felt different. At the time, I thought that was a matter of becoming a ruinman and a mister of the guild, or maybe squeaking past getting reborn by a senamee or two. Looking back, though, I think it was probably the beer.
Finally I got dressed in ruinman’s leathers and left my tent, and damn if Berry wasn’t right: there must have been twenty prentices waiting for me with hopeful looks. Some were just about as old as I was, and some were so young they must have signed on with their misters just before that season, but it took all of one look to tell me that every one of them was hoping I’d pick him and nobody else to be my first prentice. I had just about enough wits in my head to raise a hand before they all started talking at once. “Already chose my prentice,” I told them. “Sorry.” A couple of the youngest ones burst into tears, and all of them gave me the kind of look that makes you feel like you just stomped their puppy or something.
That didn’t trouble me much, to be honest, and I waited until they were leaving and walked a bit unsteadily over to Gray Garman’s tent. I’m sure the man slept sometime, but in all the years I worked for him I could count the times I saw him sleeping or washing up or anything on the fingers of one foot. This morning was no different. He had his tent flap open, and waved me in when I stopped just outside. Berry was there already, clean and bright-eyed and doing his level best not to jump out of his skin with excitement, but Garman just looked me up and down the way he always did, waved me to a chair, and said, “You decided?”
He meant the letter or the finder’s rights to Star’s Reach: one a big chunk of easy money but nothing more, the other nothing more than a hope, maybe, but a hope of finding the thing every ruinman dreams of finding. I sat down on the chair, looked at him,
and said, “I keep on telling myself that I ought to have some brains.”
For once, Garman laughed. It was as dry as an old granny’s whatnot and as short as a dumb ruinman’s life, but it was still a laugh. If he’d suddenly sprouted feathers I don’t think I’d have been more surprised. “If I was twenty years younger,” he said, “I’d be telling myself that.” Then: “Berry says you picked him.”
“That’s right.”
Garman nodded once. “Good choice. He’ll be of use.” Berry lit up like a lamp; Garman didn’t say that sort of thing lightly. “The original’s going to Shanuga today for auction,” Garman went on, “but a copy needs to go to Melumi right quick; Mam Kelsey’s talked with them by radio and they want it. You headed that way?”
I hadn’t even begun to make plans yet, but it suddenly seemed like the best possible idea, not least because I guessed what Garman had in mind. “I was thinking that,” I lied.
“Good.” He pulled two copies of the letter off a table next to his chair, handed them to me. “One for you and one for the scholars. And here—” He tossed me a leather bag that landed in my hand with a clink. “Ought to be about a fifth of what they’ll pay. That’ll keep the two of you in food on the way.”
A fifth of the price was courier’s wages, but from the hard plump shape of the bag, he’d rounded up a good bit. I pretended not to notice, and thanked him.
“Don’t mention it.” He leaned forward, then, and gave me one of his looks. “Now listen. You two go fast, keep mum, and stay off the main roads. Some people might kill to get this before the Versty does.” He handed me another sheet of paper. “This might help.”
I read the paper. It was a letter from him to some mister in the Cago ruins, up north on the lakes, saying the Shanuga ruins didn’t have room for a new mister and asking the Cago ruinmen to find a place for me. “If anyone asks, that’s why we’re traveling.”
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