Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  I should probably say something about sirks, just in case whoever reads this is from the Neeonjin country or somewhere else that doesn’t have them. A sirk is a show in a tent, or rather it’s a whole bunch of shows one after the other in the same tent, and it’s not like any other show there is. Part of it’s people doing things nobody else can do, like eating fire and lifting big weights and dancing on a rope way up in the air, and part of it’s clowns making fun of everything and everybody, and there’s music and all kinds of other things jumbled in together with it. There are, I think, three of them now, though the Baraboo Sirk is the oldest of them, the only one that’s been around since before the old world ended, and not that long ago there was just the one.

  So I was almost as excited as I’d been when I was six or seven years old and would have gladly sold my teeth for a ticket. Plummer paid for both our tickets, if he paid anything at all. He said something in a low voice to the woman at the ticket booth, and I wouldn’t be too shocked to find out that the coin he gave her was every bit as real as the one I gave him in Ensul. Then there we were, inside the tent, going up the wooden steps to seats where we could see the whole thing.

  It was as good as I hoped. We bought hoddogs—I don’t know anywhere they sell those now but sirks; it’s a little loaf of bread slit open the long way, with a sausage plopped down inside—and cups of pink lemonade, and then waited while the lights changed and the ringmaster came out. He had old world clothes on, a big fancy coat and a hat that looked like somebody took a piece of stovepipe, put a brim on it and fancied it up in green and gold, and a voice that covered even more ground than the man outside the tent could manage. He welcomed everyone and called out the first act, and from then on it was one thing after another.

  There was a strongman who had the six heaviest men in the place pile onto a table, then hefted the thing onto his back and walked it around the ring. There were a couple of jugglers who tossed cavalry swords back and forth between them so fast you were sure somebody was going to get split open like a hoddog loaf, but they never missed a one. There were people who climbed on top of each other into a triangle—four on the ground, three on their shoulders, two on theirs and one on top—and then did it the other way, with only one on the ground and four up at the top with their arms thrown out at the sides. There was a woman who did rope dancing, way up in the air, without a safety net to catch her if she fell. I’m used to high places, being a ruinman, but the thought of trying to walk along that rope, much less dancing out there in the middle, was enough to make my blood run cold.

  All the while, of course, there were clowns scampering around. One of them, toward the later part of the show, was a ruinman clown. He had a pick that was bigger than he was, and was trying to crack open this big concrete shape that seemed to be half buried in the ground and had old world writing on it, but every time he tried to take a swing at it, it moved away from him. Finally, when he was winding up for one more swing, it sneaked up behind him and pushed him over. I laughed so hard I had tears running down my face. The words on the box didn’t say STAR’S REACH, but they might as well have.

  There was a pause not long after that, while the rope dancer was climbing the ladder, and right then Plummer leaned over to me and whispered, “There was a time when sirks had animal acts. People would make animals do any number of surprising things.”

  I gave him a startled look. The first thing that went through my mind was why anybody would want to watch people bullying animals; then I noticed that he was watching me the way he did, waiting to see what I would say; and then I realized what he was trying to tell me. “Back in the old world,” I whispered back, “didn’t they like to think they could make everything do what people wanted?”

  He smiled. It wasn’t just his you-said-the-right-thing look, either; it looked like a door swinging open. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

  Then the rope dancer started out onto the rope, and we were both staring upwards, like everyone else in the tent. That was the big act, and after that things wound up pretty quickly; a few more clowns, someone who could eat fire, and then all the performers and the clowns and all were out in the middle of the ring, bowing, as we roared and clapped and let them know how much fun we had.

  Then the lights went down, the performers left, and the audience started filing out. Plummer motioned me to follow him, though, and zigzagged down through the crowds to the edge of the ring. The ringmaster spotted him and came right over, and before long I was being introduced. The man’s name was Ellis, and his voice sounded like anybody else’s when he wasn’t out there being the ringmaster. He and Plummer knew each other from a long time back, or so I gathered, and the outcome of it all was that the two of us got invited back to another, smaller tent back behind the big tent, where everybody in the sirk was having a late meal.

  There were about fifty of them all told, from the ringmaster and the rope dancer down to the big burly men who handled the oxcarts and hauled things around. We got introduced and then sat down at the one big plank table with everybody else. They were tired, all of them; there were two shows that day, and two the day before, and the next morning they’d be packing everything up and heading on to the next town they were going to play, a place called Clums that was about halfway between Madsen and Naplis; so they were friendly enough but not too talkative. I was fine with that. I was still trying to figure out why Plummer said what he did, and what the door was that had just opened for me, if I wasn’t just imagining it.

  I wasn’t. After the meal was over, Plummer and Ellis talked for a bit, while everyone else headed off to the wagons or wherever else they were sleeping that night, which for most of them was a couple of blankets and a straw pallet on the ground right there in the tent where we were sitting. Then Ellis got up, made a tired little gesture that said “blessings on your dreams” better than words could have done, and headed out into the night. Plummer came over, gave me one of his long considering looks, and said, “Are you possibly still up for conversation? There are, I think, some things we should talk about.”

  “I’m still awake,” I said. “Here, or—”

  “A little more privacy would be useful.” He motioned toward the tent door.

  Outside it was a clear cool night, with stars splashed across the sky and the lights of Madsen flickering off one by one not far away. A few quiet sounds came from the circus tents and wagons, and I could hear night birds calling from the banks of the river close by. We walked far enough from the tents that nobody could hear us, and then Plummer motioned: here?

  I sat down, and so did he; he pulled out his bottle of whiskey and took a drink from it, then offered it to me, and I took it and downed a swallow before handing it back. Then, there under the stars, he started to talk.

  “Do you recall,” Plummer asked me, “the children’s book we talked about that evening at Altan, the one about the little toy boat that the boy sent all the way to the Lannic?”

  I did, and said so.

  “That was written most of a century before the end of the old world, and there were hundreds of thousands of copies printed, maybe more, before things got so bad that books stopped being printed at all. As far as we can tell, only three copies survived. Two were in Meriga and one in Nuwinga, all three in our collections.”

  Plummer paused then, watching me, waiting for a question. What I wanted to know most just then was who “we” and “our” meant, but I knew him well enough to guess that that wasn’t the question I needed to ask. “Did they get there before the old world ended?”

  It must have been the right question; I could barely see his face in the darkness, but the stars mirrored in his glasses shifted in the way they did when he smiled. “We don’t know. The collections existed in the drought years, that much we know, and there were people keeping them in much the same way we do now. They had the three copies, and a decision was made just over a hundred years ago to take one copy out of the collections and put it back into circulation.” He gestured
, palms up. “A simple thing, really. A farmer found it in an old chest in the attic, and brought it to the local priestess, who saw nothing harmful in it and much that was good. Word got to the printer’s guild in a town not far away, and the printers bought it from the farmer, set it in type and made woodcuts of the pictures. Copies found their way to a Circle elder here, a priestess there, always to those who could see to it that the book would find its way to children. It made the printers a very nice sum of money in the end, and so people went searching in their attics and basements and found four more books, one of which was unknown to us.”

  “And all of that was planned,” I said.

  “Except for the four books. That was a happy accident.”

  He waited again, and after a moment I asked, “Why that book, just then?”

  Again the glasses moved, echoing the smile I couldn’t see. “Good. The Third Civil War was past, and we wanted something that would remind people in Meriga and elsewhere that their lives are woven together by something more than muskets and cavalry swords.”

  “How often do you put a book—” I had to pause to remember the words. “Back into circulation.”

  “It varies,” Plummer said. “Once in ten years, maybe. Some of us would like it to happen more often, others are worried that too much might be given out too fast. There are risks either way.”

  Another silence went by. The night birds were calling to each other down by the river. I tried to think of any other way to find out what I most wanted to know, and couldn’t, so finally I asked, “You say we and us and our. Does that mean your friends with no names?”

  That got me one of his dry soft laughs. “You’ve met a few of us, but only a few.”

  “How many are there?”

  “No one knows,” Plummer said. “It would be far too great a risk for any one person to know more than a small number of us—or more than a few of the collections.”

  “Or how many collections there are?”

  “Exactly. Or where they are, or what is in them, or who tends them and guards them.”

  That made sudden sense to me. “Of course. They’d have to be guarded.”

  “Guarded, studied, tended, and hidden, by Swords, Rods, Cups, and Shields respectively; and then the Cords link circle to circle and tie the whole together. It’s an old symbolism, useful for our purposes.”

  “You’re a Cord,” I said.

  “The Cord of the eastern Hiyo valley.”

  “Do you know other Cords?”

  “No, though I have my suspicions about a couple of travelers I’ve met.”

  I thought about that for another long moment. “What would happen if the priestesses found out about all of this?”

  “Oh, they know that we exist.” Even in the darkness, he must have been able to see my face, because he laughed his dry laugh again. “We have, shall we say, a working agreement. That’s why the farmer took the book he found straight to the local priestess. Who was, I might add, expecting something of the kind. Part of the agreement is that we don’t surprise them.”

  “There are stories,” I told him. “Stories and rumors about people who have books they shouldn’t have. That’s the way people say it, you know.”

  “Of course. The rumors are deliberate, some of them, and some of them are a side effect of the way we recruit new members.”

  That was when it finally dawned on me why Plummer was telling me all of this. Maybe I’m just slow to catch on, but I stared at him for what seemed like a long time.

  “It’s a lengthy process,” he said then, looking off toward the river. “Sometimes it starts by chance, when it’s necessary to allow someone from outside the circles to know a secret of ours, such as where a safe place happens to be hidden. Sometimes it’s more deliberate. In either case, a Cord begins the process, and then Shields listen for any evidence that the potential candidate has betrayed the secret.”

  “You said something about throats being cut,” I reminded him. “The Swords do that?”

  “It’s one of their skills.” The way he said it, as though he was talking about any other trade, put a cold wind down my back. “That’s rarely necessary, though it does happen. If the candidate keeps silence, there will be another conversation later on, and another, and still another, while Shields wait and watch. Rods make the final decision, but the Cord must concur, and it’s the Cord’s task to choose the right time for the conversation in which the point of the process will be discussed, and an offer made.”

  “Like this one.”

  “Like this one.” Stars shifted in his glasses.

  My mouth was dry, and my tongue felt like it was two sizes too big for my mouth. I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew what I had to say, and it was a good long moment before I managed to force out, “There’s a job I have to finish first.”

  “Of course there is. That’s part of the process.”

  He was waiting for a question again, but I thought I already knew the answer. “You wait until the candidate has something else to do, so nothing happens in a rush.”

  “And so any final risk of betrayal can be forestalled.” He turned to face me. “Everything I’ve told you so far is already known to the priestesses, and to a few other people outside the circles. You could tell it to anyone, and we would be in no more danger than we were before. I would be at some risk, to be sure, but that could be managed easily enough by my disappearance or my death, and once my time as a Cord is over, it’s simply another story. You could tell it to anyone, but we require you not to do so—not to speak a word of this to anyone for any reason, until and unless your Cord or the senior Rod of your circle gives you permission to do so.”

  “Ruinman’s bond,” I said then, and he laughed again. “Good,” he said, “very good. We have people in a number of guilds, and for good reason. Prentices and misters alike, they know how to keep secrets. We may be a guild ourselves someday, for that matter.” I stared at him for another long moment, and he said, “The Rememberers’ Guild.”

  I don’t think I’ll ever forget those words, or the way he said them. His voice had barely changed enough to notice, but all at once I could feel right down in my belly what it was like to have all those books from the old world hidden away, some that might bring good things to our world and some that might bring more evil than I want to think about; and to wish that the work of guarding and studying and tending and hiding them could be done the way the scholars at Melumi take care of the books they have, out there in front of everybody; and to know that it couldn’t be that way, and why it couldn’t be that way, not now, not until our world changes into something else and people don’t have to think every day about the time when the wrong knowledge used for the wrong things in the wrong ways left poisons and ruins and heaps of dead bodies all over Mam Gaia’s round belly.

  We sat there saying nothing for a while as the stars wheeled and the river birds talked about whatever river birds talk about when the moon’s coming up out of the mist in the east. “That,” Plummer said finally, “was what I wanted to talk about. I suspect you have some idea of what comes next.”

  “You won’t be here when I wake up in the morning,” I told him.

  “Exactly,” he replied, and we both laughed. “You have, as you said, a job to finish first. When that’s done, we’ll meet again, and then you’ll have a decision to make.”

  I nodded, though I don’t think he could have seen me. Then, because I’d been wondering: “Why did you decide to talk about this tonight?”

  “Good,” he said, and I realized I’d asked another question he wanted me to ask. “It’s a very easy thing to pass judgment on the old world and call it evil, the way the priestesses do: easy, and not wholly unmerited. It’s a much more difficult thing to understand it, to grasp some part of why people then did what they did. The former isn’t of use to us. The latter is.”

  He stood up then. “In your place,” he told me, “I would go back to the big tent. There’s loose straw there, and that’s
noticeably more comfortable to sleep on than the bare ground will be. Breakfast will be at dawn or close to it, so I won’t keep you longer.” I looked toward the tent, and when I looked back at where Plummer had been, he was gone. I laughed again, got up, and crossed the field to the big tent.

  The next morning I woke up early and lay there in the darkness for a moment before I remembered where I was and what I was doing there. I stretched and brushed bits of straw off me and went outside. The sun hadn’t quite gotten around to peeking around Mam Gaia’s belly; there were a few pale stars still shining overhead and more of them off to the west. More to the point, there were clattering sounds and just a bit of smoke coming from the smaller tent where Plummer and I had dinner the night before, and if there’s one thing you learn when you’re on the road, it’s that a good hot meal comes way up on the list of things to look for.

  So that’s where I headed. Ellis was already there, and so were a bunch of other people from the sirk, and they waved me over as soon as they saw me; we all said our good mornings, and then I said I’d be glad to help get things loaded up if there was anything I could do, which is how you ask for breakfast on the road. That got me a big plate full of bacon and hotcakes and a mug of chicory brew, and I sat with them and mostly listened as they talked about the day ahead and the trip up to Clums. It was like having a meal with ruinmen or members of any other guild; Ellis was the mister, the performers were the senior prentices, and the others had their place, right down to the big men who hauled things and handled the oxen. They were as friendly as you could ask, but there was never any question who was in the guild and who wasn’t.

  Afterwards, I paid for my breakfast by hauling on ropes and carrying rolls of canvas tenting over to the wagons. That was hard work, but it’s nothing I hadn’t done plenty of times already as prentice and ruinman, so I didn’t mind. Once everything was done and the first of the wagons was rolling out of the field, Ellis thanked me and told me that any time I happened by where they were, I was welcome to a couple of meals and a free show. He didn’t have to say that I could pay for it with a few hours of work, but again, that’s the way you do things on the road. So I thanked him and said I’d keep an eye out for their posters, and he gave me a big grin and climbed aboard the last wagon. I waved as they headed north, and only then realized that nobody all morning had so much as mentioned Plummer’s existence.