Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  The farmer grinned at her broadly. Clearly the granda had a point.

  “My dearest Marna is doing very well, considering that the baby is due within days. And the boys, our two sons are fine, full of mischief they are. We’re hoping that this one’s a girl; three boys would be quite the handful!”

  “Three children! You are a lucky man, my good fellow! There’s many would envy you!” Kati decided not to bring up Lady Katerina’s infertility quite yet, just prepare the ground for the admission.

  “Yes, Marna and I have been more fortunate than many. Two healthy, strapping sons and another child soon to be born. A man doesn’t mind working hard to scratch a living from the land when he has children to follow in his footsteps.”

  Kati thought that judging by the size of the load behind them, the farmer was doing a bit better than just scratching a living. That however was not her concern. Instead she turned the conversation in a direction that might give her information that she could use.

  “You are taking the products of your labours on the farm, to sell in the city, are you?” she asked with bright interest.

  “Oh, yes. It’s the only way a farmer can get a little bit of coin to buy those things that he can’t grow or make himself. Although we in the countryside live pretty much off the land; we eat what we grow, mostly we wear what we grow, and we entertain ourselves with what there is around us.”

  “Yes, that is the way of country life,” Kati agreed. “I must admit that I’ve always liked that life, having grown up on a country estate myself.

  “But, tell me, what is this city we’re coming to, like? The old folk were filling my ears with scary stories about cities, before I set out on this trip. They said cities are not safe places for a woman; that’s why I brought a servant with me, to keep me safe.”

  “Oh, if you’re from the mountains as you say, your old ones’ knowledge would have been from before The Disaster. I think the pre-flood cities were terribly dangerous for a woman alone, but nowadays there are a lot fewer people, and less trouble, everywhere. Most of this city is empty and a ruin; only parts of it are still used for human habitation. Fortunately we did not have any of the explosions that some cities did. The River City just flooded and then fell to ruins because most people had drowned. People have been coming back to it now for many generations but, compared to how many were here once, they don’t exactly fill the available space.”

  “Do you think that I’ll be able to find an inn to stay at?” Kati asked, allowing the Lady Katerina to sound a touch fretful.

  “Oh there are several near the market that I am going to. I think I can recommend any one of them, if you have the coin to pay for an inn,” the farmer replied.

  Kati suspected that he was fishing for information about her financial means.

  “Well, my kin didn’t send me on a long journey with no money at all,” she replied carefully. “But I think I better be careful with what I have. I don’t have any idea as to what anything costs in a city. Things may well be much more expensive than I might suppose.”

  “Yeah,” the farmer chuckled. “Us country folk, we don’t always understand city ways. Why did your kin send you off on a long journey anyway, if I may be so bold as to ask?”

  The Lady Katerina sighed while Kati kept her own emotions in check. The granda inside her head was laughing at her.

  “I’m afraid my family is not as fortunate as yours,” she said to the farmer, twisting her hands in her lap. “We need an heir, or the family holdings will pass to a clan that we have been feuding with for years. I am the last of the blood, and my husband and I have been childless for more than five years. The Wise Woman in our village told me that there is a temple where I should make an offering to the gods in order to bear a child. It may be here in this city, the River City, or in another one much farther away. I will know, she said, when I get there. Unhappily, I had to leave my husband behind, to look after the lands and to protect them from usurpers while I am gone.”

  “That is a sad tale, my Lady, but not that uncommon a one. Many women have gone childless since The Disaster; some say the explosions of the mechanical buildings released gases into the air which are not healthy for our kind. And when a family starts to die out, there are always those just waiting to grab any property they might have.

  “Well, Lady Katerina, I hope your Wise Woman knew what she was talking about, and you find a cure for your childlessness. Children are a true joy, as I have reason to know.”

  They had reached the city by the look of things. Remains of tumbledown stone buildings stood on both sides of the road, the road which now had an ancient paving on it, pitted and rutted with time and the passage of countless carts. Nevertheless, considering how old it must be, Kati thought it was in good shape, but, apparently, nothing motorized had used it for centuries. After looking around her for a while, she decided that it was not possible to get much of a picture of the city as it had once been. The buildings had been of stone or brick, by the looks of things around her, but how tall they had been or whether or not they had been attractive architecturally, was impossible to ascertain. Some had been refashioned into inhabited dwellings, and others had been taken over as homes by animals and birds, but many more had been levelled by vegetation. Large trees had grown where streets had once run and bushes of many kinds had infested the rubble which once had been buildings.

  “Grubbers amid the ruins,” the granda commented, looking at all these things through Kati’s eyes. The scene, with the addition of the granda’s negativity, depressed Kati; suddenly she wondered what hope she and Mikal had of finding what they were looking for. Wouldn’t the temple that was supposed to house the beacon have turned into rubble by now? And the beacon itself, wouldn’t it likely be lying among the rubble, under stones and broken bricks, never to be found?

  “Don’t you be silly, young woman,” the granda broke into her thoughts. “The Kitfi gestalt found the beacon. Somebody’s been looking after it.”

  On one side of her, the farmer guided his runnerbeasts along at a leisurely pace towards a livelier sector of what was left of the city. Within minutes they approached a square about which buildings had been rebuilt relatively recently, and where the encroaching vegetation had been kept at bay. One corner of the square housed a Farmers’ Market, complete with a bunch of stalls, mounds of produce on tables and on the ground, and noisy customers complaining about quality, and haggling about prices. This was where their cart headed, to the back of the stalls, where a number of other carts already stood, empty, and the runnerbeasts were tethered on a nearby patch of grass.

  Mikal, as Mik, stared at the beasts for a good spell.

  “So who cleans off the beasts’ leavings?” he asked, at last, in a thick accent.

  Thank goodness his node was on the job, picking up the language, Kati thought to herself. She had tried to teach him a bit on that interminable dark ride through the tunnels, even as her node had taught her, but she had really not had much of an idea of what the results were. Apparently they were pretty good, combined, of course, with what Mikal had picked up listening to her and the farmer.

  The farmer glanced at him and laughed.

  “There’s always boys around who try to make a half-a-copper however they can,” he explained. “They shovel the shit into pails, and sell it as fertilizer to them as have kitchen gardens. Very useful that.”

  They had reached the back of the Market and the cart came to a stop. Mikal climbed off nimbly and gathered up their rucksacks while Kati descended from the seat more slowly, digging out the now skinny money bag from an inside pocket of her jacket. With the granda instructing her, she offered the farmer a copper for “the ride”, and the man accepted it gratefully.

  “Thank you, Lady Katerina,” he said with a bow. “If ever an honest man of the country can do you a favour, just ask for Roch of Fertil Valley. Now, the inns are over there, and if you need to eat there’s a kitchen or two that way as well.”

  *****


  As they walked away from the Market with at least a dozen pairs of eyes following their progress, Kati spoke to Mikal in an undertone:

  “Something he said gave me an idea. Maybe when we have a place for me to sit, and we’ve eaten something, you can go looking for a likely young lad who’s wanting to make a half-a-copper. Someone who seems a bit honest, and knows this place inside out, if possible. We need to know how much to pay for things, we need to find a place where we can exchange our silver and gold coins for copper ones, and that’s only a start. Also, I don’t want to engage a room without an inside opinion.”

  “Good thinking, Lady Katerina. I will of course try to do my best for you. Your husband, my master, told me I am to look after you and I will.” He spoke louder than she had.

  Kati looked up and realized that they were an object of curiosity. A half a dozen men had moved to stand in a clot on the street, precisely where they blocked the path. She slowed down, allowing Mikal to take hold of her elbow and lead her around the blockage.

  “Hey, if he’s your servant, lady, how come he’s guiding you?” one of the group shouted to her, his voice insolent.

  “He’s my husband’s servant,” she snapped back, improvising. “My husband trusts Mik, believe me. Mik would not be with me here if my husband did not trust him.”

  “So how come your hubby didn’t come with you, dolly?” another wiseacre asked.

  They were abreast with the louts, now. Kati made a quick decision, and stopped dead in her tracks, turning to stare imperiously at the bunch. She sensed Mikal tensing up beside her, but the granda gave a mental cheer.

  “He wanted to,” she said loftily, “but if he had come, there would have been no-one to act as the head of the household in my absence. By the time we’d get back, likely we would go back to nothing, our feuding neighbours having taken over all that was ours. I would rather brave the dangers of journeying alone, with only a servant to accompany me, than lose what is mine by right.”

  She turned away from them and resumed walking, her head high. The louts watched her in silence and made no more effort to detain her. However, her ears, sensitized to sound by the granda, caught one of them muttering:

  “They’re just pretending to be from somewhere far away on-planet. I’ll make a wager that they’re more of those off-worlders who are always showing up around here.”

  Kati bit her lip at that but let it go. There was no way to respond to it.

  *****

  They found one of the “kitchens” that Roch of Fertil Valley had mentioned. Basically, it was a simple outdoor cafe; a few tables and chairs scattered under an awning, next to a kitchen with a counter from which the patrons could pick up their food. Obeying the granda’s instructions, Kati seated herself at an empty table and directed Mikal to fetch her the house fare, and to buy food for himself as well. She slipped a couple of coppers into his hand with which to pay for the food.

  She had been sitting for only minutes, studying the few other patrons and her surroundings, when Mikal came back with a tray with a meal on it for her, and a meat wrap for himself. He lay the tray before her, showed her the remaining copper, so she knew that one copper had covered the whole cost, and with an obsequious bow to her, left, munching on his wrap as he went. Kati dug into her meal with a hunger brought on by the long walk of the morning.

  She and Mikal had exchanged enough words to agree that she would look over the inns on the square while he hunted for a likely youngster whom they could hire. It would give her a plausible occupation, even though the two of them had decided to not take rooms until they had consulted a local, presumably the lad that Mikal was to hire.

  Besides, there was a small chance that she might run into the person or persons from Gorsh’s ship, in one or another of the lodgings. They had to sleep somewhere; a flit, she gathered, was not roomy enough, or adequately equipped to form a living space for even one person. Not that she had much desire to run into Gorsh’s men, they were apt to be dangerous.

  “What I think,” Mikal had told her during the interminable trip in the dark, “is that the nearer beacon is a lure. Gorsh knows that I would go looking for a beacon, that’s my guess; the knowledge of the beacons is not common to all, but neither is it classified information. It wouldn’t be very useful if it was classified—after all, you have to know about the beacons in order to use them. So, you and I should assume that Gorsh and his minions, or else some other bunch of the criminals that use the rendezvous in the mountains, decided to install a phony beacon in a handy location just in case a situation such as ours should arise. I trigger it and they descend on me; good-bye any hope of getting back to Federation territory.”

  “So why don’t we just bypass this one and go on to the farther one?” she had asked.

  “Because I don’t know for sure that this is a false beacon. I’m guessing; I’m making an educated guess, granted, but I don’t actually know. I won’t know for sure without looking at it; therefore I am going to have to physically eye it.”

  “Could the other one, the one farther away be the false one?”

  “It’s possible, and that is why I want to look at this one first. It’s not likely, since the crooks’ rendezvous spot is on this continent, and since whoever left the ship took only a flit with him. But since I have never heard of there being two Federation beacons on a single planet, one of these has to be bogus. I think it is much more likely that the nearer one is the plant.”

  Kati had heard Mikal sigh and shift his weight on the wagon before continuing:

  “Because the Kitfi found both beacons for us, we know that it is very likely that a trap has been set for us; hence we should be able to avoid that trap. If I’m right, Gorsh’s man will have paid someone to look for strangers coming to town, so we’ll have to watch our backs. I’m not counting on our disguise to fool the crooks, but it helps if we can fool the townspeople. I doubt that he’ll dare to kill us in full view of the inhabitants; whatever his relationship to the city is, he’ll want that to remain operational. He’ll want to kill us in the dark of night with no witnesses to the act. So, Kati, please keep these things in mind as we operate there.”

  That was why she spent the hour after eating going from inn to inn, haggling over prices, and keeping a furtive eye open to all comers and goers, just in case there was someone around whom she recognized from her time on the space ship.

  It had all begun to feel rather pointless and hopeless by the time she had examined every one of the five Inns on the Square. There was not much difference among them, not in price, nor in amenities. They all had pretensions of luxury but not much of such in reality. They claimed to provide privacy but Lady Katerina’s sharp eyes caught too many hangers-on hanging around in dim corners. The door locks were to laugh at. And every Inn insisted that Mik should be lodged in the small cubby-holes of servants’ rooms in the back, too far away to be of any use in an emergency. None had what she wanted, which was an anteroom outside hers, so that her servant could do the job her husband had given him, and stand between her and any possible danger.

  Back outside on the Square, she sat down on a block of granite in front of the last inn that she had checked out, feeling thoroughly discouraged with the results of her survey.

  “There’s something funny going on here,” she muttered to herself, glaring at the facade of the establishment that she had just vacated.

  It was getting towards the end of the afternoon and the foot traffic around her had picked up a lot. She was glad of that; there was safety in numbers. She wished that Mikal would hurry back; sundown was not that far away and they needed to be settled somewhere suitable by dark. Dark may not have been a problem for them among the Kitfi, but here, in this city, dark was their enemy.

  With a sigh she pulled the rucksack off her back and lay it down on the ground at her feet.

  “Are you Lady Katerina?” a woman’s voice called to her, and she looked up to see a local female walk briskly towards her. It seemed that news travelled
fast in River City.

  “Yes, I am,” Kati confessed, looking curiously at the middle-aged woman who came to stand in front of her. She looked like the no-nonsense sort: she was dressed in a simple shirt and trousers made of sturdy cloth. Not a lady of leisure this one, but someone clearly doing all right by her labours.

  The woman smiled, but not obsequiously. Kati guessed that she was used to dealing with folk in all walks of life, and probably took claims of social rank with a grain of salt. Someone with her self-confident manner would judge people with measures other than money and position. Kati surprised herself by wanting to stand well in this woman’s estimation.

  “My name is Sye, Lady Katerina. My son, Dris, came running to me a few minutes ago, saying that he did not think that the lady just come into town, the Lady Katerina, was finding the Inns on the Square to her taste. He thought that, perhaps, I ought to ask her to look at our establishment, which, although not as convenient to the Market as these ones here, has some features that they lack.”

  Kati grinned at her.

  “Your son rather understated my opinion of these inns, Mistress Sye.” She indicated the buildings with a quick sweep of her hand. “I looked at the rooms on offer in every one of them, and if I had a suspicious nature, I would certainly think that they were setting me up to be robbed by the local Thieves’ Guild. I think I’d feel as safe sleeping on the grass of the Square as in any one of those places.”

  The woman, Sye, laughed.

  “I don’t think you are too far off in your estimation, Lady Katerina. I’m afraid that there are enough of those in our city who consider visitors fair game. However, we don’t all think that way by any means; although the ones that do, seem to have a knack for making themselves visible.

  “Would you like to look at my place and see what you think?”

  “I think that I certainly would,” Kati replied but made no move to get up. “Only it just so happens that I’m waiting for my servant, Mik, to come back. I sent him to look for a likely lad who might run errands for us, and do some other small services while we are here, and I’m afraid that I cannot leave until he returns.”