Free Star's Reach by John Michael Greer

along it until a ferryman got close enough
that we could wave him in. I handed over a few bits, Berry and I
climbed into his little boat, and we sat and watched green water
roll past as he puffed and hauled on the oars and got us to the
other side. We got off the boat there and scrambled up the bank,
and a few minutes later we were walking north on the road to
Melumi.
    One of the roads to Melumi, I suppose I
should say, because there’s more than one. From Shanuga, you can go
on the main road east of the river up to Noksul, or you can go west
of the river on what’s not much more than a farm track most of the
same way, and then cross the ridges at the first good place you can
find and head west to Nashul or north into Tucki. Berry and I took
that second route, partly because Gray Garman said we ought to stay
off of the main roads, and partly because Noksul’s a soldier’s
town. That’s where my father went when he was called up for the
war; it’s where the Army of Tenisi is, when it’s not playing tag in
the mountains with raiders from the coastal allegiancies; and a
town full of soldiers is not a place where you want to take
something people might kill to get their hands on.
    I was nervous about that last bit. As soon as
we found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins, I knew that
even a copy of it would be worth a mother of a lot of money, and I
realized not that much later that a lot of people would want it for
reasons that didn’t have a thing to do with how many marks they
could get for it, but it took Gray Garman’s words to make it sink
in that one ruinman and his prentice might be fair game if the
wrong people figured out what we were carrying. With luck and Mam
Gaia’s blessing we could get ahead of the news and stay there, but
we’d need both the luck and the blessing. The radio message to
Melumi about our find would have come to many ears, even if it was
in code, and of course one rider on a fast horse could spread the
news way ahead of us.
    We talked about that a little, while we
walked; talked about the route we’d settled on, too, straight up
through Tucki to Luwul and from there straight to Melumi; but
mostly talked about nothing in particular, when we talked at all.
More often we just walked. The day was clear and cool, the sort of
dry season weather you long for when the rains set in and it’s one
big sea of mud from wherever you are to wherever you wish you could
get to; the sky was blue with a few puffy white clouds in it, and
the road was from the old world. It was rutted and cracked and big
chunks of the old paving were gone, but it still ran mostly
straight and level, and here and there you’d walk on big gray slabs
of concrete, like pictures in a storybook about the old world,
except the paint that made a line down the middle of the road got
weathered away long ago.
    All that country was full of farms. With
Shanuga so close, there’s plenty of money to be made selling garden
stuff and eggs and the like to the city markets, and the land’s
rich enough that you can do that and still grow plenty for a family
on a pretty modest plot. Ox carts rolling into the city came by so
often that Berry and I took to walking along one side of the road
to stay out of their way. Other than that we mostly saw people
working in the fields, and most of them took one look at our
ruinmen’s gear and looked away.
    We walked north until it was nearly full
dark, and found a farm where the people were willing to give us a
meal on the kitchen steps and a place to sleep in the barn for a
couple of bits. Berry dropped off to sleep as soon as we finished
getting settled in the hayloft. I envied him that, as I lay there
staring into the darkness, thinking about Star’s Reach and how on
Mam Gaia’s round belly I was going to figure out where it was if
the scholars at Melumi couldn’t help me.
    Still, I managed to get to sleep after a
while, and then the noises of farmhands going about the first
chores in the