My family was in Mythen Rood, that was one thing. My heart ached for them, for my mother Jemiu and my sisters, Athen and Mull, for my friend Haijon and for Spinner Tanhide that was his wife. I wanted to see their faces again, even if they hated me now. I wanted to explain all the things I had done that was wrong, and say sorry for them, and also tell what I learned about how Mythen Rood’s tech went from one to another at the testing.
But after that it gun to be less clear. To tell the truth was to point the finger. It was to say Vennastins should not be Ramparts no more. And to say that was to push Mythen Rood off its roots like a sawed-off tree, and see it topple. Without Ramparts, it was hard to know what Mythen Rood would be. Or if it would be anything at all.
So was I going home to be back with them that I loved, or to be revenged on them that had cast me out? It seemed like it would be a good idea to know before I got there.
53
At a place called Arkom, we stopped a while.
We had laid more than forty miles of road in less than three months, and met with thirty villages along the way. Not all of them was in the right line of the road, but all was close to it – and almost all, after Dinder, welcomed it. The news went ahead of us now. Oftentimes, people come to ask if we would bend the road to take them in. Also, of course, they come to gape at the wonder of it – the caravan of mighty wagons that shouldered the forest out of its way and went where it choosed to.
We had a following too. People from every village was falling in behind us as we went, walking the new road even before it was all the way cold and dry. They brung leather hides with them, clothes and boots, tools, dried herbs, jewellery, honey and preserves, wine and beer and cider. They was looking to sell or barter these things in the villages the road passed by, which meant my hopes of a gene pull was already somewhat borne out, though it was only small beginnings. Those who come to trade would stay to tumble, and their genes would spread out further and further.
Ursala’s plans was working too. She had set the dagnostic in the store-space of one of the three drudges, and now at the end of each day’s work she plied her old trade of healing and making good. She would treat anyone that come, but she made a preference for women that was with child, or pair-pledged couples that was trying to get that way. Her gene-splicer was kept busy.
That was one of the reasons why we stopped in Arkom. We had been going too quick for all that wanted healing to be seen and tended to, and some was desperate sick. There was more and more that was following our caravan not to trade but to beg Ursala’s help, until at last she said enough was enough and we should make a stop for a few days so she could deal with what she called her back logs.
Monono said it was a good thing for other reasons. The hoppers from the hot mix machines had been running day and night for near on ninety days, and now they needed to be cleaned. Most of the great wagons needed repairs to their blades and rollers, or to the thick rubber sleeves that covered their wheels. “And the three of you could benefit from sleeping in a bed for once. Not to mention taking a bath. Going by the way you look, I’m lucky I can’t smell you.”
It’s true we was all of us dirty from the sweat and dust of the journeying and the thick black smoke that come off the road. Monono was probably right that we didn’t smell like wildflowers.
So stopping at Arkom was a thing we all was pleased to do. It was a village of about a hundred and fifty souls, builded on the two banks of a river called the Lone. They knowed we was coming and made a feast for us of fried fish and mashed swede, and the Headman said we was freemen and freewomen of Arkom henceforward, whatever else we might be. There was a dance after the feast, but Ursala had fell asleep three times while we was eating and didn’t have nothing left in her to dance with. I managed a couple of jigs then left the field to Cup, who seemed to be dancing with every boy in the whole village.
So we got our beds, and the next day we got our bath, in piping hot water with petals of flowers throwed into it to make it sweet. The men that brung the water in to me when it was my turn carried it like it was a solemn thing they was doing, and one of them put his hand on top of my head and said luck-touch, like you do when you find a clover or when a red bird flies over you.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked. “There ain’t no luck to be got from touching me.” The man said he didn’t know if there was or there wasn’t, but he was pretty sure Dandrake sent me.
“He did not!” I said.
“Well, you wouldn’t know though,” one of the men told me. “He got his own ways of working.”
I was cast down after that, and restless besides. Dandrake wasn’t no friend of mine, even now I knowed he had led the fight against Stanley Banner. I had troubled thoughts and empty hands, which is a bad mixture.
Ursala had set the dagnostic up in a little one-room house that the Headman give her. People that wanted to see her had to line up outside and wait their turn, but Cup had been helping her with what she called her tree arch, choosing who was sick enough to go in first and who was well enough to sit a while. The two of them was kept busy all the hours there was, but they didn’t need me and nobody else did either. My work was the road, and the road was stopped.
By and by, to keep my hands from fidgeting I turned to my old craft of woodsmithing. I begged a baulk of seasoned choker from the village’s smith, a woman named Seginsel, cut it into smaller pieces and gun to whittle one of the pieces into the shape of our crawler. Before I was halfway done, I had a bunch of little ones standing round watching me do it. “So which of you wants this when it’s done?” I said. They all answered in a chorus, me me me, and I realised I had got some work to do.
“Koli Toymaker,” Monono said. “It’s a long way from saving the world.”
“Maybe it is,” I said. “But it’s a restful thing to do. It’s small and stupid and has got no meaning at all except for filling an hour and raising a smile on someone’s face. So I’ll keep right on doing it until I’m made to stop.”
“Go ahead. I’ll make vroom vroom noises. It’s all this shitty little speaker is good for.”
We stayed in Arkom for five days – long enough for Ursala to see everyone that had come along with us and everyone in the village besides. She had one other patient in mind too, but Cup still was not ready to let the dagnostic go inside her body and change her. “You need me on the road,” she said. “I’m the only real fighter you got, and I ain’t staying behind while you go uphill and downdale without me. Maybe I’ll do it when we get to your village. We’re like to stop there for a long while, ain’t we?”
I didn’t answer. I still didn’t know.
Spinner
54
Torri forged the mast in six pieces – three for the base and three for the upper part. She only put them together at last when we took them up on the roof of Rampart Hold and moored them to the chimney stacks there. We had to re-lay the bricks with fresh mortar first and firm them up with iron braces.
The wire was ready in good time though. We had settled on a width that was about half the thickness of a nail, but in the end we had enough metal to go a little thicker than that. Challenger said this was a good thing as the messages in the wire would go more quickly if the road they travelled on was wider.