Ruins

  “I’m reminding you of what Umbo was taught in Fall Ford at the base of the Stashi Falls,” said Olivenko. “So all of a sudden, his boyhood friend—a boy who was even lower in social standing than Umbo, remember, because he lived a wandering life as a trapper’s son—his boyhood friend has a bag of jewels and starts talking like a lord. That came as a shock, you can imagine.”

  “Rigg was coming out of his disguise, coming into his heritage,” said Param.

  “Coming to prison as fast as the People’s Republic could arrest him, is that what you mean?”

  “It was our fate during that time,” said Param.

  “So Umbo does everything he can to get his friend out of imprisonment, and he does it just in time—”

  “Rigg got us out of prison! Using his talent and mine together. He found the passages in the walls, and I got us through those walls into the passages, and—”

  “You weren’t free of danger until Umbo pushed you and Rigg back in time a few days—which is where you acquired me,” said Olivenko.

  “I was not saying that Umbo wasn’t helpful and good,” said Param.

  “Only that his word was worthless, because he was born in a village to ordinary people.”

  “Not worthless, just uncorroborated.”

  “Remember, I’m trying to help you understand why Rigg got so angry with you. Umbo was his friend in that village, in a time of Rigg’s life when other boys wouldn’t have befriended him. Rigg was the stranger, the outsider, and everybody assumed he was a bastard. At least Umbo’s parents were married.”

  “I know they’re friends,” said Param. “But Rigg’s supposed to be my brother, and to take the side of—”

  “When people were trying to kill you, he took your side, didn’t he?”

  “Nobody was trying to kill Umbo.”

  “And then I remember a time when you announced you weren’t going to journey another step. You rebelled against Rigg.”

  “That didn’t mean I wanted to follow Umbo!”

  “And you didn’t. You followed me.”

  “You’re an educated man,” said Param.

  “Educated by the side of your father,” said Olivenko. “But still born to a much lower class. Not a natural leader, right?”

  “More of a leader than the others.”

  “Param, are you really this blind? I speak the language of court, in the accents of court, because I worked very hard to learn to talk that way. And so you followed me when you wouldn’t listen to anybody else. But I was never the leader of that group. I was simply the one person who could get you to do anything.”

  “You led us!”

  “They let me pretend to lead,” said Olivenko, “because Loaf wasn’t talking yet, and Umbo was taking care of Loaf. But the fact is, it was Umbo who did everything that kept us alive.”

  “You did it with him!”

  “I did what he told me to do,” said Olivenko. “Umbo understood that you were out of your element, that everything was strange for you. He also understood that you would only listen to me. So he made sure that I knew the right things to do, so that I’d be the one to say them, so that you’d listen.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” said Param. “You make me sound like a helpless, spoiled infant!”

  Olivenko shook his head. “I make you sound like someone who had lived inside the walls of a house, a prisoner, humiliated by any clown whom the People’s Revolutionary Council allowed to come harass you. I make you sound like a young woman who was physically weak and who had a habit of vanishing when ever things became stressful. You were trying very hard not to disappear and retreat by reflex, only you got tired, physically exhausted for the first time in your life. Umbo and Rigg and Loaf and I had experienced that many times, and we knew how to go on anyway. You didn’t. It’s not an easy thing to learn, and you never had to learn it.”

  “You’re on their side,” said Param. She stopped walking at all.

  “Have the courage to hear the truth from a friend.”

  “You’re not a friend! You’re a . . .”

  “Jumped-up peasant boy who became a scholar and then a city guard. I’m not insulted by those facts—that’s my life. Just as it’s no shame to you that you were hopelessly unprepared to deal with rough living and endless walking. We are who we are. When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.”

  The way he said it sounded soothing. Natural. But she was no fool. She knew he was patronizing her. Handling her, coping with her, getting around her, placating her, all those phrases for manipulation and control.

  And yet she kept walking, and kept listening, because even though she wasn’t in love with him anymore—she knew now that that had been a mere phase—she knew that he was a perceptive man, and he had been Father’s friend, hadn’t he?

  “Param,” said Olivenko, “we’re not in Aressa Sessamo anymore. Out here, we’re the people who pass between the Walls. We belong nowhere, we’re citizens of nothing, and there are only two classes that matter: Time-shifter and non-time-shifter. Loaf and I are non-shifters. You and Rigg and Umbo are shifters. Not only that, Umbo was the first to be able to move into the past all by himself. Can you do that? Could Rigg, until we were in Vadeshfold? We all survived and escaped from Ramfold because of one person.”

  “Umbo,” said Param. “I know that. But I saved him, too, you know.”

  “Yes, you were on the rock and when he finally let go of Rigg and me and Loaf, because he was about to die, you helped him disappear and dragged him off the rock. But even then, you couldn’t safely land from that leap until he took you into the past. Right? Am I getting the story right?”

  “Yes,” said Param, and she got his point well enough. “It was unbelievably rude of me to forget how much I owed Umbo.”

  “No, you’re not getting my point yet,” said Olivenko. “Of course you were ungrateful and spiteful and nasty and mean, but that’s what Umbo was taught to expect from royals, so that wouldn’t have bothered him. In fact, it didn’t bother him. You pushed him out of the flyer, but when he got up, he wasn’t going to do anything to you. He probably wasn’t even going to complain. It was Rigg who yelled at you. It was Rigg who, apparently, was going to push you out the door after him or some such thing, which Rigg and Umbo came back to prevent.”

  “Yes, and I’m still angry at Rigg for being so disloyal.”

  “Disloyal! No, Param. I’m the fool who still can’t get over being loyal to you because you’re a princess, next in line for the Tent of Light. But Rigg doesn’t give a mouse’s petoot about that, because he grew up like Umbo. Rigg wasn’t being disloyal. He was being loyal. Because in our company, Umbo is the royalty. Don’t you get that? Don’t you see? In this tiny world where the only classes are shifters and non-shifters, Umbo is the first of the shifters. He’s the one that everything depended on. He’s the king.”

  “He is not the king,” said Param. “We follow Rigg.”

  “That’s right. Umbo is the king, but he doesn’t rule, Rigg does, because Rigg has better training, and Rigg can see the paths, so Rigg can time-shift with more accuracy, and much farther, and Rigg has all that education that Umbo would have had if Ramex had chosen him instead of your brother. Umbo should be the highest among us, but he isn’t. Rigg’s in that place, partly because you treat him that way.”

  “Because he’s a—he’s one of—”

  “He’s royal,” said Olivenko. “But that’s not why any of the rest of us follow him. We follow him because he’s smart and creative, because Ramex educated him to be ready for situations the rest of us aren’t prepared for, and because he doesn’t want to be boss and so his hand rests gentle on the reins.”

  “He doesn’t want to lead us?” asked Param.

  “It’s something that he and I have in common. Whereas you and Umbo both think you should lead, but Umbo can’t because nobody would follow him, and you can’t because you’re completely incompetent.”
/>
  Param was so stung by those words that, by reflex, she began to time-slice, becoming invisible to him. Time-slicing made her slow down relative to him, though she was walking as quickly as before. For a moment she thought he hadn’t noticed that she vanished, but no, he kept walking, kept walking; he had to know she wasn’t by him; he wasn’t going to stop and wait for her.

  He isn’t going to pamper me. He isn’t going to let me control him by disappearing. He told me the truth, that’s what he did, and if I can’t take it, then too bad for me.

  Param stopped time-slicing and called out to him. “Please wait for me,” she said.

  Olivenko stopped and turned around. “Oh, you’re back,” he said. “Well, good. That’s good. I’m sorry I spoke so plainly. I hoped you’d have the courage to hear it, but I was afraid you might have too much arrogance to bear it.”

  “Both,” said Param. “I have both.”

  “But here you are,” said Olivenko. “I like you, Param. More to the point, I respect you. I’m the only one here who really understands anything about your life—and that’s only from being close to your father, and hearing him talk about you. Watching him shed tears when he talked about how helpless he was to protect you. ‘How am I even a man, when they can treat my little girl like that, and I do nothing.’ And I said to him, ‘What good will it do her if you’re dead? Because that’s what will happen if you try to stop them from treating her that way.’ And he said, ‘I would be a better father, dead because I stood between her and danger, than I am now, alive because I don’t have the courage.’”

  “He didn’t have the power,” said Param. “And look what he did die for!”

  “He died to try to cross the Wall,” said Olivenko. “And now we’ve done it. His dream, and we’ve fulfilled it.”

  “Turns out not to be so much a dream as a nightmare,” said Param.

  “Nightmare?” said Olivenko. “All those people—including your mother the queen, and General Citizen the dictator of Ramfold—they’re all nothing compared to us! We’re the walkers-through-walls, the world-striders! The rest of them don’t even know the world is about to be destroyed, but we’re working to try to prevent it. We’re the gods that the whole world will sing about one day.”

  “They’ll get three notes into the song and the Destroyers will incinerate them,” said Param.

  “Well, we only get the song if we succeed.”

  “If the mice succeed, you mean,” said Param.

  “Whoever,” said Olivenko. “We’ll mention the mice, of course. We’ll tell how the magical mice helped us save the world.”

  Param laughed at his joke. “Yes, that’s what the People’s Revolutionary Council taught us—whoever controls the history gets to be the hero!”

  “Param, I honor your office as daughter of the Queen-in-the-Tent, I can’t help that, it’s my whole upbringing. And I like you because you’re charming and when you’re not feeling sorry for yourself you’re even funny and happy and smart. But I respect you because you have had the hardest life of any of us, a life so lonely it breaks my heart to imagine it, and you lived it. Your mother was your whole world and she betrayed you—Rigg had only known her for a few months, he hardly knew her. But you thought you did.”

  “Oh, I knew her,” said Param. “I wasn’t as surprised as you seem to think.”

  “Not surprised, but still betrayed,” said Olivenko.

  “I’m glad you respect me,” said Param. “And I’m glad you took the time to talk to me. Because I do see your point. I spoke so harshly to Umbo, not because he deserved it, but because by putting him down as a peasant, I could cling to the only value I thought I had—my royal blood. But thanks to you, I now see how worthless that is.”

  “I wasn’t saying that it—”

  “‘Worthless’ was my word, not yours,” said Param, putting her hand on his wrist so they both stopped walking. “But it’s the right word. And I see your point. I am who I am. Even though my time-slicing is a pretty pathetic talent, since it makes me so vulnerable to anybody who knows how it works, and it makes me so slow, I’m a shifter. And I’m trying to learn how to be somewhat useful, and you respect me for my efforts, and I appreciate it. That’s what I’m saying. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, my lady,” said Olivenko. Then he bowed over her hand like a courtier, and kissed it.

  It was a gesture that had always been done by people who were only trying to suck up to Mother. But because Olivenko actually meant it for her, and because he was a good and wise man, and because she was, in fact, still desperately in love with him, Param was overwhelmed by it, and she burst into tears.

  They walked the rest of the way through the Wall with his arm around her.

  “Took you long enough,” said Rigg when they finally reached him.

  “So take us back in time so we don’t waste a moment of this precious experience of Larfold,” said Olivenko. “Though as far as I can see, it looks suspiciously similar to Odinfold. Complete with the mice.”

  “They’re dispersing,” said Rigg.

  Umbo was striding down the slope toward them. Apparently he had had time to crest the rise and see what lay on the other side.

  “Pristine wilderness as far as I can see,” Umbo reported, when he was near enough for anyone but Loaf to hear him. “But you’ll tell us if there are any human paths.” Clearly Umbo was talking only to Rigg, though Param and Olivenko stood beside him.

  “No paths,” said Rigg. “Not even in the early days of the colony.”

  “They took to the sea right away,” said Param. “And then they stopped talking to Larex, and we have no more of their history.”

  Umbo didn’t exactly ignore her. He waited for her to finish talking, and he was listening. But he didn’t look at her once. And when she was done, he said, “There’s one thing we should be seeing, and we’re not.”

  For a moment Param didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he pulled out his jeweled knife, and she realized. “No expendable to greet us.”

  “There wasn’t one in Odinfold, either,” said Umbo. “But the way I see it, Larex has been without a job for eleven thousand years. He’s too busy to come chat us up when we come into his wallfold?”

  “The ways of expendables are inscrutable,” said Rigg.

  “Scrute them,” said Umbo. “If you think it’s a good idea, I’m going to call for the flyer. Do you want me to ask Larex to come with it?”

  “Maybe later,” said Rigg. “At some point we might want to see what the local mechanical man has to say for himself. At least his people aren’t all dead, like Vadesh’s.”

  “We assume,” said Umbo.

  “If we can still call them people,” said Param.

  Loaf spoke up. “Oh, my definition of ‘people’ is definitely broader than it used to be. The mice have decided to take my advice and not accompany us. We’re weird-looking enough, what with this thing on my face and Olivenko being so butt-ugly by nature, without tipping off the locals about this smirky-smarty mouse invasion.”

  “In other words, they want time to get established before the Larfolders find out they’re here,” said Olivenko.

  “They’re already mating their little brains out,” said Loaf. “They won’t want to meet any Larfolders until their babies are having babies.”

  “Which should be in about an hour and a half,” said Rigg.

  “Gestation’s a little longer than that,” said Loaf.

  “So?” asked Umbo, holding up the knife.

  “Call for the flyer,” said Rigg. “I’m trying to figure out how I used to get around. I vaguely remembered that I used my legs somehow.”

  “Yes, legs,” said Umbo. “I try never to use mine.”

  Param chuckled. But the banter between the boys stung her. Olivenko was right. By blood, she was Rigg’s sister. But by love and loyalty, Rigg’s only sibling was Umbo. That was why Rigg had been so angry with her. He didn’t want to have to choose between them. But if push
came to shove, quite literally, he would choose Umbo. Had chosen him.

  And he was right, thought Param. I haven’t earned my place with them yet. Damsel in distress, even a talented disappearing damsel who’s also your closest living kin, isn’t automatically a dear and trusted friend. That will take time. And more strength and courage and self-control than I’ve shown up to now.

  CHAPTER 20

  Larfold

  The flyer carried them over pristine landscape, but because Rigg saw with the eyes of a pathfinder, he was struck by how empty it was. Like Vadeshfold, only even more devoid of paths. Though Odinfold had billions of paths, they were all faded by the thousands of years that had passed, and in recent years the paths had been few, and clustered up against the Wall.

  How different they all were from Ramfold, full of life, the webs of paths still weaving themselves afresh with every day’s activity.

  Odinfold was carpeted with ruins; Vadeshfold had its one empty city; but Larfold had nothing at all in this vast sweep of forested land, the hills and cliffs and mountains. Only the wispy trails of the colonists from eleven thousand years before, heading northward to the sea, and then nothing on land that was more than a few hundred meters from the shore.

  Yet this land was similar in climate and terrain to the land the Sessamids had come from, the barbarian forests that had spawned invasions of the great valley of the Stashik River again and again through history. The land was the same, but untorn by slash-and-burn farming, unscarred by roads, ungraced by bridges and buildings.

  It was not more beautiful than lands that human beings had shaped, thought Rigg. He remembered the ruins of the old arches that had once spanned the Stashi Falls, broken in ancient storms or earthquakes. He remembered the stairs cut into stone that led up in a breath-robbing highway to the crest of the falls; he remembered running up those stairs, and also staggering down them carrying bundles of pelts. Was the mountain somehow ruined because humans had cut away stone to make a stairway for themselves? Or was it made more beautiful as well as more useful?

  What comes into being naturally is pleasing to the eye, yes, Rigg thought. There is a beauty to the wildness of it. But there was also beauty in the Great North Road that wound along beside the Stashik River, and beauty in the patchwork of farms, and in the rough raw buildings of Leaky’s Landing, which was such a new place, and in the ancient buildings of O, so many of them built of stone barged down the river, as if humans had moved a mountain to make O. There was beauty in Aressa Sessamo, too, by nature a shifting swampland, but made by humans into a huge island of raised earth on which a city ablaze with life had been raised, a forest of wooden buildings where an empire was governed and people lived their lives of joy and misery, of boredom and excitement, leaving paths behind them in a tangle that to Rigg seemed the very tapestry of life.