The Star-Crowned Kings

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Race lay awake long that night. He felt as the sod must feel when the plow comes and stands it on end, one edge to the sky, the green tops on one side and the cut roots on the other. All in one day had come a shake-up such as few of Ravenham’s placid people experienced in all their lives. And it came as he was still adjusting himself to the life of an equipment Operator on the great green fields.

In the cozy feelings of the dinner table and the later talk, he had forgotten about the movement of the flagstone. His mother’s words brought it all back again, and now that he had time to rest after the excitement of packing he almost trembled at the possibilities.

As was her habit, Janinda had come to bid him goodnight. “Race? We’ll not tell Joss about you until we’re in the mountains. Not that I think she can’t keep a secret — but she’ll have enough to think about. And we don’t know if it means anything.”

“All right. I’d just as soon not talk about it — it sounds so ... weird.”

“I don’t think she’d laugh, even if you can’t do it again. That’s another reason for going to the mountains.”

“To have room to practice — yes. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Practice! Why, Janinda must really believe he could do it! Long he lay awake, now believing, now despairing; now hoping it was true, now fearing that it was.

The next morning was Sunday. The Wordens were up by first faint light, an hour before the sun. Already the village was beginning to stir. Church service was held on Sunday, for the less than half who attended on any given Sunday. Religion was not an important part of such monotonous lives as these; men who worked six days a week saw nothing wrong in taking a frequent Sunday to hunt, fish, or go on a short trip. They would have company on the road.

Race carried the rifle and a supply of shells.

All three had packs of food and blankets wrapped in tarpaulins — discarded implement covers, common in the villages. A few cooking utensils completed their outfit, and clothes. Race felt obscurely ashamed to be carrying so much more than the usual pleasure-seekers, and Janinda appeared to share this feeling; she was anxious to be off.

They were the first out of the village. It seemed much lighter, out from under the great trees; then it seemed immensely daunting. The road seemed both endless and deadly monotonous. Overhead, the Imperial Cluster had long since set, but other stars were still visible. They faded as Ravenham shrank behind them.

The road was hard-packed gravel; the usual traffic was steam tractors pulling trailer-loads of hay and silage out, and manure coming in. Rides could be hitched on weekdays, but there was no specific passenger traffic; no tractor traffic at all on Sunday.

The sky turned from gray-black to deep blue to deep green. Then the sun began to rise behind them, and as the world brightened the sky began to assume its normal apple-green, a deeper color near the zenith. It looked yellow around the sun, and when Race looked back at Ravenham, southeast of them, he saw it as a dark green blot against the dazzle of yellow, set in the rich light green of the fields.

None felt like speaking. They marched in a grass-green circle bisected by the brown road, under a sky-green dome. No other road was visible from this angle — the grass was shoulder high. Little by little, Ravenham dropped below the curve of the planet. The only break in the monotony was the colorful specks of travelers far behind them in the road.

At length — some three hours of steady walking — Paulfields loomed up before them. This was a larger village but otherwise quite like Ravenham, fronting on a transverse canal and serving as a shipping point for half a dozen villages. To it they shipped the grass they raised; from it they got back manure and such food, tools, and manufactured items as they could not produce themselves, plus tractor fuel. The Wordens were reasonably familiar with Paulfields, had friends and even relatives here.

Now they avoided the canal-front center of the village, where they might meet people they knew, swinging north around the edge of the village to the canal above it.

“Wow!” said Jocela in relief, dropping her pack and throwing herself down in the shade. “I never knew blankets were so heavy.”

“I’m hungry.”

“It might be better to go easy on the food,” said Janinda expressionlessly. “It may have to last us a long time.”

That made them feel twice as hungry, but both of her children stared at her in awe. No one ever had to economize on food; the necessity of rationing it had never occurred to them.

The transverse canal made a double s***h of shade across the endless fields. Both sides were lined with trees, now quite old and huge. It was a placid stream. Like the river it emptied into, it was designed to minimize fall and current speed; one of many graded and regulated tributaries coming down from the mountains or up from the southern hills. Like the river, these canals were string-straight and were controlled by dams at their heads. The grass fields were so skillfully managed that they had little runoff, and that seeped evenly into the canals — there were no streams winding through the fields.

On the water side of the trees, on each side of the canal, was a stone-slab road — typical Starling make. Each slab was yards thick and usually more than a hundred feet long; a mountain had been sliced into chips to make a road. The joints between chips, however, were frequently several inches wide. The Starlings had not patience for careful work, though in their defense it might be said that there were thousands of miles of such roads in the Plantation.

Now the occasional fishermen pulled in their lines and stepped back across the road; the Wordens heard the ding-a-ling of bells. A barge train came nosing past the town, pulled by an electric locomotive on the canal road. The Wordens gathered up their packs without haste; this was a familiar sight to them. The locomotive’s brave scarlet and violet paint was dingy close up, but it was massive enough to be impressive. The Operator looked languidly at them. Its speed was a little faster than a walk.

Behind came the lead barge, covered. The next barge was silage, also covered. Then another, and another, of the special silo barges. Finally a barge-load of hay. It was early for hay; even the silage was only just being brought in. But hay went upstream all the time — there were a dozen barges of it behind this one.

Janinda led them across the grooved road — the rubber tires of the engines had cut the grooves too deep in their century and a half of operation, so the bottoms of the grooves had been repaved with cobblestones — and down to the edge of the canal. Joss leaped for the barge-load, clutching the timbers of the rack with a laugh. Race followed. His baggage hampered him more than he had thought, and the rifle got in his way. Janinda prudently seized a rack timber and stepped down onto the front fender wheel.

The right bank was always the near bank, whichever way you faced, so that the barges needed wheels on but one side to fend them off the canal side. These were about two feet in diameter, rubber-tired. Each horizontal fender wheel was covered with a wooden shield; too many people had been injured stepping onto the hub.

It would take an impossible number of guards to prevent such joyrides, so neither the Plantation authorities nor the Transport Company tried it. No one on the banks paid any attention to the Wordens.

Joss and Race clambered rapidly up the towering load, to the top of the timber rack, on up the pyramid of five-hundred-pound bales of hay. They dropped their packs with a sigh and looked eagerly around. The load was as big as a house, but was still overshadowed by the huge trees on the shore.

With a guilty start Race remembered his mother and started down to help her, but Janinda had reached the top of the rack and pulled herself easily and gracefully up despite her bundle and the umbrella. Atop the load she brushed her hair back, smiled and waved to a boy on the bank who was delighted to see a grown woman on a hayride, and looked around with pleasure.

“It’s been years since I went on a joyride. I had almost forgotten what it was like.”

“Don’t you just love it in spring?” Joss asked eagerly.

“Yes, or in early winter when the banks are full again and it’s not too cold.”

“This breeze is nice, and we won’t need the umbrella for hours yet.”

The sensation of steady if slow movement was irresistible, so rarely did they ride a powered vehicle. Race would have been entranced even if he were not used to his tractor, though it went faster than this, twice as fast with a full gangplow. The faint hum of the distant locomotive was all but drowned by the lap of the waves between barge and bank; those were the only sounds. They knew that this motion would continue without a break to the head of the canal.

“We should be about halfway there by noon,” Janinda said.

Race looked at Joss; excitement lit their eyes. Surely nobody from Ravenham had gone more than halfway there; they had to allow time for the return journey, as the barge trains on the transverse canals did not run by night.

“The farthest I ever went was two hours up,” said Joss.

“Me too — to Moreton.”

Both had been downstream to Fulvia on the river several times, but didn’t care to mention it in their mother’s presence. She knew it though, and smiled in her way, as if to herself. No one went alone, and no group could keep a secret; mothers always knew. It was not usually forbidden, but everyone knew that it was better to stay away from the town, where village gossip had so little restraining influence.

Janinda opened her bundle, rolling the tarp out on the hay first, then the blanket and the two quilts; a bedspread on top. “I wish we had more sheets,” she murmured. Race wished for pillows.

Joss jabbed the folded umbrella into the hay, ready for use. It was twice as old as their mother — half as old as the Plantation, almost. Their grandmother had put a new tarpaulin cover on it about the time of their parents’ marriage, so it was still in fine shape, its gold and black hardly faded.

They all sat decorously for awhile, watching the endless fields passing by beyond the trees. Then Joss and Race got restless. They prowled over the load, shouted insults at friends they saw on barges behind, and went down to drink from the clear, cool canal. They swung off and ran ahead, to climb trees and drop on the load, and for awhile they played king of the mountain on the load, though neither could swim.

They sat dumb and decorous whenever they passed a village on their side of the canal, being warned in advance by the fishermen. At each village the locomotive climbed a stone bridge over the harbor entrance, paying out cable from the boom to the lead barge. Though the engine never slowed, this allowed the barges to do so. There was time for the villagers to leap aboard and unshackle the covered barges on the end. In midstream a steam tug awaited, with a line of new barges to be attached.

Race explained the system to Joss, though she understood it as well as he. “The main idea is never to stop the locomotives; constant stopping and starting is not good for their guts. You notice that they always break the train just after the hay and silo barges. That lets each village put its own grassers on with the rest. At each village we drop a line of covered barges and pick up a different line dropped by the previous train; the train that follows us will move our covered barges up to the next village.”

“Gee, thanks for telling me! I always wondered — if you knew. —It must take days for a covered barge to make it up the canal, except for the specials at the front end.” The specials went straight to the canal-head villages.