Railsea, Page 2

  The impact sent his pole shattered & clattering across the railsea but the points slammed sideways as they disappeared below the figurehead, & the Medes’s front wheels hit the junction. The train continued, back on a safe line.

  “Well done, that man,” said the captain. “It was an ill-marked change of gauge.”

  Sham exhaled. With a few hours, industrial lifting & no choice you might change a vehicle’s wheel-width. But hit a transition full on? They’d have been wrecked.

  “So,” Captain Naphi said. “He’s a tricksy one. Leading us into trouble. Well grubbed, old mole.”

  The crew applauded. A traditional response to that traditional praise for such quarry cunning.

  Into dense railsea.

  The moldywarpe slowed. The Medes switched & circled, braked, kept a distance as the buried predator sniff-hunted for huge tundra earthworms, wary of pursuers. It wasn’t only trainsfolk who could read vehicles in their vibrations. Some beasts could feel the drum & pulse of train motion from miles off. Cautiously, the traintop cranes lowered jollycarts onto nearby lines.

  The cart-crews gunned their little engines, switched points gently. They closed slowly in.

  “Off he goes.”

  Sham looked up, startled. Next to him, Hob Vurinam, the young trainswain, leaned out enthusiastically. He snapped up the collar of his battered finery with practised cockiness, his third- or fourth-hand coat. “The old velvet gent can hear them.”

  A molehill rose. Whiskers, a prow of dark head emerged. It was big. The snout went side to side & sprayed dust & spittle. Its mouth opened, very full of teeth. The talpa had good ears but the double switch-rattling confused it. It growled dustily.

  With sudden violent percussion, a missile slammed down next to it. Kiragabo Luck—Sham’s compatriot, Streggeye native, truculent harpoonist—had shot, & she had missed.

  Instantly the moldywarpe upended. It dug at speed. Cart Two’s harpoonist, Danjamin Benightly, moon-grey yellow-haired hulk from the woods of Gulflask, yelled in his barbarous accent, & his crew accelerated through the scattering soil. Benightly pulled the trigger.

  Nothing. The harpoon gun was jammed.

  “Damn!” said Vurinam. He hissed like a spectator at a puntball match. “Lost it!”

  But Benightly the big forestman had learned javelin hunting dangling upside down from vines. He had proved himself adult by spearing a meerkat at fifty feet & reeling it in so quick its family had not noticed. Benightly grabbed the harpoon from its housing. Lifted it heavy as it was, his muscles bunched like bricks under his skin, as the cart rolled closer to the digging behemoth. Leaned back, waited—then hurled the missile right into the mole.

  The moldywarpe reared, the moldywarpe roared. The spear juddered. The harpoon rope whip-unwound as the animal thrashed, blood on the soil. Rails buckled & the cart careered, tugged behind the animal. Quick—they knotted a soil-anchor to the line & threw it overboard.

  The other cart was back in the game, & Kiragabo didn’t miss twice. Now more anchors scraped the ground behind a bellowing hole & furious earth. The Medes juddered to a start & followed the molecarts.

  The drags kept the burrower from going deep. It was half-in half-out of the ground. Carrion birds circled. Bolshy ones flew in to peck & the moldywarpe shook its shag.

  Until at last in a lagoon of stony steppe, a dirt space in the infinite rails, it stopped. It quivered, then settled. When next the greedy railgulls landed on the furred knoll of its body, it did not dislodge them.

  The world silenced. A last exhalation. Twilight was coming. The crew of the moletrain Medes readied knives. The devout thanked the Stonefaces or Mary Ann or the Squabbling Gods or Lizard or That Apt Ohm or whatever they believed in. Freethinkers had their own awe.

  The great southern moldywarpe was dead.

  TWO

  A MEAT ISLAND! THE CARCASE LOOMED.

  Molecarters snared the ropes in its skin & traintop winches hauled tons of moleflesh & a precious pelt across the ground on which no one would step. Scavenger birds at last flew home, replaced in the sky by Arctic darkbats. In waning light the moldywarpe undertook a last, posthumous journey to the butchery wagon. & no illustrations; no flatographs; no salvaged thriddies, paintings, saltprints or liquid-crystal renditions; & certainly not the arse-achingly dull molers’ reminiscences Sham had heard too many times could have prepared him for what extraordinary stinking work followed.

  The mole was opened. The flatbed truck filled with its spilling remains. Sham breathed shallow at the sight. Hollow-chested. As if he was at prayer.

  The crew hacked, unfolded, peeled, sawed. They grunted & sang shanties. “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Brakesman?” they sang, & “A Life on the Open Rails.” Overhead, Sunder Nabby conducted their concert with his view-scope. Sham stared & stared.

  “Nothing to do?” It was Vurinam, broken off from flensing, a gory knife in his hands. “Feeling soft-hearted?”

  “Nah,” Sham said. Vurinam was shirtless in the tight radius of heat around the cutting & the fires, skinny & muscled & sweating mere inches from where the air would freeze him. He grinned a little crazily. Sham could suddenly believe there were only a few years between them.

  No one needed first aid, but Sham knew Dr. Fremlo would not forebear lending him to the wider crew on a night like this. Vurinam’s gaze went side to side as he hunted for, & found, inspiration. “Oy!” he shouted to everyone wetly unmaking what had been a mole. “Anyone thirsty?” A big tired cheer. He inclined his head & looked meaningfully in Sham’s direction. “Well, you heard that.”

  Really? Sham said. He even liked Vurinam, well enough, but really? I’m not even saying an apprentice doctor is my favourite thing to be in the world, he said, but hauling liquor? Don’t you have a cabin boy? No disrespect, it’s an honourable profession, but is it really my job to lug grog? To grog-lug? To grug? Sham said all that but only in his head. Outside of his head, what he said was, “Yes sir.”

  & abruptly, Sham Yes ap Soorap was right in the middle of that moment. Quickly bloodstained. So started the longest hardest night he had ever worked. From butchery car to mess & back, again & again, running the length of the train. With drinks, with food to keep the strength up, to Fremlo’s cabin where the doctor loaded him with bandages & unguents & astringents & analgesic chews for rope-burns & sliced-up palms, back again to apply them.

  What reward Sham got lay in the fact that the ribaldry & jokes & excoriations of his laziness with which he was greeted by the crew unmoling the mole was more often good-humoured than not. He even, he realised, felt a bit of relief in knowing just what he was to do, the precise nature of his task, in those moments.

  He snatched seconds when he could to sway in stupefied tiredness. Cutting or not, there was no avoiding the blood in that butchery wagon. So Sham became the gore-stained boy, swaying like a young tree, quite red. Not knowing what to turn his mind to. He’d been waiting for this, like all the crew, & now here he was, awed but still not knowing what it was he thought. Still lost.

  He didn’t ruminate on hunting. Nor on the medicine he was supposed to be learning. Nor beyond wordless aghast wonder at the scale of the mole’s bones. He just endured.

  Sham diluted booze—“More water than that! Not as much as that! More molasses! Don’t spill it!”—snuck a couple of swigs himself. He held cups of it to the lips of those whose hands were too entrail-slippery to grip. Shossunder the cabin boy carried cups, too, with poise, glancing at Sham with a nod of rare, imperious solidarity. Sham lit fires, heated metal, stoked blazes to keep trypots hot while railers took skin & fur to be tanned & cleaned, meat to be salted, strips & slabs of fat to be rendered.

  The universe stank of moldywarpe: blood, pee, musk & muck. In the moonlight everything looked splashed with tar: in the train lights that black turned to the red of the blood it was. Red, black, redblack, & as if he drifted off like a paper-scrap out to railsea & looked back, Sham envisioned the Medes as a little line of lights & fires, heard the musi
c of its tools & train songs swallowed in the enormous southern space of ice & freezing rails. Everything spread out from the centre of the universe that at that moment was the moldywarpe face. The set snarl, the dark-furred leer, as if even in its death the great predator did not lose its contempt for those who had, outrageously, snagged it.

  “Ahoy.”

  Dr. Fremlo nudged him & Sham lurched. He’d been asleep & dreaming where he stood.

  “Alright then, Doctor,” he stuttered, “I’ll …” He tried to work out what it was he would.

  “Go put your head down,” Fremlo said.

  “I think Mr. Vurinam wants …”

  “& when did Mr. Vurinam pass his medical licence? Am I a doctor? & your boss? I prescribe sleep. Take one, once nightly. Now.”

  Sham didn’t argue. Just then, for once, he knew precisely what it was he wanted: to sleep, indeed. He shuffled out of the heat, away from the empty rib-room that had been mole, into the swaying corridors. Towards his little nook. One shelf-bed among many. Through snores & farts of those who’d come off shift already. The songs of the butchers behind him were Sham’s ragged lullaby.

  THREE

  MARVELLOUS!” HAD SAID VOAM, WHEN HE GOT Sham the job on the Medes. “It’s marvellous! You’re not a child anymore, you’re quite old enough for work, & there’s nothing better than a doctor. & where else are you going to learn as fast & deep as with a moletrain doctor, eh?”

  What logic is that? Sham had wanted to shout, but how could he? Enthusiastic, hairy, barrel-shaped Voam yn Soorap, Sham’s cousin or something, relative on his mother’s side by a thread of unsnarlable connections, one of the two who had raised Sham, was not a trainsman. Voam kept house for a captain. The only people, however, he held in higher regard than molers were doctors. Which was not surprising, given how much of his time Sham’s other cousinish surrogate parent—stooped, nervy, angular Troose yn Verba—spent with them. & they were mostly kind, too, to the boisterous old hypochondriac.

  Sham could no more turn down the work Troose & Voam had arranged for him than he could have trod dog muck & railsea earth into the old men’s clothes. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to suggest, wrack his brains though he did. He’d been fretfully kicking his heels long enough since ending school. His time at which had also been spent, if more youthfully, kicking his heels.

  Sham felt sure there was something he fervently wanted to do & to which he was excellently suited. Which made the more frustrating that he could not say what it was. Too vague about his interests for further study; too cautious in company, perhaps a little bruised by less-than-stellar school days, to thrive in sales or service; too young & sluggish to excel at heavy work: Sham’s tryings-out of various candidate activities left him het up. Voam & Troose were patient but concerned.

  “Maybe,” he had tried to venture, more than once, “I mean, what about …” But the two men would always catch & interrupt his drift on that topic, in uncharacteristic accord.

  “Absolutely not,” said Voam.

  “No way,” said Troose. “Even if there was someone you could train with—& you know there ain’t, this is Streggeye!—it’s dangerous & dubious. You know how many beggars there are tried & failed to make that a living? You have to have a certain …” He had eyed Sham gently.

  “You’re much too …” Voam said.

  Too what? thought Sham. He tried for fury at Voam’s hesitation, but only got as far as gloom. Too wet? Is that it?

  “… Too nice a lad,” Troose had concluded, & beamed. “To try his hand at salvage.”

  Eager to give him a gently caring shove, to be an adult bird nudging a fledgling into squawking terrified first flight, Voam had pulled a favour & secured moletrain-based apprenticeship with Fremlo for his ward.

  “Life of the mind, teamwork & a sure trade, too,” Voam had said. “& it’ll get you out of this place. See the world!” When he told Sham, beaming, Voam had blown a kiss at the little clicking portrait of Sham’s mother & father. It cycled on a three-second exposure, an endless loop. “You’ll love it!”

  SO FAR, love of the life had been evasive. But to his own surprise, when he woke after that night of butchery, though the first noise out of him was a yelp & the second a whimper, so stiff & bone-battered was Sham, & though he staggered out of the cabin as if in rusted-up armour, when out he came & saw the grey sun through the upsky clouds & the swirling railgulls & his comrades taking hacksaws to the hosed-down pillars of the moldywarpe skeleton, even still feeling like an imposter at he knew not even what, Sham was lifted.

  A kill so big, the mood aboard was good. Dramin served breakfast molemeat. Even he, ash-coloured & cadaverous, a cook who looked like a scrawny dead man & had never liked Sham at all, slopped broth into Sham’s bowl with something almost like a grin.

  The crew whistled as they wound rope & oiled machinery. Played quoits & back-gammony on the cartop decks, swaying expertly with the train. Sham hesitated, hankering, but blushed to remember his previous participation in the hoop-throwing. He felt fortunate the crew had let slide what had looked likely to become his permanent nickname, Captain Rubbish-Aim.

  He went back to watching penguins. He took flatographs of them with his cheap little camera. The flightless charmers bickered & clattered their beaks on the islets they jostlingly inhabited. Hunting, they would dive into the inter-line ground, the earth of the railsea between the metal, & with their big shovel-shaped bills, their adapted clawfeet & muscled wings, they would tunnel aggressively for yards, burst squawking up again with some subterrestrial grub wriggling in their beaks. They might be prey in turn, chased by a fanged meerkat, a badger, predatory chipmunk packs, flurrying hunters at which Sham would stare, & which some of his trainmates strained with nets to snare.

  THE MEDES’S JOURNEY was winding. Sham stared wistfully at each jag of salvage the switchers steered them past. As if one of them—that wire-wrapped stub of wheel, this dust-scoured refrigerator door, the glowing thing like a segment-missing grapefruit embedded in the shale of a shore—might wake up & do something. Could happen. Sometimes did. He thought his attentions were sneaky till he noticed the first mate & doctor watching him. Mbenday laughed at Sham’s blush; Fremlo did not.

  “Young man.” The doctor looked patient. “Is this the sort of thing, then”—with a gesture at whatever ancient discarded object it was they left behind them in the dust—“for which you pine?”

  Sham could only shrug.

  They interrupted a group of person-sized star-nosed moles. The Medes snared two before the labour got away. Sham was bewildered that the sight of those kills, the squeals of those animals, made him wince more than the enormous slaughter of the bellowing southern moldywarpe. Still, it was more meat & fur. Sham snuck by the diesel car to see how full their holds were, to gauge how soon they would have to dock.

  Fremlo gave him more doll-things to take apart & label & put back together again, to learn how the body worked. The doctor would examine the results of these macabre surgeries in horror. Fremlo put diagrams in front of him, at which Sham stared as if studying. Fremlo tested him on beginner medicine, at which Sham performed so consistently badly the doctor was almost more impressed than irritated.

  Sham sat on deck, his legs dangling over the rushing dirt. He waited for epiphany. He had known soon after the journey started that medicine & he were not to be close friends. So he had auditioned fascinations. Tried scrimshaw, journal-keeping, caricature. Tried to pick up the languages of foreign crewmates. Hovered by card games to learn gamblers’ skills. These efforts at interest did not take.

  Northish, & the frost grew less severe, plants less cowed. People stopped singing & started arguing again. The most robust of these altercations blossomed into fights. More than once Sham had to scurry out of the path of roaring men & women knocking bells & leather out of each other at the most minimal provocations.

  I know what we need, Sham thought, as ill-tempered officers ordered the perpetrators to clean the heads. He’d overheard se
cond-hand train-lore about what to do when tensions got great. We need some R&R. It was not long ago he had not known what those Rs might stand for. Perhaps bored women & men, he thought, needed Rice & Remembrance. Rollers & Restitution. Rhyme & Reason.

  One drab afternoon under sweaty clouds, Sham joined a circle of off-duty trainsfolk hallooing on a cartop. They gathered around a rope-coil arena in which two grumpy insects lumbered at each other. They were tank beetles, heavy iridescent hand-sized things, solitary by nature & pugnacious when that nature was denied, so perfect for this nasty sport. They hesitated, seemingly disinclined to engage. Their handlers prodded them with hot sticks until they grudgingly charged, shells clattering like angry plastic.

  It was interesting, Sham supposed, but their owners’ relentless provocation of their insects wasn’t pleasant to watch. In cages in his colleagues’ hands, he saw a burrowing lizard with anxious reptile sneer. A meerkat, & a spike-furred digging rat. The beetles were only the warm-up fight.

  Sham shook his head. It wasn’t as if the beetles were any less press-ganged or unwilling than rats or rockrabbits, but even annoyed at the one-sidedness of his own mammalian solidarity, Sham couldn’t help feeling it. He backed away—& retreated right into Yashkan Worli. Sham staggered & careened into other onlookers, leaving a trail of annoyed growls.

  “Where you going?” Yashkan shouted. “Too soft to watch?”

  No, thought Sham. Just not in the mood.

  “Come here! Soft belly & soft heart?” Yashkan catcalled, accompanied by Valtis Lind & a few others who could be bothered with the casual cruelties. A patter of slang name-calling, reminding Sham unpleasantly of school. He flushed beacon-bright.

  “It’s only a joke, Sham!” Vurinam shouted. “Grow up! Get back here.”

  But Sham left, thinking of the insults & those beetles pointlessly crippling each other & the scared animals waiting their turn.