“What d’you mean, he can’t come with us?” Sham had said.
“Ah now, lad,” had said Unkus Stone, & added a short scream as someone shifted where they leaned on his bed & moved his still-very-tender legs.
Sham & Vurinam & Dr. Fremlo & Yehat Borr & a few others had been in the sanatorium. The equipment around Unkus & the few other patients—here someone with injuries caused by crushing train-metal, there a blood-rabbit bite, one or two with bugs of the railsea—was battered. But it was not unclean, & the smell of the lunch the staff had brought Stone was not undelicious.
“Can’t believe I’m awake,” Unkus said.
“Neither can I,” said Fremlo.
The laughter after that was uncomfortable.
There was no way they could wait, Sham’s colleagues told him. He was being sentimental. There were moles to hunt. The bill for the sanatorium was paid for a while longer—topped up, might they point out, by the captain herself out of her own share. They had to get on.
“I really do not like it here,” Vurinam said. He glanced to either side & lowered his voice. “People keep asking where we’re going, where we been. Bollons people are nosy. Someone even asked us if it was true we was salvors!” He raised his eyebrows. “Said they heard we’d found a wreck! & a treasure map!”
Hmmm, thought Sham, a little uneasily.
“Shouldn’t just leave you,” Sham had said.
“Ah now, lad.” & Unkus had given Sham an awkward pat on the arm. “I can get myself to the docks, get paid passage back when I’m better.”
“It ain’t right.”
It wasn’t just for Unkus that he wanted to stay, though Sham could not admit that. The longer they stayed in Bollons, he thought, the more chance he might persuade the captain to visit Manihiki. From where, it was his tentative judgement, the man, woman, children in those images came. He felt uncharacteristically certain that going there was what he wanted to do—to make that connection between those images, & that place.
He had been running through increasingly baroque ideas of what he might say or hint to Captain Naphi to persuade her so far out of her intended path. He had nothing. & he was still astonished, could barely believe they were not in any case going.
He couldn’t not, with an ecstasy of scandal, keep recalling that picture. The secret of that line, that solitary line, leading, it seemed—& it still felt like curse words even just to think it!—out of the railsea. One of the first things he had done, back from the ordinator room in Bollons—whatever job the captain would have had him do forgotten by both of them—was to draw, as well as he could, all the images he had seen, from memory. Until he had a sheaf of scrappy ink renderings of memories of images of unlikely landscapes. They would have meant nothing to most who saw them, but to him were mnemonics, reminders, to conjure the railsea flatographs he had seen, that the captain had destroyed.
Oh yes. She had, making sure he saw her do so, carefully crushed the memory in her tough, skinless hand, while Sham made an involuntary noise of protest. When she opened her tough hydraulic fingers again it was full of plastic dust. “Whatever that silliness was,” she had said, “it concerned neither molers nor doctors’ assistants.”
Naphi had put a mechanical finger to her lips. “Be quiet,” she’d said. The instruction had covered both the noise of the clumsiness of his awe, & the potential saying of what he’d seen to others.
“Captain,” he’d whispered. “What was …?”
“I’m a moler,” Naphi had said. “You are a doctor’s assistant. Whatever you saw or thought you saw, it has nothing to do with your life & aims, whatever they might be, any more than it does with mine. So we don’t speak of it.”
“That was Manihiki,” he said. “Where they came from. We should—”
“I strongly advise,” the captain had said, looking at her own hands, “that you do not now or ever tell me, or any other captain under whom you roll, what ‘we’ ‘should’ do.” The quotation marks were audible. “I am considering, ap Soorap.”
So Sham said nothing. The captain had led him out of the café past packs of the goats that Bollonsians let roam the streets, trained to eat rubbish & leave their droppings in alleyway compost-heaps. Slowly, heart still slamming (approximating the clattername fudustunna, he thought, that came with great but dogged & determined pace), he thought through what he had seen. Those pictures.
Alone at last, back on the train, he had checked his own camera. That she had not seen him use. There it was. The picture. Horribly compromised by his shakes. Off-centre. But there it was, & it was not mistakable. The single rail.
He bit his lips.
There was a family. At the centre of the railsea. A woman & man of that family had left. Exploring? The extraordinary trainless landscapes. Exploring. Past animals. Past a place where what might be an angel prowled. Just far enough from it to stay safe. Through areas beyond the known railsea. To (that line) … to (that single line) … to that single line. To where the railsea untangled. & out of it.
& then they had come back. By some strange route, at last via the fringes of the Arctic. Heading, surely, for home. Where those children waited.
What a journey, Sham thought, & knew that that sister & brother needed to know what had happened. Those trainsfolk had been returning for them, & it was their right to know that. If someone found anything of the train my father’d been on, thought Sham, I’d want to know.
& they would. Whatever strangeness it was, that impossible rail, it was a priceless insight. The captain, he had thought, must be desperate to get going. He thought she must be working out routes to get them to Manihiki lickety-split. Where she & her officers could do whatever it was they’d do, work out how & to whom to sell the information, reconstruct the route those flatographs represented. & meanwhile, if they weren’t going to do it themselves, he, Sham, could pass on the sad news of the train’s & the trainsfolks’ demise to that boy & that girl.
That was what the captain must be doing.
“Your train’s away soon, then,” the harbourmaster said approvingly to Vurinam, in Sham’s hearing. “Good good. I hear chatter.”
Chatter about what? Sham wanted to ask. But he never got that information, & in Bollons chatter itself—as currency, bait & weapon—was trouble enough. Then word of their intended route had got out, & Sham had, in disbelief, realised Naphi had meant what she first said. That it had not been a moment’s reflexive denial of an underling while a plan was hatched. That Naphi was not taking them to Manihiki.
He considered saying something, but remembering her rejoinder to his first attempt, unconsidered it. Well then, he thought at last, as pugnacious as he could make his inner voice, if she really wasn’t intending to go there anyway, as she bloody well should, he’d just have to persuade her.
THE BEST-LAID PLANS can go belly up, & Sham’s was not even best laid. Twice he started to approach the captain, heart clatternaming on his inner rails, ready to ask her how she could do this, what this was, this refusal to pursue those images, her resolute not-talking-about-it-ness. The Medes set out, & headed in, as far as Sham was concerned, entirely the wrong direction, & he couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. & each time she looked at him one second too long, with very cold eyes, & he swallowed & turned away. & instead of to Manihiki, home to Streggeye Land they went.
EIGHTEEN
ON THE DOWN SIDE, ONE OF THE MEDES TRAINSFOLK had been left behind, flesh & muscle gnawed off his bones, in an ether-smelling shed on the shores of a land he didn’t know or like. On the up side, they’d snaffled quite the moldywarpe. Their holds were full of salted molemeat, barrels of rendered mole-oil, carefully cured skin & fur.
Between the Cape of Chatham & the questionable little hardland islands of the Leweavel Range, they snaffled two star-nosed moles. Where interline railsea earth was churned up, they would slow, & the women & men of the Medes cast with their rods & angled for small burrowers. They dangled wire lines, weighted & hooked & baited clockwork corkscrew
s that coiled & ground in the dirt, dragging snips of meat. Eventually something might grab, tug the line & veer off through the earth. The anglers would tussle, play out wire, bring up wriggling frantic bodies at line’s-end & reel them in.
They caught the smallest moldywarpes, that grew with the telling, arm-length hunting earthworms that made the crew howl in disgust, beetles as big as their heads, that, depending on their island of origin, some would eat & others throw back. Shrews, muskrats, carnivorous rabbits. Burrowing bees. This was a rich stretch of railsea. Fussy, tidying rail angels did not come here often, it seemed: there was edible weed protruding between untended rails, that the crew snatched for salad.
“Mr. Vurinam.” Sham practised clearing his throat to introduce a topic. “Dr. Fremlo.” He thought of those images he had seen & decided that dammit, yes, he would, he would tell them, that they were his friends were they not?
But the secrets dried up in his mouth like unloved fuel tanks. It was simply too much, that stretch, that solitary iron road, too impossible to be describable. He could show them the picture. But even if that shaky flatograph would mean anything to one who had not seen the original, word of his words would surely reach the captain. & that would be him committing incitement to mutiny.
It was not only that he was intimidated by her—though certainly, yes, he was. It was a sense Sham could not shake, that it would not be unhelpful to have her on his side.
TWICE, THEY PASSED close enough to trains from Streggeye that they halted & connected to each other via catapulted rope-pulley, to exchange gossip & letters. Captain Skaramash of the outgoing Murgatroyd visited them for tea. Over he came, sitting sedately in a dangling chair hauled & swaying across the yards of tracks.
While Shossunder & Dramin brought in the best tea & dry biscuits & silver & porcelain, Sham clambered the outside rear of the caboose—astonished by himself as he did—& hunkered out of sight, flattened at a porthole, listening & catching glimpses.
“So, Captain Naphi,” he heard Captain Skaramash say. “You’ll do me a service if you can help me. I’m looking for a certain beast. A grand, big fellow.” His voice took on a certain tone. “A ferret. At least a carriage-long. & in his head he carries a hook. I gave him that. It protrudes out now like crooked fingers, dangling back. Beckoning me.” He whispered. “Beckoning me wherever he goes. Old Hookhead.”
So Skaramash had a philosophy, too, & that’s what he was after. Right then, get on with it, Sham thought. Captain Naphi cleared her throat.
“No such animal’s crossed our paths,” she said. “Be assured I know now your vehicle’s name, & at the first sign of that beckoning metal in a sinuate mustelid eruchthonous presence, I shall take careful notes of locations. & I shall get you word. On my honour as a captain.”
“I thank you,” Skaramash murmured.
“I don’t doubt yours took something from you, as mine took something from me,” Naphi said. Skaramash nodded, on his face an expression of speculation & grimness. Which now that he formulated that in his head, Sham realised was the expression he most usually saw on any captain’s face. It was their mien.
Skaramash rolled up a trouser leg, knocked his knuckles on wood & iron beneath. Captain Naphi nodded appreciatively, then raised her light-winking arm, its intricate molebone, jet & metal. “I remember the feel as those teeth closed,” she said.
“I’m grateful for your help,” said Skaramash. “& for my part I will watch for the custard-coloured moldywarpe.”
Sham’s eyes widened.
“Old-tooth coloured, Captain,” Naphi said harshly. “A great mole the hue of ancient parchment. Ivory-reminiscent. Lymphlike. A white stained like the old eyes of frantically ruminating scholars, Captain Skaramash.”
The visitor whispered some apology.
“There’s nowhere I’ll go & nothing I’ll not cross to reach it. My philosophy,” Naphi said slowly, “is not yellow.”
Her bleeding philosophy! That was why she was ignoring those pictures, Sham thought. Those proofs of—he didn’t even know what of, of some grand tremendous upset to the world of the railsea, at very least. She would not spare the time out from her molehunting philosophising!
Any more than would Skaramash, it sounded like. How many of these philosophies were out there? Not every captain of the Streggeye Lands had one, but a fair proportion grew into a close antipathy-cum-connection with one particular animal, which they came to realise or decide—to decidalise—embodied meanings, potentialities, ways of looking at the world. At a certain point, & it was hard to be exact but you knew it when you saw it, the usual cunning thinking about professional prey switched onto a new rail & became something else—a faithfulness to an animal that was now a world-view.
Daybe was learning to hunt. The daybat could fly again, now, for short distances. Sham swung a bit of meat on the end of a rope, at the corner of the deck, while Daybe flapped & snapped at the whirling snack. Now that was hunting with a point.
Sham thought of the awe with which those very few who snared the objects of their fascination, who made it into the Museum of Completion, were held. Maybe there was competition between the captains, he thought. “Call that a philosophy?” they perhaps sneered behind each other’s backs. “That prairie dog you’re after? Oh my days! What is that supposed to signify?” One-upmanship, one-upcaptainship, of the themes some quarries had come to mean.
THEY CROSSED A RAVINE to get home, on one of the tangle of bridges that stretched the twenty-, thirty-yard gap. He’d known it was coming, but the view made Sham uneasy. The rails went up on raised earthworks & wood-&-iron rises, jumping pools & streams full of cramped fish.
“Hardland ho!” the tannoy announced. Then: “Home ho!”
It was twilight. Birds circled. The few interrail trees were thick & shaggy with them. The crew bustled & laughed. The local daybats were going home; darkbats were coming out. They greeted each other, handed over sky-scudding duties with chitterings. Daybe, on Sham’s shoulder, chittered back. He leapt up & out. Sham wasn’t worried: the daybat always came back to the Medes: often, as then, crunching an unlucky cricket.
Lit up by the last red blast of the sun were stone slopes. Like dark mildew, patches of jungle pelted the hilly nation they approached, & like light mildew, houses & buildings aggregated around its flanks & became the town of Streggeye. Bustling from the harbour came hardy tug-trains, to ferry goods in & out of land, to guide the Medes into dock.
Home.
NINETEEN
THE RETURN OF ANY MOLETRAIN IS ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED by delighted shrieks of husbands, wives, children, lovers, friends & creditors. Sham’s heart shook happily to see Voam & Troose, on the railsea wall, waving & yelling with everyone else. They hugged him, yanked him into the air, bellowing all sorts of endearments, dragging him embarrassed & delighted home, as Daybe whirled around his head wondering what these man-things were that were attacking its human, & why it appeared to make Sham so happy.
His cousins were unsurprised by Sham’s animal acquisition. “It was going to be a tattoo,” said Voam, “or jewels, or something, so this ain’t bad.”
“Lots of lasses & lads on moletrains come back with some companion,” Troose said. He nodded enthusiastically. Voam winked at Sham. Troose always nodded. He always had. Including at silences, as if it was imperative that he & the world be in accord about everything, including nothing.
The house where Sham had grown up: halfway up a steep street, overlooking the railsea, epic darkness punctured from time to time by the lights of night-voyaging trains. All was as he’d left it.
He did not remember his arrival there, the first time, though he very dimly recalled moments he knew predated it, the voices & solidity of his missing mother & father. Sham did not even know where on Streggeye he had lived with them. Once, some years previously, Troose had offered to show him, as they walked through an unfamiliar part of town. Sham had deliberately stamped in a puddle & got mud all the way up his trousers, begged to be taken home to change,
rather than continuing wherever they were going.
His father had disappeared almost his whole life ago on some ill-fated messenger train lost to an everyday catastrophe, its specifics never known, in the wilds of the railsea. His bones doubtless gone to animals, as the bones of the train were gone to salvors. Sham’s mother had taken off soon after, travelling the islands of the archipelago. There had never been a letter. Her grief was too great, Voam had gently explained to Sham, to return. To be happy. To be anything but alone. Ever. She’d hidden from her cousin, as Voam vaguely was; her son; herself. & hidden she had stayed.
“You’re so big!” shouted Troose. “You’ve got deckhand muscles! You’ve got to tell me all the doctoring you’ve learned. Tell us everything!”
So over broth, Sham did. & in that telling he discovered himself with pleasure & a degree of surprise. A few months ago, had that stumbling young chap tripping on cables & stays on the roofdecks of the Medes attempted to tell a story, it wouldn’t have gone well. But now? He could see Voam’s & Troose’s faces, agog. Sham fished for gasps & aaahs & the goggle-eyed fascination of his audience of two.
“… so,” he was saying, “I’m by the crow’s nest, captain’s yelling blue & bloody murder, & down comes a razory bird right at me. I swear it wanted my eyes. But up goes Daybe, right for it, & the two of them go wrestling in the air …” & no force on hardland, on the railsea, under it or in any of the skies would have prodded Sham into admitting, including to himself, that the bird had been not quite as low as all that, had been in fact somewhat of a speck, that it & Daybe had rather than fighting to the death perhaps been competing for the same ill-fated bug, & their wrestling match a brief bump.
But Voam & Troose enjoyed it. & there were some events he told & varnished nothing. The eruption of the mole rats from the earth; antlions gnawing prey in sight of the train; the outpost city of Bollons.
He told stories while Voam & Troose ate; he told them while the moon came up & made the metal of the railsea shimmer its own cold colour; while the night sounds of Streggeye Land rose around the house. His mouth got on with the telling, leaving him free to think about Manihiki in the centre of the world. He did not tell them what he had seen on the ordinator screen.