Railsea (15 page)

“Yes,” Sham said. “How did you know?”

“It’s my job to pick through things thrown out there, & that might include things said. The
Medes
. Made an unexpected stop in Bollons.” Sham’s gasp was awfully eloquent. “Ah, it’s not so much of a thing,” Sirocco said. “I can tell you the same sort of snippets of likely wholly boring such stuff about plenty of recent arrivals.” She smiled.

“If you say so,” he muttered.

“Still wishing things had gone another way?” She inclined her head. “I’d stick with your crew if I were you.” She did not say it unkindly.

“Well … thank you.”

“I think your friends are waiting for you.” Sirocco nodded at the still-watching gang.

“They ain’t my friends,” Sham said.

“Hm.” The woman frowned a little. “Watch yourself, then, won’t you?”

He would. Sham was already ready.

There were occasions he’d been accused of being a bit dozy, had Sham ap Soorap, but not this time. He hefted the bag of books onto his shoulder, thanked Sirocco again, left the building. & it really did not come as a huge surprise to him, when he emerged into the afternoon light of Manihiki, that the ganglet bundled out of the hall after him & rushed him, grabbing for his bag, his money, came with their fists swinging.

A
FIGHT, THEN
.

What kind?

Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

Some bemoan this fact: “Why does everything have to be put into boxes?” they say. & fair enough, up to a point. But this vigorous drive to divide, subdivide & label has been rather maligned. Such conceptual shuffling is inevitable, & a reasonable defence against what would otherwise face us as thoroughgoing chaos. The germane issue is not whether, but
how
, to divide.

Certain types of events are particularly carefully delineated. Such as fights.

What ran towards Sham, announcing its presence with throaty jeers, was incipient fightness, carried in the vectors of eight or nine aggressive young men & women. But what kind of fight?

Let fight equal
x
. Was this, then a play
x
? An
x
to the death? An
x
for honour? A drunken
x
?

Sham focused. Hands & boots were incoming. One of those hands, in fact, was grasping for his bag, & in doing so answering that question.

What this was was a
mugging
.

T
WO BIG LADS COMING FOR HIM
. S
HAM DUCKED—HE
moved quick for a heavy young man. He was ringed, his attackers shouting, & here they came again & now
he
was kicking, & he could be proud of that one, but there were too many of them & something hit his face &
wow
hurt & he tried to pull hair but someone hit his eye & he was all rocked for a second—

Something interrupted. A sound high-pitched & not even distantly human. Enraged vespertilian lungs!
Oh
, Sham thought, you
beauty
. From his undesired vantage point, flat on his back, hands up to block a blow, what he saw framed in backlit clouds with wings spread & wingskin taut, descending like a small furry avenging ghost, was Daybe.

& there came another voice. A boy. “Oy, bastard!” Behind the tallest & heaviest of the muggers was the young man Sham had seen watching his own watchers. Here he came, shoving hard & hands up. A gust of blows from the newcomer & a skirr of bony-&-leathery wings from Daybe. The boy’s attacks were, to Sham’s bruised eyes, more enthusiastic
than effective, but the muggers scurried out of his way. & they were genuinely terrified by Daybe, small but so demoniac in chattery-toothed appearance.

It was a mad gush rush. Sham was struggling shaky to his feet, the attackers were suddenly scarpering away fast, the boy who’d come to his aid was yelling imprecations as they went, & Daybe—brave & splendid mouse-sized bodyguard, Stone-faced gods of Streggeye bless & keep it—still chased them as if it would catch them & eat them, as if they were flies.

“You alright?” His rescuer turned & helped Sham brush himself down. “You’re bleeding a bit.”

“Yeah,” said Sham. Dabbed at his face with his finger & checked the flow. Not too bad. “Thanks. Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

The boy shook his head. “Sure you’re okay?”

Was Sham sure he was okay? What scraps of doctorliness he had bobbed to the top of his brain. He was mildly surprised to find them there at all. Teeth? All present, only slightly bloodied. Nose? Not loosened, though sore. Face abraded, but that was all.

“Yeah. Thank you.”

The boy shrugged. “Bullies,” he said. “They’re all cowards.”

“People do say that,” Sham said. “I think there must be a few brave bullies out there & everyone’s going to be in a bit of a shock when they meet them.” He checked his pockets. Still had his coin. “How did you know they were going to attack me?”

“Oh.” The boy waved vaguely & grinned. “Well.” He laughed a bit sheepishly. “I’ve done enough ambushing in my time to know when I can see someone else about to have a go.”

“So why’d you stop them?”

“Because eight against one ain’t fair!” The boy blushed & looked away a moment. “I’m Robalson. Where’s your bat gone?”

“Oh, it’s always off. It’ll be back.”

“We should go,” Robalson said. “The navy’ll be here soon.”

“Isn’t that good?” Sham said.

“No!” Robalson began to tug at him. “They ain’t going to help. & you don’t want to get mixed up with that sort of so-&-so.”

Sham went with him a way, confused, then abruptly raised his hands & squeezed shut his eyes. “They got my bag,” he said. “My captain’s stuff. I’m bloody for it.”

He looked vaguely about him. He wanted the bag back, he wanted to punish those muggers, he wanted to track down the children of the wreck, but, lungs full of dust & defeat, he felt suddenly quite deflated.
Come on!
he tried to think. He tried to think himself into energy. It didn’t go well. “I better go,” he muttered.

“Is that it, then?” Robalson said, to Sham’s back. “Come on, mate!” Sham didn’t answer. Didn’t look back. Began the miserable trudge back to the harbour.

He slowed as he went. Began to feel the ache & scrape of all those injuries. Down the hill he went, through streets & by landmarks he’d not known he’d noticed on the way. Sham dragged out the journey. He more than took his time. He was thinking about the books. He’d clocked how expensive & rare some were.

A figure emerged from an alley ahead, cutting off his morose descent. He stopped. It was Robalson. “Books?” Robalson
said. Meeting Sham’s eye, holding out the bag in which was every one of the texts he thought he’d lost.

“H
OW DID YOU FIND THEM
?” Sham’s question came after a flurry of gratitude & astonishment.

“I know Manihiki better than you. I’ve been here a few times. Second of all I thought I saw your bat circling over something, so I went to check it out. Well, it was: it was over this. That lot who went for you ain’t interested in stuff like this.”

“But these are precious.”

“They ain’t master criminals, they’re just out for a quick dollar. They slung them.”

“& you found me again.”

“I know where the harbour is. It was obvious you were having a bad day, figured you’d head home. So.” Robalson raised his eyebrows. They stared at each other. “Anyway, so,” Robalson said. He nodded. “Glad you got them back,” he said at last. He turned to go.

“Wait!” said Sham. He jiggled the coin in his pocket. “I owe you big-time. Let me … I’d like to say thanks. Do you know any good pubs or whatever?”

“Sure,” said Robalson. He grinned. “Yeah, I know all the best Manihiki places. Near the harbour? We’ve both got trains to get back to.”

Sham thought. “Maybe eight o’clock tomorrow? I have to do something now.”

“The Dustmaid. On Protocol Abyss Street. Eight o’clock. I’ll be there.”

“& what’s your train?” Sham said. “Mine’s the
Medes
. Just in case there’s a problem I can find you.”

“Oh,” said Robalson. “My train’s—something I’ll tell you later. You ain’t the only one with secrets.”

“What?” Sham said. “What is it? Is it a moler? A trader? Railnavy? Fighter?
Salvor?
What are you?”

“What is it?” Robalson walked backwards & met Sham’s eye. “What am I? Why’d you think I want to get away from the navy?” He put his hands to the sides of his mouth.

“I’m a pirate,” he said, in an exaggerated whisper, grinned, turned, was gone.

D
AYBE CAME BACK
. I
T LOOKED PLEASED WITH ITSELF
, lazily snapping at local beetles more on principle than out of hunger.

“You’re
such
a good bat,” Sham cooed. “Such a good bat.” It nipped his nose & drew a blood bead, but he knew it was in affection.

Sham followed the salvor’s directions. “Why’d you want to go there?” the locals asked, but they pointed the way. Through noisy machine- & navy-filled streets, into grubbier areas full of rubbish & quivering dogs eyeing Sham & making him nervous.

“He says he’s a pirate,” whispered Sham to Daybe. Images came to Sham—how could they not?—of pirate trains. Devilish, smoke-spewing, weapon-studded, thronging with dashing, deadly men & women swinging cutlasses, snarling under crossed-spanner pendants, bearing down on other trains.

“ ’Scuse me,” he asked stoop-sitters, hawkers, builders & loungers-by-roadsides. “Where’s the arch?” He could feel the streets descending. They were nearing railsea level. “Can you
tell me where the arch is?” he asked a street-sweeper who leaned amiably on his shuddering cleaning machine & pointed him on.

This was a region of building sites, rubbish sites, drosscapes. & right there in among them—“How’d I miss that, Daybe?” Sham whispered—was the entrance to a lot. & over it, announcing it, was that arch.

Eighteen yards tall, triumphal & oddly blocky as if it were pixelated, it looked as if it had been cut,
hewn
as the captain might have had it, from cold white stone. But those weren’t stone slabs Sham was looking at. They were metal. They were salvage.

The arch was salvage. Arche-salvage, too—but not of mysteries. The nature of this had been long-established by scholars. The arch was mostly made of washing machines.

He’d seen a demonstration of one once. At a fair on Streggeye, a show of restored findings. Hooked up to chuggering generators, a whining thing like a needy animal prince issuing stupid orders: a fax machine. An ancient screen on which enthusiastic badly drawn figures hit each other: a vijogame. & one of these white things, used to clean ancients’ clothes.

Why would you use arche-salvage for something it clearly wasn’t for? When there were much bloody easier things to build an arch out of?

“Hello?” Sham knocked on it. His knuckles made the hollow machines boom.

Beyond the arch was a bony-looking leafless tree, a big garden, if he could call the tangles of bramble & wire that, if a scrubland free of plants but for exuberant weeds was gardeny.
What the land seemed really to be was a resting place for endless bits of salvage, odd-shaped metal, plastic, rubber, rotted wood, festooned with sludgy ruins of old advertisements. There was a patch of scratched-up plastic telephones. Their wires jutted up, stiffened. At the end of each was a coloured receiver like a recurved plastic flower.

“Hello?” A path led to a big old brick house, with extra rooms constructed, Sham saw, of more washing machines, of the old ice makers called fridges, of antique ordinators, of black-rubber wheels & the hulking fish-body of a car. Sham shook his head.

“Hello?”

“Leave it at the end of the path,” someone said. Sham jumped. Daybe jumped, too, from his shoulder, & kept going, circled a tree. Watching Sham from a branch, a security camera winked. “What have you brought? Leave it at the end of the path. We’re in credit,” said a crackling voice from a speaker, that had been crooked so long in the V where a bough met the trunk that the tree had grown around it, embedded it in its skin, so it protruded like a bubo.

“I …” Sham stepped closer & talked into it. “I think you’ve got me mixed up. I’m not a delivery man. I’m looking for—I don’t know their names. I’m looking for a girl & a boy. About … well I don’t know how old the pictures are. One’s about three or four years older than the other, I think.”

Sham could hear distant bickering from the speaker, voices muttering at each other, disguised by static. “Go away,” he heard; then in a different voice, “No, wait.” Then more murmurs. & at last, to him, the question, “Who are you?” Sham could hear the suspicion. He ran his fingers through
his hair & gazed into the clouds & the discoloured upsky above.

“I’m from Streggeye Land,” he said. “I’ve got some information. From a lost train.”

W
HAT OPENED
the door to him was a stamping figure covered completely in a dark leather costume, eyes obscured behind flinty glass, uniform strapped all over with charcoal filters & water bottles, bits of equipment, tubes & nozzles, shaggy & swaying like a fruit tree. Sham didn’t blink. The figure raised an arm & ushered him ponderously in.

The house didn’t even surprise him. After that arch & the garden he fully expected it to be the mix of sumptuous decay, jury-rigged half-fixes, splendour & grubby salvage it was. Past all kinds of strange stuff, salvage stuff, the silent guide took him into a kitchen. Also crammed, every surface covered, in bits of everything. Junk covered the huge table like unappetising hors-d’oeuvres. Trash sat under dust on windowsills.

Behind the huge table, looking at Sham with his arms folded over his denim overalls, was the boy from the flatograph. Sham exhaled.

The boy was perhaps two years older than in the picture. Maybe ten? Dark skin, short dark hair jutting straight up like hedgehog bristles. Brown eyes full of suspicion. He was stocky, compact, his chest broad like a tough older boy’s. He stuck out his chin & his lower lip as if pointing at Sham with them, & waited.