Railsea (31 page)

So far as he could tell, Sham’s fervent campaign of begging had persuaded the Bajjer to make that city a stop on their unending journey slightly sooner than it might otherwise have been. Dangerous as it undoubtedly would be, it was his best chance of finding a way to get home, or to follow the Shroakes. All he could do meanwhile was console himself with two facts: one, that he was travelling much faster than he would have done alone; & two, that he was not dead.

Sham tried to learn to sail. He could not stop worrying about Caldera & Dero. The navy would be hunting for them. He consoled himself with the knowledge that if there was ever, anywhere in any of the railsea, a pair better suited to escaping even so total an enemy, it was Caldera & Dero Shroake. That put a smile on his face.

It was those thoughts, of that family, that reminded him of something. Sham had told his rescuers what little he could of his story. They had not seemed entirely surprised. Which in turn surprised him. Maybe they were forever rescuing castaways & playing host to fascinated travellers, he thought.

& a memory stirred in him then. Something Caldera had said in her salvage-cluttered kitchen, about her parents’ preparations, their researches. They were railseaologists. They had got ready for their journey assiduously. They had, Sham abruptly recalled, sought out & investigated the particular expertises among the railsea nomads.

“Shroakes,” he demanded. “Know them? Shroakes? In a
train?”
Shrood?
the Bajjer muttered to each other.
Shott? Shraht?
“Shroake!” Ah. One or two remembered that name.

“Years gone,” one said. “Learn rails.”

“What did they ask you?” Sham said. Another round of muttering.

“Heaven,” they said. Heaven? “Stories. Of the …” Mutter mutter mutter, the Bajjer debated the best word. “Shun it,” someone said. “Angry angels.”
Right
, Sham thought uneasily. Shunning again. “Weeping,” the Bajjer said. “Weeping forever.” Yes, he’d heard that before. Shun the weeping. No matter how you interpreted it, Sham thought, it does not sound much like Heaven.

M
OST EVENINGS THE
B
AJJER OF THIS TROUPE
would find a place where the rails gathered & circle their rolling stock as best they could, build a fire on the ground of the railsea itself. Cook & debate things. Let the semi-wild dogs that hunted alongside them into the light & heat.

As a guest—initially honoured, now, he feared, becoming a bit of a bore—Sham was given decent cuts. Another time, he would have been fascinated by the specifics of this lifestyle: he would have learnt to rod-cast, to net fleeing bugs, to sing the songs, to play the dice games, call the calls that summoned the hunting birds. It was just very not the right time. Every morning he woke early, looked to the horizon, past molehills & termite mounds, straight across & ignoring the occasional grots of salvage.

When Sham’s Bajjer crew saw the sails of another group they veered off to meet them. He could have wept as they took their time, collected carts together over convivial suppers,
exchanged news & gossip, which various enthusiasts would whisper-translate into Sham’s ear.

“Oh—they say this person die, was eatted by antlion.” A pause, a moment’s mourning. “This other group found, um, hunt place … is good, they say we should go.” Oh bloody
hell
please not, Sham thought. “They want to know who is you. How we finds you.” The Bajjer told that story, of Shroakes & pirates & Sham & the navy.

That night there was more jumping from cart to cart than usual. Sham was flushed & startled by the frank attentions of a Bajjer girl about his age. After deeply flustered hesitation, he avoided her & fled to bed, where he thoroughly unsuccessfully attempted sleep.
Another time
, he thought again, oh were it only another time.

The next morning the groups parted with ceremonial valedictories, & Sham realised that they had swapped a few members. The whole convivial, he supposed, had only cost a half-day or so. But a couple of days after that he saw more rapidly approaching sails, & Sham thought he might cry in frustration.

This time, though, there was to be no relaxation, no nattering or supper. The newcomers were blowing alarm trumpets & waving flags. When they came close enough, he saw they wore expressions of misery & rage. They were waving flags & pointing. They were pointing right at Sham.

H
IS RESCUERS STRUGGLED
to explain. Somewhere, something the Bajjer treasured had been attacked. In a place they went to hunt & harvest. It was not an accident. & it was something to do Sham.

“What are they
talking
about?” Sham said.

They were not accusing him, though they stared in suspicion & anger. It was more tenuous than responsibility. Nothing was certain; these travellers had seen nothing at first hand, were passing on garbled information as it had been passed to them. But even as details faded farther from the source, the whispers that raced along rails & among traveller bands linked whatever it was that had been perpetrated—some abomination, committed by ferocious pirates, the slaughter of some band & the poisoning of their runs—to the story of Sham’s grub-trap rescue.

The few survivors of the onslaught said their onslaughterers had been looking for someone, demanding information to stop what they were doing. A lost boy. A Streggeye boy lost & got away from pirates.

“We go.” Everyone readied their carts & weapons. “See. All the Bajjer go.” East. Towards wherever it was that had happened had happened. Away from Manihiki, & from any direction the Shroakes might have taken.

“But …” Sham half-wanted to beg. “We can’t lose any more time.” But how could he? These were their people. How could they not go?

N
OTHING PREPARED THEM
. Three days into their eastward trek, the two bands sailing together, they reached the outskirts of the tract where the attack had happened. Where Sham had thought they might find injured escapees, perhaps dead remains, a battered sail-cart band.

There was a stink in the air. Chemicals, worse than any
factories Sham had ever sniffed. They rolled towards smoke. “Look.” Sham pointed. A stench came up from below. Sham’s eyes widened. Oil & effluent, on the ground between the rails, on the roots of trees, dripping from the branches, on the rails themselves. The trainsfolk switched, swung, steered, their faces grim.

A grieving silence descended. Even the wheels seemed muted, as they reached splintered & scattered remnants of Bajjer craft. At the limits of his vision Sham saw a tower, a huge engine, of the type that dotted the railsea, drawing energy from deep below the flatearth. It was motionless, burning off no excess.

“Is it a spill?” Sham said. “Have they had a blowout? Is that what happened here?”

Other sails were approaching. Bands were converging as word spread. With signals, with coloured flags, they swapped what little they knew, going farther, slowly, in more disgust & misery, into a zone that seemed almost to be dissolving, sopping & destroyed with industrial slop, defoliant & toxin.

“This ain’t no broken rig,” Sham said. This was thuggery, a carnage of landscape. Someone was sending the Bajjer a message. No wild crops would grow here now. There was nothing to hunt, & would not be for years. The earth was motionless, animals all rotting in their holes.

Among the vehicles approaching, Sham saw one much larger than the rattling wooden crafts. All around him, the Bajjer stared at this act of oily war. Sham narrowed his eyes. The big train came out of the distance, venting diesel fumes.

Despite the depredation around him, the despondency & anger of his companions, Sham’s whole body lurched with
shock, because the train approaching through the trashed-up hunt-grounds, escorted by scudding Bajjer-carts, cutting through the newly ruined railsea, was the
Medes
.

Even as the Bajjer gazed helplessly at the catastrophe, Sham let out a whoop of joy. & then another as, like a nuzzling thunderbolt, streaking out of the sky into a heavy sniffing kiss in his arms, came Daybe, the bat.

EARWIG

(Dermaptera monstruosus)
Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society
.
Credit: China Miéville
(illustration credit 6.1)

I
T WAS BADLY BATTERED, A BRUTALISED & CREAKING
train in which the Shroakes passed beyond any horizon most trainsfolk would ever see. & here their troubles began.

Actually—

It is, in fact, not time for the Shroakes. Not quite.

That phrase—here the troubles began—is ancient. It has been the fulcrum of many stories, the moment when everything is much bigger & more vertiginous than anyone thought. This is in the nature of things.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is
Homo sapiens
—wise person. But we have been described in many other ways.
Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora:
we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete.

That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be,
Homo vorago aperientis:
person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

O
UT OF THE EAST & SOUTH THE TRAIN CAME
. I
T
howled, it whistled, en route through & out of the known railsea. It breathed diesel breath. An everyday moletrain, transmogrified by urgency & peculiar direction into something more than itself, something grander, buckling of more swashes.

The
Medes
was not alone. It came as part of a multitude.

Syncopating with the staccato of its iron wheels was the hard wood rush of a Bajjer war party, windblown in the
Medes
’s wake. Like a huge semitrained predator, the subterrain
Pinschon
grumbled fast into the light where rails allowed, submerged again to tunnel alongside & below the hunters.

Leaning from the
Medes
, Sham was at the head of an armada.
Don’t dwell on that
, the voice in him said.
Don’t even think about it. You have a job to do
.

It had been a bittersweet reunion, in the mashed-up Bajjer grounds. Of course, the eruption of welcome from his trainmates had made Sham cry happy tears. The tears had stayed & the happiness gone when he heard what had gone
down, of the loss of Klimy & Teodoso to a monster out of the bad sky.

“Someone punished us,” a Bajjer warrior said, staring at pools of scummy offrun in what had been fertile soil. “Who? For what?”

“Who,” Sirocco said, “is easy.” She had leaned on the subterrain’s hatch.

“You!” Sham said.

“Good to see you again, young man.” She touched the brim of an imaginary hat.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“Sham!” It was Hob Vurinam. Arms outstretched, vaguely dandy threads even more battered than usual by the remorseless journey, tiredness making him look much older than he was, but his lined face wide in delight. He grabbed Sham & they pounded each other’s back in greeting, & Vurinam scruffed up Sham’s now-shaggy hair for longer than you would have thought, only becoming embarrassed after a few seconds.

& there was Mbenday, jumping from foot to foot, almost as vigorous in his welcome, & Kiragabo Luck, more restrained but not by much, Shappy, all his trainmates, suddenly Dr. Fremlo to Sham’s happy squawk, giving Sham a huge & lengthy hug, then holding him at arm’s length & shaking his hand.

“If it weren’t for her we wouldn’t have ever found you,” Mbenday said, pointing at the salvor. “She knows how to follow trails, & she was watching the bat, & then there were rumours that someone had you, & then that there’d been something terrible. But it was her.”

“Me?” Sirocco said. She glanced down into the bowels of the
Pinschon
. “I’m just here for the salvage.”

People lined up to greet the returned boy. Even Lind & Yashkan shook Sham’s hand, surly but not wholly ungracious. & then, suddenly, there was Captain Naphi.

She stood back. Sham hesitated. Was he happy to see her? Unhappy? He could not have said. She looked a little lessened. Diminished? She wore—Sham blinked at the sight—a bandage wrapped around her artificial arm. He bowed, & the captain bowed back. “Ap Soorap,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you’re alive. We’ve worked hard. We’ve given a lot to find you. A
lot
.”