The Rise of Ransom City (25 page)

By the time I had accomplished this I was the last person left on the boat. The upper deck dipped to starboard into the black water. It rose up to port behind me. I held the mechanism tightly beneath my arm and I threw myself into the water.

I sank.

Like I think I have said, I cannot swim, and besides the piano’s mechanism was shockingly heavy and unwieldy. I kicked madly to put distance between myself and the sinking boat, which only drove me further down. The strength of the river took hold of me. All I could see was blackness, either beneath the water or above it. I recall that I panicked. I recall that I was quite certain that so long as I held on to the mechanism I would be safe. This was a self-defeating conviction but an irresistible one. I continued to sink.

Slowly darkness gave way and I began to see a red light at the edges of the world.

I do not recall letting go of the mechanism or how I came to be clutching instead a piece of wood that turned out to be a bench from the
Damaris
’s bar. I do recall that when I finally noticed that the mechanism was lost I was too tired even to regret it— regret would come later.

I recall floating aimlessly downstream, all alone in the warm night.

At last the current took me toward the river’s bank, where I came to rest in the tangled roots of a huge green tree.

I struck out for solid ground but I found none in any direction. The woods were swampy, like I said. They smelled green and wet. Black water came halfway up my legs. Tall cattail stands horripilated. Every moonlit ripple in the water looked to my imagination like a snake swimming toward me— every vine or frond that dangled from the trees looked snake-like too. There were fever-dream scatterings of fireflies— there were invisible insects that bit. Again and again I pushed through walls of wet fern and reed to look out over yet another expanse of dark weed-thick water.

Eventually I climbed up into the roots of another tree and decided to wait out the night.

The root was thick as the back of a horse, and not as uncomfortable as one might imagine. I sat with my back against the trunk and considered my situation.

I had no means of making fire, no food, very little money, a half-completed letter to my sister Jess, and the Great Rotollo’s business-card. I had no weapons— only a small pocket-knife that I used to use to work on the piano, and it was hardly fiercer than a fingernail. I had only one shoe, and it was both soaked and slimy.

I still wore the jacket of the russet suit Mr. Southern had given me when I signed on with the
Damaris
. There had been a dried rose in the lapel but it was gone now. The jacket had been a loan not a gift and I guessed it belonged to Mr. Southern still, but because I saw no likelihood of returning it to him, and because he had not paid me in weeks, and because in any case it was now so vile that he would not want it back, I decided it was mine now. I hung it to dry from a protuberance on a nearby branch. It was like a sort of company. I half-expected it to speak to me in Mr. Carver’s voice.

I did not know where I was. I knew that I was on the edges of the Tri-City Territory, south-west of Gibson and west of Jasper. I knew that I was not far from the River Jass. But I did not know what woods I was in, or where the nearest town might be. The River Jass ran westward, and I assumed therefore I had been carried by the current some distance west, away from Jasper City and back out toward the Western Rim. I did not know how far. Far enough that I was alone— whoever else had survived the sinking of the
Damaris,
they were nowhere in evidence.

There were no sounds in the night that I recognized as human.

The piano was gone. I tried to remember how it worked, in some vague hope that I might one day reconstruct it, I recall that I even took my knife and held it poised to carve a memento into the soft root— but I was already forgetting. I mourned it as bitterly as if it had been a lover. I still do.

I think I mourn it more than I do its maker.

I said that I would tell of four times I held history in my hand. Well, this was the second. Had I only held on to the mechanism perhaps the piano could have been reconstructed, and who knows what might have been done with that technology. Who knows how things might have gone differently with poor Adela, and maybe therefore everything else.

I will write about Adela in due course, when I get there.

I never said that this would be a story of triumph. For the most part it is not.

Anyhow there I was. Alone in a swamp, with no prospects and no name.

I tried to recall if Mr. Alfred Baxter of Jasper City had ever found himself in a similar predicament. I did not think that he had. I was without guidance.

At one time in the night there was a sound that might have been feet splashing through the swamp not far away from me, and I thought it might be other survivors from the
Damaris.
I stood, and was about to call out
Here, help me, it’s Rawlins, the piano-man,
when it occurred to me that there had been fighting in those woods. Somebody had attacked an Engine of the Line. It might be a soldier of the Line, looking for the perpetrators or it might be the perpetrators themselves. In either case it might be deadly to draw attention to myself. The cry froze in my throat. The noise receded. It was not until after it was long gone that I thought that maybe it was somebody as lost as me, who might have needed my help, whose heart might have leapt at the sound of my voice, and that I had been selfish again, I had been a coward, thinking only of myself.

“When I get out of here,” I said to myself, “I will be a better man. I have suffered more than the usual run of worldly misfortune but there is still greatness left in me. One day I will do good things for the world.”

I thought of Liv and John Creedmoor and I thought of poor Mr. Carver. I thought about Mr. Carver’s last words to me, that I was a thief, and I thought that he was both right and wrong, and I thought about how I would one day make everything right, how I would make everything perfect. I thought about my sisters and how I missed them and how I would explain everything to them if I ever saw them again, which seemed unlikely. I thought about the Great Rotollo and his long-suffering wife Amaryllis and about the Ormolu Theater, which in my imagination was like a great golden palace. I thought about the Apparatus and how much I missed its light and its warmth. I thought about Jasper City, and recalled all my old dreams of how one day I would ride in high style down its triumphal avenues.

I spent a great deal of time on this kind of profitless rumination. Hours, at least. I waited for dawn and dawn stubbornly did not come. Instead there was a flash of white light in the distance, which by the time it came through the trees to fall on the backs of my hands was soft and spiderwebbed. It stuttered, flashing and then fading, like telegraph-signals. There was a coughing sound then a deep roar.

The noise and light was coming from what I guessed to be the north-west, a few miles or so upriver. Fear made me shrink against the trunk of the tree. Then curiosity got the better of my fear and I jumped to my feet and started climbing the tree.

I was cold and tired and my shoulders ached and creaked and cracked like an old boat as I pulled myself up. It was a good tree for climbing, with knots and a thick sturdy mesh of vine and broad swooping branches. I remember thinking as I lay panting on a branch that I could not recall the last time I had climbed a tree. Not since back in East Conlan, in fact. The town was bare of trees and most of us did not dare go too far into the woods south of town but I recalled incidents of climbing, throwing stones, boys shouting. I felt like a boy again but at the same time I felt very old, and very far from home. I stood, slowly and carefully, and pushed my head through a curtain of slimy green leaves, and I saw that flash of light again.

The light flashed, then ceased, then came again. It illuminated a long dark shape behind the trees. I could not properly judge the distance or its size, except that it was huge, and far enough away that I did not think it could sense me.

It was the wounded Engine. Later I would learn from the newspapers that it was the Engine that runs out of Kingstown.

Do you know what Kingstown is? Maybe not. I hope no one born in Ransom City will know of the Stations. I hope in the New Century all the Stations may have fallen. But in those days Kingstown was the westernmost of the Stations of the Line. It was a town of many thousands of people, mostly soldiers or factory-workers. It was full of industry and smoke and toil. It was a huge machine for projecting the power of the Engines westward. Mr. Carver and I went nowhere near it on our travels. Kingstown was thousands of miles west of the place where I stood, but the Engine that was its heart and soul and brain and god went ceaselessly back and forth across the continent carrying men and weapons and prisoners and information and . . .

It moved. There was a flash of its lamps, then darkness, then another flash and it had moved. Its long metal body had stretched a hundred yards closer to my hiding place. Each flash illuminated a huge and growing trail of black smoke.

I had seen Engines before, of course. East Conlan was not far from Line territory and we saw them in the north. Carver and I had crossed tracks, seen Engines roaring across the horizon, even considered on occasion traveling by Engine (we could not afford it). They were strange at the best of times, but that night the Kingstown Engine was quite terrifying.

It was injured. Its tracks took it not so very far north of my tree and when its lamp flashed again I could see that its frame was broken. The huge cowl that was its face was dented and twisted. The lamps above the cowl were lopsided, as if some had been blinded. Several of the cars that were its half-mile body were missing, or caved in like broken teeth, or still smoking from what ever or whoever had attacked it. There were cannon on the hindmost car, one of which looked bent.

I don’t know why it was flashing its lamps in that way. I have heard that the Engines of the Line signal to each other— all across the continent— with their noise, their thunderous awful clatter, their smoke. Maybe it was signaling its distress, its outrage, maybe it was calling for aid, for revenge, for tightening of control. Maybe it was broken, or mad. I have always hated the Line. I have written about what it did to my father and to East Conlan and to me. And this particular Engine had destroyed the
Damaris,
and left me stranded, and destroyed the beautiful piano, and had done all this casually, indifferently, the way they did everything. I did not yet know which Engine it was, but I had a particular and specific hatred for it, whichever it was. And yet to see an Engine injured was troubling, and gave me little joy. It made me aware of my own so much greater fragility.

I thought about Miss Harper and John Creedmoor and their weapon and for the first time I thought what it might be like if it were really true. Maybe their weapon could end the War, maybe it could do away with Engines and Guns and their servants. But they would not go quietly. The War would be worse before it would be better. And what would take its place?

For the first time in my life, the thought of the
Future
frightened me. I do not mean to claim any great prescience. I did not foresee the Course of History. Any man who claims to have such powers of foresight is lying. Truth is I was lost in a swamp at night, and any man’s thoughts will turn grim in such circumstances.

The tree shook as the Engine passed. There was a noise that made my bowels turn to water. Leaves were torn loose and blew around my head in its wake. I lost my footing and fell, catching myself painfully on the branch with knees and elbows and bloodied palms, and when I stood again the Engine was already far in the distance, heading north-east toward the Three Cities, toward Jasper.