Railsea (10 page)

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 corkscrews 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.

T
WICE, 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.

T
HEY 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.

T
HE 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.

“You’re a proper grown man now,” Troose said. “You should join us. Three adults.” The two men looked intense with pride as Troose said it. “Like adults like us do. We’re going to the pub.”

& impatient as they could sometimes make him, Sham felt that pride swell in his own chest, walking with them through the steep streets of Streggeye, kicking cobbles that
bounced a long way to scuff & settle eventually, perhaps, on the railsea itself. So good was Sham’s mood that it did not suffer more than a little when he realised that they had come to the Vivacious Weevil, a captains’ pub, one of the most famous. Where Captain Naphi would surely be. Discussing her lemon-coloured philosophy.

I
T WAS CONTAINEDLY RAUCOUS WITHIN
. F
ULL OF EXCITED
debate. People sat listening to the stars of the evening holding forth. Naphi was there, listening to the speaker, a portly, muscular man close to two meters high. Sham could tell by his cadences that he was well into his story.

“It’s Vajpaz,” Troose whispered. “He had another encounter.”

“… By now,” the big man said, “my philosophy was coursing frenetically horizonward. You see? Carrying my leg.” Oh, yes, he was missing one, Sham noticed. There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions. On the whole, you were a leg person or an arm person: had one a tail to lose, a pair of prehensile tentacles, a wing or two, it would increase the possibilities for those vivid scars of philosophising. “But I was beyond fretting. I tourniqueted my own stump & laughed. & set that jollycart after the beast. I set the course to hope. Always a few yards ahead, the rolling humps of its
passage. Behind me my crew were piled onto the upturned wreck of the train, yelling for me to come back.

“The greatstoat slowed & readied itself, & burst out of the earth, looping overhead. I could have reached up & grabbed its hairs. I watched as it set forth horizonward again, underground dancing at speed. & I stopped trying to catch it, & tried only to keep pace with it, & gloried in its letting me do so. I surrendered to the speed.”

Ah, there it was. So this philosophy was about
speed
. Acceleration. Captain Vajpaz theorised about a slim sinuous line of fur & savage teeth, focused on him with spike-eyes personal & full of urgency. It wanted to pass on a message. Even taking his leg had been part of its communications. “Follow me!” it had been saying. “Quick!”

So Vajpaz followed his philosophy, this greatstoat. The acceleration had become its own point, & Vajpaz’s life was changing as he became a prophet of enstoated speed. & so on.

“The speed!” Vajpaz said. There was a whisper of appreciation.

In the taverns of Streggeye Land, in the books they wrote, which Sham & his classmates had sat through, in lectures public & exclusive, captains held ruminatively forth about the bloodworm, the mole rat, the termite queen or angry rex rabbit or badger or the mole, the great mole, the rampaging great moldywarpe of the railsea, become for them a principle of knowing or unknowing, humility, enlightenment, obsession, modernity, nostalgia or something. The story of the hunt as much their work as the catching of meat.