The Rise of Ransom City (12 page)

“Yeah.”

I was ashamed that I had started talking about myself again, but it was only to fill the silence of the rocks and the big blue sky above and Carver and the blackened bodies.

“You got questions,” Carver said. “Go on then.”

“How did you know—?”

“Saw the smoke.”

“Is that a fact. I didn’t see a damn thing, Mr. Carver. I guess I don’t pay you enough.”

“Huh,” he said. He looked around. He traced one of the signs carved into the rock with a finger. He peered into one of the dark openings in the rock but did not go in. Neither of us did. You don’t go crawling into the Folk’s secret places if you know what’s good for you.

“Was like you knew this was here,” I said.

“Was it?”

“It was, Mr. Carver. It was.”

“Told you I traveled when I was young. Said you wanted somebody who knew this country. Was I wrong?”

“I guess not. You visited with the Folk often, then?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

There was a long silence.

“You know,” I said, “I visited one of their places once.”

“I know.”

This surprised me and I did not know what to say. I was referring to an incident back in East Conlan, when I was a boy, that I have not yet written down here and maybe will not. Mr. Carver and I had never discussed the matter and I did not know that I wanted to discuss it all, and so instead of saying more about it I asked, “Who did this?”

“Someone hunting. Someone questioning. Someone prying into secrets.” He glanced at me in a meaningful way. Then he looked around and I guess he saw something I didn’t because he added, “Wolves.”

“Wolves did this?”

“Wolves were here— led by men. One man. A hunter. A madman. Not the Line, then— the others. Fuck.”

“What did they want?”

“Who knows?”

I remembered the rumors I had heard in Kenauk, of Folk weapons and Folk magic at large on the roads of the Rim. I had not thought much of those rumors, but I guess someone took them seriously.

“Fuck,” said Mr. Carver.

“Nothing we can do here and we should move on.”

Maybe you’ll think me callous but soon enough I forgot about this incident. I have that cast of mind that can only think about a problem when it can be solved.

When we got back to the wagon there was a man and a woman in filthy rags peering into the back of it, most likely wondering how in the world to go about stealing the Apparatus and what they would do with it if they did, and we had a short successful scuffle. We had forgotten the hatchet up there on the rocks and I told Mr. Carver that I would ordinarily take it out of his back-pay, but that I was so relieved at our triumph over the would-be Apparatus-Thieves that I would overlook the matter. We bought a new hatchet in the next town over, and some other parts to mend what had been broken back in Kenauk, including an apothecary’s full stock of glass jars. I haggled, Carver mended. He cursed and spat a lot and was back to his old self.

We ate at a saloon where I explained to the owners that I was a Vegetarian, and I explained what a Vegetarian was, and after they were done snickering they fed me well enough. I glanced at the other diners eating pork and beef and hardly thought about burned bodies at all. I struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be a probate attorney, and I thought about mentioning the news about the Folk just west of town but I suspected from some other not especially agreeable political opinions he’d already expressed that he would say
good riddance.
So that was the last I thought about them until now. Instead we talked about the road ahead and I learned that the James River was unseasonably high and passable only at the bridges, the nearest of which had been destroyed in the fighting. Travelers were detouring a day or two north-east to the Black Cut Bridge. So that was what we did.

Three high iron arches held the Black Cut Bridge aloft of the water. You could see them from miles away because the land around the river was muddy and flat. We approached through waterlogged wheel-ruts and the deep ridged tracks of Line motor-cars, that always looked kind of scaled to me, like they were dug by the bellies of great big snakes. Also there was a considerable concentration of horse shit. Beneath the arches there were tents, and several motor-cars and one monstrous Ironclad with the blind eye of its cannon patiently regarding the road, and among the tents there were men in black uniforms going to and fro or shouting at each other or just standing all day foot-deep in mud and blank-eyed. In other words an encampment of the Line held the bridge. There was quite a crowd of travelers ahead of us waiting to pass, some being questioned and others searched, and among them I saw Elizabeth Harper and Old Man Harper.

The two of them were surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers of the Line. They were being questioned from all sides and it did not seem to be going well. The Linesmen had not yet drawn their guns but you could tell that it was only a matter of time. I saw this as a problem I could solve and I got to work.

“Stop them!” I yelled and I shoved my way through the crowd. “Stop them!” I repeated and I came up to where the Harpers were being questioned, and I held up one hand to dissuade the Linesmen from shooting me and with the other I seized Miss Harper by the arm and said, “Thought you’d got away from me, did you?”

I confess it delighted me to look in her eye and see that for once I knew what was going on, and she didn’t.

I turned to the nearest Officer of the Line. They all look alike to me and I have never been able to figure out their ranks. I said, “Thank you for stopping these people, sir. I’m Harry Ransom, inventor and businessman, and these are my papers.” And I began to show him the various licenses and passports and authorizations I had had to purchase over the last year in order to do business in this part of the world, which was either Line territory or debatable territory and the Line has different forms for each. He was more interested in the Harpers than in me but a Linesman cannot resist the urge to study paperwork and authorizations.

“I am an honest businessman and I pay my dues, and these, sir, are my servants. I picked her up in Melville where she’d been arrested for fraud and him in Gooseneck where he was a vagrant and they fled from me in Kenauk where I had a dispute with the locals over money and they took with them their papers of service and no doubt they’ve burned them. What did they say they were, what lies did they tell you? Sir, they are mine. Had her for a year and the old fellow for two, I wish I could reward you for stopping them but . . .”

Well I had to talk a lot longer than I have rendered here, but I trust you get the gist. The Harpers played along smartly. At first they denied everything— then they started accusing me of withheld meals and other mistreatment. I noticed but did not let my eyes dwell too long on a photograph in the Linesman’s hand of a man who kind of resembled Old Man Harper, though younger and handsome and smiling or at least less worn-out, and anyhow the picture was blurry as if the man in it were caught in the act of turning suddenly to shoot the photographer. The Linesman’s eyes slowly dulled as he lost what little interest he’d ever had in me and eventually also the quite considerable interest he’d had in the Harpers. He filed away the photograph with a grunt and a shake of his head, and at last the Harpers were released into my custody. I was so pleased at my daring and ingenuity that I didn’t mind when the officer discovered a deficiency in my licenses and assessed me a fine. Nor did I think much about what might be pursuing the Harpers, or that it might now be pursuing me, too.

We traveled together for some time after that— through the end of fall and into winter. At first they had no choice but to come with me, in case the Linesmen were watching, and after a while I think they decided the cover I offered was as good as any. They did not acknowledge what I had done for them and I did not mention it again. Sometimes I tried to puzzle them out, and other times we were too tired or too hungry or too hot or too cold or too lost to care about puzzles and mysteries. We were just on the road together.

The world is made up of an infinite number of words, but it contains only a finite quantity of paper and ink. I cannot describe every little town we passed through or every person we met. But for the boys and girls who will be born in Ransom City and for all the generations to come I want to make some record of how things were.

There was a town called Mammoth that is worth recording for posterity. In a big red barn there they had a whole skeleton of a long-dead beast that they said was a monstrous precursor to human settlement or even Folk settlement, from back when the world was hardly made at all. Miss Harper suspected it was composited from bison but I was enthralled regardless. I displayed the Apparatus under the arch of its rib cage and its knuckly spine cast weird shadows on the ceiling.

The town of Izar had more dentists on Main Street than I could imagine was necessary or good for business or good for anyone’s peace of mind. New Delacorte was built at the edge of a valley flooded with jewel-blue but lifeless water, stinking of salt and sulfur and dead fish, and nobody was willing to give me a satisfactory explanation as to how this came about. Dope fiends littered the streets of Caldwell, basking like lizards in the summer heat. In Kattagan a dispute over grave-rent threatened to turn violent. There was a store in Hamlin that sold nothing but candy! A hairy-knuckled woman on Main Street outside that extraordinary cornucopia thrust two live rattlesnakes up to my face as I stood sucking a mint and watching Carver water Mariette and Golda. She cut off both serpents’ heads with a single snip of her scissors and purported to read my future in their throes. I had not solicited this service and I was vexed about paying for it.

The fattest man I have ever set eyes on was the Mayor of Ford. Flesh rolled down his body like foothills and if he had a nose I cannot say that it was distinguishable from any other mountainous swelling of his features. I would just as soon have bought tickets for the Mayor as for the Mammoth.

There were at least three Glendales in that part of the world, and one New Glendale. None of them stick in my mind much but the four Beck Brothers, who you may recall have joined up with our westward expedition, Dick, Erskine, Joshua and John, they say that they grew up in one of the Glendales, and they want me to say it was an excellent little town. However when I ask them for details they are stumped too.

In the hills above Marchoun the trees were turning green to red to gold, the same way the light of the Process sometimes does as it grows unpredictable. I thought that was beautiful, and said so. But what held the Harpers’ attention was that two big Ironclads of the Line had been abandoned on Marchoun’s Main Street, their crews mysteriously vanished, their cannon blind. The townsfolk had resigned themselves to the presence of those hulking machines and business went on around them— certainly nobody dared try to move them. I dallied awhile in Marchoun to pay court to a handsome woman who owned a general store.

Skewbald’s Main Street was one long slavemarket where convicts and debtors and captured Folk stood chained to every storefront and porch in silent reproach, and we passed the town by, stopping only as long as it took to re-shoe Mariette. The blacksmith in Skewbald mostly worked on chains and goads, and you would have thought some unease would show in his face, some hint of disturbed sleep or bad digestion, but in fact he was a smiling and handsome fellow. As we walked out I remarked that there is no justice in the world and Old Man Harper remarked that I was too old to be just learning that now.