China Mieville - Railsea

The captain looked down. From deep inside her came a sound. An exhalation. She raised her head, started to keen, looking up & up until she stared right into the tipping-down sky, & was howling. A long, loud wail. A moment of lament for a moment lost. The crew gave her that. She was, for all of it, a good captain.

She finished. Looked down. Released the bat into Sirocco’s arms.

“Mr. Mbenday,” she said. Her voice was perfectly calm. “Find us a junction. Switchers, ready. Ms., Lady, Sirocco, salvor, person.” She didn’t pause. “The bat, we think, remembers the direction it came from. & it trusts you, now?”

The salvor shrugged. If Sirocco smiled, it was so subtle as to be hard to see. “I’ll stick around,” she said. “There’s bound to be some salvage on the way.”

“Stations,” the captain shouted. The train shuddered as engines fired. “Find us a way around this sinkhole. We hunt one young trainsmate, name of Sham ap Soorap.”

TACKING, SWITCHING EXPERTLY WITH & AGAINST THE wind, sliding from rail to rail with quick touches of the points, came the travellers. A community of trainsfolk in single-carriage vehicles. Each was light, made of fire-hardened wood. None encumbered with an engine, they gusted, were masted, complexly patchworked with triangular sails. Their canvas boomed as the wind yanked. The wind-powered trains hauled a zigzag way across the railsea. Standing at the prow of the front-running vehicle was Sham.

He still marvelled at the quiet running. (Even as he was willing them to get a bloody move on.) His vocabulary of clatternames was unhelpful for these nomads: their very wheels were wood, & the vibrations they sent his feet were softer & more whispered than any he had known. He would have to introduce new words when he made it back to Streggeye. The hrahoom of a skilfully executed line shift, the thehthehtheh of a long straight.

His rescuers, the Bajjer, followed a labour of moldywarpes: red-furred horse-sized moles, fast-moving, cantankerous by nature & made more so by the dive-bombing of the Bajjer’s domesticated hawks & the snaps of the dogs that ran with them trackside, by the harassment of the hunters who harried them with javelins to wear them down. The carts weaved across the animals’ paths, moving in concert, their sails swinging.

This hunt was opportunistic, chances taken en route to & from the net traps where the Bajjer gathered most of their meat. It was at one such that they had found Sham, hallucinating with hunger & exhaustion.

Over the last few days, he had grown used to the spices with which his rescuers cooked & the air-dried gamey molemeat with which they had coaxed him back to health. He wore what of his old clothes he could save & that were not so big they fell off him, together with the fur & skin vestments of the Bajjer.

A man only a little older than Sham came up behind him. What was his name again, Stoffer or something? He was one of those who spoke a few words of Railcreole, & he was keen to learn more. With several of the Bajjer, Sham was able to make halting conversation in simple mixed-up tongue.

Sham knew his urgency was beginning to annoy them. “So …” he said. “When? When Manihiki?” The young man shrugged. Sham did not even know for certain that that was where they were going.

The Bajjer had undoubtedly saved his life. Sham knew he had little right or reason to expect them to disrupt the rhythms of their own lives, too. But he was desperate & impatient & he could not stop asking. The rail-nomads’ travels took them, he understood, to trade points, every so often, where they might drop him. Mostly these were tiny market villages & isolated hunting communities in the railsea. Pirate towns, maybe, too. Well, that would be interesting. Whatever. Sometimes, though, they’d take their business to one of the larger hubs—very occasionally Manihiki.

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.

MOST EVENINGS THE BAJJER 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.