Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Baj trotted up beside Richard, murmured, "Why no questions?"

"Perfect belief admits no questions."

"Ah… And if we fight these people, then run?"

"We could kill some… but there are more than 'some' riding their thing. Those sticks are not sticks."

"Then what? Are they the WT guns?"

"Shhh… They are pretend-those-guns, made to look as the copybooks show them."

"Then what keeps us here?"

"The Guard knows those sticks. They have rows of little steel springs inside them that look like leaves. A notched steel rod is forced down into the stick, that catches those springs and bends them against their will."

Baj found it difficult to keep close with Richard's long striding. "… I see. Then whatever grips the rod, if that's released and the springs spring straight -"

"Yes. Then the rod flies out – and will nail a Person to a tree if it strikes him."

"That's a serious weapon."

"Serious, yes – but slow to make work again, and without an arrow's range, or a slung stone's, either… Their spring-sticks aren't the reason the Guard doesn't come this way."

"Then why?"

"Because," Richard said, even more softly, "- madness may be caught, as the pox is caught."

Baj thought of asking more, then decided not to, and dropped back to more comfortable walking.

Nancy poked him, and whispered, "What were you saying?"

"Saying there is no fighting, then running. The sticks are spring-shooters, and dangerous."

"I knew that," Nancy said, not troubling to whisper. "Everyone knows that."

Someone called to them from the road-traveling thing – a different voice from the old man's. "Is there a question?"

"No," Baj called back, "- there is no question. And we are not touching your road."

… But there began to be a question as the night wore on, and the road-thing's big wheels turned and turned down the gravel way behind the flare of its yellow lamp. The roadside was graded even, its dirt covered only with rough grasses, but even a level can weary after several dark glass-hours – and tire travelers more, when they are traveling captive. Baj heard Nancy trip and stumble once… then, later, again – something she'd rarely done where there was freedom, and unevenness for her bounding pace.

"Give the boy to me." Baj turned, caught Errol by his shirtsleeve, then stepped aside and stopped to let Nancy by. "Go on…"

It seemed that surely the men riding their road-thing would grow tired of riding, but they never did, so it breathed its hoarse boot-step breaths, and its wheels rolled on through hour after hour, until all seemed to Baj – tugging the silent boy along – only a dream as his moccasins marched the night away… until at last they brought him into the first of dawn's gray light.

Then, leaving Errol with Nancy, and trotting up past Richard – who made a face and gestured him back – Baj began to see the traveling thing clearly, its lamp's glow fading. It was a huge box – high, wide, and very long – painted the red of rust, and rolling on iron wheels, front and back. Baltimore & Ohio was printed along its side in black.

Thirty men sat in three rows, riding the top of it – all dressed in Warm-time ways out of copybooks: jacket-suits and white shirts with colored cloth strips tied under the collars. They all held spring-sticks upright beside them. And none turned their heads to look down at him.

… There was a chimney at the front, a black smokestack like those that Ordinary merchants built into their houses on the River. But this was made of painted wood planking, like the rest of the rolling box – and the big light (a cluster of oil-lamps and polished mirrors) was fastened below it.

Though rolling on no iron rails, and perhaps otherwise odd, this was so nearly the chugging "locomotive" copybooks sketched – and now come back after six hundred years – that tears flooded Baj's eyes, and he slowed to wait for the others, touched Nancy's shoulder. "Look… Look!"

She turned in brightening morning, her narrow face very human with fatigue. "I see it, Baj," she said, and didn't whisper. "I see it, and the faces of the Sunriser-humans riding it – and still smell burning from them."

"Yes. I suppose… they destroyed that village."

"There are no children with them. Those must have been sent back with others, and another way."

Baj could smell that faint odor of charring drifted with the red recalled-locomotive. The men riding, sat in their rows along its roof, their faces still as if they slept, though their eyes were open… The old man, beard breezing with their slow steady passage of stomp-chuffing, sat up front behind the chimney-stack, and occasionally tapped one side or the other of the box's roof with the butt of his spring-stick.

With a real – not recalled – locomotive, there would have been weary, relaxed steam coming from somewhere, and smoke from making a boiling heat would be puffing from the chimney-stack. Here, there was neither – only chuff-chuffing.

"What pushes it? – perhaps some great spring-engine mechanical, since these people do metal springs."

"Baj," Nancy said, "are all princes fools?" An exhausted girl. He saw how she would look when old – the part-fox queen of a different country.

"What…?"

"Bend down. Bend down and look!"

"Be quiet," Richard said, beside them.

Baj bent… had to bend lower as he walked along, and was just able to see, deep under the locomotive's rust-red edge – and behind one of the great turning wheels – ranks of heavy boots stepping all together. Pairs and pairs and pairs of boots – thirty… perhaps as many as forty men working there beneath it, driving the thing along, toes digging in for purchase. Tired men, now. Baj could see some were a little out of step, their stomping almost stumbling.

The sadness of it was surprising – though it shouldn't have been. Had he really thought even remotely possible a true locomotive, with an engine real and panting or unwinding with great power? Who, after all, even in Middle Kingdom, had come close to the tolerances and thousand perfections of the copybooks' engines of cramped steam?… Like a child, he'd imagined that so-unlikely thing out of longing, a half-formed wish for the return of an ancient miracle.

Nancy glanced at him. "I'm sorry," she said, an unusual gentleness.

Shortly after, at sunrise – as they trudged past wide fields of carrot, cauliflower, and potato, the rows planted between shielding beds of straw – Errol fell down sound asleep, and wouldn't rouse. Baj had to pick the boy up and carry him – surprisingly light in his arms.

Straight down the narrow road – its crushed limestone brilliant white – the copy-locomotive rolled slowly through a stand of tamaracks shading many long wooden sheds, its hidden booted engines stumbling, exhausted.

"Listen." Nancy cocked her head.

Listening, Baj thought for a moment he heard the River's gulls calling along its shores. Then realized it was children. Children were crying out from the long sheds, calling for mothers… fathers, burned and dead.

"Say nothing," he said to Nancy. "Say nothing…"

The pretend locomotive rolled slowly, slowly on… and on into a place past pretending, a dream to live in. It was a small town of six hundred years before.

The gravel road became a sunny street with scythed green-grass lawns, trimmed evergreen hedges, and rows of perfect little wood houses, painted white, yellow, and pale blue with marvelous pigments – pressed from plants, Baj supposed, or ground from minerals dug in the mountains. Some of these must-be-cottages were shaded by tall paper-birches, tamarack, or black spruce, and each was decorated with neat borders of trimmed fireweed, goldenrod, and what Baj thought might be columbine – wall-weather plants, this far north, even in the short summer.