Railsea

know …”

“Pictures,” said Elfrish. “As in …” He shook the camera.

“Pictures! From a camera! They were in the wreck!”

“You’re lying, boy.” Elfrish’s voice was frosty & certain. “They were not.”

“They was! Only in the ground! In a hole!”

The captain cocked his head. “A hole?” he said.

“One of the Shroakes dug it! Where the window used to be. Shoved it inside.”

Elfrish gazed thoughtfully roofward, scrunched up his eyes in thought or memory. “A hole,” he breathed. “A hole.” He looked at Sham. “If there were pictures,” he said, “perhaps someone might use them to reconstruct just where the Shroakes had been. They were always assiduous about not disclosing their itineraries. Whatever the encouragement.”

“Yeah!” said Robalson. “We should totally do that!” He nodded nervously at his captain.

“But,” whispered Elfrish to Sham, “you don’t have those pictures anymore.”

& though he wanted more than anything to say, “Yes I do,” Sham, after he had stalled as long as he dared, had to whisper, “No I don’t.”

With a bellow like an animal, Captain Elfrish dragged Sham abruptly out of the room & into the corridor. Down the hallways, past pirates at their tasks. They looked like other trainsfolk. Only the furnishings were more random, their clothes more varied, & every one of them was armed.

Into a room where scarred officers were waiting. Sham saw through the windows that they were racing through lush lands, overbent by mottled boughs & climbing flowers & trees that seemed to scream, so full of bright birds & startled marmosets were they. Sham could feel the train judder over junctions, pass signal boxes & switches, as lines veered from their own.

So they were heading north, then. Someone was holding Sham down in a chair. He shook & yelled but could not break free. On the table in front of him, someone laid out thick paper. As if to protect the table from spills. Sham yelled again. An officer was slowly unrolling a leather pack containing glittering sharp things.

“I don’t know nothing!” Sham shouted. What ghastly instruments were these? “I told him!”

“Juddamore,” Elfrish said. “Begin.”

The big man took a wicked grey spike from the pack. Licked his thumb & pressed it to the point. Winced his appreciation. Sham screeched. The man lowered it until it pointed at Sham’s face.

“So,” said Elfrish. “You said you found pictures. That would be these.” He held up scraps—the greasy, now- torn & well-worn images that Sham had scribbled for himself, the remembrances of what he had seen on screen. “& culminating in this.” Sham’s cheap little camera. On its screen that single line. Even so small & ill-focused, it hushed the room.

“Know where this leads?” Elfrish whispered. “No. Neither do I. But I am, as you know by now, very much of a one for stories. & such intimations as there are for people to hunt the let-me-stress-it legendary, mythical, obviously-not-at-all-real places beyond, revolve around money. A lot of it. You see my point.

“Oh, people’ll go after those Shroakes. It’s hardly just me. With their train, that won’t go well, I suspect. But followed as they know they are, they’ll wind their route. What I want to do is head them off. Which means knowing where they’re going.

“Now, your well-being is up to you, Sham ap Soorap. These—” He shook the images. “—may make sense to you. To me, not so helpful. To me they are scrawls. So, the things you saw?

“Describe them.”

The man called Juddamore lowered his sharp point to the paper. It was a pencil. He began to draw.

HE TRANSLATED SHAM’S gabbled descriptions into images. Juddamore was talented. Even in his wash of fear & relief, Sham was impressed to watch the pictures emerge from scrawled grey lines as tangled as the railsea.

Someone’ll run come save me, he thought, & described his pictures & memories, in case they did not, in fact. In the days & weeks that he had prepared his trip to Manihiki, formulating his plan, Sham had gone over those images in his mind, leafed through his scrappy redrawings, more than once. They were vivid in his mind.

“& then in the third one there’s, yeah, that one …”

“What is that?” some deep-voiced pirate muttered, staring at Sham’s original. “Is that a bird?”

Sham. Never an artist.

“No, it’s, it’s like, a sort of, a sort of overhang, like, like …” & with frantic hand-motions Sham described the rock angle, & so on. To stay alive. Juddamore drew what he described, & Sham would pass comment & correct him like some lunatically agitated critic. “Not like that, the little forest was a bit more, lower trees, like …”

Each of these scenes had originally been chosen & frozen because it was a sight, after all. Each of them had some quality, some feature, something to distinguish it from the everyday railsea, to make it worth recording. For hours, Juddamore drew pictures of descriptions of memories of glimpses of digital images of sights once long ago seen. The pirate officers looked, heads cocked, rubbing their chins. Debated what they saw.

“& this is the order?”

“Look. That bit there sounds like the corner off the coast of Norwest Peace.”

“There’s rumours about rail shenanigans up Kammy Hammy way, & couldn’t that be the cut in the mountains that gets you up by its western islands?”

They traced a route. With maps beside them, they ruminated. Over a long time, guessing where they had to, putting to one side controversies, the best brains of the pirate train reconstructed a dead explorers’ route. Until, astoundingly, they had decided they knew—more or less, roughly, in broad sweeps—where they were going.

This is not what I ever had in mind, Sham thought. I ain’t even a pirate. I’m a pirate-abetter.

FIFTY-ONE

BUT WAIT. STUDENTS OF THE RAILSEA, OF COURSE YOU have questions. You are likely to narrow in on uncertain & mysterious questions of iron-rail theology.

You wish to know which is the oldest civilisation in the railsea, which island state’s records go back furthest, using which calendar? What do they tell us about the history of the world, the Lunchtime Ages, prehistory, the times before the scattered debris from offhand offworld picnicking visitors was added to aeons of salvage? Is it true the upsky used to be full of the same birds as now fly the down? & if so, what was the point of that?

What of the decline & fall of empires? Human empires & godly ones? & what about those gods—That Apt Ohm, Mary Ann the Digger, Railhater Beeching, all that brood? What, above all, about wood?

That is the key mystery. Wood makes trees trees. Wood is also what makes ties—those bars crosswise between railsea rails—ties. A thing can have only one essence. How can this, then, be?

Of all the philosophers’ answers, three stand out as least unlikely.

—Wood & wood are, in fact, appearances notwithstanding, different things.

—Trees are creations of a devil that delights in confusing us.

—Trees are the ghosts of ties, their gnarled & twisted & dreamlike echoes born when parts of the railsea are damaged & destroyed. Transubstantiated matter.

All other suggestions are deeply eccentric. One of these three is most likely true. Which you believe is up to you.

We have pirates to return to.

FIFTY-TWO