Railsea

“Some meat,” she said. “& a rope. Looks like I’m going sky-baiting. I have a guest.”

SIXTY

SHAM HID. FOR HOURS, THAT WAS MORE OR LESS ALL HE did. He did it hard, he did it with all his energy.

After that crazy leap to rock-strewn freedom, there he was, exploded pirate train behind him, scattered & slid across the rails, the Manihiki navy powering in, survivors shrieking, the sounds of the last bits of battle, the snarls of predators. The haul of prisoners.

Sham had slid down the scree, into a steep slope hidden from the wind. Into the shadow of stones, shivering as the cold of that isolated islet hit him. Sham scootched into a hollow & hugged his knees. & waited. Both the fighting forces wanted him, & he wanted neither of them.

What was he supposed to do?

The noises didn’t last very long. He heard the last of the pirates wait until the last of the navy had investigated the last of the audible sounds. Hunting, among other things, for him. He heard the great train go back the way it had come. He heard the jollycarts, that in some patrician mercy the Manihiki forces used to pick up the pirate wounded, putter away.

Sham tried not to think about the fact that he could not stay like this forever. He closed his eyes, & tried to stop the image looping in his head, the sight of Robalson gusted away in smoke & fire.

In the second or third hour after the last skirmish, long after there were no more sounds, he listened to the absolute trainlessness of the island. He heard railgulls, wind, dust sandpapering stone. He searched his pockets as carefully as any explorer on the wrong bit of a map ever did. Found some nuts & the stump of a block of tacky. Ate a miserable meal.

& then it was dark. How & when did it go dark?

& then he slept.

Without much else to do, stripped of options, exhausted, fearful, hungry, thoroughly & utterly alone, Sham retreated out of wakefulness &, surprised that he even could, slept.

HE WOKE VERY EARLY with flinty cold going through him & the sky light but not bright. He was stiff like a miserable puppet, like a bundle of damp twigs. Sham hugged himself a while & listened to the wolflike snuffling of his stomach. Eventually what got him up was that he was bored of being terrified.

That day he explored. On the railsea off the coast he saw the remains of the pirate train. & here & there the grisly remains of those pirates dead & not taken.

His island was perhaps a couple of miles round. Its sides were absurdly steep, shagged in ivy & vines of various scrubby kinds, from some of which hung little nodules of fruit or something. Gingerly he nibbled at them. Horrible, bitter, sappy grossness he spat out. His stomach yowled. There was water, though. It dribbled down from some on-high aquifer. Sham put his lips into the streamlet & slurped, not even minding the cold & mineral bite of it.

The island was full of noises. The rustlings of birds, the chatterings of other things, that went silent when he approached only to sound off again behind Sham’s back. He climbed as far as he safely could & stared at the upper reaches where, maybe, the peak prodded into the upsky. He descended to the pebbled shore, where the island met the dark & ancient rails.

A few scrips & scraps of stuff lay near the shoreline. Stuff he could maybe even get hold of if he went for it with a stick. Things lost from pirate pockets, the debris of trainsplosions. Stuff too small for salvors, too drab for glint-loving birds.

Thinking of salvors made Sham think of the Shroakes. Though they were not salvors, of course. Perhaps that’s why he had thought of them. Minds, he thought, can be funny that way. Sham considered Caldera, only a little younger than he, commanding her impossibly advanced train. She would not stop for sloughed-off junk like this.

There were many words for what she had. Oomph, verve, drive, elan. Caldera & Dero seemed full of all of them. It was as if there was none left for anyone else. Sham sat on the shore. Sort of fell onto it, cross-legged. He picked up a bit of wood. He picked at it with his nail.

This must be a notorious clutch of train-wrecking islands. He could see others, out to railsea, beyond the shells of carriages & engines. The mashed-up Tarralesh was just the latest. Even so close to maps’ edges, salvors had come, cleared out the worst or best of the ruination. But there was plenty of unreclaimable junk out there.

Sham looked down. He realised that he had been using his thumbnail to give the old wood he carried a face.

The nearest island to his, he saw, was lusher, lower, flatter. Covered with trees. Maybe they grew fruit. Sham licked his lips. Between this beach & that one were perhaps two miles of rails. Between each of those rails were stretches of rumbustious earth. & motion. Animal motion. Sham shivered.

A spine of stony offshoot islands trailed from the shore, on each of them weeds & squabbling birds. Stones bent up broken-tooth-style between ties to send trainsfolk to the ground. Sham could see remnants from cargo holds spilled & mummified or rotted; a rust-clogged handcart; a cairn of ruined engine parts; a crushed caboose.

His stomach muttered, impatient little animal. What do you want from me? he asked it, & tried to keep his panic under control. A wodge of birds came at him, & for a moment he imagined it might be Daybe at their head, come to snap affectionately at his face. It wasn’t. It was just some anonymous, ill-tempered, guano-bombing gull.

That other island looked increasingly delicious. I’m not a kid anymore, Sham thought. Shouldn’t take anything for granted. A big bird cawed as he thought that, & Sham took it as applause. All my life, he thought, they’ve told me about the dangers of the earth. Maybe it’s true. But … He kept his eyes on the foody island across the narrow railsea strait. But maybe it’s also useful for them if everyone believes it. If people are too scared to just go.

Without giving himself time to think, Sham set out walking.

He stuck out his chest, kept his stare ahead. He marched off the edge of the rock shore. Stepped over the closest rail, put his foot between ties & iron & continued.

I’m walking, he thought. I’m on the earth. He kept going, crossing rail after rail. He laughed. He sped up. He whooped. He tripped. He sprawled. He thumped the ties. The earth jiggled.

Oh. Yes, the earth definitely moved. Sham rose, no longer laughing. There he was, stopped, looking back at the shore. Which looked an awfully long way away.

It wasn’t a jiggle anymore, what was going on in the ground, it was a full-blown shudder. Again. He watched aghast as a ridge came up. Something moved underground. It was coming towards him. Experiment fail, Sham thought, turned & ran.

He ran, & behind him there was a boom, a crash, the grind of the ground. Muck showered Sham as whatever that was coming burst the earth from below. It closed on him, clattering.

Sham wailed & accelerated. With two last huge leaps he made it back to the baked, rocky earth, almost blown by a howl from his pursuer, something like a kettle screaming & an electrical short, all at once. He stumbled, rolled, turned to see.

Shiny segmented shell, scissoring pincer on its rear, bum-jaws. It wriggled down again out of the light. He just glimpsed it. An earwig. Oh Stonefaces. Sham was lucky. In a different mood it might have come up onto the shore after him.

He picked up a big rock, chucked it onto the disturbed earth of the earwig’s wake. Another rumbling, & he saw the head of a meat-eating worm. A flurry of fur & metal-hard claws as a vicious digging shrew came just up enough to yank it down.