Railsea

“Oh, Stonefaces help us,” said Zhed the Yimmer at last. Captain Naphi moved her fingers like horse’s hooves. “What do we do?” Zhed said. “Things couldn’t get any weirder.”

It would have been simply rude for reality not to respond to a challenge like that. As that last word came out of Zhed’s mouth, there came the whistling noise of something plummeting, & a small, firm, heavy body fell out of the air into Vurinam’s hands.

Everyone yelled. Vurinam yelled, he staggered back, but what had landed held him tight, & Vurinam saw its jabbering little face. Sham’s bat. Daybe, the transmitter still winking on its leg.

SIXTY-FOUR

TIME FOR THE SHROAKES?

Not yet.

SIXTY-FIVE

SHAM ROLLED UP HIS SLEEVES, WENT TO THE SHORELINE, & looked out at the ruined trains.

With care, effort & bravery, he was able to brace himself on the iron, the ties, the various bits of natural & wrecky business he could reach. He even walked the earth where he had to, dragging a makeshift cart. Sham made it at last to the ruin of some once-grand cargo train, stripped it of fittings. He dug into the ground & hauled out debris.

Dangerous work, but he got on with it. He dumped his finds on the shore. Gathered junk. A few more trips out to the wreck & Sham had a yard-load of nu-salvage. As night fell he began to cobble it together. When the sun came up he was standing, proudly, in a hut.

He made it into the old train’s hold where he discovered that, by happy chance, it had been carrying seeds. These he planted. He continued building until he had made a small township of corrugated iron. His crop grew. Sham collected rainwater & wove flax. He tamed local animals & got more stuff from the train. Sham made bread.

In the second year he got a bit lonely & then luckily he found the footprints of another human being on the island. He followed them & met a native, who was astonished but impressed by him & became his happy servant. Together they continued building, & after a few more years Sham managed to build an actual train, & he left the new country that he had founded with the handy discards of his old, & he set out on a journey back to Streggeye, the wind in his hair.

That didn’t happen.

Sham sat, cold, frightened, starving, on the beach. Staring at nothing. His fantasy hadn’t made him feel any better. It hadn’t been convincing at all.

He chewed at the … well, it was a sort of leaf that he had found.

“Mmmm,” he said. Out loud. “Piney. You’re the first ingredient for a new drink I’m going to make.” He grimaced & swallowed. “I’m going to call you fizzboont.”

He had, in fact, built a shelter out of rubbish, but he would hesitate to say he had “salvaged” it: it was only trash lying at shoreside. & he would hesitate to say he had “built” it: he had really sort of leaned it up one bit against another. & he would hesitate to call it a “shelter.” It was more of a pile.

“Troose,” he said. He sniffed. “Voam.” Their hopes for him—were they so foolish? Did their ultimate aim, that he might at least abut a philosophy, seem quite so terrible now?

The wind blew on him, & it felt like it was mocking him. Like it was saying Pfffft, disdainfully, at this almighty castaway failure. Whatever, the wind said, smacking him on the head. He could have cried. He did, a bit. Just a little bit in the corners of his eyes. It was just because he was staring into blown grit, but then again it wasn’t just that really.

Sham did spend a lot of time looking out at the salvage, like in his daydream. He was very hungry. It had been two days. He was very hungry. He spent his time looking at ruined trains, at spread-eagled bonelike stubs of cranes, at scattered carts, bruising & bloodying his thumb by using it like a crude chisel or awl on his slowly enfiguring stick. He wondered what would happen to him.

Scattered carts. Some were bust up, some upside down. One, half-hidden in a thicket a few score yards offshore, right-way-up, was on its wheels.

On its wheels. On the rails.

Sham got slowly up & walked to where the rails started. It wasn’t even a jollycart. No motor. It didn’t even have sides. It was an ancient, tiny, flat handcart. A tabletop, basically, with a crank like a seesaw, for two operators to pump up & down, to make the wheels turn.

A two-person pump that, in a pinch, one person could use.

Actually—

Actually, thought Sham, enough.

Looking straight into the wind that rushed across the railsea, blinking from its gust-borne dust, & in the flurry of his own resolve, too, Sham felt something catch inside him. Long-stalled wheels strained for purchase. Straining to pull himself together.

Sham swallowed. Like the crew-member he was, with the skills into which he had been trained, he traced a rail-route to the cart with his eyes. He threw his unfinished nail-carved figure away.

SHOULDN’T YOU JUST STAY?

Sham heard that voice in him more than once. As he gathered his useless stuff, a few odds & ends of rubbish on the shore. As he stretched & psyched himself up. A fearful bit of his head asked him if he was quite sure he wouldn’t rather wait a bit? That, you never knew, someone might turn up.

Enough. He shut it up. He surprised himself, battening down that little whine as if it were something troublesome rolling on a deck in a gale. No I should not wait, he thought. Will not.

He had to go. Sham didn’t stop to think about what the stakes were—he simply knew he would not stay & wait. He wanted food, he wanted revenge, he wanted to find his old crew. & he was worried for the Shroakes. Their enemies still hunted.

He stood on the beach & swung his arms. Sham stripped to the waist. He’d lost weight. He threw a handful of rocks, in diversion. Another. Then while his missiles still settled, he jumped onto the nearest tie. He walked the rail. Balanced on the iron, jumped from plank to plank. Threw another bunch of distracting stones. He veered at a junction, & jumped across a couple of yards of unbroken earth, & onto another rail.

Sham rolled, Sham staggered, Sham threw more stones. He was walking on the rails! He was in the railsea! The only thing worse would be if he was on the actual earth.

Hush, don’t think about that. He ran fast, & ever faster, his heart hammering, taking the route he had planned until with an almighty jump & a gasp of triumph he leapt, & landed on the handcart. He lay still.

“How about that, Daybe, eh?” he gasped. “What d’you say, Caldera?”

He wasn’t losing his mind. He knew the bat was elsewhere, that the older Shroake was countless miles away. He just wished that wasn’t so. He remembered the colours in the former’s pretty pelt, the latter’s frank stare, the one that flustered him. He rose. Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realised, the quicker he worked.

OF COURSE THE HANDLE was solid with rust, but he worked at it, hitting it with a stone. Tried to spread what grease remained on the mechanism around. Again & again & again. Hit, smear.

His percussion went on so long the railsea, the railsea animals, began to ignore it. Slowly, the fauna emerged, as Sham continued his cack-handed engineering. The twitching-nosed face of a moldywarpe broke ground