Railsea by China Miéville
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.
SIXTY-EIGHT
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.
The next morning the groups parted with ceremonial valedictories, & Sham realised that they had swapped a few members. The whole convivial, he supposed, had only cost a half-day or so. But a couple of days after that he saw more rapidly approaching sails, & Sham thought he might cry in frustration.
This time, though, there was to be no relaxation, no nattering or supper. The newcomers were blowing alarm trumpets & waving flags. When they came close enough, he saw they wore expressions of misery & rage. They were waving flags & pointing. They were pointing right at Sham.
HIS RESCUERS STRUGGLED to explain. Somewhere, something the Bajjer treasured had been attacked. In a place they went to hunt & harvest. It was not an accident. & it was something to do Sham.
“What are they talking about?” Sham said.
They were not accusing him, though they stared in suspicion & anger. It was more tenuous than responsibility. Nothing was certain; these travellers had seen nothing at first hand, were passing on garbled information as it had been passed to them. But even as details faded farther from the source, the whispers that raced along rails & among traveller bands linked whatever it was that had been perpetrated—some abomination, committed by ferocious pirates, the slaughter of some band & the poisoning of their runs—to the story of Sham’s grub-trap rescue.
The few survivors of the onslaught said their onslaughterers had been looking for someone, demanding information to stop what they were doing. A lost boy. A Streggeye boy lost & got away from pirates.
“We go.” Everyone readied their carts & weapons. “See. All the Bajjer go.” East. Towards wherever it was that had happened had happened. Away from Manihiki, & from any direction the Shroakes might have taken.
“But …” Sham half-wanted to beg. “We can’t lose any more time.” But how could he? These were their people. How could they not go?
NOTHING PREPARED THEM. Three days into their eastward trek, the two bands sailing together, they reached the outskirts of the tract where the attack had happened. Where Sham had thought they might find injured escapees, perhaps dead remains, a battered sail-cart band.
There was a stink in the air. Chemicals, worse than any factories Sham had ever sniffed. They rolled towards smoke. “Look.” Sham pointed. A stench came up from below. Sham’s eyes widened. Oil & effluent, on the ground between the rails, on the roots of trees, dripping from the branches, on the rails themselves. The trainsfolk switched, swung, steered, their faces grim.
A grieving silence descended. Even the wheels seemed muted, as they reached splintered & scattered remnants of Bajjer craft. At the limits of his vision Sham saw a tower, a huge engine, of the type that dotted the railsea, drawing energy from deep below the flatearth. It was motionless, burning off no excess.
“Is it a spill?” Sham said. “Have they had a blowout? Is that what happened here?”
Other sails were approaching. Bands were converging as word spread. With signals, with coloured flags, they swapped what little they knew, going farther, slowly, in more disgust & misery, into a zone that seemed almost to be dissolving, sopping & destroyed with industrial slop, defoliant & toxin.
“This ain’t no broken rig,” Sham said. This was thuggery, a carnage of landscape. Someone was sending the Bajjer a message. No wild crops would grow here now. There was nothing to hunt, & would not be for years. The earth was motionless, animals all rotting in their holes.
Among the vehicles approaching, Sham saw one much larger than the rattling wooden crafts. All around him, the Bajjer stared at this act of oily war. Sham narrowed his eyes. The big train came out of the distance,
Despite the depredation around him, the despondency & anger of his companions, Sham’s whole body lurched with shock, because the train approaching through the trashed-up hunt-grounds, escorted by scudding Bajjer-carts, cutting through the newly ruined railsea, was the Medes.
Even as the Bajjer gazed helplessly at the catastrophe, Sham let out a whoop of joy. & then another as, like a nuzzling thunderbolt, streaking out of the sky into a heavy sniffing kiss in his arms, came Daybe, the bat.
EARWIG
(Dermaptera monstruosus)
Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.
Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 6.1)
SIXTY-NINE
IT WAS BADLY BATTERED, A BRUTALISED & CREAKING train in which the Shroakes passed beyond any horizon most trainsfolk would ever see. & here their troubles began.
Actually—
It is, in fact, not time for the Shroakes. Not quite.
That phrase—here the troubles began—is ancient. It has been the fulcrum of many stories, the moment when everything is much bigger & more vertiginous than anyone thought. This is in the nature of things.
Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens—wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete.
That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.
SEVENTY
OUT OF THE EAST & SOUTH THE TRAIN CAME. IT howled, it whistled, en route through & out of the known railsea. It breathed diesel breath. An everyday moletrain, transmogrified by urgency & peculiar direction into something more than itself, something grander, buckling of more swashes.
The Medes was not alone. It came as part of a multitude.
Syncopating with the staccato of its iron wheels was the hard wood rush of a Bajjer war party, windblown in the Medes’s wake. Like a huge semitrained predator, the subterrain Pinschon grumbled fast into the light where rails allowed, submerged again to tunnel alongside & below the hunters.
Leaning from the Medes, Sham was at the head of an armada. Don’t dwell on that, the voice in him said. Don’t even think about it. You have a job to do.
It had been a bittersweet reunion, in the mashed-up Bajjer grounds. Of course, the eruption of welcome from his trainmates had made Sham cry happy tears. The tears had stayed & the happiness gone when he heard what had gone down, of the loss of Klimy & Teodoso to a monster out of the bad sky.
“Someone punished us,” a Bajjer warrior said, staring at pools of scummy offrun in what had been fertile soil. “Who? For what?”
“Who,” Sirocco said, “is easy.” She had leaned on the subterrain’s hatch.
“You!” Sham said.
“Good to see you again, young man.” She touched the brim of an imaginary hat.
“What are you doing here?”
“Sham!” It was Hob Vurinam. Arms outstretched, vaguely dandy threads even more battered than usual by the remorseless journey, tiredness making him look much older than he was, but his lined face wide in delight. He grabbed Sham & they pounded each other’s back in greeting, & Vurinam scruffed up Sham’s now-shaggy hair for longer than you would have thought, only becoming embarrassed after a few seconds.
& there was Mbenday, jumping from foot to foot, almost as vigorous in his welcome, & Kiragabo Luck, more restrained but not by much, Shappy, all his trainmates, suddenly Dr. Fremlo to Sham’s happy squawk, giving Sham a huge & lengthy hug, then holding him at arm’s length & shaking his hand.
“If it weren’t for her we wouldn’t have ever found you,” Mbenday said, pointing at the salvor. “She knows how to follow trails, & she was watching the bat, & then there were rumours that someone had you, & then that there’d been something terrible. But it was her.”
“Me?” Sirocco said. She glanced down into the bowels of the Pinschon. “I’m just here for the salvage.”
People lined up to greet the returned boy. Even Lind & Yashkan shook Sham’s hand, surly but not wholly ungracious. & then, suddenly, there was Captain Naphi.
She stood back. Sham hesitated. Was he happy to see her? Unhappy? He could not have said. She looked a little lessened. Diminished? She wore—Sham blinked at the sight—a bandage wrapped around her artificial arm. He bowed, & the captain bowed back. “Ap Soorap,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you’re alive. We’ve worked hard. We’ve given a lot to find you. A lot.”
“How did you know where I was?” he said. “Why did you break off hunting? &—” He stared at the stink all around. “& who then?”
“Who did this?” Sirocco said. “Who do you think?”
“Pirates!” someone shouted. Sirocco shook her head.
“That? See that?” She pointed at a particular ditch of sump. “That oil—you’ll excuse me but as you can imagine I know my effluent & runoff—that particular oil …” She wafted the air towards her & sniffed like a connoisseur. “… is used almost exclusively by one force. The Manihiki ferronavy.”
There was a silence. “That—” She pointed at a bush not merely killed but dripping with the remains of leaves enzymatically degraded into slop like a salted slug. “—is their favourite unleafer.”
“I heard it was pirates,” the same voice as before said.
“They may have driven under the skull-&-spanners flag.” Sirocco shrugged. “But …” She performed a mocking salute.
“What do they want?” Sham said. Then looking across the acres of miserable Bajjer, he said, “I know why. They were looking for information. & punishing the Bajjer because of who they once helped.”
“What?” said Vurinam. “Who did they help?”
“They want information about me,” Sham said. “& the people I’m trying to go after. & they’re punishing these people. Because of who they taught about the railsea.”
The Bajjer who could understand him nodded. “Shroakes,” someone said.
“The Shroakes,” said Sham. That little bit of history! That investigation, by Caldera & Dero’s parents, the meeting of those minds. All these years later, this deadened land was what it had cost the Bajjer, to have helped the Shroakes find a way to Heaven & the eternity of tears. To have helped them, & now to have helped him.
“Would someone,” Fremlo said, “& by ‘someone,’ Sham ap Soorap, I mean you, please explain what in the name of the Stonefaces & Their Stern Gaze you are talking about?”
So, rushing the details for now & promising to come back to them, Sham told the gathering about the Siblings Shroake, about their family & their family’s work, of their odyssey towards something of which they were quite unsure, & of what & who was hunting them.
The Bajjer had no loudspeakers, but Sirocco had three. “Can’t believe she came for me,” Sham whispered to Vurinam, as the equipment was checked & walloped into working. He stared at Captain Naphi on her dais.
“Well …” Vurinam said, & shrugged. “Tell you later.”
Sham saw the captain check the scanner again, again & again, but such glimmers of nostalgia for the hunt she almost made were surely forgivable. When she spoke, her voice was firm.
“May I suggest,” she said, “that we come to some sort of order?” & one by one, across all the vehicles, loudhailers sounded in repetition, translation & debate, until everyone there understood the shape of this. That, when you got down to it, Sham was looking for a hunted girl & boy.
“& whatever the rest of you decide,” Sham said, “I’m going after them. I’ve got to. They need help.”
The Bajjer were raging. The dead & the land, they said, whispering translations to Sham between exhortations, demanded revenge. “Don’t think who did this is finished with you,” Sham said. “Until they get what they want.”
“Punish.” That word was fast translated, & mor
“Plus also,” Sham said after a decent pause, “where we’re going there’s an X. X the unknown. Off the edge of the map. Figuratively speaking. You know what X means.” He rubbed his fingers together.
Night reached them. Tumbleweed tumbled, investigating the gathering while a consensus emerged in shouts & declarations.
Sham listened. He was slowly staggered. He had to bite his lip. Whether out of a sense of justice at the thought of young Shroakes chased by armoured trains, out of a hope for treasure, out of fury at this despoliation, solidarity with him, or some combination, an astonishing number of those present were ready to come with him.
“But come where?” Mbenday said. “The whole point of this—” He indicated the poisonous slurry. “—is that no one knows where the Shroakes’ve gone.”
During the silence that followed that, Sham thought. A strategy he could not have followed on his own might not, in company, be closed.
“The Bajjer go all over, yes? All over the railsea? & Sirocco?” She was moonbathing on the hull of her digger. She looked up politely. “You must’ve travelled a lot, there’s salvage all over. & us.” Sham looked at the Medes crew. “We got people from Streggeye, from Manihiki, Rockvane, Molochai, from all over. We’re trainsfolk. What we don’t know about the railsea ain’t worth knowing. Between all of us,” he said, “we’d surely recognise pretty much anything out there.
“Captain,” Sham said, & gave up the last secret. Rumbled her. “A long time ago, you & me saw some pictures.” Everyone turned to her & stared. “I want you to help me, because you saw them, too. If we want to find the Shroakes,” Sham said, “we have to find where they’re going. So everyone listen. Tell me where you think this stuff is. I’m going to describe some places to you.”