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 nearby, a specimen about his size. It sniffed & made dry-throated noises & he paid it no mind. A shoal of arm-sized earthworms churned amid the ties. There was the plastic-on-plastic rattle of scute: a buried bug, a glimpse of its mandibles telling him it was a good thing he was on the platform. Bang, smear, clang, smear. & now it was evening, & Sham was still banging & smearing.
& then the handle moved. It moved, & Sham whooped & leaned on it with all his weight, his feet dangling, & over the crunch & gristly grumbling of surrendering corrosion, it slowly sank, & screaming their own complaint, the cart’s wheels began to turn.
It was a vehicle made for two. Having to haul up as well as to shove down was exhausting. Very quickly, Sham’s arms & shoulders hurt. Soon they were hurting a lot. But the cart was rolling, & with each foot it moved, it moved faster, its old cogs remembering their roles, its scabs of oxide falling away.
Sham, giddy, sang shanties & pumped his way into—lord, it was late—the railsea twilight.
HE HAD NO LIGHT but he could see. There were not many clouds, & the moon did its best, all the way through the upsky. Sham couldn’t go fast. He stopped & started, rested his poor limbs. He slowed at junctions. Mostly he stuck with his existing trajectory: only occasionally, according to whims he did not question, would he effortfully smack or kick old switches until they changed, & veer off on a new siding.
Sham had no idea where he was going. But though he was cold & moving at a punishing slow pace, he was peaceful. Not tired, though Stonefaces knew he should have been, but calm. He listened to burrowers lowing, the call of nocturnal hunters. He saw brief bioluminescence from a predator in the upsky, something that looked like a colour-winking thread of nerves or lace. Up close it must, he knew, be the most monstrous thing, that tangling beast, but that didn’t stop it being wind-gusted silk just then, & beautiful.
Perhaps he slept. He opened his eyes & it was washed-out daylight & he was still pumping. The creak & creak & whine had become the sound of his life. Hours of pumping & stopping & starting again, & there was another shoal. Grubs, the size of his feet, surfacing & tunnelling & moving en masse & as fast as he was on his old cart.
What now? A scrap of hook protruding from the jaw of one of the grumbling beasts. Someone had tried to catch that one, once. He followed them. Sham watched his own long shadow lurch up & down pumping its own long-shadow handcart. He made for churning earth beyond a copse where the bugs were playing.
Were they? Why had they stopped? The animals were corralled. Tangled in fine mesh nets. Sham was waking up. The panicked grubs wriggled, thrashed & sprayed dust. It really wouldn’t be so hard to catch one now, Sham thought, & almost fainted with stored-up hunger.
He wondered what he would do to snare one, how he might cook it, whether he could bear to eat it raw, & as the shifting of his stomach told him, yes, he rather thought he could, Sham heard sounds other than the scratch of the disturbed earth.
Looked up. Billows were coming his way. Sham stared. Licked dry lips with a dry tongue. At last let out a quavering cracked halloo.
Those were not mirages. These were sails. They were approaching.
SIXTY-SIX
IT RAINED & MADE THE RAILSEA MUD & SLICK METAL, the ties slippy. The venting clouds obscured the upsky. The Medes seemed to hunker in the pouring wet.
Beside it, not hunkering, thrusting rather from the muck, was the subterranean digger, the Pinschon. Captain Naphi stood with her officers around her, the crew around them & beside her in the middle of the circle on the rooftop Medes deck, was Travisande Sirocco, the salvor.
WHEN DAYBE HAD DROPPED onto the deck, the crew had done a quick recce of the surrounds, & seen a pipe jutting from the ground in the middle distance. Swivelling to watch them, dragging through earth. A periscope. The ground had upfolded & fallen away, & “Ahoy!” a voice had boomed from the speakers of the tunnelling machine. “Sorry to interrupt you. There’s something you ought to know.”
“Look at that,” Sirocco said when she came aboard the Medes, & stared at the monster-rooted siller in the distance. “Haven’t seen one of them for, oh. & that’s the Kribbis pit, ain’t it? Would that I could get down there. All that salvage. But the rock’s too hard, & there are ticks down there you wouldn’t believe. Anyway, I’m one for arche-salvage myself.”