Chapter 10

I woke about dawn. The smell of cooking was coming up the cracks in the floor. I could hear voices downstairs, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I recognized Viina’s voice, and I guessed the other voices were the two lads who had the other room downstairs.

I was wrong. When I went downstairs, I found Viina sitting at the table with Roonim and Medaal, sipping skiir. “Graamon’s in the washroom, Owen. Breakfast’s ready when you are.”

I joined Graamon in the washroom, and then we both joined the others at the table.

Roonim began. “Medaal’s come up with an idea, Graamon. I think we could do it, but obviously it’s your decision – and up to you to design the details if you think it’s a good idea.”

Graamon got Medaal to explain it. The idea was a method of releasing a plough that had got stuck the way ours had the previous day, by blowing steam out of holes in the plough blades.

“Hmm. Might work, but I don’t think so. I can see problems. Unless you blow a little steam all the time, the holes are going to get blocked as you plough. You’d have to blow enough steam to keep the pipes warm enough not to get filled with condensation, which would block the pipes as soon as it freezes. The pipes are going to be being chilled by contact with the metal of the plough blade, which is being chilled by contact with lots of snow. Effectively, you’re trying to keep the plough blade warm – practically melting your way through the snow. Much too much energy needed. An expensive thing, in time and materials, to try out with not much prospect of success, I’m afraid.”

Medaal looked crestfallen, but Roonim seemed satisfied. I had the distinct feeling that Roonim hadn’t really believed in it from the beginning.

“But don’t be discouraged, Medaal,” Graamon went on. “If you have more ideas, don’t be afraid to tell me. I’m always willing to think about them and discuss them, and you’ll learn from the discussions and get more likely to have usable ideas. I’m glad you’re thinking about these things – the more people did that, the better things would be all round. And not all my ideas work out, either – as you saw yesterday!”

Roonim and Medaal let themselves out, and Viina put our breakfast in front of us. “Sorry it’s a bit overdone! But better that than cold.”

“Not your fault, Viina. Anyway, it’s absolutely fine.”

“What are your plans for today? It’s been raining all night, and the snow’s almost completely gone. We’ll be using the front door again soon.”

“If it’s been raining all night here, it’s almost certainly been snowing all night on the top. We won’t even be able to get to the stuck plough, and if we try without a rear end plough, we’ll end up getting stuck ourselves. But we ought at least to go and see what the weather’s like up there. We’ll keep the big plough on the back of the train, and come back as soon as we get to dry snow, or when the little plough on the front won’t take us any further. We’ll most likely be back for lunch, but we’ve still got yesterday’s packed lunch if not.”

“You’re a one, Graamon. It’ll be completely stale.”

“Yes, but perfectly eatable. I’m not one for feeding perfectly good food to the goats or the pigs and turning ten meals into one.”

Viina laughed. “I should be used to you by now. Well, to tell the truth I am used to you. Owen will get used to you in the end, too.”

“I’m sure I will. But I’ve always felt the way he does about food, anyway.”

“You must have eaten some pretty stale stuff on your balloon ride!”

“I certainly did. But that was the least of my worries, really.”

All the drivers were already in the Railwayyard inn. They’d tended their fires, which they were keeping going low to stop the engines freezing up. “If we were confident the cold weather wasn’t about to come back, we’d let the fires out in most of them for the moment, just keep a couple ready to fire up and go. But it could so easily freeze hard again tonight.”

“We’ll go up the line to take a look at the weather on the top. Big plough on the back, little plough on the front. I don’t expect to get anywhere near as far as the stuck plough, but I want at least to take a look. No need to take more than two engines – worth taking two rather than just one, I think. Jinni and Viilam, we’ll take your engines. You’re on each end of the train as it is just now, facing the right ways and already coupled to the plough. That way we don’t need to move the other engines at all. If anyone else wants to come for the ride, you’d be more than welcome.”

If all the drivers come, that’ll be seven of us altogether – four in one of the cabs. Graamon didn’t want four of us in Jinni’s cab yesterday – but one of the four would have been Baamoon. Graamon thinks Baamoon needs more personal space, I think, even though he’s no bigger than me. But it fits with my understanding of the way people are. Baamoon’s presumably playing with his grandchildren today.

In the end, only Peyr came for the ride. “I’ll come in Jinni’s engine. I feel a bit mean leaving Viilam on his own, but you see better from the front engine, obviously.”

Viilam laughed. “Don’t worry, Peyr. It’ll be Jinni’s turn to be on her own on the way back!”

“On the way back it won’t make much difference which engine anyone’s in. You can’t see through the big plough!”

“That’s a bit of an issue, actually. You can see past it by leaning out of the cab, but not easily and not very well. I wonder about making one just over half the height, with extra blades you can slide up when you need them. Using steam rams, obviously – you don’t want to have to put them up and down manually.”

I must remember to mention using hydraulics, rather than running steam out to the plough. But this isn’t the time, in front of all the drivers.

We didn’t even get as far as the first rock cutting. “We could obviously have got a lot further with a big plough on the front, but what’s the point? We know it’s not thawing up here, and that’s all we need to know. I just wish there was some way of knowing when the thaw gets under way without having to come up here every day for a look.”

Well, in England I’d know how to do that – or at least, how to know what the temperature was in a selection of locations. But can I think of a way to do it with things we can get here? Doubtful. But we’ll talk about it.

We didn’t have any trouble backing out. Even though we’d been slipping trying to go forwards, we set off smoothly enough backwards with no sign of slipping. “It’s the shape of the plough,” Graamon explained. “These little ploughs only have a very blunt angle at the front, so they don’t wedge themselves into the drift like the big one. It means they get stuck sooner going forward because they’re piling up snow in front, but can pull back easily.”

I’d realized that anyway, but didn’t say anything.

We were back by mid-morning. “We’ll do the same thing tomorrow. I don’t suppose things will change much for a while, but we’ve got to know as soon they do.”

In Briggi, the snow was completely gone. Even the slushy ponds had drained away.

We popped into the workshops on the way home – home! Viina’s place. My own room, my home. Will Aila want to stay there, for a while at least? We’ll see. I wonder what kind of place we’ll get when we have a place of our own, and when will that be?

Roonim showed us the progress on the expandable plough. “I did right to bring Medaal round this morning, I hope?”

“Oh, yes, certainly. You know I like to encourage anybody to come forward with ideas. You did a good job of not showing your doubts! I could see what your reaction was, but only because I know you very well. I don’t think Medaal could possibly have seen anything but encouragement from you. And much better that he came to me at home rather than embarrassing himself in front of the other drivers.”

Graamon explained his idea about the two-tier version of the expandable plough to Roonim. “It’s not fully worked out yet by any means, and there are obvious problems. It’s even more complicated than this one, of course, harder to make it strong enough, and harder to build as much weight into it. I’m not certain yet that I even want to try it, it’ll take some cogitation. But you know I value your thoughts.”

“Well, my immediate reaction is exactly those obvious problems. But the fixed blades at the bottom could be a lot more than half height without obstructing the view, and that would help with the strength and the weight. I’ll think about it too, and let you know if I come up with anything. It’ll be a few days before you’re ready to do any detailed planning, if I know you.”

Graamon laughed. “Which you do, of course.”

I get the feeling that before long I’ll feel perfectly comfortable talking about ideas in front of Roonim. I like him. He’s obviously a very good workshop man, too.

We were stuck in Briggi for four weeks. The temperature in Briggi remained above freezing for several days, and we made daily trips up the line towards Tambuk, but each time we failed to get as far as we had the day before because more snow had fallen in the meantime. Then the temperature dropped below freezing in Briggi again, and we didn’t even bother to venture up the line for another two weeks. We didn’t get much snow in Briggi, but it obviously wasn’t going to be thawing on the top.

We picked up my second jacket and two pairs of trousers. Lomeyr asked when the wedding would be, and we told him we didn’t know yet, and that my fiancée wasn’t in Briggi – we were stuck one each side of all the snow. He made a sad face and expressed his sympathy.

Back at home, I tried on the trousers and overcoat. Like the jackets, they were the best I’d ever had.

My new boots and shoes were the best I’d ever had, too – a perfect fit. “Keep them well oiled, and they’ll last you a lifetime,” Graamon said as we left the cobblers. “He’ll put new soles and heels on them for you once a year – don’t wait until they’re worn out, or you’ll damage the body of the shoe.”

He’s been looking at my English shoes!

Graamon was desperate to make a trip to Siroha and pick up my things. Of course I wanted to see Aila, tell her about my job and my room and everything, and work out with her what we’d do. Ah well, what happened, happened. You can’t change the past.

We spent a lot of our time just talking, and drawing diagrams for each other to help explain what we were talking about. Graamon showed me around the workshops, and we went into a lot more detail than when Baamoon had been with us. I got to know, and appreciate, Roonim.

“You couldn’t ask for a better workshop man,” Graamon said. “With a better education, he could have been a good engineer. But I’m still thinking about what you said the other day. A lot of our best workshop men in Laanoha and Meyroha could have been good engineers. And then how would we run the workshops?”

Well, I know one Laanoha workshop man. Judd could probably have been an engineer, with the right education. Or Peyr, for that matter – and he’s not even a workshop man. Being out on the line instead of shut up in a workshop probably suits Peyr better, though. I’m sure it would suit Judd better, too, come to that. We can’t all have our ideal life.

“Well, good engineers can still do workshop work. I’m sure you can operate all the machinery in the workshop, for example.”

“Oh, certainly I can. But truth to tell I’m not as good at it as Roonim. I’m not even as good as Kaasham, who’s only been learning for a few months.”

“I wonder. I bet they’re very good at doing things they’ve done twenty-five times before, but I bet you’re at least as good as them, probably better, at doing anything new.”

“Yes, you’re right. That’s certainly true.”

“It’s a matter of what they – and you – are practised at. They’ve had much more practice doing repetitive work on the machines, and you’ve had much more practice thinking about engineering problems.”

Graamon showed me around the foundry, introduced me to the foundry workers, and showed me the charcoal plant. I knew about charcoal plants in England, similar in principle but on an industrial scale. Graamon wanted to know anything I could tell him about them.

“This little plant of mine is useful in itself, but I’m mainly trying to develop the process for Barioha. Our iron smelters there use a lot of charcoal, all made in the forest by traditional charcoal burners. Some of the charcoal burners make tar as well as charcoal, but all the gas and liquid products just go to waste – and all the heat. Most of the charcoal burners don’t even make tar, they say it’s too much trouble making the tar traps.”

“I know that in England they separate a lot of different products, but that’s only feasible because they’re doing it on a much bigger scale. But I’ve never actually seen them, I only know about them from my teachers. As far as I can remember, they work pretty much exactly the same way yours does.”

I tried to tell him that I didn’t know much about the chemistry of the products, but couldn’t find the words to get my meaning across. I wasn’t sure whether chemistry was a subject about which anyone here really knew anything.

We discussed at length how the ancients must have known far more about this kind of thing than anyone did in our time. I told Graamon about Godfrey, his theories about some of the things the ancients did, and how he was pretty sure that they had many materials and resources that we simply didn’t have any more. “The amount of iron they had, they must have been able to make iron without charcoal. The world couldn’t have had enough trees to make all that charcoal.”

“Did they have a huge amount of iron in England, and the countries around there? They had some around here, but I don’t know that they had all that much. What we do know is that they chopped down pretty much every tree in these parts. The general opinion around here is that what finished them was running out of trees – but the evidence is pretty skimpy and I’m skeptical, and there are some other theories floating about. It’s one of the things we want to investigate.”

“Does the railway really care?”

Graamon laughed. “No, the railway doesn’t care a bit. This is part of that other project I mentioned. You remember when you were telling us about schools in England, how people gradually move from being students to being researchers and then to teaching what they’ve discovered in their research? Well, there’s a certain amount of that going on in some of the bigger schools in Meyroha. I know a lot of the people involved. They find Meyroha very stifling – the authorities want complete control of everything that goes on there. We’re thinking to set up a new institute somewhere other than Meyroha – and not Laanoha or Barioha, either. Laanoha’s almost as bad as Meyroha, and Barioha could easily get that way too, it shows all the signs.”

“Briggi?”

“I don’t think so, although that’s been strongly suggested in some quarters. The trouble with Briggi is exactly what’s going on now: it’s liable to be cut off in winter. Worse than that, in fact – and of course this is something that touches me especially hard – it’s only a matter of time before we have to abandon Briggi altogether. A few years ago Baam gave Briggi sixty or seventy years, but I know he’s been revising his estimates, and I’m pretty sure it’s downwards. By how much, I’m still waiting to hear. Even if it’s that far away, that’s soon enough that we don’t really want to be setting up a major institute here.”

“Where else is there? It would surely be difficult to set it up in a really small place. Of course I only know the places on this line, and have heard of Meyroha and Barioha. Oh, and Maaram, but my impression was that’s small, too.”

“Well, there are a couple of other places, but the main candidate so far as I’m concerned is Kiizhiha. It’s quite big. It’s an old place, and used to be pretty important – and it’s got some very well built, big old buildings that aren’t being used, beautiful big old stone places. Aha! You might even have noticed it – you can see it in the distance from the Sirimi road, as you come down from Siroha. I’d not thought of Maaram, though. It’s true it’s small, but it’s not all that small – a lot bigger than Belgaam, which is the biggest place between Briggi and Kromaan. It’s a bit off the beaten track, like Kiizhiha, but it wouldn’t be if we built that line from Belgaam to Barioha that way. I could easily see it becoming the new north outpost, like Briggi is now and like Liimiha was before Briggi. Kiizhiha will always be a bit off the beaten track – there’s nothing else over that way at all.”

“You say Kiizhiha used to be important – what happened to it?”

“Oh, the railway is what happened to Kiizhiha. It was important in the days when the main traffic was coaches and the river. But the engineers who designed the line reckoned the cost of constructing the railway that way was more than it was worth – they thought Kiizhiha could manage with a coach service from Raamba or Veglid. Well, it does – but it’s dying on its feet now.”

“Would it have been so much further via Kiizhiha?”

“No, slightly shorter in fact – but it would have been on soft ground for a long, long way. Building railways on soft ground is expensive. Kiizhiha itself is on bedrock, but it’s an island of it in the middle of a sea of deep mud. We’ve got the same problem all the way from Laanoha to the foot of the mountains, but Laanoha is a much more important place. The first railway was Meyroha to Barioha, but then it was obvious it had to extend to Laanoha. Or at least, to Kromaan – it didn’t go through to Laanoha until 770, there was a ferry before that. Well, there still is a ferry, of course, but it’s nothing like as important as it was.”

“You say Kiizhiha is dying on its feet without the railway – but it seems Maaram is doing okay with just a coach service, isn’t it?”

“There’s two reasons for that. One is that Kiizhiha is on its own, there’s nothing else anywhere near it, whereas Maaram is a centre for quite a lot of villages. All small, but a lot of them. The other is that Maaram has much better river access – it goes directly to Barioha in one direction, and Briggi in the other. There’s nothing else of any significance on Kiizhiha’s river, you have to go all the way down to the sea and then along the coast to Laanoha. On the Maaram side, firewood and timber – and charcoal – go straight down the river to Barioha.”

“Could a railway compete with the river on the Maaram side?”

“If it was just firewood, no, pretty certainly not. But for fresh produce we would, the river’s too slow. And we’re better than coaches for passengers, too. It wouldn’t justify as many trains as we have on this line, though, so there’d probably only be one passing loop between Barioha and Maaram. Mind you, there was only the one at Belgaam when the Briggi line first opened. Even the main line was single track at first.”

Another time, we got talking about the advance of the ice, and the history of sea level changes. I’d learnt something from Godfrey, but sadly didn’t know all he knew by any means. Graamon was in a similar position, with Baam and another friend, Kerrim, as his experts. The difference of course was that we’d be able to talk to Baam and Kerrim about it later, whereas all we could ever get from Godfrey was what was already in my head.

“Nonetheless, that’s potentially valuable – it may not be all that’s known in England, but it’s still more than we here knew about the other side of the world.”

Within the limits of our knowledge, history in the two regions did seem roughly to match, which inspired some confidence that our understanding was probably broadly speaking correct. In both regions, sea level was currently descending by about seven centimetres a year, which it obviously couldn’t have been doing forever. It had certainly being descending for the whole of recorded history, and at roughly the same rate for at least several decades. In both places, about forty-five metres above current sea level, there was a line that appeared to have been a coast for a protracted period.

In both regions, that line had been noticeable but hard to interpret. It had only gradually dawned on researchers what the sea could do when it remained at the same level for a long time: cutting away the rock like people quarrying at it, and making huge flat areas of rock, boulders, gravel, sand or mud at or just below sea level. We could still see similar processes going on in our time, but on a tiny scale by comparison. Godfrey reckoned that sea level must have been within a metre or so of a constant level for thousands of years, and Kerrim had apparently come to exactly the same conclusion.

That also explained why the ancients’ activities had apparently been particularly concentrated along that line. They had built elaborate structures there, seemingly dock facilities and the like. They appeared to have been intended to be permanent, but had evidently subsequently been submerged by a rising sea level. Sea level appeared to have risen to a peak about ninety metres above its present level before beginning its descent.

In both regions, ice was advancing southwards, but the rate of advance was so variable from place to place even within the same region that we couldn’t put any useful figure on it. “I don’t know whether Baam could work out some kind of average value, but I think it would be very hard – we don’t know how much snow is falling on the ice, or how thick it is. But it’s pretty obvious that the descent of sea level is a direct result of the accumulation of snow on land.”

“And presumably, the prehistoric rise of sea level was a result of a general melting of ice. The only thing that’s a bit hard to explain is the apparent stability of the coastline in the time of the ancients. Perhaps they knew how to stabilize the ice, to prevent more ice accumulating or melting?”

“If so, they seem to have done it for thousands of years. But it’s hard to imagine that they could have stabilized the ice until they’d developed some pretty clever technology, and the general consensus is that their technological heyday was quite short-lived. I think it’s more likely that it was something the ancients did in their heyday, presumably unintentionally, that destabilized a system that had been naturally stable for a long time. We’re pretty sure the population peaked at many times today’s, and they seem to have been using resources at a rate that makes it hard to imagine where they got them from.”

“That’s almost exactly what Godfrey says. I remember his words, ‘They were using resources like there was no tomorrow. And for them, there was no tomorrow.’ It made me laugh at the time, but we went on to realize that in the last few generations we’d embarked on the same road again. In England, they’re cutting the forests faster than they can grow.”

“Here too. At the present rate there’s a few hundred years’ worth left, but the rate is increasing. That’s one of the reasons I’m so keen to improve the efficiency of engines, and charcoal production.”

“Godfrey was convinced the ancients had some other source of energy, other than muscles and burning wood. He couldn’t see how they could possibly have powered all the machinery they seem to have had without using all the world’s trees in just a few years. Perhaps we should be trying to find out what it was.”

“Well, we know they did consume pretty much all the world’s trees, in these parts at least, and from what you say, in England too – but we’re going round in circles now.”

But we carried on going round in circles. There wasn’t much else we could do until we could get together with some of Graamon’s friends. I was really looking forward to that.

When will this snow thaw? When will I see Aila again?

The expanding plough was finished, but Graamon didn’t want to try it while the other big plough was stuck. “We might even get through to the other plough. And then what? We very possibly wouldn’t be able to get home again. With a big plough on the back, we could pretty certainly reverse out okay, but with just a small plough on the back, I’m far from sure of it. And until the thaw, I don’t see much prospect of getting that stuck plough out now. No, we’ve got to wait until the thaw.”

Roonim suggested he spend the time building another non-expandable plough, but Graamon thought it would be better to wait to see how the expanding plough performed. “If the expanding plough works well, we’ll want at least one more of those, possibly one with a movable top, but we won’t want any more plain ones. We’ll only want more plain ones if the expanding one is a failure for some reason.”

I eventually got round to suggesting hydraulics. I had to explain what I meant. “Use the steam to push a piston, then use that to push a liquid, then drive the rams with that liquid, rather than directly with the steam. That way the volume of steam used is only what’s needed to push the ram, rather than a lot being wasted when it condenses in all the pipework.”

Graamon was interested, and thought it might have applications elsewhere, but wasn’t sure about it for the plough. “What kind of fluid are you thinking of? You need something that won’t freeze solid at the temperatures the plough gets down to. Steam’s a bit annoying, it’s true, because you spend a lot of energy just warming up cylinders and pistons to the point where it stops condensing, but at least you’re delivering heat to do that.”

“Even oil freezes, or gets too viscous for the system to work properly, when it gets too cold. But you could deliver heat with a recirculating system, and you wouldn’t need to keep it anywhere near as hot as a steam system. With the intermediate fluid at a higher pressure, using smaller pistons, everything’s smaller, too, so it needs less heat to keep it warm for that reason as well.”

“Ah, now that makes it something worth exploring. I hadn’t thought about using very high pressures in your intermediate fluid. That makes it much more interesting. What do you think, Roonim?”

“Well, even though it’s more complicated, it’s using less metal – smaller parts are quicker to make, so even with more of them, the complication doesn’t worry me. Definitely interesting, but I think we should do some preliminary experimental work on it first.”

“Well, there’s something useful we can be doing while we’re stuck here, anyway. I’ll get some designs drawn up.”

It was actually me who did most of the drawing, with some guidance about local drawing conventions from Graamon. At last I felt as though I was doing something useful for my actual job with the railway. Roonim and Kaasham built the experimental set up, which worked with only a little tinkering.

“Now we need to try something with recirculating fluid, and take it somewhere cold. That’s actually a bit of a problem – I don’t want to risk getting stuck, going up the line, and how else are we going to get anywhere much colder than about freezing?”

“Can we get hold of a lot of salt in Briggi?”

“How much is a lot? We can certainly get hold of a few hundred hefts of it it. Why?”

“Well, there’s plenty of snow about. We can make a cold room. Build an insulated room, put a load of snow in it, and mix the snow with salt – you can take the temperature down really low like that.”

“Well, if that works, that’s a really useful trick. I never knew that.”

Building the cold room kept us all busy for several more days. Then I designed a heating system for the hydraulics. In the end it was a simple vented steam system, rather than a recirculating fluid. “More trouble than it’s worth, recirculating. Twice the pipework and a pump? Not worth it. You’d save no fuel at all, and water isn’t a problem. In fact, you’d waste fuel, keeping the extra pipework warm.”

We found that insulating the pipework was really worthwhile, but we didn’t try to insulate the joints. I told Graamon about flexible polymer hoses, but we agreed that if that was possible for us at all, it was a long term project to be undertaken in collaboration with others. I didn’t even know the chemistry well enough, all I could do would be to provide some pointers for others about lines of experimentation worth following.

We talked about electricity. Graamon did know something about it – his little engine used electric ignition, for example – but not very much, and the idea of a public electricity supply astonished him. He thought it sounded like a frightful waste of energy, and I agreed that it probably was. “Yet the ancients seem to have managed it on a vastly greater scale. And Godfrey thinks they had connections between towns, not just within towns. I don’t think Godfrey himself has seen the evidence, but he knew people who had, and they’d regarded the evidence as pretty convincing. They seem to have had electrical connections pretty much all the way along their railways, although those could have just been telephone wires.”

Then I had to explain telephones to him. He was amazed. “So if we had telephones between here and Tambuk, we’d only have to dig through from one direction when someone got stuck in between? Or at least, we’d presumably start digging from both, but then one end would give up as soon as the other said they found the train?”

“Better than that. They could carry a telephone on the train, and clip it to wires by the lineside. Then the driver could tell us where he – or she – was stuck, and we’d only dig from the nearer end. The other thing I was going to mention is that there’s a method of making a thermometer that can be read from the other end of a pair of wires, so we could know in Briggi what the temperature is at several points along the line, without having to go up the line ourselves. You’d need a lot of wire though – two for each thermometer, and two for the phone. Well, no, they could all share one of the wires, so it’s only one more than one each.”

“I’m not sure I could do a single wire all the way to Tambuk, never mind a whole bundle of them. Imagine the work winding the insulation onto them! I suppose we could design a machine to do the winding.”

“I’m sure we could. There must be machines for that in England. You can buy reels of ready insulated wire there, reasonably cheap for the quantity you need to wire a few lamps in a house – although for a fifty mile telephone run it would work out pretty expensive. Apart from the length, you’d need thicker wire, because there’s too much loss in thin wires over long distances. What’s the price of copper like here?”

“It’s expensive. About eight hundred coins a heft, and always rising. Almost all of what’s on the market is recycled scrap. Sometimes a ship arrives from here or there with a bit to sell, but they never undercut the local price. There’s none left in any of the ancient sites – at least, not in any of the known sites. Where the ancients got it from, who knows? Or maybe they made it somehow.”

“It’s not cheap in England, either, but I don’t think it’s as expensive as that. It’s hard to make comparisons between prices, though. How much is a coin worth in eksyus? The only way to compare is to decide that some particular item should be the same value in both places – and then everything else is different. Eight hundred coins is sixteen weeks’ of my income, which sounds like a lot. Sixteen weeks’ of an assistant engineer’s income in England would buy a lot more than a heft of copper there, but here I’m getting accommodation, clothing and food supplied by my employer, which an assistant engineer in England would have to pay for himself. I don’t think an assistant engineer in England could afford accommodation like mine at all, before you start on food and clothing.”

“Don’t forget this is Briggi. Accommodation here is much cheaper than it is in Laanoha or Meyroha. You wouldn’t get a room like yours there until you’d been with the railway a couple of years. Well, never, really – they just don’t exist, or at least, nothing like it ever seems to become available.”

“Peyr’s place isn’t bad. I’ve never seen Judd’s, though.”

“Grim and Yaani are both working – and I dare say Yaana’s earning a fair bit on the quiet. And of course the railway doesn’t feed Peyr at home. It won’t feed you at home when you and Aila get a place of your own, but your income will have increased by then. I don’t know Judd’s place, either. I know where it is, but I’ve never been inside. I do know it’s not very big.”

‘When you and Aila get a place of your own.’ Aila! We had so little time together, and it seems so long ago now. It’s almost like a dream. I hope it’s really going to work out, and that it really is right for both of us.

Graamon clearly takes it for granted. So does Peyr.

Eventually the temperature rose above freezing again in Briggi, and it began to rain. We took an engine up the line towards Tambuk. We only took one engine, not intending to push beyond the point where the rain turned to snow. “There’s no point until there’s a chance of getting through. We’re only going up there to take a look.”

We’d only gone five miles and climbed about a hundred and fifty metres when we reached the snow and headed back. “We won’t get through tomorrow, either, but we’ll come and take another look if it’s still above freezing in Briggi.”

It was, and we did. We got a bit further before the rain turned to snow, but by then we’d been splashing through slush for some way, and in places there was still enough wet snow on the rails to make our wheels spin for a moment. “Don’t worry, though. It’s downhill on the way back, and there won’t be any more muck on the line going back than there was coming up.”

Peyr was right. The return journey was no trouble at all. “It’s just another run up for a look again tomorrow, one engine. There’s no way we’ll be able to get through tomorrow.”

On the fifth day, Graamon and Peyr agreed that we’d attempt to reach the stuck plough the next day.

“Even if we manage to reach the plough, we may not be able to get through, of course. But I’d like to be ready just to head south straight away if we do. I know you’d like to get to see Aila as soon as possible, Owen, but do you think we could make a detour via Siroha, to make arrangements to pick up your stuff? I think it’ll inevitably cost us a day or even two, and we won’t be able to take the things ourselves – apart from your clothes. We should be able to take those okay. We’ll hire a gig from Raamba.”

“Of course that’s okay. If we don’t do that now, it could be a while before we get the chance again, I suspect.”

“Well, yes. Then I ought to visit the workshops in Laanoha, arrange a wagon on the next train to take your stuff to Briggi, see what’s been going on in the workshops, and then head for Meyroha as quick as I can. I’ll get Judd to bring you along as soon as you’ve sorted things out with Aila, and we’ll get you introduced in Meyroha. I’ve not asked you before, have you and Aila actually fixed a date yet?”

“No, not yet. She had to talk with Gamaara, and I really don’t know the proper procedure at all. I need advice!”

“I suppose you do. You’ve settled in so well in general I forget how new it all is for you. Do you have any idea what Aila’s thinking, Peyr? Or do you have any ideas yourself?”

“Oh, that’s a hard question for a man to answer! My mother would be the one to ask that. But I guess we’ll be seeing Aila before we see my mother, and she might well tell us herself. But the only option is to wait and see. Anything else is guessing. I’ll be taking the first train down, so if you and Owen go up to Siroha, Graamon, I’ll see Aila before either of you do – but I don’t see how I’ll know which train you’ll be on, to make sure she meets your train. Can you find your way to Gamaara’s house, Owen?”

“Well, I can find my way to the big gates. Will I be able to open them, or do you need a key, or any special trick? And once I’m through the gates, is the way easy to find?”

“There’s no problem once you’re through the gates, you just follow the track and there’s the house. They normally lock the gates at night, but they leave them open when my train’s due if I’m on one of the late trains, and I can get them to leave them open for you, too.”

“The only problem about that is that we really don’t know which train we’ll be on. Who knows how long it’s going to take us to get to Siroha, how long they’ll keep us there before we can decently get away, and how long it’s going to take to get back to Raamba? And the timetable’s going to be all shot to pieces for days anyway.”

“That’s very true. They’ll have been running a shuttle service between Laanoha and Kaahes, or even all the way up to Tambuk if that stretch is open.”

“Jinni will be bringing the next train after mine down. All being well, I can tell Aila to catch Jinni’s train and come home straight away, then she’ll be at home when you arrive, Owen. I’m sure she’ll have sorted things out with Gamaara by now. She might even be at home already, desperately waiting for you to get through.”

“That’s a better solution, Peyr.”

I was beginning to feel a bit nervous about seeing Aila again – but looking forward to it, too.

The five engine train, with the expandable plough on the front, was ready not long after dawn, but Graamon waited until about eleven before deciding to set off. “We’ll give the day a chance to warm up a little. I dare say it froze again overnight near the top. We’ll probably get a chance to try the expandable in the cutting. Even if it’s raining right at the top, I doubt if it’s washed all the snow out of the cut yet. But I don’t think there’s much risk of getting stuck, even with only a small plough on the back end, as long as we give up if it starts to look risky.”

Graamon was with Jinni in the front engine again, then me and Baamoon in the second with Peyr. It was sunny as we set off, the first morning we’d seen the sun for weeks, but the clouds closed in again as we climbed, and it began to rain – not heavily, just a little more than a steady drizzle.

Even the slush had mainly washed away at first, but by the time we reached the first rock cutting we were splashing along through deep slush flowing sluggishly along or across the line in many places. In a few places there were faster moving rivers of more or less ice-free water.

The first cutting was a sight to behold. It was half filled with a bank of wet snow probably twice the height of the engines, with a river of slush pouring out of a cave underneath it. Jinni brought the train to a halt, and we all climbed down for a better look.

“Well! We don’t want to go charging into that. We’d end up buried in soggy snow.”

“I suspect you’re right, Peyr. No, we’ll creep up to it gently and nudge it. I suspect it’ll all collapse of its own accord with only a few gentle nudges. It’ll probably be easiest if we uncouple just behind Jinni’s engine, and the rest of you back off a bit. Jinni’ll have more control like that.”

I could see the relief in Jinni’s face. Controlling a whole train by remote control, whistling to four other drivers what to do, can’t be easy.

Peyr uncoupled his engine from Jinni’s, and the bulk of the train backed off a few metres. Jinni and Graamon hung out one each side of the cab to see around the big plough, and crept forward. As Graamon had predicted, the first touch of the plough on the near edge of the mound released an avalanche of wet snow that cascaded down each side of the plough, and sloshed alongside the engine halfway up its wheels. Jinni rapidly reversed the engine back out of the cut.

It didn’t take long for the avalanche to stop. When it had, there was no cave underneath the pile of snow, and only a trickle of slush running from the bottom. We all got out for a look again.

Graamon almost got the slush over the top of his boots before he turned back. “I think if we just push into the pile and pull back, then push in again, it’ll gradually all pour out. We shouldn’t leave it too long between pushes, either – the river that was coming out before must be ponding up behind that snow that’s fallen at the front, and it’ll coming gushing out. We don’t want to be completely flooded.”

After the fifth push, we could see right over the top of what was left of the pile, and Graamon decided we should just couple up again and push straight through. “We might get a bit wet in Jinni’s and Peyr’s cabs, but we don’t want to spend all day here. If the worst comes to the worst and it puts our fires out, the other three engines will be able to push us through easily enough.”

Jinni had a better idea. “If Peyr and I shut our firebox doors before we go through, there’s not much risk of that. We’ll just put our valve gear in neutral and let the other three push us through from the beginning.”

In the event, we got through with only a modest amount of wet snow falling into the cabs of any of the engines, and we pushed it out again as soon as we came out of the other end of the cutting. Baamoon was clearly relieved. “Let’s hope the other cuttings are as easy!”

The second cutting looked much the same as the first had. Again, Peyr uncoupled and Jinni and Graamon edged up to the snow and released an avalanche, then pushed in and out until the other big plough appeared out of the pile. Then they opened the front of the expandable plough right up and coupled on.

The stuck plough pulled out of the pile with no trouble at all. They didn’t even need the other engines. But at that point the pile didn’t collapse completely. Some snow fell down where the plough had been, but the wall of ice that the plough had been stuck in stood firm.

Jinni backed out, and Peyr coupled up. Jinni and Peyr shut their fireboxes and put their valve gear in neutral again. Then we charged the pile – and just kept on going. We popped out the other end of the cutting, pushing a huge lump of ice in front of the plough. Jinni – I assumed on instruction from Graamon – whistled to us all to stop, and we did.

“We’ll have to smash that up somehow before we reach the next cutting. We’ve got pickaxes in the first wagon, but that looks like a bit of a big job for eight of us with pickaxes!”

“It’d be quicker to go back to Briggi, take the first plough off the front, bring the expandable plough up to it, and split it in half!”

“If it did split in half. I think we might just break the two wedges off this end of it, and leave the rest unaffected.”

I suggested that if we simply backed off and charged it a couple of times it would probably fall to bits, now it was out of the cutting, and that’s what we did. And it did.

The third cutting was only a little more trouble than the first. Jinni’s cab did get flooded, but with the firebox door shut it didn’t put the fire out. She and Graamon got wet and cold, but as soon as we were through they swept the slush out of the cab, got the fire going well and warmed up.

We whistled a five engine, ten whistle chorus as we steamed down to Tambuk. Tambuk’s whole family, and Berraami, were there to greet us.

“Five engines? Eight mouths to feed? We’ll get some more food cooking as quick as we can!” Tambuk and his wife disappeared into the inn at a run.

Berraami came over to me and Peyr, and gestured to Graamon to join us. She was looking very serious. “I’m glad I was still here when you got through, Owen, not any of the others. I have bad news. Come in and sit down, you three.”

Me, particularly, and Peyr and Graamon? I hope Aila’s all right!

We sat at a table in a corner. Berraami poured us each a mug of warm skiir, then began her story.

“Fortunately, mine was the first train going north the morning after you came north. I was going full speed approaching Baragi, not expecting to stop there, but right at the beginning of the village I saw Aila, waving like mad, obviously wanting me to stop. I put the brakes on hard, and Aila began to run alongside the train. She caught up with the cab before I’d had really got down to the right speed for anyone to jump on board, but she jumped and managed to grab the rail and pull herself in. She told me to get going again, so I did.

“She was shivering cold – it was only seven in the morning, and she was only wearing her indoor clothes. She’d got nothing else with her but what she stood up in.

“Well, I’ll cut a long story short. The night before, Jerem had got into a real rage when he heard about Aila and you. He smashed her little Owen, and tried to rape Aila. That was a big mistake for him – she isn’t a girl to mess with. She whacked him on the head good and proper with one of the children’s toys, a really heavy one, and then ran out of the house. She wasn’t sure whether she’d killed him, in fact. She hid up until she heard my whistle as I approached Baragi.”

Bloody hell! I hope she’s all right! I thought, but I couldn’t say anything. I could see in his face that Peyr was thinking much the same thing.

Berraami went on, “Well, she came with me as far as Elbrouha, where I was due to wait for Mum, but she wanted to go back to Laanoha with Mum, so I stopped short of the loop to make sure Mum didn’t steam straight past, and then slid in and stopped cab to cab. Aila went with Mum, and that’s the last I know. My train’s stuck between here and Kaahes. Tambuk’s men got to my train first, so here I am.”

Peyr looked relieved. “Well, at least we know Aila’s all right. And you don’t know any more than we do about whether Jerem’s okay. I don’t think his family would make trouble for Aila anyway, whether he is or isn’t.”

Peyr didn’t say it, but I could see what he was thinking. Nobody would miss Jerem much, apart from his parents, and maybe his on-off girlfriend in Kromaan. And even his parents would understand Aila’s point of view.

“Aila’s all right physically, certainly, and of course she’s a tough cookie mentally, too. But she was pretty upset, naturally. I think she was more upset about Jerem smashing you to bits than anything else, Owen. The sooner she sees you whole and well, the better!”

Graamon was thoughtful. “I’m sure she doesn’t believe that stuff – in her head. But it’s one thing not to believe something in your head, it’s quite another what you feel. She’ll really be hurting, Owen. We’ll cancel our trip to Siroha, they can wait. My curiosity about your ballooning stuff can wait, too. It’s too late to dig Berraami’s train out today, but we’ll do it first thing tomorrow, and then we’ll get down to Laanoha as fast as we possibly can. They’ll be running a shuttle between Kaahes and Laanoha, and that should mean only one overnight, even if it takes us a while digging Berraami’s train out.”

“I’m afraid my engine’s drained down, Graamon. I kept the fire in for a week, but they don’t have a lot of extra wood here in Tambuk, and my train’s too far from Kaahes for them to carry it from there. They only visited once, just to check that I wasn’t still waiting to be rescued. If I’d had a plough like that one you’ve got, Graamon, I don’t think I’d have been stuck at all. It’s amazing.”

It was only later she realized that it was actually two ploughs, one in front of the other.

They shuffled the train around straight after we’d all eaten, so as to be ready to go at dawn the following day. There was no way to turn anything round, so the first new plough was left, still facing south, in the loop ready for Berraami to take it down to Briggi on the back of her train. It was quite a shuffle to leave it in the south loop, so that we wouldn’t crash into its coupling-less pointy end when we came back up the line pulling Berraami’s train.

I scarcely slept that night. Every time I got to sleep, I had nightmares, and woke up again. For some reason it was usually the innkeeper from Veglid I was trying to protect Aila from, but sometimes she was lost in the snow, or drowning in slush, and once I was holding the little Aila and she was breaking into matchwood and bits of painted plaster in my hand. I didn’t even know for sure that’s how she was made, but I suspected it.

Sometime in the small hours, I woke and saw a candle alight on the table. Jinni and Berraami were sitting at the table, sipping skiir and talking quietly. I wondered whether to let them know I was awake, and join them at the table, but decided against.

The next time I woke it was pitch dark, apart from the glow of the fire on the beams of the ceiling. I wondered what they’d been talking about.

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