Chapter 2

It was broad daylight when I woke. Peyr was still asleep, but everyone else was sitting at the table, eating and drinking and talking softly together. When they saw that I was awake, they showed me where to get washed, and invited me to a breakfast of bread, fruit and water.

They’d obviously been awake for a while, and had been discussing my situation. Judd told me that everyone was saying there’d be no problem me staying with them a while, but that even if I learnt the language it would be very hard for me to earn a living in the city. Without identity papers I wouldn’t be able to get a decent job. Some people had false papers, but they didn’t know how to go about getting them, and it was certainly very risky.

Some people managed to work without papers. Yaana had none, and worked at home, making clothes. Peyr smuggled the cloth in, then smuggled the finished clothes out again.

Judd suggested that I should stay long enough to learn enough of the language to get by, and then either try to get work on the ships that plied in and out of the city, or travel with Peyr to Briggi, the smaller town at the other end of the line, where people didn’t have identity papers and things were much more relaxed.

I wondered whether any of the ships travelled as far as England, or anywhere else where I might be in danger of being recaptured by the English authorities. Judd said that in all his days sailing, although he’d met quite a few English-speaking sailors and even been in ports where everyone spoke English, he’d never heard of a place called England.

I’d worked on small boats, but never on a ship. I really rather wanted to settle down anyway, so I said I thought I’d try the town at the other end of the line.

Although I was very grateful for the invitation to stay long enough to learn the language a little, I felt it would be too much of an imposition on them all. But Judd assured me that they were all very understanding of my plight, that they understood very well about authoritarian regimes and the consequences for those who rebelled against them, and that it would be much easier to find a niche in the other town if I already knew at least the basics of the language.

With Judd as interpreter, Yaana said I could help her. Even if I couldn’t sew well, I could cut cloth to a pattern. If it enabled her to make more clothes, Peyr could smuggle more cloth easily enough. She laughed, and said I could earn my own keep for a few weeks or months, but wouldn’t be able to raise a family like that!

I'd never thought about raising a family, but I’d have been pleased to earn my keep.

I wondered where the other railway, the double-track one, went. Judd said it went to a bigger city, Meyroha, and that I didn’t want to go there: the authorities there were much more efficient than they were here. A small town had to be best for me. Cities, at best, were like this one, Laanoha – with an oppressive regime, but chaotic enough for non-citizens to disappear down the cracks – and at worst might be as bad as going back to England.

In the countryside, there’d be no problem with the authorities, who didn’t really attempt to keep control there. However, the poor lived a very hard and insecure life, and while the rich might be hospitable enough as long as I was a novelty, I wouldn’t be able to find a niche with them. There wasn’t really anything between poor and rich in the countryside.

Of course our conversations weren’t really as fluent as I perhaps make them seem. But we got the meanings across somehow.

At first, I stayed the whole time in their room. Judd came round and helped to teach me the local language, Laana, as much as he could, but he worked long hours in the railway workshops. Most of the time there was just Yaana and me at home. All the others went out to work. Judd was very helpful, but I learnt more from Yaana, not just Laana but the local customs as well.

Judd said that once I’d got the basics of Laana there’d be no problem me going out in the city with any of them – there were plenty of strangers around who didn’t know Laana very well, but someone who didn’t know it at all would attract a lot of attention. Judd lent me some of his own clothes. “Yours do look very strange. You’ll be less noticeable in mine.”

I couldn’t go out on my own. Whoever was with me had to keep a weather eye out for officials who might want to see my papers. For one thing, I might not spot them in time, and for another, I wouldn’t know my way around well enough to get away from them – certainly not without attracting attention. It sounded a bit scary, but I was used to some uncertainty about the future, and none of my new friends seemed unduly worried about it.

Yaana had lived in the city for fifty years without papers. “But she knew Laana quite well when she first arrived, and by the time she'd reached an age where a sweet smile wouldn’t get her out of trouble, she was a well-known figure around the place,” said Judd. “That’s true,” she said, “except that I reckon I can still smile sweetly.” And she could.

I wondered how her children had managed to get papers when their mother hadn’t. “There’s only Peyr,” she said. “His dad took him to the office to get his papers when he was ten. His dad had papers.” I could see what they meant about disappearing down the cracks!

I rather missed Peyr when he went away only a couple of days after I arrived. By the time he got back several days later, I’d learnt to cut cloth to a pattern. I’d tried my hand at sewing, too, and managed to do a reasonable job, but I was very slow. Yaana laughed at me. “You’d learn if you had to, but it’d take quite a while to get up speed. It’s not worth it.”

On his third trip after I arrived, Peyr took me along. “It’ll be good for you to get out of the city for a while – and come and see Briggi. Get some idea of the place before deciding whether you really want to settle there. It’ll be good for me to have some company, too.”

Before dawn, Yaani and Grim took me down to the side of the track. I managed to clamber aboard the moving engine without twisting my ankle again! Then I was secreted away under the footplate along with several parcels of clothes.

Formalities leaving the city were evidently less stringent than on entry. We didn’t even stop, we just slowed to a crawl while Peyr had a shouted conversation with a couple of officials.

Once we were clear of the city, Peyr let me out of my hiding place. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but it was just beginning to get light. We were crossing a wide, lazy river with numerous sand bars, some of them with lines of bushes growing on them.

Leaning out over the side of the engine, I could see the bridge below us. It was a metal lattice supported at intervals on stone piers. I wondered how deep beneath the sandy bottom of the river they’d had to dig to get a good enough foundation for the stonework. Peyr didn’t know. The bridge had been built before he was born.

At least, I think that’s what he said. My grasp of Laana was still rather limited – I’d only been learning for just over three weeks. Total immersion, every waking moment, is a pretty good way to learn, but three weeks isn’t long.

I looked back at Laanoha. The spires and towers that looked so impressive from afar still looked pretty impressive from this distance, but along the bank of the river I could now see the more ordinary buildings. They were a motley collection of different designs, mostly rather dilapidated and seeming to lean on each other for support. Most of them were four or five storeys high. Alleyways just wide enough for a cart pierced the line at intervals, each leading to the end of a long jetty.

At the other side of the river the flood plain far below us was in intensive use, with what looked to be vegetable patches. Beyond that were badlands of ravines and rough scrubland and then a large village before we entered the rich farmland of the plains.

Whistle, village – whistle, level crossing – rattle, rattle, rattle, another bridge over a river, not as big as the first one, but still pretty big. It also was flowing east, so it wasn’t the same river. Then we were slowing down for a village where Peyr said we were going to stop.

A young woman ran alongside for a little way, and then clambered up into the cab. Peyr said something to her that I didn’t understand – apart from my name. Then he turned to me, and said more slowly and clearly, “This is our daughter, Aila.”

We stopped in the middle of the village. Some men started to load a stack of wooden boxes into two of our wagons.

The three of us walked down a road away from the railway line, Peyr and Aila talking all the while. I couldn’t follow the conversation, but found I was picking up the odd word here and there. Aila glanced at me every now and then. I kept looking sidelong at her – she was a very pretty young lady. I’m sure my embarrassment showed in my face when our eyes met, but she just smiled a smile that was oddly like her grandmother’s.

I didn’t only look at Aila; I did take in some of the features of the village, too. Every now and then Peyr broke off from his talk with Aila to point out something or other to me. On each side of the road there were small, single storey houses – mostly built of wood, but a few brick ones – each with a vegetable garden around it. The road finished at a pair of imposing wrought iron gates in a high brick wall. Aila went to the gate as though to open it, then seemed to change her mind, and set off up a path along the foot of the wall. Peyr and I followed her.

The path led away from the houses. Soon we were between the brick wall on our left, and a field of maize on our right, both too tall to see over. The path continued like this for a couple of hundred metres, and then we emerged onto an area of rough ground, dropping away into a deep ravine. Several goats were grazing on the far side of the ravine. I guessed the boy standing near them was keeping an eye on them, but he seemed to be more interested in playing with a couple of sticks.

Aila led the way along the edge of the ravine, which gradually widened and deepened. After a short way it angled left, and led down to fields at a lower level, by the side of a wide, slow river. To the right I could see a long bridge that I assumed was the railway.

We reached a point where we either had to scramble down a steep slope to those lower fields, or turn back. The view across the river and its flood plains was fabulous. Aila made a sweeping gesture to show that this was what she’d brought me to see. I said it was beautiful – well I thought that was what I said, but she smiled a shy smile and ran over to me, reached up and kissed me on the cheek, then ran back down the path we’d come along.

Peyr laughed, and said that we’d better get back to his train. He led the way along a different path, that took us directly back to where the men were just finishing loading the boxes.

We climbed back into the cab, Peyr built up the fire again, and we set off.

“Aila works in the big house there.”

“Ah – the one with the big iron gates?”

“That’s right. They’re quite decent people, as rich folks go. Well, Gamaara is, and Tiiram is okay as long as you’re on the right side of him.”

I thought to myself that the rich people I’d stayed with the first night seemed to be decent people, too – but of course I didn’t know how they treated people who worked for them, or their tenants, if they had any.

“You made me laugh when you said Aila was beautiful!”

“Ah. Is that what I said? I meant to say the view was beautiful.”

Peyr looked puzzled for a moment, and then laughed again.

“That’s the wrong word. You can’t say that about a view. That’s for people.”

Language is funny, but I knew enough of a few languages to understand what I’d done.

“A lucky accident. Aila is beautiful. You have a beautiful daughter.”

“Only a foreigner would say that in front of a girl so soon after a first meeting!”

“That’s okay. I am a foreigner.”

Laughter.

“What does she do at the big house?”

“She looks after the children mostly, but she does some cooking and cleaning too.”

As we neared the mountains, we slowed down and stopped behind another engine. Peyr jumped down and went and coupled the two engines together.

Even with two engines and a half-empty train, going up the incline was slow.

It felt very different going back up into the mountains. I almost felt I knew where I was going, but the mountains looked different somehow, looking forward as I approached them, rather than looking back at them as I was leaving. Laanoha, too, appearing behind us again as we climbed, looked different from a distance now I’d seen it up close – even just the fact that I knew its name seemed to make it look different. Or maybe it’s just the different light, the different time of day.

At the top of the escarpment, where the gradient diminished somewhat, we began to pick up a little speed. We might have got up to eight or ten miles an hour. In the gorge, the labouring of the two engines made a thunderous noise, somehow bigger and more impressive coming from something that seemed so small and insignificant in that vast space between those towering rock walls.

As the line levelled out at the summit, we slowed down and stopped. There was a strange feeling of silence. Only gradually did I become aware of the sound of the river below us, actually making quite a lot of noise, but of a very different character, really quite soothing.

Peyr uncoupled the engines. The other driver moved his engine forward a short way, then set off backwards, crossing over onto the other track and back down the way we’d come.

The tunnel didn’t seem as long as it had coming up the gradient, and it seemed like no time before we were on the long, high viaduct, then speeding across the plateau beyond it.

There was a train waiting in the first passing loop already. I hid down the side of the engine until Peyr was sure Laar, the driver of the other train, didn’t have any awkward passenger with him. He didn’t, so I joined in the job of loading wood onto Laar’s engine.

Peyr had brought food for Laar as well, and we all sat on the wood stack to eat. The weather wasn’t warm, but it was sunny and the breeze was light, and we had a very pleasant half hour sitting there chatting. Then we all took turns at the pump, filling Laar’s engine’s water tank.

I was still thinking about Aila, and how she’d kissed my cheek and then run away; but I was too shy to want to talk about her with Peyr. Peyr had no such inhibitions, but he was sensitive to my shyness.

“It’s Aila who gives me dinner in the evening in the other direction. But I have to go and get it, because she doesn’t know when I’m coming. In this direction, we’re still not too far from Laanoha, so she knows pretty much what time I’m going to arrive.”

“Does she cook it in the big house? Don’t they mind? Do they know?”

Peyr laughed. “Yes, they know, and they don’t mind at all. I think it might have been their idea, in fact. They’re some of Yaana’s best customers, too. Good arrangements all round!”

We arrived at the next loop about half an hour before the other train. “If I’d known it would be so long, I could have taken you to see the waterfall. But if Rodd had come and found my train and me not here, he’d have wondered what had happened to me. The down train nearly always arrives here at least half an hour before the up, but you can’t rely on it.”

I was a bit puzzled for a moment why Peyr couldn’t have left a note for Rodd, and then realized that I’d never seen any of them reading or writing; and that Peyr’s identity papers carried a thumbprint, not a signature. I was glad I’d not said anything.

I knew that some people in Laanoha could read and write. There were written signs outside some of the shops, and street names and numbers on buildings, and while Peyr’s papers carried a thumbprint, there was also a lot of writing on them. But I wondered how many people were literate, and how many weren’t. Back in England, illiteracy was quite unusual – certainly you couldn’t get a job like Peyr’s without at least basic reading and writing.

I suspected that Judd might be literate. He’d not introduced me to written Laana, but perhaps he just thought that an unnecessary complication, or that maybe I wasn’t literate in English. I’d have liked to learn to read street names and shop signs at least, but I’d not thought to ask. At least I could read numbers – they were roughly the same as in England.

Was Aila literate? Suddenly it seemed to matter to me. But I couldn’t ask Peyr, for two reasons: I didn’t want to insult him, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

Rodd didn’t even stop. He didn’t slow down at all. Peyr got us going again.

It seemed to be no time before we were at the point where Peyr had first stopped to pick me up. Peyr waved to a lady sitting in a gig waiting at the crossing. She waved back. “One of Yaana’s customers!” said Peyr, “She wants me to stop on the way back to pick up an order.”

“She doesn’t live in a big house in woods at the top of the escarpment, does she?” I wasn’t sure whether she might have been one of the people in the house where I’d stayed. She wasn’t one of the people who’d taken a particular interest in me, but she did look familiar.

“I don’t know where she lives.”

“How do Yaana’s customers know to come to you?”

“Oh, that’s the grapevine. It’s very efficient!”

I didn’t feel able to ask about how the grapevine could be so good at putting customers in touch with Peyr without also risking the authorities in Laanoha discovering the smuggling.

We were now heading into country I’d never been in before. A few miles after the crossing, we pulled into another passing loop. We had to wait again for the train coming the other way.

This passing loop was different from the other two, in that there were a few buildings close by. A young man in rough clothes came out of one of them, carrying a dish. Peyr called out to him, and he went back into the building, reappeared with two dishes, and brought them over to us. Peyr paid him, and he left us to eat our meal, returning a short while later with drinks. He waited while we drained our mugs, then took the dishes and mugs away.

We could hear the other train approaching by this time, and Peyr built up the fire again. “I don’t know why Shiim is so late. He’s got a good engine, and it’s usually the up train that has to wait for the down here anyway.”

But it wasn’t Shiim, and it was a different kind of engine from all the others I’d seen.

“That explains why it’s late,” said Peyr. “That’s a train off the Sirimi branch, a load of stone. Shiim won’t be happy.”

I hid down the side of the engine as usual, but only for a moment. Peyr didn’t know the driver of the other train, but their talk was friendly. The other driver declined the meal he was offered. “I need to get out of the way,” he said. “The regular train’s following me up.”

We had to wait in the passing loop for Shiim as well. I thought that seemed pretty irregular, but Peyr said, “No, it’s the way we always cope with the extra trains off the Sirimi branch. There aren’t too many of them.”

Shiim’s train was appearing in the distance as the Sirimi train left. He steamed straight through without stopping. He waved and blew a double blast on the whistle. “Like I said, he’s not happy, but it’s one of those things. If the Sirimi branch ever gets busy, they’ll have to double the track from here to the junction. The Briggi traffic nowadays is really as much as the line can take. Shiim’s missed his dinner anyway, he’d normally get it here.”

“What time will Shiim get to Laanoha? It’s later than when you picked me up there.”

“There’s only two more stages today. He’ll stop at Veglid – that’s where we load fuel and water for the pass, just before the long viaduct. He’ll get to Laanoha about midday tomorrow. The Sirimi train will have to go right through though. There’s nowhere to stop on the main line.”

“Where will he sleep at Veglid? There’s nothing there at all!”

“Oh, there is. There’s a whole village – Veglid. It’s about half a mile from the loop, that’s all. It’s an old coaching station, but its main trade now is handling firewood for the trains. And overnighting one or two engine drivers every night, of course.”

“You said, ‘an old coaching station’. Aren’t there any coaches any more? Are there passenger trains? I’ve not seen any.”

“You’re about to. There’s one every other day.”

“So where do the passengers sleep? The passing place this side of Veglid is surely in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. That’s why it’s the passenger trains that stop there. They sleep in the train, and there’s a kitchen on the train, too. They could stop at Raamba of course, like we do, but they’re safer at Elbrouha. With a kitchen on the train, they don’t need a café.”

I thought that maybe I’d learn the names of all the stops in the end, if I came this way often enough. I wondered whether I would. But Peyr had raised another question in my mind.

“Safer at – what was its name? What’s the danger at the other place?”

“At Raamba? Bandits. The goods train is pretty safe. The wagons are very tough, and what is there to steal on the engine? If they knew where to look there’s Yaana’s cloth or clothes, but a couple of parcels of clothes isn’t much of a prize for a bandit.”

“Are bandits a big problem here?”

“No, but they would be if people didn’t know what to do about them. They used to be.”

“So why’s the other place safer?”

“Elbrouha? It’s almost completely inaccessible except by train. It’s real break-a-leg country for miles around, vertical cliffs up or down each side of the line for more than two miles in the Veglid direction, and a tunnel the other way.”

We had to wait in the next passing loop for the passenger train. It only had four short coaches, and a smaller engine than ours. It didn’t stop, but whistled.

The junction for the Sirimi branch was just at the beginning of the loop.

“Sirimi is little more than a village, but it’s an old place, and has some pretty nice solid houses compared with most places in the hills. Big quarry – that’s why it’s got a railway.”

A big quarry? Old stone houses? That sounded like the village where I first landed. Pretty much in the right place, too. If it was, then that muddy track at the end of the village, where I thought, “that can’t be it,” probably did lead to the railway, in only a short distance. How my perception of the world had changed in just three weeks!

I’d walked a lot further than I needed to – except that I might have waited a week for a train in Sirimi, by the sound of it. It would have been a quarry train, and the driver wouldn’t have been Peyr, and who knows whether he’d have given me a ride, or been willing or able to smuggle me into Laanoha? How very lucky I’d been.

“I think I’ve been there. That’s where I first landed, I reckon.”

“That’s something that’s been puzzling me. How on Earth did you get here in the first place? How can a foreigner arrive anywhere but a port? Or somewhere on the coast at any rate. Sirimi is bang in the middle of nowhere, not even up at the ice, although how anyone would come all the way over the ice anyway I don’t know.”

Well, I knew I was going to have to explain myself a bit more some time. Evidently now was the time, and at least Peyr was a sympathetic audience, with a fairly good understanding of engineering. I hoped I wasn’t going to make him think I was a magician, or telling tall stories, but I was going to have to tell him the truth.

“I flew. It was the only way I could get out of England, but I’d no idea where I was going to end up. It was very risky, I could have ended up landing high up on the ice, or falling into the sea, or just falling from a great height. But it was my only chance.”

Peyr looked very puzzled. Then the light dawned.

Just as there are unrelated words for beauty – one for a beautiful person, another for a beautiful thing or view – so there’s only one word for flying, and that’s for birds.

Apart from the fact that I’d used a word that didn’t go with humans, there was another problem with what I’d said. Birds – the Laana word covers bats and flying insects as well – don’t talk, so they don’t say “I flew”, and there’s no word “I flew.” I’d made it up the way some other “I did so-and-so” kind of words seemed to be made up, but it didn’t exist until I made it up.

If that sounds as though Laana is a linguistic straightjacket on thought, there’s some truth in that. But English is also a straightjacket on thought in its own ways. Every language is.

Peyr was illiterate, but highly intelligent. It didn’t take him long to work out what I meant. He also believed me, which was a relief. He could see that it was the only way I could possibly have arrived where I had, and was desperate to know how I’d done it. He knew it wasn’t magic, and he wanted to understand the technology.

Explaining how I’d flown was a problem of a different order. Peyr had never heard of electricity, and he’d never seen plastic film. I’d filled big plastic bags with hydrogen that I’d made by electrolysis. Peyr didn’t even know about gases – but he did know about steam, and he knew about hot air. He’d played with little hot air balloons: paper lanterns, lit by a candle, that floated into the sky.

Floated! That was the word I wanted. I hadn’t flown, I’d floated on air. Hanging from balloons – not hot air balloons, but something a bit like them. We were getting somewhere.

I’d floated like a lantern, with no control over where I went. I hadn’t flown like a bird, who can go wherever it likes.

“So you were very lucky not to land in the sea, on the ice, or high up in the mountains!”

“Quite lucky, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. If I didn’t like where I was coming down, I could go up again. I started out with nearly half a ton of water, and dribbled a bit out of the tank if I wanted to go up. If I was getting too high, I detached one of my smaller balloons. My biggest worry was if I ended up in high mountains or over the ice. I’d got a lot of warm clothes, but it gets very cold when you get really high. Even if you’re warm enough, it doesn’t feel good being too high, you feel funny inside, you don’t seem to be able to breathe, and you can get an awful headache. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it’s so scary just thinking about falling so far, but it seems to be more than that.”

The next passing place was right in the middle of a village – Belgaam, Peyr told me. There was a train going the other way already in the loop, but that was where both trains would stay for the night. Gomaal, the other driver, had already gone to the inn. We found him there, sitting by a roaring fire and eating his evening meal.

The atmosphere in the inn was very congenial. Half the village must have been there, all drinking skiir, and many of them eating a meal. There was a terrific hubbub of conversation, and a great deal of laughter. Everyone wanted to know who I was, but Peyr realized I didn’t want to talk much. “He’s a friend of mine, a foreigner. He doesn’t speak much Laana.”

Our meal arrived. It was a meat and vegetable stew – mutton I think. It was the first meat I’d had in weeks. There was plenty of fish in Laanoha, but very little meat, and we couldn’t afford it. “I sometimes smuggle a bit of salt meat in for a special occasion,” Peyr had said, “but fresh meat is impossible for anyone but the rich in Laanoha. Even salt meat is very expensive – there’s a big import duty on it.”

Gomaal finished his meal. He curled up in a pile of old cloth in a corner, and was soon snoring, despite all the noise. Peyr and I soon followed suit. It had been a long day.

I woke once in the middle of the night.

I’d been dreaming. I didn’t recall a lot of my dream. It was very confused, but I know it featured Aila, and my room back in England, and sailing, and flying, and riding an engine. Especially Aila, she kept turning up again and again. I remember that much very clearly.

Apart from the quiet breathing of several sleepers, the room was silent. The fire was a barely visible red glow, but otherwise everything was pitch black. All the candles of the previous evening had been extinguished.

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