Chapter 3

It was still night when Peyr woke me, gently shaking my shoulder. There were a few candles lit, the fire was roaring again, and there was a delicious smell of breakfast frying. The same two girls who’d served the meals the previous evening were cooking over the fire.

There were just the first hints of light in the sky as Peyr and I went outside and disappeared into the darkness in the corner of a field with little pots of water to clean our backsides. So different from arrangements in Laanoha, or the posh house where I’d stayed the first night, or most of my experience in England! But just like I remembered at my Granny’s farm on the banks of the Thames near Frenchport when I was a child.

We washed at a pump in the yard behind the inn, and went back into the inn for our breakfast. Gomaal was a few minutes ahead of us.

Potato fritters, made with quite a lot of egg. And a hot drink! The first hot drink I’d had here; a bit like the dandelion tea that’s so popular in England nowadays, but less bitter. I wondered what leaf it was made from. Peyr told me the name in Laana, but I couldn’t recognize it from the description. Maybe it was something that doesn’t grow in England.

The girls gave us a hot fruit stew and a piece of cheese to finish. I’d seen goats by Aila’s village, and there had been cheese in my packed lunch from the posh house, but there was no milk or cheese in Laanoha. Nor eggs. Not for the likes of Peyr and his family, anyway.

The inn was on contract to the railway and Peyr didn’t have to pay. Yaana had given me some coins, and I asked whether I should pay for my stay. Peyr said no, so far as anyone knew I was the railway’s responsibility. It didn’t make any difference to the railway, they paid a set amount anyway. It would just make it more complicated if I tried to pay.

I thanked the two girls as best I could. They just smiled broadly and said they looked forward to seeing me on my way back. I left with a warm feeling about Belgaam. I’d been made to feel very much at home.

After Belgaam, the valley got steadily narrower, and we began to climb again. The fields were smaller, with hedges between them, and each one a little above the last, but the land still had crops rather than livestock.

We and another train arrived almost simultaneously at a passing loop. Both trains slowed almost to a halt, but neither of us stopped completely, the timing was so good.

“Preysh likes to judge passings as nicely as possible. Just here, on a clear day like today, we can see each other from a long way off; and since it’s our first passing of the day, we’ve got a fair chance of timing it to get here at the same time. You have to slow right down, though – you need to be able to stop if you have to, you can’t take a chance of clipping the last wagon!”

Peyr and Preysh blew a few short blasts on the whistles in greeting as we passed, or so I assumed; but Peyr told me it was drivers’ slang congratulating each other on a perfect passing.

Preysh had spent the night at the next passing place, another one in a village, Kaahes. Men from the village helped us load firewood and fill our water tank. We were fully loaded and ready to go before the next train in the other direction appeared in the distance.

“It’s the other Laar. He’s got the last of the old, slow engines. It was supposed to be retired last year, but one of the new ones has been taken for main line duties. They’ve added an extra train on the Meyroha run. They’ve got three passenger trains a day on that route now.”

“Doesn’t it slow the whole branch line down, having one slow train?”

“He’s only slow on a couple of stretches. He pulls a short train, so he can climb just as well as anyone else. But he doesn’t have the top speed the rest of us have. Most places that doesn’t make any difference, because downhill stretches are uphill in the other direction so they have to be short anyway. But this next stretch is nearly level, so it’s long, because most of the trains can go quite fast in either direction.”

“They’re building another engine, then?”

“Yes, they are. But they might have to build two before we can retire Laar’s engine, because they’re talking about adding one more train every other day, so that half the passenger trains can get all the way through to Laanoha with just one overnight. If they started them early enough in Briggi they could do that anyway. But it’s funny, you can finish a passenger train as late as you like, but you can’t start it early in the morning.”

I laughed. “People are just the same in England.”

“I can understand it on the main line, where there are several passenger trains a day. Given a choice, most people wouldn’t catch the early train. But when there’s only one passenger train a day, they don’t have a choice. I don’t know why the railway thinks it has to start them late. But who am I to fathom the minds of the committee?”

“Maybe it’s the committee who don’t like to get up in the morning?”

“They don’t use the passenger train anyway. They’ve got their own coach, and attach themselves to a goods train whenever they feel like it. They’re a damned nuisance. You have to do a shuffle in the passing places because you’re too long. Either that or take a couple of wagons off the train for the whole run, both ways, and they wouldn’t like that.”

As Peyr had said, this stretch was long and level, and we got up a good speed. The river was meandering about lazily in a wide, flat valley, but this wasn’t rich cropland like the plains lower down. There were a few sheep and even fewer goats grazing on rough pasture.

Peyr seemed thoughtful, so I didn’t trouble him with questions. I spent most of the time gazing out at the landscape, trying to spot any signs of human life other than the railway. Well, the sheep and goats were presumably a sign of human life, but that was about all. They were looking after themselves, but I suspected that they couldn’t do that for the whole year. If it was as chilly as this in autumn, what was it like in winter? Buried in snow was my guess.

Peyr extracted Yaana’s bundles of clothes from their hiding place, and put them on the wood pile. “Our best customer’s at the next stop.”

There was a train waiting in the next passing loop when we arrived.

Beside the line there was a single large building, built of huge, rough blocks of grey limestone, and with a roof of large gritstone slabs. It looked almost as though it had grown out of the ground. The sides of the valley had been littered with similar rock for miles.

“Faahiha will be in the inn. She’ll have been here nearly an hour by now.”

“She? A lady engine driver?” It didn’t seem to fit with the local culture.

“Yes. Why not? We’ve got three lady drivers on this line. But you’re right, it’s an unusual job for ladies. There aren’t any lady drivers on the main line. There’s a bit of history about it. I’ll tell you later, but we’d better not be talking about it just now!”

We went into the inn. There were half a dozen people sitting on benches each side of a rough wooden table, sipping skiir, chattering and laughing.

“So! You’ve arrived at last!” She must be the lady driver, I thought.

“Are you in a hurry, or do you want to eat here? I’ve got a packed meal ready if you’d rather get on.” He must be the landlord.

“We’ll eat here. We’re holding no-one up now. We’re in no hurry to get to Briggi. There’s some parcels for you from Yaana on the back of the engine. Your lad can go and unload them.”

“I’ll stay and chat for a while too. Jinni will get her dinner at Kaahes without me if she’s there before me, but she’ll probably be late as well anyway. Who’s your quiet friend?”

“This is Owen. Owen, this is Faahiha.”

Peyr also introduced me to the family who ran the inn. I remember Tambuk's name, because that’s also the name of the inn, and of the village half a mile away, but his wife's name and those of their three grown-up children escaped me. Tambuk and his wife busied themselves preparing food, and their son and two daughters went off somewhere.

“Have we driven them away?”

Faahiha laughed. “No, they’re going to round up the goats.”

“I saw a lot of sheep and a few goats on the way, but they didn’t look as though they were going to get rounded up.”

“No, most of them won’t be. But Tambuk has some milking goats here. Tambuk’s famous for cheese. Just you wait and see!”

We'd just got our food when there was an earthquake. It wasn’t a very bad one – I’d been in much worse, and so apparently had everyone else – but it was enough to make me jump up and start to run outside.

Peyr laughed. “Sit down, Owen. We’re not in Laanoha here. This place won’t tumble down round your ears from a little tremble like that. Tambuk’s been here a thousand years and it’s not fallen down yet.”

“I don’t think it’s as old as that, really, Peyr. Graamon says there weren’t any earthquakes in the old days, before the ice. That’s less than a thousand years ago. And Tambuk was built with the likelihood of earthquakes in mind.”

I felt a bit stupid. Faahiha was right: I could see that Tambuk was built to withstand a pretty vigorous shaking. And whoever this Graamon was, he knew what he was talking about: back in England, that’s exactly what they used to say about the earthquakes. Well, what some of them used to say, anyway – the ones I reckoned knew what they were talking about.

“Who’s Graamon?”

“Graamon’s a friend of ours in Briggi. He’s someone you ought to meet – he’d love to hear about your ballooning. He’s someone who’d probably understand how you did it, or at least have a better chance than I have! But I’ll tell you more about him on the way. We’d better get moving. That wasn’t much of a quake, but any quake can bring rubbish down onto the line. I don’t want to have to crawl along in the dark for hours, and neither does Faahiha.”

“I’d rather stay the night here, to be honest, Peyr. Nobody will blame us if everything’s late tomorrow, they’ll have felt the quake. Even in daylight you can’t go fast safely after a quake, not until the line’s been checked, so it’ll be dark before we get anywhere anyway.”

“Okay. I don’t need much convincing about that. Owen and I can stay here too. Briggi will still be there in the morning. And our meal’s nearly ready.”

“And I’ll get to hear Owen’s story!”

I got to hear Faahiha’s story, too, and how the Briggi line came to have three lady drivers.

Faahiha’s family lived in Briggi. Her mother died when Faahiha was still quite small, and her father, who was an engine driver, took to taking Faahiha with him nearly every trip, only leaving her with her elderly grandparents occasionally. She became a favourite with all the drivers. An observant little girl, she soon knew all about the railway and the engine.

When she was older, she had to spend more time looking after her grandmother, but still felt very attached to the railway. She became involved with a young engine driver, Berraam, and after her grandmother died, she started accompanying him to Laanoha and back.

There was an earthquake just after they’d left Tambuk at the end of one trip. Faahiha was six months pregnant and it was snowing. The earthquake was a bad one, and they were in a rock cutting when it struck. A rock fell on the engine, crushing part of the cab, and killing Berraam outright. Faahiha could see immediately that he was beyond help.

Naturally she was distraught, but she knew she had to save herself. It was very lucky for her that she knew the engine and the railway well. She brought the train to a halt as quickly as she safely could.

She either had to walk back along the line to Tambuk, or somehow drive the train to Briggi. Walking four or five miles back to Tambuk in what looked likely soon to be a major snowstorm didn’t appeal, but she couldn’t be sure the line to Briggi would be passable.

It had been quite a powerful quake. Would any of the bridges and viaducts have been damaged? Might there have been landslides onto the track? Either way was a bit of a gamble, but driving the train seemed the better option. She told herself that the line was built to withstand quakes, and that the falling rock was a very unhappy bit of bad luck. She walked back up the line to inspect the train.

Her fears were well founded. Halfway along the train, several wagons had derailed. She tried to uncouple the rear of the train, but couldn’t shift the coupling. She returned to the engine and inched it forward a little, hoping to take the pressure off the couplings so she could undo one of them. She walked back along the track to the first derailed wagon. She still couldn’t shift the coupling, which she quickly realized was jammed by the misalignment. The next one forward was free enough to undo.

She’d never actually driven the engine before, but she’d watched Berraam and her father doing it often enough. She was very nervous about the condition of the line, so she drove very slowly. She'd almost reached Briggi when she found the line flooded.

She knew that the flood wasn’t very deep, because she knew the line was almost level at that point, and began to climb again at the other side of the river as it went into the town. But she couldn’t see whether the line was intact under the water, and anyway she couldn’t be certain the flood was shallow enough for the engine to ford safely.

She wondered why the river had flooded, and whether it was getting deeper or draining away. She didn’t want to wait for it to drain away, even if that was going to happen.

If it hadn’t been snowing, she’d have been able to see Briggi – and people in Briggi would have been able to see the train. She wondered if they’d heard it.

There was a road bridge about a mile upstream, that would be above the level of the flood. On the other side of the river, the road would take her into Briggi, but what was the country between where she was and the road like? In the snow...

Then she realized that they’d hear the engine’s whistle in Briggi, no problem.

They did. There was an answering whistle from the other side. Faahiha knew they would think it was Berraam driving the train, but she thought they must realize he wouldn’t attempt to take the engine blindly through the flood. She was right.

She waited. She knew they’d come across to her before long somehow, and she was right about that, too. It was an hour before a four-handled trolley appeared out of the blizzard, the water halfway up its wheels, four men – two of them engine drivers Faahiha knew – pumping the handles, and two sitting on the front of the trolley, feeling for the rails under the water with poles to make sure the line was sound.

Knowing that the line was sound, and knowing that the water wasn’t too deep, the two experienced drivers drove the train slowly into Briggi, pushing the trolley.

There was one other fatality amongst the railwaymen in the big quake. Faahiha’s father’s engine derailed at speed near Embrouha, and fell forty metres into the gorge. Faahiha had lost everybody, but not her spirit. She was tough.

There was a lot of damage to the line. It was three weeks before it was reopened, and there were speed restrictions on several sections for a good deal longer than that.

Just two months later, Faahiha gave birth to twin daughters – Berraami and Jinni. The Briggi line drivers decided that they’d club together to support Faahiha and her twins, but Faahiha wouldn’t have it. “I’ve proved I can drive an engine,” she said, “I’ll earn my living.”

The railway company didn’t want to employ her, but they made the mistake of trying to make the excuse that the other drivers wouldn’t like it. They were utterly wrong about that.

Berraami and Jinni grew up on the footplate, even more than Faahiha had. It seemed inevitable that they too would be engine drivers, and they were.

I told Faahiha and Peyr all about my escape from England. She agreed with Peyr that he must introduce me to Graamon in Briggi, and that he would want to know all the technical details of how to make balloons capable of lifting a man.

I rather suspected that the technology to do it was beyond anything available here, but I didn’t want to sound too certain about that – I wasn’t completely certain myself. But I’d seen no sign of anything electrical, and suspected that even if there was electrical apparatus hidden away in workshops anywhere it wouldn’t be able to produce the currents needed to generate large volumes of hydrogen. I didn’t know any other method. Add to that, I didn’t think there was any plastic sheeting here. I couldn’t imagine what else you could make the balloons out of, unless you could make a single really huge one out of the heavier materials that were available – and then how would you control ascents and descents?

Faahiha and Peyr were much more interested to hear about the trip itself.

I’d floated up from the garden at home on a dark, foggy evening, deliberately choosing a time when no-one would be able to see me. Happily it seemed that no-one had taken any notice of the forest of balloons I’d collected, tethered to a couple of big trees in the garden. I was under house arrest, but what I was up to no-one seemed to care. With guards all around the area, it was obvious that I couldn’t escape. I’m pretty sure no-one witnessed my departure.

What they must have thought when they found I’d disappeared, I don’t know. I very much doubt anyone worked out how I’d escaped, or where I’d got to. I’d wanted to get far, far away, where no-one would know who I was, and I’d certainly succeeded in that.

I’d never been off the ground before, and nor had anyone I knew. As far as I knew, no-one had since ancient times, when according to legend, some sort of controlled flight had been commonplace. How much truth there was in the legends, I wasn’t sure – but I suspected there was more truth in them than most people believed.

I had no idea what I was letting myself in for as I floated up into the fog. Would my methods of going up and down work as planned? Would the wind take me too fast? Where would I drift? How long could I keep aloft, if I didn’t like the look of any of the places I passed? How high would I go, and would it be very cold, as it was in high mountains, or even colder if I had to go right over the top of the mountains? How high could I go? Might I end up forced to land high in the mountains, in the sea, or on the ice?

How big was the risk of my balloons catching fire? I’d made sure there was a good vertical separation between them, but if one low down caught fire, would the wire to the upper ones survive? Or would the rising fire ignite the upper balloons anyway? From the lowest balloon upwards, I’d used wire rather than rope to minimize the risk of it burning through, but would that make me vulnerable to lightning? I didn’t know.

There were so many unknowns. I consider myself very lucky that none of the dreadful things I’d imagined came to pass – they so easily could have done. But it was the only way I could think of to escape, and I couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of my life under house arrest. They were supplying food and water and fuel, and no doubt they would have supplied clothes when my wardrobe began to get ragged, but they read all my letters, and my friends and colleagues couldn’t visit me without a guard present. I was suffocating.

Fortunately I’d had the foresight to stock up with materials at home, suspecting that I might be placed under house arrest. It was fortunate too that they didn’t cut my electricity supply, and didn’t seem to think about how much electricity I was using. I used a lot making all my hydrogen. Godfrey reckoned that the ancients had had much more powerful electricity supplies than modern England, to judge by some of the archaeological finds he’d examined. How they’d produced so much electricity he’d not been able to fathom.

Faahiha and Peyr were fascinated to hear how I’d floated right up through the fog and out into the clear sky above it, seeing the fog from above like a blanket of clouds below me, and the stars in a clear sky above me even though it was a night of thick fog in the town below. It was eerily quiet, and the top of the fog was only dimly illuminated by the starlight.

It was very cold. I was glad I’d anticipated that, and brought plenty of warm clothes.

There wasn't much wind, and I drifted very slowly southwards – not realizing I was moving at all until I floated over the edge of the fog, and the ground beneath came into view. Really it was the disappearance of the white fog I could see. The ground was utterly black.

I was very high by then, but I didn’t know how high until first light, well before dawn. I’d seen a few lights on the ground, but just points of light, nothing recognizable. I could see light in the sky before I could see anything on the ground, but it wasn’t long before I could make out fields and houses. The houses were barely more than specks.

I considered letting one balloon go, to float a little lower, but decided just to float on. I wasn’t too high – it was cold, but not unbearable. I liked that I probably wasn’t very noticeable from the ground, and the fewer balloons I released, the further I'd be able to go.

I didn’t know how far I’d come, but I was sure I wanted to go a great deal further before I could be confident of being beyond the reach of the English authorities, or their spies and friends in neighbouring countries. I guessed I was doing fifteen or twenty miles an hour, judging by how fast the scenery was passing below me. Despite my speed, I felt very still.

By the light in the sky I knew I was heading south, and before long I knew exactly where I was. The view from the sky was surprisingly easy to relate to the maps I’d seen of southern England and northern France. I was crossing the river Thames, just upstream of where the chain ferry runs between Frenchport in England, and Louvigny in France on the south bank.

I told Faahiha and Peyr how the French have a different name for the Thames, and how there’s a joke argument about which is correct; that there are a lot of serious arguments between the English and the French, but that the language difference isn’t really one of them. The difference between English and French is much less than between either of them and Laana!

The wind changed during the morning. It had been from the north, but was now from the west. I sometimes floated over towns and villages, but mostly it was farmland. Late in the day I began to see snowcapped mountains far to the south, and knew they were the Alps.

For a long time, far below me there was a big river, nothing like as big as the Thames, but a good size nonetheless. I saw several large boats on it, some apparently trading up and down it, others seemingly ferries plying across it. Then the line of my drift and the line of the river diverged, and it disappeared off to the south.

Gradually the proportion of woodland to fields increased, and towns and villages got smaller and more widely separated, until eventually I was floating over apparently uninhabited forest, broken only by a few rivers and bare-topped hills.

As the sun got lower in the west, I began to descend. This didn’t look like a good place to land, almost uninhabited, and anyway I wanted to get much further, well away from England. I opened the tap at the bottom of my tank of water for a few moments, and was relieved to find myself rising again without having to lose too much of my water.

I hadn’t slept the previous night, and although I wasn’t doing much but watch the scenery, I was exhausted. I dozed on and off, but was afraid of losing too much height and crashing, or getting too high and maybe freezing to death in my sleep.

At one point I woke to find myself skimming the treetops – I think it might have been my feet brushing the top of a tree that woke me. In a panic, I released too much water before I’d really woken properly, and then I rose quite fast and got very high. It was really cold, I began to feel light-headed and nauseous, and I had a pain in my ears. I wasn’t sure whether that was caused by fear or the cold or both, or something else entirely; certainly breathing felt hard.

I released a small balloon from the very top group, and down I went again. I had to release more water to avoid crash landing, but I was careful this time not to release too much.

Over the next few days I learnt to control my height quite well. I don’t know how many days I was in the air though; I was so tired I completely lost track of time.

I found that I almost never needed to release a balloon, but needed to get rid of a little water quite often, especially at night. It seemed that my balloons were leaking steadily.

Another time I had to release a balloon, I’d climbed to a great height to avoid a thunderstorm. Lightning was one of my greatest fears. A couple of hundred metres above the ground, I was being drawn towards the storm, but as I climbed it drew me less, and before I reached the top of the thunderhead, I was being blown away from it. I knew Godfrey would be very interested in such information, but I was sure I was never going to see him again.

“Graamon would be interested to know that, too.”

But escaping the thunderstorm I’d climbed too high again, and had to descend after only a little while because it made me feel so unwell.

Most often I seemed to be drifting eastward, but sometimes I’d drift in other directions for a while. Of course I don’t know which way I went when it was dark, or when I was dozing, and I wasn’t always thinking about which way I was going anyway. Often I could see ice in the north, but I was relieved to find that I never approached the ice closely, nor did I approach very high mountains, although I saw them in all directions at one time or another.

I did cross a huge area of bare rock and sand for a while, and hoped against hope that I wouldn’t have to land in it – but I wasn’t much happier at the idea of landing in the vast empty grasslands I crossed, either, or the apparently uninhabited forest.

Finally and most worryingly, as the light revealed the scene below me one morning, I found myself over the sea, with no land and not even a ship in sight. I was out of sight of land for at least several hours, but it could have been much longer, I’d lost track of time so badly by then. When land did finally appear, I was so disoriented and confused that I didn’t know which direction I was approaching it from. I hoped it would be inhabited.

The coast was rocky and bare; inland was unbroken forest. Then there was a line of rocky hills, and at the foot of the hills a broad band of what looked like fields, and unmistakably, a village, with a large quarry beyond it.

I released a balloon, and another when it seemed I might end up high on the rocky hills beyond the village. Then I seemed to be descending too fast, so I released a little water, but I didn’t dare release too much for fear of starting to rise again. I had quite a rough landing on a rocky slope a mile or so from the village, but luckily I wasn’t seriously hurt.

I tied my remaining balloons to a large rock in case I decided I needed to move on again – I’d still got some water in my tank, so I knew I could still go at least a little way, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to, because I’d completely run out of food.

“So your balloons are still tied to a rock near Sirimi? I wonder if anyone’s found them. I wonder what they’ll make of them if they do?”

“There’s a very odd water tank, too – it’s made of plastic, a material I don’t think you have here. And a lot of warm clothes. The hydrogen’s most likely all leaked out of the balloons by now, so they’ll just be plastic bags tied to bits of wire. Odd enough anyway.”

“You left some clothes there?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to carry them all. There are a lot more than I needed once I’d landed, even allowing for being out in the cold at night.”

“We should go up to Sirimi sometime and see if they’re still there. I’d like to see your plastic stuff, and it’d be a shame to lose your clothes.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to find them. I was pretty confused when I left them.”

“And yet you walked half way to the Sirimi Road crossing before you got to sleep?”

“No, I slept right there, still in my harness, tied to the rock along with the balloons. I don’t know how long I was there, my guess is about twenty-four hours, because it was early afternoon again by the time I unharnessed myself and walked into the village.”

This conversation took much longer than you might think if you forget that I was still at an early stage of learning Laana. The candles were nearly burnt out before we blew them out and rolled ourselves up in the piles of cloth in the corner of the inn. Tambuk and his family had been asleep in another corner for hours. How much they’d heard of my story I didn’t know, and it didn’t seem to matter; but I think they’d probably given up listening when Faahiha and Peyr were telling me Faahiha’s story, which they knew already.

Back to the top

On to Chapter 4