Chapter 4

It was still dark when we woke to the smell of frying meat. Tambuk and his wife were preparing breakfast. It was goat, and it was delicious. There were fried potato slices, too.

“All being well, in a couple of hours you’ll be in Briggi, and Faahiha will be at Kaahes. But I’m making you packed lunches in case there’s problems on the line.”

“Thanks, Tambuk. It’ll be a good four hours anyway, even if the line’s clear, because we’ll take it really slow. We can’t afford to risk hitting a rock that’s big enough to derail us, but too small to see until it’s too late.”

We set off as soon as it was light enough to see the line clearly. Before long we were in a rocky cutting, and Peyr told me it was where Berraam was killed. The line was clear for us.

Closer to Briggi, there was a cutting through softer ground where there were a couple of minor landslips, but they didn’t quite reach the line. Peyr couldn’t be sure of that from a distance, so we had to approach them very slowly, but they were no trouble to us.

“I’ll report them, and they’ll send a team out to clear them. The cutting’s wide and shallow to keep landslips like that off the line, they always happen even in minor quakes.”

“I wonder what the line south was like for Faahiha?”

“I expect it’ll have been okay. Quakes usually get stronger the further north you go. They’ll have felt last night’s even right down in Laanoha, but it’ll scarcely have made the roof tiles rattle there. It’s usually noticeably less even in Kaahes than in Briggi.”

“Aha. I wondered when you said about Laanoha being less quake-proof than Tambuk.”

“A big quake in Briggi usually gives Laanoha a bit of a rattle, and there’s often more damage in Laanoha than there is in Briggi. But that’s only because there’s a lot more of Laanoha, and Briggi’s built to live through them, just like Tambuk. A proper Briggi quake would flatten half the buildings in Laanoha. There’d be thousands killed.”

We emerged from the cutting onto a curve on an embankment, and then onto a low viaduct over a broad meadow with a river meandering across it. “Faahiha’s flood was here.”

At the other end of the viaduct the line disappeared between buildings. I guessed – correctly – that this was Briggi. We’d arrived at last – about eighteen hours late.

There was a train ready to leave. The driver had started to raise steam as soon as they heard Peyr’s whistle approaching the town, but he wanted to hear from Peyr about the condition of the line first. “Clear as far as Tambuk, anyway. I don’t know beyond that, we were already at Tambuk when the quake struck.”

I realized that he’d meet someone at Tambuk who knew what the next stretch was like – or if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to go on at all anyway. The drivers obviously knew that without a moment’s thought.

We met up with a couple of other drivers for lunch at an inn right by the railway yard. They wanted to know who I was, but Peyr didn’t tell them very much beyond the fact that I was foreign, and I didn’t say much. They wanted to know if the line had been damaged by the quake at all, and of course Peyr only knew about the first stretch. One of them was due to take a train out as soon as Jinni arrived, but we’d no idea when that would be. It was going to be a couple of days before everything was back on schedule, even if the line was undamaged everywhere.

On this shift, Peyr should have had two nights in Briggi before returning, but we’d had one unscheduled night at Tambuk, so we only had an afternoon and an evening to take a look at the place. The contrast with Laanoha was striking, but I got a good feeling about Briggi.

I also got a good feeling about the people. People in Laanoha were friendly enough in private, but out on the street most people seemed very wary. It wasn’t like that in Briggi at all. There was a universal openness and friendliness, even on the street.

Peyr delivered the last bundle of the clothes Yaana had made to a house in a back street, then we went on to Graamon's lodgings. He wasn’t at home. His landlady said he’d gone to Meyroha, and she wasn’t sure when he would be back. “He often goes to Meyroha nowadays, I’m not sure why. He’s usually back in less than two weeks, though, so he’s not staying there long. Maybe he’s got a girl there!”

Peyr laughed. “That wouldn’t surprise me a bit. It’s time he had. He’ll make a good father if he ever gets round to it. Oh, and tell him I've got a foreign friend he ought to meet – Owen here. He knows my schedule, or can find it out easily enough. If he gets a chance, he’ll make the effort to catch me, and then we can arrange something.”

“I don’t know why, I thought Graamon was about your age, Peyr.”

“He’s not all that much younger than me. Maybe ten years at most. I’m not sure how old he is. He had a girlfriend for years, long ago, but she was sickly and wouldn’t marry him. She said she couldn’t raise a family, she wouldn’t live long enough for them to grow up. She was right, she died in her late twenties. Graamon took a long time getting over it. I’m not sure he ever really has. But he’s got the sharpest mind of anyone I know. He’s the brains behind the new engine design, amongst other things.”

“But he lives here in Briggi? I thought they were building them in Laanoha.”

“They are. Doesn’t stop him doing the designs here, although he does have to visit the workshops from time to time. But he likes it better here, and the bosses don’t dare to tell him where to live, he’s too valuable. They can’t afford to upset him.”

We walked all the way along a street of shops, and took a look in several of them. Peyr bought a couple of silky scarves. “Yaani and my mother’ll like these. The winds are beginning to get chilly again, even down in Laanoha, and last year’s scarves are looking about ready for the bedding pile.”

“Won’t you get one for Aila?”

Peyr laughed. “I thought you could get her one. She’d like that.” So, shyly, I did. I got the nicest one I could afford, and the shopkeeper said, “It’s a present for your young lady? Would you like me to wrap it nicely for you? No extra charge.”

I was about to say, “No, thanks,” but Peyr was quicker. “Yes please. She’s not exactly his young lady, though. Well, I’m sure he’d rather you didn’t put it like that, anyway.”

Peyr was right, I would rather she didn’t put it like that. I’d met Aila once, for about three quarters of an hour. In the presence of her father, and with a significant language barrier. But I’d definitely felt something, and Peyr had obviously seen that and thought Aila felt it too. Or was it just Peyr’s sense of humour? Or some cultural thing I’d not picked up on?

For our evening meal we went to an inn down by the river. Before we went in, Peyr took me to look at the boats. They were very different from the boats on the Aaha at Laanoha. There, the boats were beamy, with tall masts – there was plenty of room in the river, plenty of height under the bridge, and the bigger boats were designed to sail up and down the coast, as well as up and down the river. Here, the boats were more like English barges – narrow to fit in locks, with a hinged mast to go under low bridges, but seemingly with a deep draught.

There was a short spur of the railway right down to the dockside. A group of men were loading logs from a barge onto some railway wagons.

Peyr seemed to know people wherever he went. I tried my best to follow the conversation over the meal, and I could understand a lot of what Peyr said, but the clientele in this inn seemed to have a very different dialect. I’d had little difficulty understanding people elsewhere in Briggi, but here they might have been talking a different language. If so, Peyr understood it – but was replying in plain Laana, without apparently causing any reaction.

After the meal, we went back to the inn by the railway yard for the night. We drank skiir with other railway workers and the innkeeper and his family, laughing and joking well into the night. “We’re due out of here at one tomorrow afternoon, but everything’s still running hours late. Goraal hasn’t arrived yet, and he was due at four this afternoon. I doubt he’ll come tonight now, but I expect everyone will make an extra early start tomorrow, so we’ll have to be ready to go on time. It could be another day or two before things are back on schedule though.”

Faahiha’s daughter Jinni had apparently arrived a few hours after us okay, but we’d not met her. Being a Briggi resident, she’d gone home.

The pile of old clothes in the corner, that was the typical bedding arrangement in this country, here smelt rather of wood smoke. “They’ve not had enough dry weather recently to dry them out of doors, and you can’t leave them unwashed forever,” Peyr explained. “Especially in an inn. Most inns have a drying room upstairs around the chimney, but here they use the engine shed. Briggi’s not an easy place to have upstairses.”

“What do they do at the waterside inn?”

“I don’t think you’d want to sleep there unless you were pretty desperate!”

I thought he was saying the bedding pile might not have been very wholesome, but there might have been more to it than that. Reading between the lines of the conversation earlier in the evening, I guessed that Peyr had taken me down to the waterside inn deliberately to introduce me to a community it was best to be on good terms with.

I dreamt about Aila again that night. At one point it was dark, and snowing, and I was trying to rescue her from a flood. At another she was running away from me as if to make me chase her, but she kept disappearing into the driving snow and I was afraid of losing her.

Then somehow we were in a maze of old alleyways between wooden buildings in Laanoha. There was an earthquake, and the buildings were shaking and seemed about to collapse around us; and always Aila was running away from me, looking back at me, smiling that shy smile and laughing.

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