Chapter 9

I woke again. Someone was knocking at the door of my room. “Hello?” I said.

“Breakfast time, Owen. Graamon said he wants to be at the yard at first light.” It was Viina.

There was just the faintest hint of light in the sky, and I could see lamplight under the door of my room. I guessed that Viina had left an oil lamp outside my room for me, and went and opened the door. She had.

Graamon was already in the washroom. I joined him.

Breakfast was porridge made with milk, something I’d not seen since I left England, and boiled eggs. Graamon and I were the only ones eating. “I’ll have mine later, with the lads,” Viina said, “There’s packed meals for you on the table in the hall. I’ll expect you if I see you for dinner, to judge by what you were saying, Graamon, so there’s enough in your lunch packs to keep you going all night if need be.”

“Thanks, Viina. I hope we’ll be back in time to pick up Owen’s jacket from Lomeyr, though. I think with a bit of luck we might be.”

It was bitterly cold as we walked down to the yard. It’ll be okay on the engines, though.

Jinni had already built up the fires in all five engines and put the train together. Peyr and the other drivers arrived just as Graamon and I did. We all gathered to discuss plans, and agree communication. “We can’t just use the standard whistles for communication between two or three engines working together, it’d get too confusing.” I didn’t manage to follow the whole discussion, but I knew they’d worked out a system.

Baamoon arrived just as we were ready to set off.

“We can’t all three crowd into Jinni’s engine at the front,” Graamon said. “I’d better be with Jinni, but you and Owen go with Peyr, Baamoon.” Peyr’s engine was second in line.

It began to rain as we set off. “It’s rain down here in Briggi, but it’ll be more snow on the top,” Peyr said. He was right; the rain changed to snow far below the top.

The snow had drifted again since we’d ploughed our way through before, and the path we’d cut had been completely obliterated. But with five engines and the big heavy plough we cut straight through the snow as if it wasn’t there – until we got to the first rock cutting. Here, we’d already packed snow against the cutting walls from our earlier passing. More snow had drifted, and filled in the passageway we’d cut. It was snowing heavily by this time, too. Even with five engines, we’d only gone twenty metres into the cutting before we’d lost all our momentum.

Jinni whistled the code for reverse, and we backed out of the cutting, then “Forward!”, and we charged the snow again. What the jarring was like in Jinni’s engine, I don’t know, but it wasn’t too bad in ours, with two more pairs of buffers in between to absorb the shock. Still, they’ve got the long travel buffers on the back of the plough, which are worth several sets of ordinary buffers. It won’t be too bad.

We’d gained another twenty metres. Gradually we hammered our way through the cutting – then suddenly we were free, and heading through easy drifts to the next cutting. Baamoon observed drily that it took eleven charges to travel just under half a mile. “Well worth having a roof over that cutting. I don’t know what this is doing to the engines, never mind the fuel we’re using, or even what we’re doing to the cutting walls. And if we can’t get all the way through, we might yet have to hammer our way back out through that lot. It’s beginning to fill up again already.”

That’s probably true too, looking at the way this is falling, and how it’s blowing about.

Half way through the next cutting, after the eighth charge, Jinni whistled the reverse code again. All five engines went into reverse – and went nowhere. Thirty driving wheels spun uselessly on the track. The plough refused to budge.

Jinni whistled the stop code, then “creep forward”. “If we can,” Peyr muttered under his breath, “Graamon wants to take the tension off the coupling, so he can uncouple the plough,” he explained. “We’re going back to Briggi without it. It’s wedged in solid.”

Peyr was right. It took Graamon some time to get the plough uncoupled, but eventually the “Head for home” whistle came, and then an answering, “Okay, I’m the lead engine now” from the other end of the train.

With the plough detached, we got moving again without difficulty. But Baamoon was right as well – we had to hammer our way back out through the first cutting, because it had filled in again quite a lot. “I hope we don’t get stuck in this cutting now. I don’t fancy being here until they dig us out. But I think we should be okay, I doubt if it’s filled in that much yet.”

It only took five charges to get back through the first cutting. We were back in Briggi in time for a late lunch.

It was raining hard in Briggi. Huge snowdrifts were visibly shrinking, turning into rivers of grey slush that blocked the gutters and made great slushy ponds everywhere. We were all glad of our long boots and thick socks – I was wearing some of Graamon’s, which were several sizes too big for me, but we weren’t going far or fast.

“We’ll keep the packed lunches for later. Let’s all go to the Briggi.” No-one disagreed with Baamoon’s suggestion.

“Disappointing” was Graamon’s verdict on the morning. “I’d hoped we’d get through, especially after getting through the first cutting relatively easily. But I wasn’t originally thinking of using five engines, and it’s clear that we’d have been struggling even sooner with any less.”

Baamoon wasn’t sure about that. “I think all it would have meant would have been a longer run-up for each charge. It was the momentum of the plough itself that did the work, not engines pushing.”

“Okay, but it would still have meant the whole process would have been much slower. You don’t want to be taking all day just getting through the cuttings. I’m beginning to wonder about the expanding plough idea, too, now – it might have got us through where we got stuck today, but it wouldn’t be a quick process. I think I want those roofs. What do you think, Baamoon?”

“I was saying the same thing to Owen and Peyr when we were out there. But we’ll talk about that later, Graamon.” Baamoon gave Graamon a look that I read as, “there’s an issue here that I don’t want to talk about in front of all these drivers.” Umm, I thought.

“Apart from being slower with less engines, the plough might have got stuck sooner, with less engines to pull it back out.”

“That’s true, Owen. The expanding plough might solve that problem anyway, but we obviously need two of them in case we still need to back out. If we’d spent much longer in the second cutting, or even got through to the third before we got stuck, the infilling behind us could have trapped us completely. And this is a bigger snow than anyone’s ever dug through to rescue drivers yet, I think. We’re obviously going to have to sit it out until the thaw now. I just hope Berraami’s safe at Tambuk or Kaahes, that’s all.”

“The more I think about it, the more I want those roofs. And two expanding ploughs. If the snows get any worse than this, we’re going to need them all the way, not just in the cuttings.”

“It’s not if, it’s when, Baamoon. Unless the weather changes the habits of the last few hundred years, anyway. Hell, when my Dad was a boy, there was never more than a few centimetres of snow in Briggi, and my Grandad remembered keeping goats in Liimiha. It’s always been bad on the top, but never like this before.”

Baamoon gave Graamon that look again, and Graamon changed the subject. A discussion ensued about things that could usefully get done in the yard while we waited for the thaw.

It was still pouring with rain when we’d finished lunch. Baamoon, Graamon and I headed for the workshops, and the drivers headed for the yard. “I’ll bring the expandable up to the workshops in a minute,” Medaal said as we parted.

“Thanks.” Graamon was deep in thought.

We left our boots and thick socks at the foot of the stairs up to the office.

In the office, Graamon slid the pot of skiir closer to the fire, and we all sat down. Nobody spoke for a few moments, then Graamon began.

“The question has to be raised. Whatever we do, sooner or later Briggi is going to be cut off for weeks at a time every winter. We can keep fighting to keep the line open in all weathers, but that’s just going to cost more and more every year, and we’ll always be a step behind anyway, like we are now. Who knows how long it’ll be before we can get through again? My guess is a couple of weeks, but it could be less – or it could be more. Roofing the cuttings, and routinely putting big ploughs on both ends of every train between Kaahes and Briggi at the first sign of snow, will obviously help, but it only delays the evil day. If we carry on like this, sooner or later we’re going to have a driver frozen to death, and nobody wants that. We’re going to have to work out a procedure for deciding when to close the line before we get a stuck train, not after – and just accept that it’s closed for as long as it has to be.”

Baamoon raised another option. “We could build a complete new line down the valley instead of over the top, and then tunnel through under the pass between Maaram and Belgaam, or even just carry on down the valley all the way to Barioha. There’s other towns we could connect if we did that. But that’s a huge project, and I doubt whether the committee would be prepared to raise the coins. In the long run, it could be worth it – but how long is the long run, for Briggi?”

“That’s another question that has to be raised, painful as it is. I can guess, but the man who can really give you an answer is in Barioha – Baam, Biiniha’s husband, who’s been studying the glacier for years. Of course when Briggi finally is abandoned, somewhere further south will grow a lot, but second guessing where that will be could be hard. Except that the railway itself will be a big influence on where people choose to resettle, of course. Is the committee bright enough to realize that?”

“Some of them are. Between us, we can probably persuade the others. But it’ll take time.”

“There’s another problem with the route down the valley, of course, which is why it was never routed that way in the first place. Landslides, especially at the narrows, but also for the next twenty-five miles downstream. The valley sides are steep and unstable. It would be possible to engineer a route, but it’d be awfully expensive to make it safe, and there’d be a lot of repairs to do after every earthquake. It would probably be cheaper to roof the line all the way to Kaahes.”

“We’ll push for roofing the rock cuttings, and plenty of big ploughs. Then probably the best rule is to give up the first time you’re stopped, on the basis you can always hammer your way out backwards.”

“It’s not as simple as that, Baamoon. It’s one thing to hammer your way backwards when you’ve got an engine at each end of a short train. I don’t fancy hammering backwards with a single engine at the front of a full length train. Sounds like a recipe for a derailment, to me.”

“I suppose so. So what’s the solution? Put an engine on both ends of every train at the first sign of snow?”

“It might sound expensive, but it’s probably cheaper than playing the kind of game we played this morning several times a year. And with the rock cuttings roofed, trains like that could probably get through anyway – it was only in those cuttings we had any trouble. Everywhere else, we barely noticed the snow at all, even drifts practically the height of the engine. Okay, that was five engines, but even so. I wish I’d had a gauge on those long buffers, so I knew what force we’d used and where. Before we do another run, I’ll get Roonim to put one on, with a dial in the cab. Means a link to connect every time you put the plough on, which is a pain, but worth it I think.”

Roonim must be the senior workshop man, I suppose.

For the first time, I felt I had something to contribute. “Surely a gauge on the engine’s own buffers would give you the same information?”

“That’s true. Good thinking, Owen. In fact, it’s something that would be useful on all the engines, front and back, for normal operations as well as for snow clearing. Coupling tension as well as buffer pressure. Excellent! No special gauge needed on the plough at all, then.”

Baamoon decided there was nothing much he could do around the railway for a while. “I can see it being a while before we venture up the line again. I’ll pop in every now and then, and see what’s going on, but I’ll go and play with my grandchildren for the moment, I think. Send word if anything comes up.”

Graamon was quite glad to see him go. “Baamoon’s a good chap, as committee members go fantastically good, but I can only take so much of him. It’s quite nice to have the office to ourselves!”

“You’d think committee members would have more idea of the relative costs of things.”

“You certainly would. Especially the head of the committee. He’s actually pretty good at it, when he thinks about it – but it’s not instinctive for him, he has to work it out. In some ways that’s good, it means he’s prepared to listen to ideas that sound crazy at first but actually work out well. For example, I don’t think a line down the valley between here and Maaram would be a good idea at all, but it really might be worth thinking about a tunnel through from Belgaam to Maaram, and a line from Maaram down to Barioha. I don’t think there’d be any engineering problems about any of that, and we’d serve quite a few sizeable villages, one or more of which might well develop strongly if they had a railway. It’s more fertile land than the Belgaam side of the ridge, but mostly wilderness because it’s so inaccessible at the moment.”

“I really don’t have much idea of the geography around here yet. I’d never even heard of Maaram before. But one thing has been puzzling me. As far as I can make out, I must have crossed the main line somewhere between the coast and Sirimi, yet I didn’t see it from the air. It seemed to be unbroken forest from the coast almost until Sirimi.”

“I think I know pretty much the route you must have followed, then. There’s a four mile stretch of cut-and-cover tunnel along the foot of the escarpment south of Sirimi. You probably saw a line of tall cliffs with scree at the foot of them in the middle of the forest. The line is underneath that scree. One of the nastiest bits of engineering on the entire railway, but the best option of a bad lot.

“Baam reckons it’s old sea cliffs, from the time of the ancients when sea level was stable for a long time. That’s why they’re much taller and steeper than most sea cliffs nowadays. And why there’s such a huge flat area to the south of them.”

“I might have seen it at the time, but I don’t remember. I’d seen a lot of natural landforms by then, and what I was looking for was signs of human activity. If I did see it, I didn’t take any notice of it.”

“I can understand that. Sometime before too long you’ll have to come to Meyroha, but of course unless we get off the train and go walkabout, all you’ll see of that area is two tunnel entrances.”

Will Aila get to go here and there with me? I don’t know how often any of the family go anywhere much with Peyr – but then it’s probably different for drivers and assistant engineers anyway. Time enough to find things like that out later.

Aha! I do know that Faahiha travelled with Berraam – and they weren’t even married. That was a long time ago; things could have changed. But I also know Aila’s travelled with Peyr quite a bit, and not just back and forth to Baragi, either.

“Sometime we’ll want to do drawings for those buffer and coupling gauges for Roonim, but he’s up to his eyes with the expanding plough at the moment, so there’s no hurry with that. We might as well go home too. Viina will probably be only too happy to carry on teaching you reading and writing, and I can finish that paperwork. And we mustn’t forget to pick up your jacket.”

At the bottom of the stairs, we put on our – well, Graamon’s – boots and socks. “We ought to get you some of your own. I’ve got plenty, that’s not the problem, but they’re too big for you, I think! We’ll go there on the way home. We’ll get you some shoes that don’t look so outlandish while we’re at it. Anything goes in Laanoha, but in most other places they do stand out a bit.”

The cobbler laughed at Graamon’s big boots on my small feet. He measured my feet in more places than any cobbler in England ever had, and round my legs in several places almost up to the knee. “They’ll be ready in five days’ time. I’ve got socks the right size for you in stock, though. Three pairs enough?”

“Give him five pairs if you’ve got them. He’s going to be away from home for a couple of weeks at a time quite often.”

“You can have the other two when you pick up the boots and shoes, they’re not made yet.”

Viina was very happy to continue my lessons. After about an hour, she said, “You and Graamon ought to go and get your jacket, and I’ll get started making dinner. I’ll dig out some books for you later on, you ought to start practising reading – and probably copying out, and rewriting things from books in cursive script. You’ll have the occasional question for me or for Graamon when something’s not clear to you, but basically practice is really all you need now.”

She’d gone and called Graamon before I’d had a chance to react. Graamon and I set off through the rain to Lomeyr’s shop.

My jacket was ready, and was a perfect fit. I’d never had such beautifully made clothing before.

After dinner, Viina found me a book to read and copy from. Graamon went to finish his paperwork. I sat by the fire and tried to read. Viina sat knitting in another chair near the fire.

Even when you’re beginning to get fluent conversing in a foreign language, and have learnt more or less how the script works, reading is hard at first. I could convert the text into the sounds of the words in my head, but the meaning didn’t come immediately, even when I actually knew the words. I had to repeat the sounds to myself to hear the meaning. And Viina’s book contained a lot of words I didn’t know anyway – many more than I was used to encountering in conversation. But Viina was quite happy to explain them to me.

At first I wasn’t sure whether the book was fiction or an account of someone’s actual experiences, but it didn’t actually matter one way or the other. It was mainly just reading practice for me. Of course I was also learning about the culture, without really realizing it. Gradually I realized that it was at least basically an account, possibly with fictional embellishments, of a life in Liimiha maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years earlier, before the railway was built. The culture had evidently been a little different then, but seeing the changes made me more aware of the present reality. Noticing that effect was an interesting and enlightening experience. I wonder to what extent Viina chose this particular book deliberately? Surely she didn’t actually anticipate that effect? She’s clearly an intelligent and perceptive lady, but for her to be so aware of the way having a different cultural background affects one’s perceptions is surely too much to believe. Maybe subconsciously? Possible, I suppose.

After a while, Graamon emerged from his room. “Finished! There’s nothing more I can do with that until I can talk to the committee, and I can’t do that until we can get down to Meyroha. How’s he getting on, Viina?”

“Oh, he’s doing fine. He needs some more writing practice, but look at him reading! He’s getting well into my great-grandfather’s book, and I know he’s taking it in by the questions he asks.”

“Oh, I love that book. But the language is a bit archaic, if I remember correctly, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is, I hadn’t thought of that. Most of my books are probably like that, I’m afraid – maybe not quite as much so as that one, that’s true. But archaic is just more formal, really, nothing wrong with it – and learning to write formal Laana is probably better than writing the modern slipshod way, anyway!” Viina laughed.

“You might laugh, Viina, but you’ve got a point, really. I remember your grandfather addressing a public meeting here in Briggi when I was a tiny boy. I laughed at his way of speaking at the time, but I realized later how much respect he commanded amongst the adults – and part of that was the way he spoke. Formal language carries weight, whether people are consciously aware of it or not.”

“This is your great-grandfather’s book, Viina? Is it all true, or is it partly fictional?” I realized too late that this might be a rude question to ask, but Viina was unperturbed.

“I think it’s mostly true. I can’t be sure about some of the stories, and he certainly changed a lot of the names. I don’t really remember my great-grandfather, he died when I was very little, but my grandfather said it was all true. But however much weight his speeches might have had, in the family we all knew that grandfather was fond of telling fairytales. If you knew him, you could tell when he was telling the truth and when he wasn’t by a little twinkle in his eye, but people who didn’t know him ended up believing all kinds of crazy things. He didn’t have that twinkle when he said his father’s book was all true – but that could just be that he believed it himself, not necessarily that it was actually true. And there’s no checking any of it now, with Liimiha ground to powder under the ice, and all the people long dead and gone.”

Graamon was thoughtful. “What is truth, anyway? What is the difference between truth and fiction, when there’s absolutely no possible way of knowing which is which?”

“I remember my headmaster asking questions like that. We had long discussions about them, interesting discussions at the time, but I’m not sure they were really very productive.”

“I almost wonder whether it’s more about the limitations of the meanings of the words, than about any real substantive issue. Maybe we need a word for ‘possible as far as we know at present, might prove to be true or might prove to be false eventually, or we might never know’. And it’s a continuous range from black to white with every grey in between, not just three words. And we’ve only got two in Laana.”

“Same two in English! But you’re right to mention the language. I’ve been noticing more and more how words in Laana and words in English don’t match up one to one – sometimes there are five or six words in Laana covering a range of related meanings that we have to cover with just two or three words in English, and sometimes it’s the other way round. You get the same effect between English and French or German, but not to the same extent. And then there’s the sounds the language is made up of, and they don’t match up one for one either. Learning to read and write is helping a lot with this, actually. It’s cleared up the way you have five different consonants in the err, eyr, er, el, and ell area – we only have two in that area, although people in different parts of England do say them a bit differently. And I expect you’d have trouble with vee and wee, because we have two sounds there where you only have one sort of halfway between our two – one of ours is almost into the end of your el and ell area. Those aren’t the only examples, either.”

“Without knowing English, that’s an idea that’s quite hard to get my head round. Oh, with words it’s easy enough. I grew up bilingual in Liimi and Laana, and you get that effect there. Maybe not as much, but enough to be conscious of it. But Liimi and Laana use the same script, and the pronunciation works pretty much the same way. What does English writing look like?”

But her great grandfather, from Liimiha, wrote in Laana, not Liimi. I wonder why? I’ll have to ask her later.

“Oh, I can show you. We’ve got an alphabet of twenty-two letters, but each of them can be written in two or three different ways. One of the differences is a bit like your printing and cursive forms – it’s the difference between a printed book and handwriting. The other is something Laana doesn’t have at all. It’s called capitals and lower case. You can write in all capitals, but writing is usually mostly in lower case, with capital letters just at the beginning of some words, or for emphasis. Most capital letters are the same in printing and handwriting, but lots of the lower case letters look different. I’ll draw them all for you.”

The handwritten forms were easy enough of course, but I found drawing the printed forms quite difficult, which took me by surprise.

“Goodness me! Complicated. But I suppose Laana writing seems just as complicated to you.”

“Well, at first it didn’t seem to make any sense at all, but it didn’t take Aila long to explain it enough that I could see the patterns. And I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it. But every time I think I’ve got it all into my head, something new turns up! And of course I need lots of practice, or it will slip away from me again.”

“If once you learn the twenty-two letters of English in all their forms, is that it? Or do new things keep turning up in English, too?”

“Well, no new letters turn up. But there are punctuation marks – a lot more than Laana seems to have, unless your great-grandfather didn’t use them all. And English uses combinations of letters in weird ways, so although you can learn all the letters and punctuation quite quickly, you have to learn how to write every word individually – you can’t tell from the pronunciation, although you can often make a reasonable guess. The other way round isn’t so bad. If you see a word written you can usually guess what it is – if you know the word. If you don’t know the word, you can make a guess at the pronunciation, but it might be a bit wrong. At least with Laana, if you can read a word you know how it’s pronounced.”

“Well, you know how well-spoken people will pronounce it, and if you pronounce it that way, people will think you’re well spoken. Not everyone speaks like that.”

“Aha! Last time I was in Briggi, Peyr took me to an inn down by the river for a meal, and I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”

“That probably wasn’t Laana at all, though. Mostly the river men talk Maara.”

“Peyr seemed to understand them okay, and he was talking back in plain Laana.”

“Well, they’d understand Laana okay, of course. But how Peyr comes to understand Maara, if he does, I don’t know. But he’s a one, that Peyr, full of surprises. Good brain. Pity he never got an education.”

“How’s a man from a poor family going to get an education, Graamon?”

“That’s a good question, Viina. One we could do with an answer to, but I don’t have one. But look at all the wasted effort trying to educate rich children with no brains, and all the wasted brainpower of poor people with no money.”

“There’s something in that, Graamon, but it’s not that simple. In England, some poor people do get an education. Well, they all do up to twelve, but those who do particularly well sometimes get sponsored to continue beyond that. But usually those people either end up rich and leave their roots behind completely, or they end up frustrated because despite their good education, rich people don’t take them seriously and they feel they can’t achieve much without money. And poor communities need some clever people to deal with the poor communities’ issues just as much as rich communities need them – maybe more.”

“That’s an interesting thought. In fact, that could be a perspective changing thought. Hmm. I shall think about that.”

I already had a high opinion of Graamon, but that raised it higher still. A willingness to reconsider things like that is not common.

“Owen...you’re nodding off. You should go to bed. Breakfast back to your normal time in the morning, Graamon?”

“That’ll be fine, Viina. He’s had a long day, look at him!”

“Same length as yours, Graamon, near enough.”

“Yes, but it’s all new to you. I know how much more tiring that is. See you in the morning!”

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