by Guy Haley
“Forty-one, he’s eight years my senior, but we were very close when we were young.”
“How close?”
“Friend close, Mr. Quinn! He was like my brother,” she said.
“Alright, alright. Closer than that, things get tangled.”
He was weighing up the journey. The danger. What was in it for him? Knights have honor and nobility and all the things they should have, but these great virtues weren’t intended by the angels to be wasted on little folk. They are the levers and fulcrums of kingdoms. And no matter how well disposed to you a knight might be, they ain’t hell-bent on suicide.
“You will be paid,” she prompted.
“You’re offering a lot of money,” he said.
Mom must’ve told him about her silver. That scared me.
“It is.”
I tensed.
“I’ll try harder then to be accommodating,” he said without rancor. “Alright. I’ll do it,” he said. “But from now on, you and the boy do what I say, when, and how. Your lives will depend on it. Are we clear?”
“I understand, Mr. Quinn.” My mother’s voice was light with relief. “Now that our business is concluded, I will retire. Wake me when it is my turn to take watch. And . . . Thank you, Mr. Quinn.”
Quinn said nothing, but I imagined him nodding, and staring into the fire lost in thought. My mother bedded down next to me, letting in a draft of cold air as she lifted our blanket. Under her pillow of rolled clothes she’d have a knife in her hand. What she thought she could do to a man in full armor with a knife like hers, I don’t know. But she’d have died finding out if she had to. A wolf howled out in the woods, and I shivered, wishing the fire were higher. My mother snuggled into me, bringing me her body heat.
“Hush,” she said. “Hush.”
It was a while before I could sleep again. My ears strained for sounds. More than that, I wondered how much of her money Mom had promised the knight, and if he’d kill us and take it all.
Fact of the matter is, it turned out she’d promised him half. We got a good deal, because the Emperor’s Punishment, the dragon, roamed the woods between Winfort and Charleston, and our road went right through its territory.
My mother woke me in the morning with a gentle shake and a gentler kiss. “Get up, Abney, it’s time to go,” she said softly, breathing the words onto my face along with her love. For a second I felt safer than I had in a long time.
Gray cloud clotted the sky, thicker toward the east and the mountains I’d never seen. I smelled rain. It wasn’t properly light, but dawn was close.
“Sun’ll be up soon, we best be going,” said Quinn. He threw a bit of wood onto the embers of the fire; bright flame leapt up out of the white ashes. “Son, your mom and me made a deal. I’m taking you all the way to Winfort. Make us some breakfast, and make it quick. I want us over the Winfield bridge within five days. The way should be easy going until we get there. Once we get over, that’s when things will get hard.”
“Do as Mr. Quinn says, Abney.”
“Yes, Mom,” I said. As if I wouldn’t.
The Emperor’s Railroad
AFTER TWO DAYS we came upon the Emperor of Virginia’s railroad.
We heard the railroad before we saw it; the creak of wood and leather, iron wheels grinding on iron rails, the shouts of men, the clop of horses’ hooves. Quinn took us a sharp left, down a long, gentle slope onto one of the great roads of the Gone Before. Roads are like rivers, they always join together to make a bigger road, then a bigger road, until you get onto one so wide you don’t see what they was half the time, until you suddenly notice that this wide flat was made by people. There must have been a whole lot of people back in the Gone Before, to move all that soil and rock.
It was on the remains of one of these highways that the emperor had built his railroad.
The old road had been cleared right back to the bottom of the embankment. The amount of trees they’d felled was staggering, and the road again cut a broad scar through the forest that had hidden it for hundreds of years. With the full scope of the road revealed, it made me think what marvels they made in that age, before the angels came.
This hadn’t all been done to awe folks like me. In the middle the emperor had made two new roads of graded stone either side of a rail line. There was a train going on by, forty horses dragging a line of three flatbed trucks piled high with lumber. Twenty men went with it, some to manage the horses and the flatbeds, the rest to stop either being stolen. Most of them were armed with crossbows and armored in mail, and prowled up and down the walking boards of the flatbeds.
The rails gleamed in the sun, stretching out in a long, lazy curve. The road on the far side of the railroad was reserved as a towpath for the rail horses. The nearside was free for the traffic of citizens such as ourselves.
Our wagon settled onto the paved road, and I was amazed at how smooth the ride was. After the emperor fell, the road hadn’t been so well kept up, but compared to what I was used to it was like gliding over ice, even with the potholes and such, and that knotty bit of wood for a rear axle.
The rail horses plodded, the flatbeds moved slow. Our wagon was faster, and we outpaced them soon enough. I was glad, because I didn’t like the way the guards were looking at my mom.
Civilization cut harder into the woods the closer we got to Charleston. At first there were stockaded homesteads isolated in the trees. Brave people living that far out of Charleston, or those who like to keep to their own. The two go hand in hand sometimes. Maybe when you don’t like other people much, the forest doesn’t seem so bad. I sometimes get the notion that living in a town ain’t what God intended for us, all rammed up close cheek by jowl, nosing into each other’s affairs, all that sinfulness. The Garden of Eden sure weren’t like that. Towns is God’s punishment.
More traffic came onto the road. We passed another lumber train. Charcoal ovens and wood cookers stood in clearings. The number of farms grew, until the forest lost so much ground there was more farmland than trees, and stepped fields marched up low, naked hills. The walls round the farms got lower, became stout fences.
A view opened up, wider than any I’d seen before. In the distance I saw a city, the biggest place I ever saw. I stood on the seat to get a better look.
Quinn looked at me, the gawking farm boy. He nodded ahead.
“That there is Charleston,” he said. “Second city of the Kingdom of Virginia.”
“I never thought I’d see the railroad, now I’m seeing Charleston,” I said. I think standing up high on the wagon and looking down on Quinn helped me keep my wits.
“This is just a spur, son. We’re coming up to the main line soon.”
Not long after, the railroad split in two and curved off to the left and to the right to join up with a double line. This was differently made, and I knew it instantly as work of the Gone Before. Sure enough the rails and all must have been new, but the ballast and the carved terrain it ran through were the handiwork of the ancients.
The road went over a bridge over the railroad, and merged with another road, this one also built on centuries-old groundworks, and very busy. On the far side of that was a broad river; the Kanawha, green and sluggish as a snake in winter.
The road crossed the Kanawha on a huge bridge. This was another of the works of the Gone Before, much patched and fortified, the first and last piers crowned by twinned stone gatehouses. We went up onto it. The gates were open, but every person was required to stop and pay a toll, and the traffic ground to a halt high over the water.
Another wagon drew up by ours. “You’ll be here a while, kid! You’ll have plenty of time to enjoy the view,” said its driver. He was dirty, but honest dirty. His wagon bed was crammed with barrels. “I got a cargo of good cider here. Whenever I’m coming into town I’m thinking I’ll be here long enough for it to turn. But you know what?” he said with a conspiratorial smile. “I always says to the old lady, well then, I’ll sell them vinegar!” he laughed at his own j
oke. Quinn gave him a dark look.
“Mom?” I said.
The bridge was crammed with people. More people than I’ve ever seen. Fifty or so wagons, all types, wanting to get through, more coming from behind. People on foot, carrying baskets full of goods. All kinds of folks, all kinds of wares. Such a thing to be going to the city, and we weren’t even in it yet.
“Alright, Abney, but to the side of the bridge, no further, don’t go where I can’t see you, and make sure you keep pace with the wagon when we get moving, it might appear like we’ll be here a while, but you get lost in your daydreaming and we’ll be through without you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Then I was off the side of that wagon fast, I had to see!
I went to the edge of the bridge. Walls of crumbling concrete bounded it. A cold breeze came off the water, but it was refreshing, and I laughed into it. It brought tears from my eyes. Fall is my most beloved time of year, that feeling you get from the mixing of all kinds of weather. You can feel the sun hot on your skin, hot enough to burn you should you take your hat off. But the air is often cold, and the wind colder still. It’s four seasons all of a time.
Beneath me was a goods yard for the trains, a docks beside. The main line of the Emperor’s Railroad comes up on the south bank of the river. Trains take goods off the river, back overland to Huntingdon on the Ohio where they can be loaded up on boats again. The Kanawha joins the Ohio, but it was thoroughly blocked before the confluence, and there was the dragon up that way besides.
There were three big cargo ferries coming and going dragging themselves over on ropes, sail barges coming down the river from the east, but none coming upstream from the north.
On the other side was Charleston. The town’s there on a spur of land caught between the Kanawha and the Elk. The rivers give good protection from the dead, but there’s a wall fronting the river just the same on account of Virginia’s frequent warring with Ohio. Broken blocks quarried from the buildings of the Gone Before made up its footings, stone on top of that, taller than anything I’d ever seen. It fair took my breath away, but Charleston was a mean old town. Five thousand souls cut off from the wild lands of the north by no more than ten feet of rock. It was more a fort than a home. South of the river is softer lands, Charleston’s where Charleston is more for reasons of history than sense.
There was another, smaller bridge on the other side of the Kanawha, going over the river Elk into the city. Another gatehouse had been built across that. There were the remains of several other bridges on both rivers. They’d all fallen in, leaving their piers behind as vertical islands and their decks in the water as ragged weirs where they’d not been cleared. Charleston looked bigger than it actually was. An arm of the wall came out from the main part, running a few hundred yards along the river to shelter the northern docks. I found out that behind that wall, on the landward side, was nothing but ruins and pumpkin patches.
Outside the precincts of the present town were the foundations of the Gone Before. Around the town as much as could be had been torn down, the past scraped away to give an eyeline to the perils of the present. But even on the northern hills there were fortified farms overlooking the city, their terraced fields full of dead maize stalks and apple trees, and a couple of little villages too, thready smoke rising from their forges and fireplaces.
If I could have climbed those hills right then, I’d have seen nothing but forest on the far side. There were no men there, excepting Winfort. To the northeast it was even wilder. The further you went away from Charleston toward the southeast, the more evidence of people and their works you can see on both sides of the river. The Kingdom of Virginia’s a patch of godliness either side of the mountains, but Charleston’s a frontier city. To the west is Ohio. North is deadly country, a kingdom of monsters whose lords are the angels. Somewhere far north was the Dreaming City of Pittsburgh. But there wasn’t any way through to get to it.
And we were heading into the very edge of the wildlands to the Winfort. It’s still wild north of here, but back then it was wilder.
Nine tall chimneys came up out of the city, all of them pumping out smoke. There were more, if the columns of steam were to be trusted, lower than the walls. A harsh smell blew on the wind when it turned to the north; tanneries, chemical works, wood cookers. In the river were three dozen or so paddle-wheel platforms, moored to the bridge by thick chain rising up to the deck. These turned night and day in the flow of the river, making electricity. Charleston is a free town, they got a charter there and so some leeway for the science of the Gone Before. There are lights that burn all night. The angels don’t mind it there. It is permitted. They were mighty proud of their lights in Charleston, kept pointing them out to me. Quinn thought they mattered not a horse’s shit.
There were seven towers set into the circuit of the city walls. All were big, blocky, stone and scavenged concrete halfway up their height, timber the rest. All except one, bigger than most, made of new concrete and so being all smooth and of a piece. Stories back home had it that the Emperor of Virginia had the knack for making such, and that he had built that tower with old knowledge for his wars, and that was why they called it the Emperor’s Tower. But that was before I was born, and stories is all I had.
Stories filled my sight that day. The works of the Gone Before were everywhere around the city and the river: concrete and moved earth, the greened mounds of ruins. Far out in the woods, the leaning skeletons of tall towers, and one topped with a dome like a cracked eggshell. They must have been such buildings, but these were a ways from the new town.
Truth is, all that’s left of the world before is just hints for those who know what to see. If the river was a snake, then the old world was its sloughed skin, discarded and dead on either bank. The wooden houses and farms of today’s people looked mean and small by the wreck of the past.
I took my hat off, let the purity of that wind draw out my joy, and a little sorrow besides. I’d not had time to mourn for my friends and kin in New Karlsville, I was trying so hard to be brave for my mom, and I did not want to trouble her with my tears. You got to remember most everyone I knew was dead, dragged down by the unliving. All my friends, my teachers—hell, even my enemies, such petty and terrible ones as a youth can have. Confronted with all the ruin around Charleston, the corpse of the past alive with the work of men like maggots, something broke in my heart, and the tears coming out of my eyes suddenly weren’t all down to the wind.
“Quite the view, ain’t she?”
A man came up on me unawares. I blinked my tears away hurriedly, wiping them away on the back of my hand. I felt such a fool, snotting and blubbing like a baby. “Yeah, uh, yeah. I guess so.”
“Say, my boy, are you alright? You appear to be a trifle discommoded, if you don’t mind me speaking so baldly.”
I shook my head, but I minded. Boy my age then doesn’t like it when his weaknesses are there for all to see. The shame a boy that age can feel is mighty powerful.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Abney,” I said.
The man made a funny expression. Of course that’s his name, he seemed to be saying, why are you telling me? Everyone knows Abney!
“Pleased to meet you, young man. The name’s Theo Germaine, an introduction that is as germane as the name.” He chortled, then skipped over my lack of comprehension, waving it away with his hand. His other went to my shoulder and squeezed me companionably. He was a funny looking fella, with a dirty red jacket with feathers of all kinds hung along the seam of the sleeves like buckskin tassels. He wore a wide-brimmed hat with a kind of bowl-shaped crown I’d never seen before. His hatband had beads all around it, and more feathers, wrapped and dressed the Indian way, lying flat along the left side. A pair of goggles with smoked glass were about his neck, on top of a shirt as dirty as his jacket. He smelled of woodsmoke, liquor, and engine grease.
“What brings you to the fine city of Charleston, jewel of the Kanawha!” He said this in a way that coul
d have been ironical or not. Like he was leaving it up to me to decide what he really meant, to see if I’d laugh. Men like that are dangerous, I had a sense of that even then.
“Passing through,” I said.
“And where might a fine young man like you be headed?”
I didn’t care for the way he was examining me. I tried to pull back, but he gripped my coat hard, wrinkling up my shirt and vest underneath.
“Just passing through,” I repeated.
“A smart boy! Very wise to keep your doings close to heart.” He released me and cupped his chin, patting his cheek with his fingers. “How’s about I show you around? I know a good hotel, a better bar, and the best whorehouse. Good rates all, but I can get you a finer deal. My name’s known about these parts, and the ladies’ll part their legs for a fine-looking boy like you for less. You’ll secure yourself a fine discount. What do you say, lad?”
I blushed a raging red at this talk of sex. He was hoping I’d hop along with him, a happy little frog right until the moment I jumped into the pot. I shook my head.
“No thank you, sir,” I mumbled.
“Sir, is it? Sir?” The man’s good humor was turning, becoming hard as a cobble. “I told you, boy, the name’s Theo, Theo Germaine! Call me Theo, go on.”
“Theo,” I said.
“There, that wasn’t so hard! Come, have a drink with me.”
“I gotta be getting on, sir.”
I made to step around him, get between a pair of horses and the wagon in front of them, but he blocked the way. I looked to the driver for help. He made no move, but kept on watching.
“Reconsider; you won’t get a better offer.”
I tried to shove past, but Theo was stronger than me.
“Let me by!” I said.
There was something sharp at my ribs. Germaine looked me in the eye, said nothing, as he panted his strong liquor breath in my face.