Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Perhaps not quite everywhere,” Priya said. “Perhaps we simply didn’t go far enough. What would you say to a much longer journey into the west?”

  “Into Persia?”

  “Yes, into Persia.” Priya patted her hand. “Though I’ve heard that they call it Eran now.”

  Asha shrugged. “I really don’t care what it’s called.”

  Priya smiled. “I didn’t think you would.”

  Asha smiled back, just a little.

  Chapter 7

  Asha paused at the top of the trail to look down on the valley below. The sun hung in a colorless sky, glaring down on high gray stone and low brown earth without a single glimmer of green in sight. She squinted back over her shoulder. There was a sound on the wind, something so faint and distant that it couldn’t be more than the last dying echo of some soul beyond the farthest horizon, and yet Asha heard it. A shudder in her ear. A thrum. “There’s something out there, somewhere.”

  Priya shuffled up beside her, tapping the hard stone path with her bamboo rod in search of jagged cracks and loose gravel. Shaded within the folds of her flower-strewn hair, Jagdish slept on the nun’s shoulder twisted over onto his back in a precarious pose.

  “Is it dark?” Priya asked.

  “No. It’s noon, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

  “But it’s so cold.”

  “I know. It’s these mountains. They remind me of home.”

  Priya nodded. “You know, when I suggested that we journey into Persia, into the Empire of Eran, I was hoping to meet new people, to learn and teach and share with the strangers we would find. I don’t suppose you can see any strangers out here for us to find, can you?”

  Asha sniffed. “No. But there is smoke rising from beyond the next ridge. Feel like walking a little farther?”

  They descended the rocky path with the chill mountain wind whistling through the narrow ravines and crevasses gouged across the face of the slope. Small stones clattered down from time to time, but Asha never saw any other signs of life. No goats or sheep. No rabbits or mice. Only a lone vulture hovered high overhead.

  “What if it isn’t real?” Priya asked.

  “What?”

  “Eran. Maybe it’s just a myth. Maybe when we left Rajasthan, we stepped off the map into some no-place beyond the edge of the world.”

  Asha shrugged. “Maybe. But there is a path. And there is smoke.”

  Priya smiled. “If you say so.” She daintily adjusted the cloth that covered her eyes.

  They crossed a dry stream bed at the bottom of the valley and began climbing the far slope. Once again at the top of the trail Asha paused to survey the land ahead. She said, “I think we’ve found the edge of Eran.”

  At the bottom of the next valley stood a small city of dusty brown tents clustering around large fire circles. Long latrine pits ran along the north side of the camp, and long wooden houses stood along the south side. But through the center of the camp was a strange road made of stone, wood, and metal. The bed of crushed stone rose above the level of the earth, and heavy square-ended timbers lay at regular intervals on the stones, and twin steel beams rested on the timbers. The strange road ran as straight as an arrowshot from the foot of the mountain ridge where Asha and Priya stood all the way to the western horizon.

  And sleeping on the steel road bed was a dragon.

  It was long and black, scaled in iron, with dozens of carriages resting on hundreds of wheels, and a thin column of white steam rising lazily from the pipe on its nose.

  “What do you see?” Priya asked.

  Asha shook her head. “I’m not sure. But I don’t like it.”

  They descended the path toward the camp. Below them, hundreds of men trudged back and forth from the ridge carrying or dragging sacks of small stones and sledges of large stones. The sounds of shovels and picks cracking away on the hard stone echoed across the camp with the steady rhythm of falling hail, and from time to time a man would shout in an angry voice.

  At the bottom of the trail Asha moved carefully through the streams of men carrying heavy stones and empty sacks. Only a few of them bothered to cast a weary glance at the tall woman in the yellow sari or the small nun in the saffron robe.

  “Asha?” Priya paused. “I don’t recognize some of the languages I’m hearing. Do you?”

  “Yes. I speak some Eranian. Or Persian, as they called it when I was a girl. But a lot of these men are speaking something else. Afghani, I think.”

  A fresh chorus of shouts drew their attention to the row of wooden houses along the south side of the work camp. A man wearing dark green robes stood on a raised platform barking orders at several grim-faced brutes carrying whips and clubs. The man in green pointed at the two women.

  “Trouble,” Asha said. Her hand went into her bag, feeling past little clay jars of ointments and paper packets of ground seeds to the steely tools at the bottom. Her fingers closed around a small scalpel.

  Two of the men with whips strode toward the women. They scowled and spat as they crossed the yard, and when they came closer the tall one said, “You there! No women! No prostitutes! No women in the camp! What are you doing here? Where did you come from? No women in the camp!”

  Asha held up her empty hands and spoke slowly and loudly in her best Eranian, “We are not prostitutes. I am an herbalist. A healer. This is a nun. We come from India.”

  The men exchanged a look and a few muttered words, and then the shorter one jogged back to the man in green. The remaining brute ran his hand through his short beard. “A healer? From India?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “We are traveling west to see the great Empire of Eran.”

  The man frowned deeper. “You are on a pilgrimage?”

  Asha glanced at Priya. “Yes. Yes, we are.”

  The man nodded slowly. A moment later his short companion jogged back again and whispered in his ear. The bearded one nodded more emphatically. “The master says you must stay here and tend to our sick men.”

  Asha raised an eyebrow. “We must?”

  Priya touched her friend’s arm. “We would be happy to stay here a short while to offer what help we can to your men,” she said in Hindi.

  The bearded man looked a bit confused but seemed to interpret her words to indicate compliance, so he pointed to the left and led the two women through the camp past smoldering cook fires, rotting food swarming with flies, and dusty tents that blew open from time to time to reveal the dusty blankets lying on the rocky earth. Finally they came to a cluster of tents at the western edge of the camp where their guide pointed at the ground. “Here.” And he walked away.

  Asha pressed her lips together for a moment. “Here?”

  There were eight tents around the last fire pit and all of their entrances were curtained to hide the men within them. But from nearly all of the tents came the soft coughing and retching of many sick bodies.

  Priya nodded. “Here.”

  * * *

  Asha entered the first tent unannounced and found four men lying on the ground trying to share a pair of tattered blankets. They were all coughing almost without pause, sometimes grunting softly into their closed lips and sometimes roaring with congested barks and shouts, to be followed by exhausted groans, gasping, and spitting. Small specks of blood dotted the ground and the side of the tent flaps.

  Nudging Priya back, Asha unslung her shoulder bag and knelt by the head of the closest man. He rolled his eyes up to focus on her for a moment, murmured something unintelligible, and resumed his coughing fit.

  “Is it contagious?” the nun asked.

  Asha leaned down to listen to the man’s wet and ragged breaths. Then she peered at his lips and nostrils and the small black flecks of blood on the blanket. “No. I’ve seen this before with coal miners. It’s the dust. It’s in their lungs. They should be wearing masks when they work.”

  “Is there anything you can do for them?”

  The herba
list shook her head. “I can’t. Once the dust is in the lungs, there is no way to remove it. They’ll continue to cough like this for the rest of their lives.”

  “So they will live?”

  “Maybe. If they haven’t inhaled too much dust, then maybe.”

  Priya exhaled slowly. “Are you certain there isn’t something you might try? There may not be a treatment for this dust-cough yet, but that doesn’t mean that one cannot be created.”

  “No,” Asha said. “Maybe with enough time and enough materials and tools, I might be able to find a way to make them more comfortable. But this is not a new or exotic condition. It’s been studied for years. There’s nothing I can do for them now, not without better supplies.”

  “I see.” Priya nodded. “Then we must go to the men in command and tell them about the masks and other precautions to safeguard the workers’ lives. Yes?”

  Asha frowned. “They didn’t strike me as the sort of men who cared too much for their workers’ well-being. I think we should wait for evening and then leave when no one is watching.”

  “No.” Priya stroked the long mongoose on her shoulder. “Someone must speak for these men. Someone must help them.”

  “I wish I could, but I told you, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Then it falls to me. I will do something.”

  Asha narrowed her eyes. “Like what?”

  “Take me to the man in command.”

  “I don’t think that would be wise.”

  “I understand that. Take me. Please.”

  She almost said something else, but Asha simply pressed her lips together, shook her head, and led her friend briskly back through the camp toward the wooden houses at the southern edge of the field. One of the grim foremen noticed the women coming and he stepped inside one of the houses only to emerge a moment later with the man in the green robe.

  “Is this your camp?” Asha asked.

  “I sent you to tend to the sick men,” he said.

  “And I—”

  Priya touched Asha’s arm and the herbalist fell silent. The nun said, “Sir, we have been to see your men. They suffer from an incurable cough caused by the dust from the digging. There is nothing we or anyone else can do for them.” Asha translated her words into Eranian.

  The man sighed. “That’s what I feared. Well, if they cannot work, then we’ll get rid of them and find others to take their place.”

  After Asha translated his reply, Priya said, “Sir, these men will need your help to return to their homes, but even then they may not be able to work to support themselves and their families. Surely a man of your wealth and resources will want to help care for them?”

  The man in green smirked and shook his head. “The railroad must be completed on schedule. I have no time or money to waste on men who can no longer work.”

  “Railroad?”

  He pointed at the black beast lying on the steel rails. “The Trans-Eranian Railway runs for thousands of leagues across Ifrica and Eran. Soon it will reach the countries of the Far East as well, and our steam trains will race across half the world.”

  “Why?” Priya asked.

  The man blinked. “Why?”

  “Yes, why? What is it for?”

  “To travel! To trade! To cross the breadth of the empire in mere days instead of weeks.”

  “But what is it you hope to find in Rajasthan and India? What is there in the east that you so lack in the west that you need this railroad to reach it so quickly?”

  The man stared at her in silence, his eyes narrowed and brows thrust furiously together with a sea of wrinkles on his forehead.

  “My friend and I are journeying into the west,” the nun continued. “I suppose we might reach distant places sooner using your railroad, but then we might miss all of the places along the way. All of the people. All of the sounds and tastes. And if we miss our own journey, then what was the purpose of the journey at all? We might as well stay at home if we wished to see and hear and learn nothing new.”

  The man’s glare faded into weary annoyance. “Obviously, you don’t understand.”

  Priya smiled. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked the question. But we have wandered far from our original purpose here. The men. The men who are sick will not recover, and the men who are still working are in danger of becoming sick as well. What will you do about this?”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “Masks,” Asha interjected, not waiting for Priya to answer. “A heavy strip of cloth to cover the nose and mouth, and to be soaked in water at least once an hour to keep the dust out of their lungs.”

  The man squinted a bit. “This will keep them healthy enough to work?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “All right. It’ll mean more water, which is precious right now. I suppose I’ll think about it.”

  Before Asha could reply, a deep crackling sound echoed up from the earth beneath their feet, and then a single titanic boom shook the ground. A pale brown plume of dust erupted from the work site at the eastern end of the camp, and the workers came running out of the dirty cloud.

  “Damn,” the man in green grimaced. “What now?”

  * * *

  Asha and Priya followed the man into the brown haze as the workers streamed past them covered in dirt and blood, coughing and limping and clinging to one another.

  “What happened?” demanded the man in green. He grabbed one of the workers. “What happened in there?”

  “The tunnel collapsed.” The worker coughed. “More than half of it.”

  “Why?” The man in green shook him. “Why?”

  “A vein.” The worker coughed again. “A vein of silver, I think.”

  The man in green shoved the worker aside.

  “I can treat the injured,” Asha said. She pointed to a cleared space on the south side of the railroad tracks. “Bring the injured men to me over there.”

  The man in green nodded. “Fine. What do I call you, healer?”

  “I am Asha of Kathmandu. And this is Priya of Kolkata. And you?”

  The man frowned at her. “I am Master Sebek.”

  Asha led Priya through the crowd of men and the cloud of dust, calling out that all the injured men should follow her. A small knot of limping and bloody workers began moving toward her, and soon she had them sitting or lying in rows while she assessed their injuries. Sprains. Broken arms. Broken legs. Concussions. Cracked ribs.

  When she reached the last man in the last row, Asha turned to survey the crowd. “I thought there would be more. Many more.”

  “If there are,” Priya said, “then they must still be in the tunnel.”

  For two hours, Asha tore sheets into bandages and smashed tent poles into splints. Several young men volunteered to help hold the injured men still while Asha wrenched their bones back into place, and so for two hours the air was filled with sharp cries and screams as bodies were slowly put back together.

  When she was finished, Asha left Priya to administer what meager pain killers she had brought in her bag and went in search of the man in green. She found Master Sebek near the mouth of the tunnel interrogating two of his foremen, two squinting men covered in dust and scrapes. She stopped a dozen paces away to wait for him.

  “You’re certain it was gold?” Sebek asked.

  The men nodded.

  “How long? How long did you know about it? A minute? An hour?”

  “Only a few minutes,” the thin foreman said. “A man ran up to me with the rock in his hand. I was trying to look at it by torch light when the first timber snapped.”

  “The timber snapped.” Sebek turned the tall foreman. “The timber snapped, and now my tunnel is only half a tunnel, the gold is buried, and the railroad is falling behind schedule. Because the timber snapped.”

  The tall foreman swallowed. “Yes sir.”

  Master Sebek drew his short sword and pressed the tip against the tall foreman’s shirt. The cloth blackened and began to smoke, and the man sh
uddered, his face pouring with sweat.

  Asha squinted at the distant sword. It was shining with a bright golden light. She glanced up at the sun, only to see it hidden at that moment behind a thick white cloud. And yet the sword shone brightly.

  The tall foreman began to babble in Eranian so quickly that Asha could not tell what he was saying. She started forward again, and was about to call out to the men when Sebek’s hand leapt, the shining sword darting into and out of the tall foreman’s belly in the briefest instant. A trail of black smoke followed the foreman as he fell to the ground. Sebek sheathed his sword and the empty space between him and the thin foreman instantly dimmed into shadow.

  Asha froze. She had seen how shallow the thrust had been, and even a deep cut to the stomach could sometimes take hours to kill a man, and yet… the man on the ground was not moving. He was not even breathing.

  “How long?” Sebek asked. “How long to recover the tunnel and reach the gold again?”

  “Five days,” the foreman said calmly.

  “Get it done. And place the timbers closer together this time.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The man in green turned back toward his wooden houses but stopped when he saw Asha standing in the middle of the dusty field. “How are the men?”

  “They’ll live,” she said softly, her eyes straying to the dead foreman. “Most will be able to work again in a few days or weeks.”

  Sebek nodded.

  “What about the other men? The ones still in the tunnel?”

  Sebek shrugged. “They’re dead.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “If they aren’t dead now, they will be by the time we unearth them. Don’t concern yourself with them. Worry about the living. I want every man on his feet as soon as possible. If you succeed, you’ll be well paid.” He began to walk away.

  “I don’t need money. I just want to reach the next town to the west.”

  He paused. “Fair enough. You can ride the train back to Herat when it goes back for supplies in two days’ time.”

  “Thank you.” Asha nodded, her eyes once again returning to the dead foreman. “But two days is not much time. What if I cannot return any of the men to work?”