“Truly I didn’t.”
“What was it then? Something I ate?”
“No. But there are some questions—”
“That make me sick.”
“—that have answers you don’t want to hear.”
“What do you take me for?” Gentle said, his tone all quiet contempt. “I ask a question, you fill my head with so much shit for an answer that I throw up, and then it’s my fault for asking in the first place? What kind of fucked-up logic is that?”
The mystif raised its hands in mock surrender. “I’m not going to argue,” it said.
“Damn right,” Gentle replied.
Any further exchange would have been impractical anyway, with the sound of the train’s approach steadily getting louder, and its arrival being greeted by cheers and clapping from an audience that had gathered on the platform. Still feeling delicate when he stood, Gentle followed Pie out into the crowd.
It seemed half the inhabitants of Mai-ke had come down to the station. Most, he assumed, were sightseers rather than potential travelers; the train a distraction from hunger and unanswered prayers. There were some families here who planned to board, however, pressing through the crowd with their luggage. What privations they’d endured to purchase their escape from Mai-ke could only be imagined. There was much sobbing as they embraced those they were leaving behind, most of whom were old folk, who to judge by their grief did not expect to see their children and grandchildren again. The journey to L’Himby, which for Gentle and Pie was little more than a jaunt, was for them a departure into memory.
That said, there could be few more spectacular means of departure in the Imajica than the massive locomotive which was only now emerging from a cloud of evaporating steam. Whoever had made blueprints for this roaring, glistening machine knew its earth counterpart—the kind of locomotives outdated in the West but still serving in China and India—very well. Their imitation was not so slavish as to suppress a certain decorative joie de vivre—it had been painted so gaudily it looked like the male of the species in search of a mate—but beneath the daubings was a machine that might have steamed into King’s Cross or Marylebone in the years following the Great War. It drew six carriages and as many freight vehicles again, two of the latter being loaded with the flock of sheep.
Pie had already been down the line of carriages and was now coming back towards Gentle.
“The second. It’s fuller down the other end.”
They got in. The interiors had once been lush, but usage had taken its toll. Most of the seats had been stripped of both padding and headrests, and some were missing backs entirely. The floor was dusty, and the walls—which had once been decorated in the same riot as the engine—were in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. There were only two other occupants, both male, both grotesquely fat, and both wearing frock coats from which elaborately bound limbs emerged, lending them the look of clerics who’d escaped from an accident ward. Their features were minuscule, crowded in the center of each face as if clinging together for fear of drowning in fat. Both were eating nuts, cracking them in their pudgy fists and dropping little rains of pulverized shell on the floor between them.
“Brothers of the Boulevard,” Pie remarked as Gentle took a seat, as far from the nut-crackers as possible.
Pie sat across the aisle from him, the bag containing what few belongings they’d accrued to date alongside. There was then a long delay, while recalcitrant animals were beaten and cajoled into boarding for what they perhaps knew was a ride to the slaughterhouse and those on the platform made their final farewells. It wasn’t just the vows and tears that came in through the windows. So did the stench of the animals, and the inevitable zarzi, though with the Brothers and their meal to attract them the insects were uninterested in Gentle’s flesh.
Wearied by the hours of waiting and wrung out by his nausea, Gentle dozed and finally fell into so deep a sleep that the train’s long-delayed departure didn’t stir him, and when he woke two hours of their journey had already passed. Very little had changed outside the window. Here were the same expanses of gray-brown earth that had stretched around Mai-ke, clusters of dwellings, built from mud in times of water and barely distinguishable from the ground they stood upon, dotted here and there. Occasionally they would pass a plot of land—either blessed with a spring or better irrigated than the ground around it—from which life was rising; even more occasionally saw workers bending to reap a healthy crop. But generally the scene was just as Hairstone Banty had predicted. There would be many hours of dead land, she’d said; then they would travel through the Steppes, and over the Three Rivers, to the province of Bern, of which L’Himby was the capital city. Gentle had doubted her competence at the time (she’d been smoking a weed too pungent to be simply pleasurable, and wearing something unseen elsewhere in the town: a smile) but dope fiend or no, she knew her geography.