Chapter 2: The Ashmount Branch

The first thing everybody learned about the Ashmount branch was that a train can be interesting for about a day and a half.

For the first afternoon the windows on the southwest side were three deep. People who had not looked out of a window on purpose in twenty years stood in the corridors with their arms folded, watching a country nobody aboard had ever seen — low hills going brown at the tops, a river that came at the line twice and thought better of it both times, a stand of dead trees standing in water like a committee that had lost its nerve. Children were held up. Bets were laid on what the next thing would be. An old man in the open carriages announced to anyone within reach that he had always said there was a line down here, which was untrue, and which nobody contradicted, because he was eighty and enjoying himself.

By the second morning the corridors were empty again. It was, Elliot thought, the single most human thing he had witnessed in four years: an entire city presented with the unknown, and finding — after roughly thirty-six hours — that unknown country looks quite a lot like known country, and that there was a queue for the wash-house.

What people talked about instead was the day.

He hadn’t expected that. The train had never run on any natural calendar; the sun outside was a rumour and the loop took fourteen months, so days aboard were named by convention, kept by bells and by habit, and everyone agreed on them in the way everyone agrees on the value of a coin. But the loop was the thing the convention hung from. You knew it was late in the loop because the plains had gone yellow; you knew a Tuesday because Tuesday was the day the farm carriages sent up the eggs. Take the loop away and the whole apparatus started to sag. By the third day Carriage 74 was two days ahead of the tea car, the tea car was a day behind the farm carriages, and the farm carriages had gone over to counting eggs.

The arguments were savage and entirely good-natured. Doss maintained a position on Thursday with the immovable calm of a woman who had never in her life been wrong about anything she cared to be right about. Somebody in 76 was keeping a tally on the wall in charcoal and charging people to look at it, which Fixer described as the only honest business on the train and then, after some thought, tried to buy.

“They’re not frightened,” Elliot said to Plum, watching two men in the corridor conduct a formal dispute about whether it was still the same week.

“No,” said Plum. He was mending a hinge that did not belong to him, in the patient way he mended things that did not belong to him. “They know the way home.”

“Do we?”

Plum turned the hinge over, found the burr he was looking for, and worked it flat with his thumbnail. “Somebody does,” he said, which was not quite comfort and not quite anything else.

They ran the branch at something under half speed, in daylight only, which was the Conductor’s order and the first order in Elliot’s memory that the whole train had approved of unprompted.

The sound was wrong. That was the part nobody had thought to warn anyone about. Four years of the loop had trained every ear aboard to a rhythm — the long steady four-beat of jointed rail taken at speed, so constant that you stopped hearing it and started hearing through it — and the branch didn’t have it. The branch had a rhythm like a man walking with a stone in his shoe. It slowed and gathered and slowed, and every few minutes it dropped a beat entirely where a joint had settled, and twice on the second day the whole long length of the train stopped dead for two hours while the permanent-way gang went forward with bars and a bucket of grease to argue with a set of blades that had not been asked to move since before anyone’s grandmother.

Elliot walked forward to watch them do it, and found the gang in a state he could only describe as professionally offended.

“Look at that,” said the ganger, a broad woman with a face like a closed door, pointing at the blades with a bar. “Go on. Look at it.”

Elliot looked at it. It was, as far as he could tell, a set of points.

“It works,” she said. “Ninety-three years. It’s a bit stiff and there’s a rook’s nest in the box and the tie-bar’s had a knock some time this century, and it works.” She sounded as though she had been personally insulted by this. “You know what a set of points does if nobody touches it for ninety-three years? It seizes. It rusts into one piece and then it cracks and then it’s scrap in a hedge. That’s what they do. That’s the whole nature of the thing.”

“So somebody’s touched it.”

“Somebody’s greased it.” She said it flatly, and then, because she was a professional and could not help herself, she added, “Not lately. Not this year. But not ninety-three years ago either, because if it were ninety-three years ago I’d be looking at a lump.” She spat, not aggressively, the way you punctuate. “Whoever it was did a decent job and didn’t sign for it, and I’d like to know who, because I’d have them.”

Elliot thought about a schedule that said branch, single, in order every year for ninety-three years, in a different hand each time. He thought about a room in a house that everybody dusts.

“You’d have them?” he said.

“On the gang. Straight off.” She was already turning away. “Good hands are good hands.”

They came down to Ashmount on the fourth day, in the last of the afternoon, and Elliot’s first thought — before the wrongness, before any of it — was that somebody had swept the platform.

The country had been flattening for a day. The hills had gone, the trees had gone thin and salt-bitten in a way he had no word for yet, and the line ran out onto a long shelf of scrub above a shallow valley with a road in the bottom of it. And then a wall, and a water column, and three sidings, and a stone building with a slate roof and a chimney that was smoking.

The Meridian came into it at walking pace and stopped, and the hum went out of the floor, and Elliot stood at an open door on the ballast side and looked at Ashmount Halt and knew, in the immediate wordless way you know these things, that he was looking at something that didn’t add up.

Start with the size. The halt was a nothing on the chart: three sidings and a water column, Casper had said, and there they were, three sidings and a water column. But a three-siding halt on a branch nobody had run since before living memory ought to be a hut and a tank and a great deal of grass. This place had a weigh-house — stone, two storeys, with a proper platform crane at one end and an office window with actual glass in it. It had a loading dock with iron rings set into the edge, worn shiny. It had a stone-flagged yard, and the flags had been laid by somebody who cared about flags, and were rutted in two parallel grooves that ran from the dock, through the gate, and away down the road into the valley.

And it had barrels.

Elliot walked the length of the yard with his hands in his pockets and counted, because counting was a habit he had picked up from a woman who was two hundred yards behind him in an office with the window open, doing exactly the same thing. Cooperage stacked head-high along the whole north wall — new barrels, banded, coopered properly, some of them still pale. Coils of cordage under tarpaulin, the rope thicker than his wrist. Crates in slatted stacks with sacking over them, and the sacking was damp, and the damp smelled of something he could not place and which his mouth, embarrassingly, recognised before his head did: it watered.

Nobody standing in that yard was surprised to see a train.

That was the thing. That was the thing he would come back to. There were perhaps a dozen people at Ashmount, and every one of them looked up at a city miles long arriving out of a ninety-three-year silence with mild professional interest, the way you’d look up at a cart being early. A man on the dock went on lashing a load. Two lads carried on rolling a barrel down a plank with the bored competence of people who had rolled a great many barrels down a great many planks. Somebody in the weigh-house closed a window because the smoke was blowing in.

On the wall by the weigh-house door was a slate board, four feet by three, ruled into columns and written up in chalk in a small neat hand.

Cart, single horse, to the water — 3 chits. Cart, pair, loaded — 7. Barrel, to the dock, per ten — 2. Barrel, from the dock, per ten — 1. Standing, per night, covered — 1. Letters — 1 the bundle, ask for Vey.

The prices had been rubbed out and rewritten. Not once — repeatedly, the way a board is rewritten by someone who rubs out a number because the number has changed. Under the chalk the slate was ghosted grey with a hundred old prices.

Elliot stood in front of it for a long time.

He had spent his old life in a job that consisted almost entirely of noticing when two documents disagreed, and then spending four weeks in meetings about it. He had spent four years in this one being paid, deniably, to notice things. And what he was looking at was a tariff: a live, maintained, ordinary commercial tariff, with current prices, at a halt on a line that no train had used in ninety-three years, serving a trade that could not possibly exist, because there was nobody down here to trade with.

“You’re never taking barrels,” said a voice.

She was young — nineteen, twenty — with a tally-board under her arm and the flat unbothered look of someone who has been sent out to deal with something and will deal with it. She was looking past him at the train, and specifically at the doors, doing sums.

“Sorry?” said Elliot.

“Barrels. Only you’ve nowhere to put them, have you.” She nodded at the open door, the packed corridor beyond it, the faces. “You’re all full. I’ve never seen one full.” She said this without judgement, as a fact about a vehicle. “So you’re not taking barrels. Are you taking fish?”

“We’re—” Elliot stopped. Somewhere in the back of his head a small door opened onto a very long corridor. “We’re here for water.”

The girl looked at him.

It was not a look of surprise. It was worse than that; it was the look of a young person being polite about something faintly sad — a look he had last received, if he was honest, from a hotel receptionist in Reading — and she rearranged it almost at once into professional neutrality and said, “Column’s on the up siding. Tank’s full, it’s always full. My uncle greases the swivel.” And then, because he was clearly not going to buy anything and she had a board to fill in: “Water’s free. Everything else is on the board.”

She went off toward the dock.

Elliot stood in the middle of a stone yard, on a shelf of scrub above a valley, four days off the circle, at a halt that everybody dusted and nobody sat in, and looked at a wall of new cooperage and a board of chalked prices and two grooves worn into stone flags by a hundred years of wheels going somewhere.

Then he went to find Casper, and asked him a question that turned out to be the wrong question in the most useful possible way.

“How long,” he said, “has this halt been on our books?”