The Silver Arrow

by Lev Grossman

  They all stood together as a grove, and it was the calmest Kate had ever felt in her life. If she’d had to stand here like this as a girl she would’ve been bored silly, but as a tree she was never bored. She wasn’t waiting for anything, or wishing she were somewhere else, she was just here, just now, all the time. Weeks went by while Earth spun like a carousel and the sun and moon and stars wheeled dizzily overhead.

  Day and night changed places like a game. Birds weren’t afraid of her, they loved her and nested in her branches. A friendly giant, she listened to the frisky low-level chatter of the little plants around her and the shadowy whispering of the fungi below that. It wasn’t all fun; there were pain and strife, too. Insects and caterpillars fed on her. Birds pecked holes in her. Lightning licked down and scarred or demolished trees seemingly at random.

  Autumn came and she let go of her leaves—it was a relief, really, as though she’d been wearing a lovely ball gown that had gotten slightly uncomfortable and now she could finally take it off. When winter arrived she felt the cold but didn’t mind it in the slightest, though sometimes the weight of ice made her ache. She dozed.

  Then spring came, and she was washed by fresh rains and warmed by the new sun, and she came alert again. Her gorgeous leaves burst out like the feathers of a beautiful green bird. Years later, when she tasted champagne for the first time, she would remember being a tree in springtime and think: Yes. This is like that.

  Summer was a grand feast of sunlight—but almost as soon as it started, something unexpected happened. She was… shrinking?

  Her head dropped below the mist again, slipping down away from the sun. Her leaves and her branches—her magnificent, multitudinous branches—were withering, and her roots were letting go of the soil, pulling back up out of it like a ship weighing anchor, preparing to set sail again.

  And then she opened her eyes, and there she was. That’s right. She was Kate. She’d forgotten her name, but that was it: Kate. She was a girl. It was all coming back to her. Everything was so different: She was small and soft, and she wasn’t rooted in the ground, she wandered around loose. She could see and talk and move, but she couldn’t taste the soil or the sunlight anymore. What a weird way to live.

  Everything looked the same as it had before. She was standing right in the same spot. The mist, the forest… did it all even happen? Was it all a dream?

  But if it was a dream then the others had dreamed it, too. They were blinking and shuffling their feet. Kate felt lost and unsteady, being unplugged from the earth like that.

  “We were trees,” Tom said.

  It was all anybody really needed to say. They walked a little shakily back toward where the train was still waiting. Next to it stood a great big pyramid of firewood, all neatly stacked.

  And many old voices thought together in Kate’s head:

  Remember this.

  17

  He Thought He Could

  THE SILVER ARROW’S FIRE WAS STILL GOING WHEN THEY got back, though only barely. Kate and Tom fed logs into it till it was big and blazing again, and they set out along the branch line, running on wood now instead of coal.

  Leaving the misty forest behind, they clickety-clacked through miles of empty fields. Kate opened the doors and looked out at the grass skimming past. It was funny: From a moving train, things close to you slipped by so fast they were blurry, whereas the trees on the horizon looked like they were barely moving at all. Then the tracks merged with another set of tracks coming in from the right, so smoothly she didn’t even feel a bump, and just like that they were back on course again, on the main line.

  They got back to their regular routine, picking up animals and dropping them off, in lush rain forests, flaming autumn forests, frozen arctic forests of evergreens, dry thorny scrub forests, flooded swamp forests. Kate took ticket after ticket: AL-ANSARIYAH MOUNTAINS, MAOLAN KARST FOREST, CROTHERS WOODS, DYREHAVEN, FORÊT D’ÉPERLECQUES, LONE MOUNTAIN STATE FOREST. As quiet and dignified as they were when they got on, the animals were always excited to get where they were going—they scampered and loped and fluttered out through the doors the second they opened.

  The Silver Arrow stopped for ibex and chinchillas. It picked up a massive bison who looked totally bizarre close up, like a bull from another planet, though he carried himself with great dignity. They picked up a pair of mighty-winged, bald-headed condors and a black-and-white-banded snake called a Malayan krait who was so venomous that she made even the mamba nervous. At one station a delicate, airy glass greenhouse car was added to the train, full of different-colored fluttery butterflies. They dropped it off again a few stops later.

  Once they rumbled through a long tunnel under a mountain—miles long, it felt like. Kate worried for a second that the library car wouldn’t fit, but it did. She switched on a light in the cab. (Interestingly—or Kate found it interesting—even though there were electric lights on the train, they actually ran off power from a little onboard electric generator that itself ran on steam power.) When they finally spotted a light at the end of the tunnel, it wasn’t daylight, it was the yellow subterranean light of a subway station.

  Men and women and girls and boys stood on the platform, all staring down at their phones. The train stopped and the doors opened. A single well-groomed owl stepped on.

  Kate thought that people might potentially be interested in the fact that a huge steam train full of animals and driven by children had just come roaring into their subway station—but they never looked up from their phones. Not once. They never noticed. It’s like they’re awake but they’re asleep, Kate thought. She swore silently to herself that she would try to never be that asleep herself.

  Kate spent most of her time in between stops in the library car, where she finished the book about the secret underground school-under-a-school and started a new one. They found a fuel depot and switched back over to coal. She explored deeper into the candy car, as far as the Swedish Fish section—she never knew they came in more than one flavor! When it was hot she swam in the swimming pool car, which was exactly as fun as you’d think swimming in a pool on a fast-moving train would be. Tom experimented to see whether he could walk all the way through both dining cars stepping only on tables and chairs. (He could.)

  Kate took pride in keeping the brass fittings in the cab polished and the floor swept—she and Tom were always dropping bits of coal on their way from the tender to the firebox. When she’d first seen the cab it had looked like a mess of random pipes and levers to her, but now she could read the Silver Arrow’s controls like a book. She felt like she had a whole new set of senses: Some part of her mind was always keeping track of the water level and the steam pressure in the boiler, and the heat in the firebox, and how steep the grade was, and where the throttle and the reversing lever were set. (She totally got the reversing lever thing now.) Steam was old-fashioned technology, but it turned out that you could be a major nerd for it anyway.

  They chugged uphill, switchbacking up into a steep mountainside forest. Gray slopes fell away behind them into green valleys, which wandered off and faded away into the distance. But as beautiful as it was, it was hard work climbing mountains. The Silver Arrow kept demanding more and more coal, and going slower, and slower, and slower, till after a while Kate could almost have kept up with it on foot.

  She didn’t want to think what would happen if they actually stopped, or even worse, started rolling back down the mountain. Tom kept whispering “I-think-I-can I-think-I-can” to the train, like in The Little Engine That Could, and the train kept telling him to knock it off.

  I’M NOT DESIGNED TO CLIMB MOUNTAINS. I’M NOT A FUNICULAR!

  “I don’t know what that is, but tell me if we have to start leaving cars behind,” Kate said. “I can live without the boxcars, but I draw the line at the library car.”

  I’M NOT LOSING ANY CARS

  WHAT KIND OF A MONSTER ARE YOU?

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  WE LEAVE NO CAR BEHIND

&n
bsp; EXCEPT MAYBE THE CANDY CAR, I’LL LET YOU KNOW

  Finally, they made it to the top, where there was a pass through the mountains. By this time the Silver Arrow was barely moving at a walking pace. The shadows of the mountains stretched away for miles behind them, spilling darkly down into the valley. For one long minute they were on level ground, and everybody sat back and took a deep breath.

  Then the Silver Arrow tipped forward and started down the other side of the mountain.

  It picked up speed quickly—and kept on picking it up. The chuffing and the clickety-clacking accelerated, slowly at first, but then faster and faster. Kate stuck her head out the window, and the wind hit her in the face. Soon they were really moving, booming down the mountain, faster than they’d ever gone before. Kate and Tom exchanged a nervous look. It was a relief to be making good time again, but maybe this was too much of a good thing.

  “I’m sorry I made fun of you for going slow before,” Tom said. “If this is your revenge, you’ve made your point.”

  I’M NOT MAKING A POINT

  I CAN’T SLOW DOWN

  “Where’s your speedometer?” Kate said.

  DON’T HAVE ONE

  “What?!”

  STEAM ENGINES DON’T HAVE SPEEDOMETERS

  “Were you literally invented in medieval times? How’re we supposed to know how fast we’re going?!”

  Kate could almost feel the weight of the heavy cars behind them, shoving them along. She shut off the steam and tried the brakes, first lightly and then harder.

  OW! MY BRAKE SHOES!

  It didn’t work anyway. She barely felt the difference. It was official: The Silver Arrow had become a runaway train.

  The cab started rocking scarily back and forth. They were cutting across a steep slope, and if they derailed that would be the end—they’d roll sideways, over and over, all the way down the mountain. The animals came crowding forward into the cab.

  “We’ve come to express our concern,” the cat said. “We’re concerned that we’re all going to die.”

  “I know!” Kate said. “I’m braking as hard as I can!”

  “I almost fell on the porcupine,” the snake said.

  “The snake almost fell on me!” the porcupine said.

  “I want you all to know,” the heron said, “that if we fall off a cliff, I will survive by jumping out the window and flying away, but I’ll remember you all fondly and in great detail.”

  “Thanks,” Kate said without much enthusiasm.

  “What’s your brother’s name again?”

  “Tom!” said Tom.

  “I’ll never forget you, Tim.”

  “I can’t believe birds used to be dinosaurs,” Tom said.

  When Kate put her head out the window again, she saw up ahead the worst thing she could possibly see: They were coming up on a tight curve on the edge of a sheer cliff, and they were going way too fast. Their momentum would take them right off it.

  She threw herself on the brake lever and pushed.

  IT’S ALREADY ALL THE WAY ON!

  “If you can transform into an airplane or something, now would be a good time!”

  THAT IS AN UNREASONABLE EXPECTATION!

  It was too late anyway. The Silver Arrow hit the curve and Kate felt the whole train lean out to one side over thin air. Everybody screamed. Kate clung to the cab’s left side, which was on the inside of the curve. Maybe her weight would make a tiny bit of difference?! She could actually feel the train’s left-hand wheels leave the track, and for a horrible instant they were riding the curve on one single rail. There was the toe-curling shriek of steel on steel, and for an unbearably long second they balanced there and time seemed to stop—

  —and then the train crashed back down onto the rails and they kept going.

  The track was straight from there. They rattled down the lower slopes of the mountain and on into the foothills. Kate looked around the cab.

  “Let’s never do that again,” she said.

  “Agreed,” the heron said.

  AGREED

  As soon as she dared, Kate stuck her head back out the window to see what was coming next. She regretted it immediately.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said.

  They’d reached the coast, and up ahead were bright white sand and the wide blue ocean. The tracks led straight down into it.

  18

  The Wise Island

  THIS TIME KATE DIDN’T BOTHER YELLING ANYTHING like “Look out!” or “Oh no!” or even just “Help!” It was already too late. All she could do was watch the wild blue surf come thundering up at them.

  She closed her eyes. If she had to die at the age of eleven, she supposed that crashing into a nameless ocean in a speeding steam train with her brother and a bunch of talking animals at least had some flair to it. She would have an outstandingly compelling obituary.

  But she didn’t die. Instead the Silver Arrow swooshed right down into the water.

  Kate wished she could’ve watched it from a distance because it would’ve looked so cool: The massive black steam engine charged right into the rolling surf, butting and smashing through the waves, throwing spray everywhere, seawater hissing off its hot boiler—and then the water parted and formed a luminous emerald tunnel down into the ocean, and the Silver Arrow shot right down into it.

  Gradually, foot by foot, the tracks descended under the water, following the slope of the ocean floor. Shifting green sunlight filtered down through the ocean overhead, quickly cooling into a deep blue dusk as the tunnel took them farther below the surface. Sound became muffled. Rocks and seaweed and schools of silvery fish rolled past, eyeing them curiously and flashing their bright sides.

  “Wow,” Kate said. “Oh wow. What is even happening?”

  DON’T ASK ME

  BUT IT’S BEAUTIFUL

  Kate reached out the window and let her fingertips skim along the side of the water-tunnel. A big blue blunt-headed fish a yard long floated past, nibbling at rocks, trailing a cloud of smaller fish that clung close to its sides. The Silver Arrow steamed along deeper and deeper under the sea till the water around them was almost black and the air got cold enough that Kate put on her heavy coat.

  The last thing they saw before the light faded completely was the enormous shadowy bulk of a sperm whale gliding slowly and majestically overhead like a blimp. Then the water was as black as night, broken only by the starry lights of a few phosphorescent fish.

  At some point—Kate couldn’t have said exactly when—the tracks ran down under the ocean floor itself, and the blackness became the blackness of an underground tunnel. She turned on the lights. The tunnel lasted for a good half hour before they came back up into dark water, then deep blue, then green, brighter and brighter till finally they burst out into a world of hot sunlight and white sand. It was so beautiful that Kate throttled down and hit the brakes even though they weren’t at a station.

  They were on a low sandy island in the middle of a glittering blue sea.

  Most of Kate’s experiences of beaches hadn’t been at the ocean; they’d been at Lake Michigan, and they’d been a bit of a letdown. To save money, her family usually went in the off-season, when it wasn’t really warm enough, and the beaches were narrow and gray and not very clean.

  This was nothing like that. The sand here was fine and soft as flour and almost as white. It stretched up into a graceful, grassy-topped dune.

  “This is practically my natural habitat!” the fishing cat said, and she bounded off into the water. The heron strode after her, and they proceeded to have a fishing contest, though it was hard to tell who won because they both kept eating their fish.

  The mamba sunned himself in the sand.

  “You warm-blooded creatures can have no idea what this feels like,” he said. “Literally none. It’s what ice must feel like when it’s melting.”

  “I think I have some idea,” Kate said. “I was a tree for while.”

  Kate and Tom took off their shoes and raced each ot
her to the top of the dune, kicking up sprays of sand as they ran. From there they could see almost the whole island: an oval of white sand all by itself in the middle of an infinite ocean. We must be the only people around for hundreds of miles, Kate thought.

  They fetched food from a dining car and borrowed a blanket from the sleeper car and had a picnic.

  The porcupine sat on the blanket with them, contentedly gnawing a carrot. The baby pangolin bumbled around, playing games in the sand. He’d gotten much more active lately, sniffing and exploring everything with his startlingly long tongue. He had four legs but toddled around mostly on two, stooped over like a tiny scaly old man.

  “I wonder how long this is going to last,” Kate said.

  “What, the picnic?”

  “This whole thing. The train, the animals, the adventure. It feels like it’s been weeks. I mean, I love it, but I miss Mom and Dad.”

  “Yeah, I do too,” Tom said.

  “I know we have to get the animals where they’re going, but surely some of them could do it the old-fashioned way. You know. Like geese do.”

  Kate let her mind drift.

  “I wonder if this island has a name,” she said sleepily.

  “Of course it does,” said Tom. “It’s the Wise Island.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “The train told me.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “What’s so wise about it?”

  “Well, you can dig for treasure.”

  Kate liked the sound of that. Though she still didn’t see where wisdom came into it. And she was skeptical, as ever, about anything free.

  “You can dig for treasure anywhere,” she said. “Nobody ever finds any.”

  “That’s the thing! You know how everybody always digs in the sand at the beach but never finds anything? Here, if you dig, you find something!”