On the Train

by Harry Turtledove

  Javan remembered the stories about the time elephants had pulled The Train into Pingaspor. He remembered the old, old photographs of the dragons. Did Siilo expect him to sizzle meat and fry tubers over the flame that came from, say, a very small dragon? He couldn’t even ask the question. He didn’t have the words for it, not in Traintalk.

  Above the grill was a small cabinet, also under lock and key. Siilo stashed his spices there. Two shakes from this jar, one from that, a pinch from a third just before things were done… “These others, they all have their own ways to make things,” Siilo said. “Some pretty good, but what I teach you, that’s the best.”

  One of the other snack-sellers jeered at him: “You can say it, but that doesn’t make it so.”

  “Are you talking or farting, Darvish?” Siilo retorted. Everyone laughed but Darvish, who was the butt of the joke, and Javan, who didn’t get it.

  He was busy all the time. He went back to his hard seat only to sleep. He was so tired when he did that it stopped bothering him. What did bother him was that he hardly saw Luisa any more. When at last he did run into her, it was in the queue for the shower stalls again.

  “Where have you been?” she asked him. Her Traintalk was getting better, as was his.

  “Working.” Javan mimed chopping and flipping pieces of meat. Then he peeled imaginary tubers and chucked the skins into an equally imaginary rubbish bin.

  “Oh,” she said. “Good for you. Pretty soon I have to find something to do, too.” She made a face. “That or get off.”

  “It’s a good ride.” Javan’s mouth twisted in a smile more like Siilo’s than he knew. “Or I think so. Now that I work, I don’t get to see out much.”

  “No, I guess not.” Luisa took a couple of steps toward the stalls. So did Javan. She went on, “I thought you were staying away from me on purpose.”

  “Why would I do that?” Javan asked in surprise.

  “I don’t know. But I thought you had some reason, or else you had another friend.” Luisa slid into one of the stalls on the women’s side. The water in there began to run. She couldn’t have heard what Javan answered even had he known what to say.

  When Siilo used a blue flame, gas from a tank fed that flame through a complicated system of tubes and valves. One morning, Javan had trouble coaxing the flame alight. He checked to make sure the burner outlet was clean so the gas could slide out and burn. Everything seemed fine, but he still had trouble lighting it.

  He looked around the crowded converted freight car. Some of the other snack-sellers and assistants were struggling with their grills, too. Others were doing things that didn’t need fire, like kneading dough and chopping vegetables. And a couple just stood around not doing anything, which was something you hardly ever saw in that busy place.

  “What’s going on?” Javan asked after trying once more to light the grill and not having any luck.

  One of the men standing around answered him: “We’re right on the edge of Dongorland, that’s what.” Bordric wasn’t quite as old as Siilo, but he sure wasn’t young. He was of the same race as the big man with the blond braid in Javan’s carriage. He was tall and fair like that fellow, but bald on top. His beard had probably been fiery once; now it was mostly gray.

  “And so?” Javan wasn’t sure he’d even heard of Dongorland. Pingaspor didn’t have much to do with it.

  “And so wait a little while,” Bordric said.

  Javan clicked his tongue between his teeth: an unhappy noise. If he stood there waiting for he didn’t know what and Siilo came in and caught him…That wasn’t a pretty picture. He tried to busy himself with vegetables. Every so often, he’d fiddle with the grill, but he couldn’t make it catch.

  Siilo did come in. Javan waited for his boss to clout him over the head with his tray. But Siilo took in what was happening at a glance. “Dongorland,” he said, and muttered to himself in a language that wasn’t Traintalk. “It’s pretty, but.…” He shook his head.

  Pretty? That hadn’t even occurred to Javan. Since he’d started working for Siilo, he’d been too busy for anything more than occasional glimpses of the outside world. One of the reasons he’d got on The Train to begin with was to see more of what lay along The Railroad than Pingaspor alone. And he had, but not so much more as he’d expected when he came aboard.

  Bordric bent over and peered down through the bars of his grill into its guts. When he straightened, he let out a grunt. “All right,” he said. “I think we’re in business again.”

  “About time,” another snack-seller said. He put meat on his grill. The sizzle announced that it was working.

  Puzzled, Javan looked between the bars of Siilo’s grill. The gas nozzle wasn’t down there. Neither was the baby dragon he’d imagined. But a small salamander smiled up at him. The little magical creature took the nozzle’s place. It glowed yellowish red. The heat coming off it scorched the tip of Javan’s nose and dried out his eyeballs. He pulled back from the grill in a hurry.

  “Oh,” he said. Here was more proof the world was bigger and more complicated than it looked to be in the place where he was born and raised. “Dongorland is this kind of place.”

  “Dongorland is this kind of place,” Siilo agreed. “You tell the salamander how hot you want the grill, it make the grill that hot. But you got to treat it good. Don’t just let it eat the drippings from the meat. Feed it scraps—feed it scraps from what you get yourself, not from what I sell. You keep it happy, it cook fine for you. Better than a blue flame, even. But you make it mad, look out! Either it go cold or it burn off your stupid eyebrows.”

  “Tell it how hot?” Javan floundered. “Does it understand Traintalk?” He eyed the salamander again, cautiously. It was still smiling, still glowing. He hoped that meant it was happy.

  “It understand you,” Siilo said. “Speak whatever speech you please. It feel what is in your heart, what is in your head.”

  “All right,” Javan answered, anything but sure it was.

  As the younger man and the older one talked, the quality of the light inside the converted freight car changed. Shadows that had been steady started to move. If you grew up in Pingaspor or places like Pingaspor, you were used to lamps that stayed in one place. In Dongorland, evidently, they were used to will-o’-the-wisps that swooped and flickered across the ceiling and the tops of the walls. The amount and color of the light they gave wasn’t much different from what had come out of the lamps. The impression was.

  “Do I have to keep them happy, too?” Javan asked.

  “Bou.” Siilo laughed at the idea. “They always happy. Put your hand up to one.”

  Hesitantly, Javan did. He couldn’t touch the will-o’-the-wisp. If you could touch one, he supposed, it wouldn’t be a real will-o’-the-wisp. This one slipped through and past his fingers. As it did, he heard, or imagined he heard, the faintest laughter somewhere deep inside his mind.

  “Take a look inside the ice chest.” Siilo’s voice was sly.

  Javan did. The ice chest ran off a wire, the way the grill ran off its gas line. It had in Pingaspor and points west, anyhow. Not in Dongorland. When Javan unlocked it now, a little blue-green creature, all covered in rime, looked out at him. Its breath made his toes want to shiver in his sandals. That breath had to be the coldest thing he’d ever felt.

  He knew, at least, the proper name for the salamander. For this? No. “What do you call it?” he asked as he closed the ice chest’s door.

  “Ice elemental,” Siilo answered. “It like brandy—strong brandy, so the stuff don’t freeze right away. Same as with the salamander, you got to keep it happy.”

  “Does it get drunk?” Javan asked.

  “Bou, bou.” Siilo shook his head. “Brandy is like food for it.”

  “Food. Right.” Javan waved his hands. Again, he almost but not quite touched a will-o’-the-wisp. Again, it laughed inside his mind. “How long are things like…this?”

  “Till they aren’t any more,” Siilo said. “Now get cracking. No m
atter how things are, people got to eat. I got to sell them stuff.”

  But Javan, for once, didn’t spring into action when the snack-seller told him to. “Maybe they eat fairy dust here,” he said.

  “Some of them do,” Siilo answered with a matter-of-fact shrug. “But I don’t sell it. They got to buy it in the dining car. You make nice to the salamander, grill me up some more meat cubes for the skewers. What I do, I got to keep on doing.” Away he went.

  Make nice to the salamander? Javan did his best. He fed it shreds of meat. He told it how he wanted the grill. And he sang it a song young men in Pingaspor sang when they cheered on their battleball side.

  He had no idea if that helped. He couldn’t see how it would hurt. Whether because of the song or in spite of it, the salamander gave him just the heat he wanted. He sprinkled on the spices the way Siilo had taught him. He hadn’t been cooking long enough to try ideas of his own.

  When Siilo came back to fill his tray, he tasted what Javan had done. After a judicious pause, he said, “Not bad.”

  “Thanks.” Not just the salamander’s heat warmed Javan—Siilo didn’t praise lightly. “Er—Siilo?”

  “What you want?” the old man asked gruffly.

  “What happens if I take the ice elemental out of the chest and drop it on the salamander?” Javan illustrated with gestures.

  Siilo’s eyebrows leaped. “You freeze your hands. Then you get burned bad. Then you get in big trouble, if you still around to get in trouble. That’s what.”

  “But what happens to the ice elemental and the salamander?”

  “You don’t want to find out. Believe me, you don’t.” The snack-seller loaded the tray and left in a hurry.

  After he was gone, Bordric said, “He’s right, kid—you don’t. A long time ago, even before Siilo got on The Train, somebody did that. They buried the fool’s frozen ashes in a jam tin. A little jam tin. And they buried some other people who didn’t do anything but stand too close to him. And they had to fit out a new car for folks like us. And The Train got thrown off schedule.”

  The way he said that made it plain that being late was the worst disaster. Fitting out a new car? Very sad—expensive, too. Innocent people getting killed? Tragic. But The Train couldn’t be late.

  Bordric eyed Javan, who realized he had to say something. He did: “All right. I won’t do anything stupid. I just wondered, that’s all.”

  “Well, now you know,” Bordric growled. His knife flashed as he sliced red and yellow peppers. Javan went back to slicing, too, and didn’t introduce the ice elemental to the salamander.

  The Train pulled into the city of Dongor late that afternoon. Javan was back in the third-class carriage when it did. He’d wheedled a little time off from Siilo: “I’ve never seen a magic city before! Why ride The Train if I can’t see magic once in a while?”

  “Oh, go on.” Siilo cuffed him on the side of the head—more affectionately than not, but not altogether. “Good thing for you you don’t do this kind of silly stuff all the time, though, or I tell you no for sure.”

  Dongor looked like—well, a magic city. In the distance, on a hill, Javan saw a castle with a tall white tower reaching for the sky. Dragons flew through the air. So did smaller gryphons and hippogriffs. Smaller still were…what was the name for those? Were they wyverns? If they weren’t, he didn’t know what a wyvern would be.

  A highway led north from the depot. In Pingaspor and other cities where sorcery didn’t work, a highway would have been paved with stone, or perhaps with asphalt. Beasts or engines would have powered the wagons and carriages that traveled it.

  Here, the highway shimmered like mother-of-pearl under the sun. A carpet piled high with crates glided along it, floating waist-high above that gleaming surface. Next to the carpet rode a man whose robe sparkled with silvery threads. His mount was not a tricycle or a horse but a unicorn.

  And yet the people at the Dongor depot didn’t seem much richer, if at all, than the people who thronged the streets of Pingaspor. Plenty of them were skinny, the way Javan had been skinny when he climbed aboard The Train. Ordinary people—people who weren’t wizards directing flying carpets—didn’t have clothes shot through with silver. Quite a few of them hardly had any clothes, silvery or not.

  Magic, Javan realized, did about the same tricks the mechanical arts did in other parts of the world. It got people things they needed and made them more comfortable than they would have been without it. If it did those tricks a great deal better than the mechanical arts did, Javan couldn’t prove that by what he saw at the depot. It was just…different.

  Then again, some of the people waiting at the depot in Dongor were…different, too. A pair of wingety fairies—Javan could find no other name for them—boarded a first-class carriage.

  When The Train left Dongor, it wasn’t with the bellow of a steam whistle. These warning blasts came from the throats of living things. Were dragons hauling the carriages and freight cars? From his place inside one, Javan couldn’t see. But what else could come out with an unearthly bellow like that?

  As soon as The Train began to move, he hopped up and hurried back to Siilo’s grill. The snack-seller would come out with an unearthly bellow of his own if he decided Javan was goofing off. He’d let Javan have a favor. Javan knew he wouldn’t get another one any time soon if Siilo thought he was taking advantage of him.

  When Siilo came back to fill up his tray, Javan said, “You go up to first class. Did you see the fairies?” The last word came out in Pingasporean. He mimed wings to show what he meant.

  “Fairies.” Siilo said it in Traintalk. “Yes, I go up there. They don’t buy anything from me yet. Too bad. Fairies tip good when they buy.”

  “When we leave Dongorland—when we leave magic—do they keep their wings?” Javan asked. He gestured at the grill, and at the smiling salamander that kept it hot. One of these days, he supposed it would start burning gas again, or maybe chunks of hardwood.

  “They keep wings, yes. But they don’t fly without magic—wings aren’t strong enough.” Siilo plucked at his white goatee. “I don’t think they fly without magic. I never see them do it.”

  “All right,” Javan said. Siilo gave straight answers. Javan didn’t always like his boss—liking someone who worked him so hard wasn’t easy—but he did respect him.

  A day and a half after leaving the city of Dongor, The Train stopped at a depot called Thargorond. Thargorond proved to be an island in the middle of a lake. Mountains rose in the distance. Like Liho, this was a place where The Train was serviced, and so, also like Liho, it was a place where passengers and crew could get out to stretch their legs.

  Siilo didn’t give Javan anything special to do while most people were getting off. The old man knew how much he could demand. He didn’t ask for more than that…most of the time, anyhow.

  When Javan jumped down onto the platform, he was pleased to see that the Thargorond depot boasted a Fredarvi eatery. He was even more pleased at the idea of eating food he hadn’t cooked himself. And he was most pleased of all when Luisa said she’d go into the eatery with him.

  She was serving meals in one of the dining cars now. That meant they both looked at the Fredarvi establishment through eyes different from the ones that had discovered the eatery on the oceanic island.

  But they talked more about what they’d been doing themselves. “We have to figure out how to get together more,” Javan said.

  Luisa nodded. “Sim,” she said; only afterwards did he realize how crushed he would have been had she answered bou.

  Everything was the same at this Fredarvi establishment as it had been in the one at the Liho depot. And everything was different. The tables were made from different wood. Different fabrics covered the chairs, which were made in a different style. Will-o’-the-wisps took the place of LEDs or fluorescent tubes or whatever the other eatery had used for light. No doubt the cooks roasted and broiled and boiled with salamanders rather than gas or coal. And no doubt ice elementa
ls kept raw food cold and the air inside the eatery cool.

  But that air was cool, as it had been at the Liho depot. The furniture here was comfortable, as it had been there. The servers here were also friendly and brisk. And the food was good and quick and cheap.

  Javan raced through his meal the way he had at Liho, but for a different reason. Then, he’d feared The Train would leave without him. He knew better now. But he did want to see the handlers fueling it.

  He hadn’t cared about that at Liho, not to the extent of a fingernail’s length of lead wire he hadn’t. So they put wood or coal or rock oil or whatever they put into the tender behind the locomotive. So what? Unless you ran on wood or coal or rock oil yourself, why would you care?

  When they fed the dragons, though…The photographs he’d seen in Pingaspor both had and hadn’t done the great beasts justice. Those photographs hadn’t been adobed all out of recognition. These green-scaled, crimson-winged beasts were plainly of the same kind as the ones that had amazed his home city by bringing in The Train one day long vanished in the great backward and abysm of time. The colors, the shapes, the dimensions were about what he would have expected.

  But no photographs, not even the most perfect thridi ones that pretended to be realer than real, came close to conveying the power and majesty inherent in dragonkind. Seen for real, seen and heard and smelled (a mixture of old serpent and hot metal), the presence dragons had was like a blow to the face.

  And when you fueled dragons, you didn’t give them wood or coal or rock oil. Oh, no! The pair that were pulling The Train through this stretch of Dongorland tore at the carcasses of some beasts that would have been great except in comparison to them. The stink of blood warred with dragonmusk. Dragons’ teeth were as long as swords, and as sharp, but thicker. Would they even notice slicing up a man? The ancient wisdom smoldering in the dragons’ golden eyes argued that they would. Whether they would care was another question altogether.

  Luisa’s hand found Javan’s. “They scare me,” she said in a small voice.