On the Train
Page 7
“Yes, Captain!” The soldier—Hanouk—saluted smartly. Now that he’d been told what to do, he would do it as well as he could. To Javan, he said, “Come on with me. We’ll get you stuff, all right. I know where there’s a buffalo that needs slaughtering, I do.”
The farmer who owned the buffalo seemed astonished to get paid for killing it. (Hanouk seemed astonished that Javan should pay him, too.) The buffalo…Well, no one asked the buffalo’s opinion.
Several soldiers helped Javan carry the meat back to The Train. They stared at the carriages in undisguised curiosity. “You were—you are—riding on it?” one of them asked.
“I sure am,” Javan said.
“How lucky is that?” the soldier said to his buddies. They nodded. Most of the time, Javan wasn’t sure riding The Train was better than staying where he’d been born. Different, certainly. Better was less obvious. Not during a war. He knew when he was well off, and knew better than to rub the soldiers’ noses in it.
Siilo cut capers in front of his grill when Javan came back with the roughly butchered buffalo meat. It was more than he could cook up himself. In a low voice, he asked Javan what it had cost. As soon as he knew, he sold some of it to the other snack-sellers. He didn’t lose money on the deals—oh, no! They paid without hesitation: it was pay or have nothing to sell.
“Even the dining car pay me for meat soon! Meat and vegetables and what all you can get!” Siilo kissed Javan on the cheek. “Dining car pay me! That never happen before.”
“Um…” Almost getting shot left Javan less worried about standing up to his boss than he might have been otherwise. After that momentary pause, he plunged ahead: “Some of what you make comes to me. I’m the one who’s taking the chances, after all. If I don’t get what I deserve, why should I bother?”
“Don’t you worry. I treat you square, I promise,” Siilo said.
“All right.” Javan nodded—it was. Siilo was a rogue all kinds of ways, but when he gave his word he kept it.
He also must have realized that Javan was going to make money for bringing back food any which way. It wasn’t long before Bordric sidled up to Javan, silver wire in his big fist. “Here, kid. Get what you can for me, too, will you?”
“I’ll try.” Javan wondered how far Uharto’s safe-conduct would stretch. He was going to find out.
It worked fine for the first day and a half. More snack-sellers than Bordric alone entrusted their money to him. He warned them he was going to charge a commission on anything he got for them. They grumbled, but they couldn’t really pretend to be surprised. Sighing, one of them said, “I’ll just bump up prices to the passengers. If I haven’t got anything to sell, I can’t do that. And I guess you aren’t in this for your health.”
Javan wondered about that health when a squad of soldiers tramped up to him while he was haggling with a tuber farmer. He was getting tired of having deadly weapons aimed at his midsection. Telling that to the men holding those weapons struck him as unwise.
“You are Javan,” said the corporal in charge of the squad. The rank badge on his tarncape was almost impossible to see, much less read. The authority he wore was more easily visible.
“I am,” Javan agreed.
“Come with us,” the corporal said. In case Javan had any hopes of finishing his dicker, the underofficer killed them with one more word: “Now.”
Go with them Javan did. They brought him to a colonel. The middle-aged man studied the document Uharto had given him. Then he said, “We have a prisoner here. Do you know him?”
At his gesture, more soldiers led out a very unhappy man in The Train’s blue livery, hands cuffed behind his back. Javan said, “His name is Manolis. He works in the dining cars.”
“Thank you, Javan!” Manolis exclaimed in halting Pingasporean. “I was only trying to—”
“Shut up,” the colonel said flatly, and Manolis did. The colonel went on, “He did claim he was trying to buy food for those people. But he speaks our language so badly, I thought he might be a Namilan spy.”
Beaky-nosed, heavily bearded Manolis looked more like a Namilan than an onion did, but not a whole lot more. Javan started to say so. The soldiers’ firespears and storm rifles gave him second thoughts. He contented himself with, “He does travel on The Train. He’s been on longer than I have.”
“If you vouch for him…” The colonel made a sour face. He’d wanted to be a spy-catching hero, maybe a spy-killing hero. He turned to Manolis. “Go back to The Train. Stay on it. If we find you again, you will not have the chance to make any more stupid mistakes. Do you follow me?”
Manolis nodded, but he asked, “How I get things to eat for passengers?”
The colonel pointed to Javan. “Get them through him. He already has a safe-conduct from our military, and he speaks Pingasporean better than a funny-looking monkey like you. Do you understand that?”
Something in Manolis’ jade-green eyes said he understood it entirely too well. However angry he might be, though, he couldn’t do anything about it. He gave another tight-lipped nod. The colonel ordered his hands freed and told off soldiers to take him and Javan back to The Train.
Manolis started swearing in Traintalk on the way there. The corporal who’d seized Javan shut him up sharply: “Talk so I can know what you’re saying.” Manolis kept as quiet as a tomb till they were aboard once more.
Then he let himself go for a minute or two, in Traintalk and a gurgling language he’d probably grown up speaking. When he ran down, he went back to Traintalk: “Not your fault, Javan. You saved my backside there. The dining cars will buy through you.”
As he had with the other snack-sellers, Javan warned, “I’m going to take a cut on the deals.”
“I should hope so! I sure would,” Manolis said. “As long as you don’t screw us too hard, how can we complain?”
“All right. I just wanted to make sure you understood.” Javan didn’t stay on The Train any longer than he had to. That tuber farmer was eager to sell. And well he might have been. Javan could give him a better price than he would have got from the Pingasporean soldiers. Javan wouldn’t shoot him if he groused about prices, either.
Late that evening, Javan told Siilo about his adventures. The old man hugged himself with glee. “Oh, wonderful!” he said. “Wonderful! Snack-sellers always buy from the dining cars. Where else can we get anything to fix and sell? But now they got to buy from us! They bought from me. Now they buy from you. Give it to ’em good!” A pump of his arm showed how he wanted Javan to give it to them.
“Manolis warned me not to get too greedy,” Javan said.
Siilo pumped his arm again. “What he do? What any of those blue-clothes bastards do? They pay, that’s what! All on account of two stupid cities go to war!” He cackled like a laying hen.
One of the cities that had gone to war was the one where Javan had been born. He started to remind Siilo of that. But what was the point? Whichever reasons Pingaspor and Namila had found to quarrel about, going to war over them seemed pretty stupid to him, too. Stupid or not, he could take advantage of it in a way he couldn’t have if two different cities had started wrangling.
He could, and he did. A lot of silver wire passed through his hands over the next few days. Most of it went to nearby farmers. Some went to the soldiers who still kept an eye on him. But some of it, now, some of it stuck.
Luisa’s eyes glowed when he handed her some of what he’d made. “We can do a lot with this,” she breathed.
“I know,” Javan said. “It’s not how I would have wanted to get hold of money, but.…” He shrugged. “In Dongorland, it would have been somebody else. It’s always somebody, though. It has to be. If it’s no one, we all go hungry.”
Luisa counted the lengths of silver wire again. “Almost, I will be sorry when they fix The Railroad,” she said. “Almost.”
The repair crew couldn’t come out from Pingaspor. The length of The Train blocked it from the stretch of track that needed repair. Javan’s city and Namila had to arran
ge a truce so a crew could come east from Namila through the lines to do the work. From the gossip Javan heard, neither Namila nor Pingaspor wanted to do that. What they wanted to do was to keep fighting.
But the rest of the cities along The Railroad started screaming at the two warring towns. They all depended on The Train, and they all suffered when the schedule failed. If Namila and Pingaspor ever wanted to do business with those other cities again, The Train had to start rolling.
And so, a white flag flying in front of them, the crew came the wrong way up The Railroad from Namila and went to work. Javan whispered in Luisa’s ear. She wasn’t the only passenger on The Train from Namila. Of course not—nowhere near. But she was the one who went out first to translate for the repair crew. And she was the one who got paid for doing that. She didn’t make as much as Javan was bringing in, but every little bit helped.
“They can’t just repair the rails. They have to take them out and replace them—they’re good for nothing but scrap metal now,” she told Javan. He nodded; that squared with what he’d seen up ahead of The Train. Luisa went on, “And they have to rebuild the roadbed before they can do that. I don’t know what kind of weapon Pingaspor used on The Railroad, but it was a bad one.”
“How do you know it wasn’t something from Namila?” Javan answered. “We’re still inside Pingasporean territory, so your people could have been shooting it at mine.”
Luisa looked surprised. “I didn’t think of that,” she said after a moment. “I guess they could have been.”
And that was as much as the two of them wrangled over whose city was to blame for what. Javan had an opinion about whose fault it was. No doubt Luisa did, too. They didn’t start waving those opinions over their heads. Why bother, when neither one could prove his or her opinion was the only true one? Sometimes—often—not starting an argument in the first place was better than winning one.
Javan could see that. Why couldn’t Pingaspor and Namila?
Still flying their flag of truce, the Namilan repair crew headed off to the west, through the lines and back to the city from which they’d come. Now white flags fluttered from every car on The Train. You would think nobody could dare shoot at it as it rolled along the track on its endless journey. You would think so, but you might be wrong. If flags of truce made even one hotheaded soldier not pull the trigger, they were worth their weight in gold.
When the whistle howled and The Train at last began to move again, cheers rang out in every passenger carriage—and in the converted freight car where the snack-sellers worked. Javan joined the cheers. Everyone else would have given him a hard time if he hadn’t. He had enough common sense to see that.
He felt a pang even so, though he also had sense enough not to show it. Wars ruined people. Wars could ruin whole cities. Only a few lucky folks came out of wars better off than they’d gone in. He’d been lucky this time, and he didn’t know when or if that kind of luck would ever come his way again.
They were getting near the front. He could tell because the explosions in the distance he’d got used to hearing while The Train was stopped weren’t so distant again. Some of them seemed tooth-rattlingly close, the way they had right after the emergency stop. Maybe the flags of truce weren’t even worth their weight in bedsheets.
Javan was walking through the carriages with a tray of super extra delicious snacks when they passed from Pingasporean-held land to territory that belonged to Namila. All he could see out the windows was devastation. Would whoever finally got to keep this terrain want it after the war was over? Javan knew he wouldn’t if he ruled a city.
He asked Siilo for a little time off when The Train came in to the depot at Namila. His boss raised an eyebrow. “You want a good look at city that is enemy?” Siilo asked.
“Sim.” Javan nodded. “I want to see if they’ve gone crazy, too.”
“Of course they crazy,” the old man told him. “How you fight a war if you not crazy?”
But Siilo let him go. Javan realized he hadn’t just made money while the war stopped The Train. He’d also built up a much larger store of goodwill than he’d ever enjoyed before. Siilo let him cash in a little of that now.
As he’d seen before, buildings in Namila looked different from the ones in Pingaspor. Namilan uniforms were different from the ones Pingasporeans wore, too. These tarncapes were longer; these fritzhats had a little more flair in the brim. The camouflage mix here had a bit more green and a bit less brown. The posters weren’t the same as the ones that shrieked from walls and fences in Pingaspor. They weren’t the same, no, but they shrieked just as loud.
Also the same were the relieved looks on the faces of the handful of Namilans who passed their cordon of soldiers to board The Train. They could have marched off in tarncapes to fight with firespears. Many of their friends and relatives would already have done that. They were getting away instead. No wonder they looked relieved.
When Javan went back to work, Siilo caught him and asked a one-word question: “And?”
“And you’re right,” Javan said sadly. “They’re crazy, too.”
The old man nodded. “See? What I tell you?”
Javan didn’t ask Luisa if she’d had a chance to see what had become of her home city. But when they got together the evening after The Train left the Namilan depot, she seemed uncommonly subdued. If you paid attention, some questions answered themselves.
There was one fight between a Pingasporean who’d boarded just before the war started and a Namilan who’d come aboard right afterwards. After the other passengers in the carriage broke it up, both men acted ashamed of themselves. The rest of the newcomers from the squabbling cities either ignored their opposite numbers or went out of their way to make friends with them. They wanted to forget the war, not to keep it going.
Everyone wanted to forget the war. The cooks and stewards who ran the dining cars certainly did. Before long, they started jacking up what they charged the snack-sellers. If the snack-sellers had to pay more, they’d need to raise their prices. And if they did, more passengers would go to the dining cars instead.
“They’re thieves,” Bordric said. Javan’s head bobbed up and down; he felt the same way. The big man eyed him. That pale gaze was disconcertingly keen. In thoughtful tones, Bordric went on, “They wouldn’t have the nerve to play these stupid tricks if you were doing the buying for us, Javan.”
“You don’t think so?” Javan didn’t squeak in amazement, but he came close.
“No. I don’t,” Bordric answered, his deep voice altogether serious. “How about it, Siilo? If I give him money, do you mind if he buys for me?”
“He take his own cut, bigger than he take from me,” Siilo warned.
“Sim, sim.” Now Bordric sounded impatient. “Of course he will. He’s your baby, not mine—you found him. But don’t you figure I’ll still do better buying through him than letting the dining-car bandits slice me and dice me?”
“Could be,” Siilo allowed. “If they remember anything, could be. But who know for sure?”
“Who knows anything for sure?” Bordric rumbled. “Worth a try, though. If it doesn’t work out, how am I worse off?”
The boss steward who haggled with Javan didn’t have a long, pointed nose like Bordric’s, but he looked down it as if he did. His name was Zulman. “Why should you get any special bargain, young fellow?” he asked scornfully.
“Don’t ask me.” Javan kept his own voice mild. “Why don’t you go and ask Manolis?”
Like most people’s, Zulman’s skin was too dark to show a flush well, but the way his nostrils flared and his lips narrowed said he would have turned red if he could. “That has nothing to do with anything,” he said, sounding chillier than any ice elemental.
“No?” Javan tried his question again: “Why don’t you go and ask Manolis?”
Zulman’s nostrils flared anew, but in a different way: he snorted through them. “So he can tell me how much you cheated us when the shoes were on your feet?”
“Why am I not surprised?” Zulman broke in.
Ignoring him, Javan finished, “—but I didn’t think it was fair. The way you’re gouging us now isn’t fair, either. You know it isn’t. That’s why you don’t want to talk with Manolis.”
“Don’t tell me why I want to do things,” Zulman snapped, still in those frigid tones. “Wait here. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.” He heaved his bulk out of his chair—who could imagine a skinny steward or dining-car cook?—and lumbered away. Would he really talk to Manolis or only pretend to? Javan couldn’t do anything about it but wait, so he did.
When Zulman returned, he looked even less happy than he had before. Javan wouldn’t have believed he could. “Well?” the young man asked.
“Pleh!” Zulman said: a sound of pure disgust. “I suppose, since you snack-sellers whine so much, we may possibly be able to make certain minor adjustments to the revised price structure.”
Javan needed to work through that to realize he’d just won. “What kind of adjustments?” he asked cautiously. Was this a halfway victory or the real thing?
Zulman wanted it to be a halfway victory, if that. Javan kept haggling. He kept not getting excited. At last, the boss steward threw his hands in the air. “All right. All right!” he said. “You have the old price back. For Siilo and for Bordric, you have it.”
“What about other snack-sellers who go through me?” Javan tried to sound as naive as he could. He knew that, if he got a better deal than other people did, they would want to go through him.
Zulman could see the same thing. “If they come late to the dance, they have to pay more for the ticket,” he said.
“How much more?” Javan wanted it still to be worthwhile for the others to work through him. The more snack-sellers who used him as their buyer, the more commission he could collect. He and Zulman dickered a while longer. Eventually, he got the boss steward down to a point where he could still make money while charging latecomers less than they would pay buying direct from the dining cars.