Sweetness pulled herself on to her elbows to watch the great cathedral disappear beyond the serrated rimrocks. Ribs grated. She coughed, no blood. No breakage. She looked at her feet. Then she looked at the world framed by her feet. From sole of her desert boots to near horizon was rippled red sand. Beyond that, reefs of harsh stone rose to the stripes of yellow and indigo evening cloud that barred the belly of the flying cathedral. Fingers, fists, twisted spires and candysticks of rock, so contorted and weathered they seemed less firmly connected to the ground than the clouds. She looked again at her ten-to-two feet. They seemed hopelessly inadequate for the landscape.
“Well,” she said. “Terrific.”
15
Dazzled by winks of sun from the rim of the silver tea bowl, the boss tanager kept his herd in pace with the slow train. They were handsome beasts, Grandmother Taal admitted, grown sleek on the well-watered Quela rangelands. Muscles moved smoothly under close-fitting striped skins, like acrobatic carnival punchinellos. They had never felt the seat of man, but each bore a patterned plastic ear-tag: owned, numbered, one day to be herded by harrying autogyros, driven up ramps on to a train like this, then taken to the breaking fair at Tzaena-tzaena.
So much for the wide country and the wilds. Grandmother Taal set down the maté bowl, eclipsing the hypnotising blink of sun. The tanagers cantered on, hog-manes bristling, ownership tags rattling. Herd things like to run. Such is their weakness.
The observation car was a glassine cyst on the spine of the last carriage of the ambling High Plains Cruiser, an eccentric rural service out of Hagios Evangelis that stopped at every hillock and hollow before finally creaking to a terminus at Mosquiteaux on the edge of the Big Red. People got on, rode a time, got off, so that the train, though it had many passengers, was never busy. Few went the whole distance. Grandmother Taal was one such transient. The Triskander-Grand Valley Limited Night had made an unscheduled request stop at Strophé, where she had thumbed down the High Plains Cruiser fifty kilometres into its journey. She would ride this train as far as signal NW two twenty-four, then pull an Uncle Billy on the twenty twenty-seven fast mail across the eroded craterlands of Old Deuteronomy.
Therefore, the observation car was sparsely populated. Grandmother Taal had a club booth to herself, to rest her feet on the leatherette banquette, sip her maté through a silver straw, watch the frankly uninspiring landscape flow past, doze and snore knowing that her nearest neighbour, a florid-faced milch-man in quaintly traditional bib-suit and paddy-hat, was five rows away and deeply engaged with the stock prices in the daily gazette. Five rows ahead of him a group of elderly people in funeral whites played cards and nodded gravely to each other. The car’s only other occupants were a family of musicians by the down stairs, making quiet tunes with guitar, zither, tabla and soft handclaps. Strange people, musicians; so much of their souls given out to their creatures of wood and skin and metal, that demanded so terrible a possession when they took them up to play.
Passenger, she decided, is another thing entirely from track, but by no means inferior. She looked out at the rolling green grass and the cantering tanagers. Their perfect mindlessness lulled her off to sleep.
A tinny clink woke her. A boy’s face loomed over hers, close enough to read his teeth stains. He held up the maté straw and set it in the tin bowl. Hairbrush epaulettes and crimson rick-rack around his lapels identified him as a Stuard.
“More maté for madam?” He held up a long-handled biggin. She could tell from the corners of the Stuard boy’s mouth that between one cup of maté and its refill, word of the Asiim Engineers’ disgrace had passed down the High Plains line.
“If you please.”
He refilled the enamelled tin bowl with the aromatic tea. Grandmother Taal fished in her bottomless bag for centavos. The Stuard boy held up his hand, scandalised as if she had offered him her own mummified excrement.
“There is no charge, madam Engineer.”
Grandmother Taal gave his back her oldest and vilest Engineer gestures as he unctuously worked his way down the aisle. The big-faced milch-man had been replaced by an anaemic couple who touched each other’s hands every few seconds. The funeral party had left to perform their obsequies. Across the aisle from their pitch was a sallow-faced young man in a cartwheel hat and duster coat buttoned to the throat. The musicians had opened wicker lunch boxes and were feeding forkfuls of noodles to the tiniest. The tanagers had galloped elsewhere, and the view from the window was of dreary altiplano freckled with upright Deuteronomy farms. The folding vade-mecum told her North West two twenty-four was hours yet at this gentle plod across the trampas. Too dull, this land, these people, this life, for anything other than sleep.
A start. She felt the face before she saw it, or heard the voice. That warm, slightly oily feeling of being observed without your knowledge or permission, that you have been observed for some time. Smell of a watching face. Grandmother Taal opened an eye.
“Madam, your maté has grown cold.”
In her eye was a dapper man of early middle years, slim as a rapier, dressed in a frock suit of crushed plum. He wore no hat, but his hair had been greased and slicked until it shone like gloss paint. Likewise, two long mustachios, waxed and tweaked to the sheen of ebony, swooped away from his upper lip. Grandmother Taal opened her other eye, all the better to three-dee this wonder. Hollow-cheeked, pale, almost olive-skinned. Poor complexion, cratered with orange-peel skin and the memories of childhood pox-scratchings. Eyebrows shaved to the merest hint of expressivity. Over his left eye, a brown leather patch. He carried a cane almost as slender and sharp as his mustachios. He wore gloves.
“I don’t care much for the maté,” Grandmother Taal said. “It is bitter. It has been stewed.”
“Yes,” the man said thoughtfully. “The service on this route is substandard. I may write to the Line Manager.”
“You would be better employed writing to the chief Stuard.”