The shrill steam slid through the trees: the train, ready to leave, was calling for passengers. Had his footwear been more stable, the Frenchman would have jumped for joy. Instead, he squeezed his friend’s hand with a mighty happiness, especially for one so small, and they moved on towards the sound, the Frenchman leading and pulling the long frame of his laughing, stooping companion through the leaves and high grass.
He saw the stillness set before his eyes, heard everything stop, just before he was yanked off his feet by Seil Kor coming to a sudden halt. Everything was arrested: the birdsong, the rustle of leaves, the shudder of life’s continued existence. He scrambled up, preparing to ask his friend for explanation, when he saw his guide hollow. The electricity and moisture, the pulse and the thought, the tension and the memory – all had drained out of him, into the ground. Seil Kor crashed to his knees, breaking some of his straight fingers in their vertical collision with the earth; they snapped like dry twigs, but he did not notice. The Frenchman broke out of his shock and rushed to embrace his friend, who toppled into his arms. There was no weight; he had become a wildly staring husk. His eyes, which darted to and fro, were the only sign of life.
‘HELP! HELP! FOR GOD’S SAKE, HELP!’ he screamed towards the trains. He found the Derringer with its last cartridge and fired into the air. ‘HELP, PLEASE, HELP!’
Then, just as he heard people running to their aid, the sound of something else reached his ears, turning his blood to water: a laugh, so close that, for a moment, he thought it was Seil Kor himself. It hung in the air around his dying friend.
‘Hello?! Hello! What is wrong?’ bellowed an approaching stranger. ‘Where are you?’
The Frenchman retrieved his voice from a sickly, viscous shell beneath his stomach and called again for help, in the feeblest of tones.
They carried Seil Kor to the wooden hut station and laid him on one of the hard pews. Nobody knew what to do. He was cold and stiff, with not the faintest sign of breathing, but his eyes worked frantically, seeking the faces of all in the room. They sent for the overseer from the workforce on the train. The Frenchman held his friend’s damaged hand, two of the fingers pointing comically at the ceiling. He thought about straightening them in an attempt to change the reality of the moment, to tidy the discordant and form a splint to normality by fussily adjusting the details. Maclish arrived, and was confused by the tableau.
‘Please help my friend!’ pleaded the Frenchman.
Maclish came closer, putting his hand on Seil Kor’s chest and touching his fingers to Seil Kor’s throat. He saw the darting eyes and recognised the condition, quickly realising that the intended recipient was not the man lying prone before him: the Orm had taken the wrong man.
‘Your friend?’ he said, his anxiety inappropriate and incongruous, but lost on the flapping state of the Frenchman.
The Frenchman agitatedly explained their journey and what had just taken place. Maclish’s culpability turned him stern and distant. ‘He can’t stay here, we have to get him back to the city,’ he said brusquely, stepping outside and shouting commands along the platform. Two of the workers looked up and loped towards him. He pointed at Seil Kor and barked out more instructions, in a tongue that nobody else present understood. They lifted him up from the pew and started carrying him along the platform, past the hissing train and its waiting carriages. There was no urgency in their actions and the Frenchman was enraged to see that both of the Limboia were grinning.
‘What are they laughing at?’ he demanded of the Scotsman.
‘It’s just their way, they are not all there,’ he said, tapping his forehead with his index finger.
The Frenchman suspected at once that this was true, and was convinced of it when he saw the vacant men carry his friend past the carriages and off into the perspective distance drawn by the flatbed trucks, which now bristled with stacked trees. ‘Where are those idiots taking him?’ he squealed, rushing after them.
Maclish groaned and stomped after his loping run.
‘Stop! Stop, take him back!’ he shouted at the grinning workers, as they carted his friend into the distance like a piece of game. They ignored him and plodded on, getting further and further from the passenger carriages and the Frenchman’s comprehension. Maclish barked again and they slowly halted, like clockwork winding a slow release. The Frenchman tugged at his friend but he was held firm between the workmen, who looked down at the small man without interest or recognition, the smiles never leaving their greasy, blank faces.
‘Tell them to take him back to the compartment!’ demanded the Frenchman of the Scot.
‘He is not going back on the train,’ said Maclish, ‘he is going back on a flatbed with the trees.’
For a few moments, the Frenchman was lost for words, panting and twitching on the other side of speech. Then he let fly with a tirade of demands and abuse while the Scotsman became red and even more stoic, as if his growing colour was a swelling gauge of his inflexibility.
‘He’s dead, man!’ said the Scot emphatically, as if talking to a child. ‘He is not going in any of the carriages!’
The Frenchman was stamping with rage, so much so that his left shoe finally gave up the ghost and sprang from his foot with a flourish of something like embarrassment. The Limboia ignored the growing argument as the hanging body, limply slung between them, swayed slightly, its eyes paying fierce attention to the discarded shoe.
‘HE IS NOT DEAD! YOU WILL BE MADE TO PAY FOR THIS OUTRAGE!’ the Frenchman bellowed at Maclish’s back as the Scotsman resumed his walk towards the back of the train.
Maclish shouted a command over his shoulder and wound the Limboia into walking mode again, the deflated Frenchman hobbling slowly behind. They halted at the last flatbed and deposited the body on the hefty wooden floor, securing it with heavy metal chains. A wall of equally lashed trees lay steeply next to Seil Kor, their sap oozing everywhere. Maclish pulled on the chain to test its fastening. He spoke again to the Limboia, who lost their smiles and ran back to their compartment. On his way back to the head of the train he passed the Frenchman, who spoke first.
‘Where shall I go?’
Maclish bit his tongue and directed his gaze away from the Frenchman’s eyes. ‘Wherever you damn well please,’ he said.
The small man took in the length of the train, trying to conjure a decision from his confusion. The whistle jolted him, but it was suddenly already too late: with much clanking, the train started to move, the engine’s iron wheels shrieking on the sap-wet iron rails, its massive load teetering forward. He ran to Seil Kor, and threw himself on the flatbed as it gained momentum, the other shoe flying off and disappearing into the undergrowth.
As the train gathered speed, its load shifted, shaking the flatbeds with bone-jarring regularity. Seil Kor showed no signs of life; his body trembled with the bumps of the track, but all else was inert. The Frenchman held on tightly, one arm covering his friend protectively, the other hooked around the chain. He had closed his friend’s eyes: the intensity of them staring out of the handsome, expressionless face had been too much for him to bear. It had taken four attempts to shut them; he eventually resorted to smearing the thick tree juice over his friend’s lids. It broke his heart to treat those once-beautiful eyes so roughly, but it felt necessary. He still believed that the energy they showed was a sign of survival, and that his friend’s present condition might be a form of coma or sleeping sickness; similar things, seen before in his lifetime, allowed him to retain a little optimism. He would find a doctor the moment they arrived in Essenwald, with enough knowledge to awaken his beloved friend and restore him to brimming health. This was his best hope as they sped through the darkening forest, rattling and slipping together.