3
W e spent the night in the hotel, and caught the train the next morning. Before leaving, Denton tapped on my door and slipped inside, looking awkward. “Ah ... I wanted to have a chat with you, if I may?”
“Certainly,” I said. I had made an attempt at folding my clothes back into my trunk, which Angus was in the process of correcting. “What’s on your mind?”
Denton rubbed the back of his neck. I wondered what made him so ill at ease.
You know, other than his cousin vanishing in an abandoned mine full of squeezes .
“You know that we don’t have sworn soldiers here,” he said.
“I don’t know how you want to handle that. I’ll do whatever you like, of course.”
Oh, is that all? I’d already anticipated the issue.
What Americans know of Gallacian sworn soldiers derives from the most lurid sort of periodical, where I would likely feature as a six-foot Amazon with a harem of cowed males.
(I wouldn’t mind being taller, but having a harem of either sex sounds frankly exhausting.) Given the choice between explaining the reality to half the people I met or simply letting them assume that I was a man .
.. no, there was no question. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but frankly, I had been tired of explaining matters a decade ago, and by now I had approached a kind of transcendent exhaustion.
And what was my other option—wear skirts and let men open doors for me?
No , thank you. At least when people mistook me for a man, they didn’t do anything more obnoxious than demand my opinion of Guam.
(To say nothing of the possible dangers if someone decided that I was a woman and thus a potential victim.
I did not want to compound the awkwardness of foreign travel by having to shoot someone in the kneecap.)
“It’s fine, Denton,” I said. “We just won’t bother correcting anyone. It’s not your fault that your language is so woefully short on pronouns. You don’t even have one for talking to God.”
“It’s an oversight,” he admitted. “Alright, then. I’ll make sure Ingold knows.”
“For a language with so many words in it, it’s got some definite flaws,” Angus said, once Denton had left.
“I don’t know that we get to judge,” I said. Gallacian is possibly the most complicated language in Europe. Among its many quirks are different pronouns for men, women, children, soldiers, priests, rocks, and God.
The ones for rocks—sha and shan—don’t come up much, but thinking of Hollow Elk Mine, I had a grim feeling that I might have a use for them sooner rather than later.
***
The train ride from Boston into West Virginia was extremely long by the standards of Europe, but it was also remarkably comfortable.
Denton apologized to us several times for the conditions when we stepped aboard, which was baffling until he explained about Pullman cars and the luxurious accommodations available on some other railways, which apparently included five-star restaurants, barbershops, and all manner of absurdities.
“Is the toilet a board with a hole in it?” I asked, breaking into this monologue after about five minutes.
Denton blinked at me. “God, no!”
“Then it’s spectacular. Wake me when we get there.”
I settled back in the extremely well-padded seat, pulled my hat down over my eyes, and fell asleep to the sound of Ingold snickering.
The journey took much longer than one nap, as it turned out.
I knew intellectually that America was larger than Europe, but when we changed trains and Ingold showed me on a map where Boston was, where the Hollow Elk Mine was, and then exactly how far on that route we had come, I nearly swallowed my teeth.
You could have crossed Gallacia three times over in that time, and we hadn’t even moved an inch on the map.
Christ’s blood. No wonder Americans all move like they’ve got extra space around them.
If their country was a house, it would be one of those monstrous old ramblers that no one can afford to heat in the winter.
They probably develop drafts in New York because someone left a window open in San Francisco.
Our fellow passengers were all exuberantly friendly by Gallacian standards.
There was a great deal of handshaking, naturally.
I only had one bad moment, on one of the platforms when we changed trains, when my tinnitus acted up and the roar of the engine was drowned out by high ringing.
A man rushing to meet his train jostled me from behind, and I spun around, suddenly disoriented, expecting the enemy.
My expression must have been alarming, because the man froze like a rabbit, despite being larger than me. What he thought of the short, stocky fellow about to go for his throat, I couldn’t guess.
“Steady,” said Angus. He must have said it two or three times before the tinnitus faded and reality rushed back, trailing embarrassment in its wake.
“Sorry,” I muttered to the man, turning away.
“All right?” asked Denton as we caught up with them.
I shrugged. “Had a moment,” I said, a bit gruffly. “Fine now.”
Denton nodded and didn’t ask any more questions. Soldier’s heart , they call it here. I’d gotten off lightly, all things considered. There had been those under my command who hadn’t been so lucky.
When we finally entered West Virginia the next day, I thought we must be almost there, until Denton gently explained that the state was almost as large as the entire country of Ireland. “So it’s a big state?” I asked hopefully.
“Not really, no.”
I sank down into the seat and watched the not-very-big state go by.
The landscape was spectacular, the hills covered in ranks of trees that blazed the colors of madness, all red and gold and an astonishing shade of pink.
And then you’d hit a valley and suddenly everything would be stripped away, the trees toppled, the earth scarred with tracks and great scaffolds of machinery, billows of smoke rising from the pumps that kept the miners from suffocating or drowning or both.
And next to that would be a ramshackle little town of a sort I’d seen before, the kind that is kept from being a slum by the sheer willpower of the people who live there.
Then the train would move past and the hills would close over the town and we’d be surrounded by a blaze of trees again.
“So much coal,” I muttered as yet another mining town flashed by. “You’d think they’d have enough of it by now.”
Ingold snorted. “There’s never enough. If people aren’t burning it, they’re finding new uses for it. That hotel we met at, where everything was purple? That’s done with aniline dye made from coal tar.”
“You know a lot about this,” I said, impressed.
“I’m a chemist. Used to work for DuPont.”
“Used to?”
“Decided there were better things to do with my life than finding new ways to dye cloth a slightly different color and then having white men take the credit for it.”
I felt a pang of solidarity. I couldn’t guess what the situation was like for someone with Ingold’s ancestry, but I was certainly used to having men take credit for things.
Even when you’re a sworn soldier, there’s always some jackass who thinks the contents of your pants means you can’t possibly be commanding a unit.
(As individuals, they’re easy enough to deal with, if most of the unit knows you and has your back.
If you get a pack of them or, God forbid, a superior officer, things get messy.)
“What do you do now?” I asked.
“I dabble in things.” I raised an eyebrow and he laughed. “I dabble in a great many things. I read too many papers and tinker with concoctions that mostly no one wants.”
“He’s being modest,” said Denton. “He’s a genius.”
“I am a singularly unfocused genius.” Ingold spread his hands in a self-deprecating manner. “Occasionally I manage to cook up something worth selling. Mostly formulas for dyes. It keeps me out of trouble, more or less.”
“Ah.” I considered this. “Well, knowing about coal as you do, what do we have to worry about in this mine, other than strange lights? Just the roof falling in?”
“Actually Oscar noted that the timbers were in remarkably good repair, all things considered,” Ingold said. “The real problem is likely firedamp. Also black damp, white damp, and stinkdamp.”
“That seems like a great many damps.”
“Oh yes. Firedamp is what they call methane. It seeps out of the coal and rises. It’s extremely flammable and highly explosive.” Ingold grinned. “Best of all, it’s completely odorless, so we’ll have no idea it’s there until the shaft explodes.”
I edged away from him on the seat.
“Fortunately there’s several ventilation shafts, so we may be lucky on that front. And we’re using the very best modern safety lamps, which cuts down on the risk of explosions. Then there’s black damp, which is heavy and sinks. Fortunately it doesn’t explode, it simply smothers you.”
“... fortunately,” I said weakly.
“White damp is why miners used canaries, and is probably the most dangerous of the lot. It’s left in what’s called the afterdamp, after blasting or an explosion.
If you begin to feel lightheaded or dizzy, alert someone else immediately.
” His smile faded. “It can cause hallucinations, and I still think that there’s a better-than-even chance that it’s behind this entire business.
” He glanced over at Denton. “If it is, then I don’t know if we’ll be able to explore the mine safely.
It’s extremely poisonous. And explosive. ”
“And what was that last one?”
“Stinkdamp. Hydrogen sulfide, smells like rotten eggs. That one, at least, is pretty uncommon.”
“Does it explode?” Angus asked, sounding resigned.
“Of course it does,” said Ingold, as if surprised that he even had to ask.
I rubbed my temples and wondered if God still looked out for fools, and if so, whether I’d exceeded Har patience already.
Eventually I grew tired of trees and coal towns, so I studied my companions instead of the landscape.
There was something just slightly odd about the way they sat on the bench seat, not touching.
Ingold, at least, was so pointedly not touching Denton that the space between them practically glowed.
Which was interesting, and also none of my business.
I went back to looking out the window again.
The train chugged on, wheels endlessly repeating their wordless word. If you listen too long, you can imagine they’re saying almost anything. Dark ... dark ... dark. Doom ... doom ... doom .
I scowled, annoyed with myself, and made a conscious effort to map a different word onto the sound. Any word, so long as it wasn’t sinister.
Which is why we pulled into the last station with the train wheels chanting squid ... squid ... squid , because for some reason that was the first word that came to mind.
When we finally got off the train for good, Kent went to arrange for our luggage to be transported, and the rest of us tromped to the livery stable to hire horses.
Along the way, we saw the town of Shaversville, although most of the locals called it “Burned Churches,” which was a trifle unsettling, and apparently referred to an incident during their civil war.
The town consisted of a depot, a mill, a couple of storehouses, a general store, a saloon that doubled as a hotel, a post office that doubled as the telegraph office, and a tangle of shacks that looked to be support for the aforementioned buildings.
Also two churches, neither of which looked burned, or even singed.
The livery stable was attached to the hotel. From what I could see, they mostly catered to out-of-towners who came in to work on one of the various local mines. I can’t speak to the quality of their accommodations, but I can tell you that quality horseflesh was not a primary concern.
Angus gazed at the five nags presented to us and produced a silence more damning than most men’s profanity.
I patted my horse on the neck. She gazed past me with an air that reminded me of an elderly Gallacian woman I used to know who had twelve children and twenty-seven grandchildren, and thus no longer registered screaming, crying, wailing, gunshots, explosions, or the sounds of breaking crockery.
On the bright side, she didn’t try to shake my hand, which was an improvement over the hostler, who did.
The horses were all equipped with what I am told was a “Western” saddle.
Like everything else in America, it was much too large.
The horn stuck up so determinedly in front that I couldn’t escape the feeling that my saddle was sporting an inconvenient erection, and the minute I leaned down to figure out why the stirrups were so far forward, the horn jabbed me in the gut.
Once we actually started moving, I spent about twenty minutes trying to figure out if the mare was simply ignoring me or if the saddle really was as thick as it felt.
It was like riding a couch. A couch with an inconvenient spike in the middle.
I tried to imagine what would happen if the mare jumped over something, and had a brief, vivid image of ending my career impaled on a saddle horn in the wilds of West Virginia.
Fortunately, I could not imagine this horse jumping without mechanical assistance.
“Are you doing all right?” Ingold called back.
“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth.
I was former cavalry, for God’s sake. I was not going to complain to a civilian.
(In fairness, I was light cavalry, which mostly meant that we had ridden our horses to the battlefield, then got off to fight, since troops are cheap and horses are expensive. Still. There were principles involved.)
I tried squeezing with my knees. Nothing happened. I shifted my weight. Nothing continued to happen. The mare plodded onward, uninterested in keeping pace with her herdmates.
“You’ve got to use the reins,” said Angus, coming up behind me. “ Just the reins.”
“Like a barbarian ?” I missed my horse, Hob, with sudden intensity.
I could direct Hob with no more than a vague notion that I might like to go in that direction.
But he was back in Paris, eating his head off, and I was sliding around like a sack of potatoes on the back of an animal that also rather resembled a walking potato.
Still, it wasn’t the mare’s fault. I gazed at the reins, sighed, and resigned myself to barbarism.