The Emperor's Railroad Read online

  Quinn shoved me back. His leather glove was rough on my chest, even through my shirt. He had his falchion in his hand.

  “Not that close,” he said.

  Although it’s a heavy sword meant for chopping, a falchion does have a point. Carefully, Quinn put this against the dead man’s left eye. The dead man groped at Quinn’s legs, but Quinn paid it no mind. He leaned on his sword pommel with both hands, pushing the point down through the skull. There was a scraping noise and a crack of bone. A slow breath escaped the dead man’s lips, the sigh of a man sinking into exhaustion after a hard day in the fields, and he was still.

  “Dead now,” Quinn said.

  Another rag came out. He wiped his sword with it. The rag went into a different pouch to the one it had come out of. Then he held the weapon up in line with his eyes, sighted down the blade for nicks, then slid the sword back into its scabbard. Then he checked his shoulder and his hands, not so much for bites to his flesh, I think, but for damage to his armor. The leather and steel were filthy with the blood of the unliving, but otherwise unmarked. “Going to take a while to clean this off,” he said.

  “We do not have the luxury—” began my mother.

  “I didn’t mean now.” He looked down at the rushes between the bank and the first pier. The old road approaching the bridge had been raised up on some sort of causeway; where it had sagged it’d been filled in with rubble and spoil by the emperor’s men for their railroad, but that had been twenty years back. The repairs were beginning to fail. The emperor’s engineers did not have the skill of the Gone Before. Trees were growing up between the sleepers. In one place the bank had been washed out, leaving rusty iron rails hanging over nothing.

  From the embankment to the bridge’s first pier was a wide gap in the old road, it having fallen in the Good Lord alone knows when. Being close to the river like that kept the rubble free of dirt, so we could see the worn slabs of it draped broke-backed over the bank and stretch of water. Thick ivy clogged the pier’s upper part. A gust of wind made the leaves rattle, passing on to ripple the brown river with silver waves. Any sound in a place like that can make you startle, and I did.

  The old bridge had been made out of concrete, the molding stone of the Gone Before, the new bridge from wood and iron. The emperor’s bridge had been made on a grand scale by the standards of this diminished era. It was wide enough for a train, with good, broad walkways for the draft horses on both sides.

  All this was carried up on a big old latticework of huge wooden beams. These were arranged in squares ten feet by ten feet, with a diagonal brace across each, all tied up with iron. It looked real impressive, but twenty cold Virginian winters and twenty humid Virginian summers do a lot of damage. The beams were the kind of wet that don’t dry easy, the wood splintery, rotted right through in places. Moss clung to every surface not directly in the wind. It being that time of year there were about ten kinds of fungus on it. Vines and briars trailed off into the water. The iron of the rails and the ties was bright orange, and streaked the wood. We looked nervously at it, but this was the only way to get to Cousin Matthew up at the Winfort, so we were crossing it, happily or not.

  “Wait here,” Quinn said. He went down the bank, picking his way through the wooden supports of the emperor’s bridge, right down to where the water was pale with fallen rubble and the river foamed over the weirs they made. There were concrete caves with flat roofs there, and he checked them for more dead. A duck burst from the water’s edge twenty yards downriver. Wings clattering, it blared an angry alarm. An uneasy silence followed. Quinn came back. He breathed out one long, thoughtful exhalation, and scanned the banks with those wrinkled-in eyes of his. I don’t know what he saw. I couldn’t see anything but woods and reeds and the Emperor’s Railroad.

  “We’ll not cross all the way tonight,” he said.

  “You have changed your mind?” my mother said.

  “Dead slowed us down. There’s an hour of daylight left, not enough to find us a good campground,” he said. He was so sure of everything he said. When he said there was an hour of daylight, well, that’s what there would be, pretty much exactly. “It’s twenty miles further to Winfort. We have to cross slowly, the wood’s rotted all to hell and the emperor never did build as good as he boasted. By the time we’re over, it’ll be dark. We’ll camp on the middle section, where the road from the Gone Before stands.” He pointed to the middle, one of two points where concrete deck still stood. The other being just across from us between the first and second piers. The railroad had been laid directly onto the old deck in those parts. “We’ll finish the crossing tomorrow. We’d be better trying to get all the way to Winfort in one day anyhow.”

  “What about the bandits?” my mom said. “You’ve had us near running through these woods, Mr. Quinn, for fear of them. Are you not worried by them any longer?”

  Quinn shrugged. “Not as worried as I am by the dead,” he said. “These are old, long turned, and near starved. But where there is one pack, there’re always more. In the middle we can see anyone coming, living or dead.”

  “And they, Mr. Quinn, will be able to see us!”

  Quinn’s jaw set. “Truth is, ma’am, we are not going much further tonight. Last thing I’m wanting to do is come down on the far side of the river when night’s drawing in. The dragon’ll be most active then. I took on your employment on the understanding you’d do what I said. These are dangerous lands.”

  “You said they weren’t dead, mister,” I blurted. I felt the tension rising between the adults. I had to say something on my mother’s side. I was the man of the family, at least for a day or so more until we got to Winfort. There was a contradiction in what Quinn said, one I could understand. I seized on it.

  Quinn gave me a quirk-mouthed look, the kind that tells you you’re being dumb.

  “How can you be sure?” my mother asked. She was a pretty woman, even when she was stern. She commanded a high bride price for it. I didn’t understand all the business of matrimony back when I was a boy. Not until I got older did I look back and understand what I’d seen. When she and my stepfather Gern were going through the endless step and counterstep of the marriage dance with each other, I wondered if he’d been blinded by her prettiness, thinking she had no brains to match. He found alright that she had plenty. My mom was not a woman to take orders from anyone, least of all a man.

  Still, that was all done. Gern was dead, along with everyone else in New Karlsville. All we had of Gern was the bride price she’d saved all them years, and she’d promised a deal of that to Quinn.

  “I’m sure, ma’am,” said Quinn. He never looked at my mother when he spoke to her. There was that reserve to him, more than him simply being formal. “If you don’t like what I say, stay here.”

  “That is not our agreement.”

  “Well then,” said Quinn, as if that settled it. He went for his horses. “You first. This bridge’ll bear you better than my horses.”

  By way of comment on his judgment, the emperor’s bridge creaked.

  “Wind’s picking up.” He sniffed the air. “We best be on our way.”

  I didn’t like the look of the bridge. My mother didn’t like the look of it either, although she hid it better than me. She took a breath to steady her nerves, sort of a high sound that was too long for a gasp, too short for a sigh.

  Mom went first, up by the left-hand edge where she could grab the vertical beams for support. Someone had tacked up a rope there for a handrail sometime, but whenever it was it was long ago, and the rope was rotten gray where it wasn’t green. Mom told me not to touch it.

  “Put your feet here, at the edges,” she said, placing her own where the beams were fixed into the side. She crept forward, putting her feet carefully one directly in front of the other. “Not this one, Abney,” she’d say. “Go careful here,” and so on. All while she moved forward resolutely. She had her mouth set in that thin line that said she was taking no nonsense, not from old Garrett down the store or
from the sheriffs, or from any damn bridge. I don’t reckon I’ve met any man as brave as my mother.

  “Now you,” said Quinn quietly, when Mom was halfway.

  I stepped up to the brink. The first beam was missing, the second a worrying dark brown and slick with it. Through the gap I could see the ground, only a few feet below me where the bridge rose up, but the bank dropped away frighteningly fast. I took a deep breath and stepped forward. I did just what my mom had done, one foot in front of the other, right at the place where the beams joined into the sides of the bridge. It wasn’t so bad to begin with, but as the bridge got higher and higher my breath came a little harder, a little sharper. My eyes shifted from my hands to my feet the whole time. Frightened I’d grab at a rotten piece of wood or rope, then frightened I’d put my foot through a hole I didn’t see coming because I was so busy looking at where I should put my hands. I got scared, and went quicker.

  “Slow down, Abney!” my mother warned.

  I wanted to be brave, for my mom, but I didn’t slow down. I stopped.

  My mom was standing on the old road on the first pier. Jagged gums of concrete with rusty holes showing where iron teeth had been. She gave me that wide-eyed stare mothers do when they’re mad at you but don’t want to shout because they’re scared for you too.

  My eyes skated down, between my feet. Between the gaps in the wood I saw rushes, the black blood of the dead, green lazy waters. I imagined falling right through that rotten old wood and plunging under the surface, never to be seen again.

  I froze. Mr. Quinn cleared his throat. I turned my head. There he was, waiting patient as you like, holding the reins of that big horse and little pony of his.

  There was no fear in him, like he wasn’t going to take a ton of horseflesh out over a rotten-wood bridge. His armor was dirty, the leather of his belts and scabbards and holsters were dusty and cracked. His beard and hair were wild. But he was still a knight, and I looked like a fool in front of him.

  That embarrassment was enough to send me over to the far side. I scampered across the last part. My mom put her hand on my shoulder. She searched my eyes for a moment, one hand under my chin to tilt my face up. Then her face wrinkled with concern for Quinn.

  Quinn led his stallion over, all nonchalant like. One hand on the reins, the other lightly on the supports at the side. The horse kept its head down, hooves picking out the good wood. Quinn joined us, passed one rein to my mother without a word. The horse bent his big white head and started crunching on the grass growing on the ancient deck. Rip, crunch crunch, that way horses do. I ain’t never heard anything make so big a meal out of grass as a horse. You ever notice that?

  That horse was so clean and white and Quinn so dirty you’d think Quinn had stolen it from a better man. Its harness was well-oiled and its coat shone. Every night, after we set camp, before he ate, he fed his beasts and he oiled the leather. Every night. He curried the pair of them for a half hour before the last light went, then worked their coats with soft brushes. When we first saw him, a vagabond on a knight’s horse . . . Well, you can’t blame us for getting the wrong idea. I ain’t ashamed to admit it. But we had to trust him. We had no choice. Good luck for us he was what he said, and not what he seemed.

  Quinn ran back down the bridge. His pony came less surely than his riding horse, but it came anyways. Halfway across that time a beam snapped, not loud; a soft wet crack, like a bone going. My mom’s hand was up to her mouth, her other gripped the front of my jacket. She pulled me in so close she knocked my hat forward and I wriggled to get some space. I had to see what would happen.

  Nothing did happen to Quinn, not ever. The beam bent, but did not give, and he got across.

  The bridge was a large reminder of the works of the Gone Before, a strong, massive thing that no man for a hundred miles of this place has any idea how to build, and no man a thousand miles past that has the things he needs to get it done. Long and straight, the bridge had lasted out the years since the Fall when so many others had collapsed entirely. But there ain’t no thing in this world so mighty as time, and so the bridge was going the way of all things: finally, slowly sinking into ruinous grandeur. Great girders of steel had held it high. This part of the country had been empty for a long time, and there was so much metal in easier spots that no one had gotten round to scavenging it. Most of the iron that had been there come the Fall was still there come our journey, rusted paper thin by years of rain, twisted by the sagging of the road they held, but still there, shaggy in coats of ivy. In sheltered spots the rust was worst, often rotted right through. But sometimes—around rivets big as your fist, in the corners where the metal had been joined by the Gone Before—you could see spots of ancient paint.

  We are iron, the girders said to me. You cannot bring us low. They were wrong about that. They were warped and fallen as the men who’d made them, broken as a spiderweb poked with a stick, but they were going down fighting. You got to respect that.

  There were four piers all told. The road had been wide, big enough for four wagons, I reckon. At the southern and northern parts, between the first and second pier and the third and the fourth, the deck still stood over the water. The emperor had shored up the original structure there so that his railroad could run over it. The section in the middle was soon to give up the ghost. The road hung from piers at one side only, the other half sloping almost into the water. But it was safe to cross if you stuck to the high upstream side; the rest was a treacherous slope of cracked concrete full of bushes, trees, and poison ivy that ran all the way into the water. That part went in years back, way before King Jonas rebuilt the bridge properly, but when we crossed it was still hanging in there.

  Between the bank and the first pier, between the fourth pier and the bank, all the old deck was in the water. The emperor’s flimsy wooden parasite crossed the gaps. Down in the river, trailing weed, were the works of mightier men.

  What concrete was left was full of holes, cracked by the weather and roots. Trees grew all over it. The bridge wasn’t a bridge anymore, but an island floating in the sky. Quinn brought his horses along, nice and slow, always looking for broken iron or holes that might catch their feet and break their legs.

  “Why’d they need such big roads?” I said. The Emperor’s Railroad looked pathetic on the bridge.

  “There were a lot more people than there are now,” Quinn said.

  “God took it away, Abney,” Mom said.

  Quinn shook his head. “They threw it away, is what happened.”

  My mother was a god-fearing woman. She frowned at me, her way of telling me Quinn was wrong.

  Downriver were the rapids. A bunch of low, crumbling islands stuck up out of the water, too regular to be natural. More work from the Gone Before. Those islands stop the river up good there. All those bridges down the rivers foul up the water for us. You can’t take anything down that stretch with a draft of more than a yard or so, the trash in there’d tear the bottom right out of it. That hundred-foot length of rapids are the reason you can’t take a boat to the Ohio River, and all the trade from Charleston has to get from the Kanawha to the Ohio by way of the railroad out to Huntingdon docks.

  There was some talk about the emperor digging a canal, opening up the way from Charlotte to the Ohio once his war was over. But he offended the Lord, the sickness came back, the dragon came, and that was that. These days the king is talking on it. Things never change.

  You only got an idea of what the Gone Before might have been like from up high. I could see the lines of the streets and the roads in the patterns of the trees, those marshes and forests that had been the homes of men. Now they’re only irregularities in the patterns of God’s world. I wondered then, and I’ve wondered many times since, how long before those traces are eaten up, broken down by the plants, pulled to pieces and digested by the Earth, so that there’s nothing left at all.

  We reached the last stretch of sound concrete. Here a section of wooden bridge stretched out down to the northern b
ank, as rotten as and streaked with rust off the railroad as the southern section. In the dark it looked pathetic compared to the structure it sat atop of—a phantom of a bridge. There was an overgrown clearing at the end studded with tumbledown walls, swampy land beyond.

  “We’ll stop here,” Quinn said.

  So we camped on the flying island. Did they have real floating islands, back then in the Gone Before? I’ve heard it said they could do most anything.

  We were in a tight spot. Dead men in the woods, something worse beyond, and we had to go through to get to a cousin Mom wasn’t even sure was still alive. I must have looked scared, because my mom pulled me close and murmured, “No one can get up here, not without Quinn seeing, don’t you worry.”

  I couldn’t help but think that whatever might happen there, it couldn’t be as bad as what had happened to New Karlsville.

  The Road to Charleston

  I HAVEN’T TOLD YOU how we met Quinn yet.

  Here’s how it went. Three days before we crossed the bridge, the axle on Walter’s mail wagon broke, and he fell. And because he fell, he died. Walter’s end was a stupid, pointless one, brought on by a pothole. One moment he was laughing—that moustache of his bristling like a catfish’s whiskers—then there was a bang, a crack, a lurch, his hand went out for support, found none. My mom swiped for his fingers but missed, and he toppled off the seat. A wet bang as his skull connected with a rock, placed just right to catch him on the head. Almost malicious, like it was done on purpose. We were sad for his loss; of all the people that could have helped us after New Karlsville fell, only he did.

  When we scrambled off the mail wagon into the road he wasn’t moving. My mother turned him over. His eyes were staring at nothing. There was a perfect round dent in his head big enough for half a cup of flour. But he was still breathing. We did what we could, which wasn’t much, and he died.