"The Inverted World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

8

I slept uncomfortably that night. Alone in the hut I undressed carefully and looked at the damage. One side of my chest was a mass of bruises, and there were several deep and painful scratches. The wound on my neck had stopped bleeding, but I washed it in warm water and put on it some ointment I found in Malchuskin’s first-aid box. I discovered that in the fight one of my fingernails had been badly torn, and my jaw ached when I tried to move it.

I thought again about returning to the city as Collings had suggested — it was, after all, only a matter of a few hundred yards away — but in the end thought better of it. I had no wish to draw attention to myself by appearing in the sterile-clean surroundings of the city looking as if I had just come out of a drunken brawl. The truth wasn’t too far from that, but even so I thought I would lick my own wounds.

I tried to sleep, only managing to doze off for a few minutes at a time.

In the morning I was awake early, and got up. I didn’t wish to see Malchuskin before I had had a chance to clean myself up further. My whole body ached, and I could move only slowly.

When he arrived, Malchuskin was in a bad mood.

“I heard,” he said straight away. “Don’t try to explain.”

“I can’t understand what happened.”

“You were instrumental in starting a brawl.”

“It was the Militia…” I said weakly.

“Yes, and you ought to know by now that you keep the Militia away from the tooks. They lost a few men some miles back, and there are a few scores to settle. Any excuse, and those stupid bastards go in and start clubbing.”

“Collings was in trouble,” I said. “Something had to be done.”

“All right, it wasn’t entirely your fault. Collings says now that he could have handled it if you hadn’t brought the Militia in… but he also admits that he told you to fetch them.”

“That’s right.”

“O.K. then, but think next time.”

“What do we do now?” I said. “We’ve no labourers.”

“There are more coming today. The work will be slow at first, because we’ll have to train them for it. But the advantage is that the resentments won’t start at once, and they’ll work harder. It’s later, when they get time to think, that the trouble begins.”

“But why do they resent us so? Surely, we pay for their services.”

“Yes, but at our price. This is a poor region. The soil’s bad, and there’s not much food. We pass by in our city, offer them what they need… and they take it. But they get no long-term benefit, and I suppose we take more than we give.”

“We should give more.”

“Maybe.” Malchuskin looked indifferent. “That’s none of our concern. We work the track.”

We had to wait several hours for the new men to arrive. During that time Malchuskin and I went to the dormitory huts vacated by the previous men and cleaned them out. The previous occupants had been hustled away by the militiamen during the night, but they’d been given time to collect their belongings. There was a lot that was left though: mainly old and worn garments and scraps of food. Maichuskin warned me to keep an eye open for any kind of message that might have been left for the new men; neither he nor I discovered anything of this sort.

Later, we went outside and burned anything that had been left.

Around midday a man from the Barter guild came over to us and said that the new labourers would be with us shortly. We were made a formal apology about what had happened the previous evening, and told that in spite of much discussion it had been decided that the Militia guard would be strengthened for the time being. Malchuskin protested, but the Barter guildsman could only agree: the decision had been taken against his own opinion.

I was in two minds about this. On the one hand I had no great admiration for the militiamen, but if their presence could avert a repetition of the trouble then I supposed it was inevitable.

Malchuskin was beginning to fret about the delay. I presumed that this was because of the ever-present necessity to make up lost time, but when I mentioned this he was not as concerned about this as I’d thought.

“We’ll make time on the optimum on the next winching,” he said. “The delay last time was because of the ridge. That’s behind us now and the land’s fairly level ahead of us for the next few miles. I’m more concerned about the state of the track behind the city.”

“The Militia will be protecting it,” I said.

“Yes… but they can’t stop it buckling. That’s the main risk, the longer it’s left.”

“Why?”

Maichuskin looked at me sharply. “We’re a long way south of optimum. You know what that means?”

“No.”

“You haven’t been down past yet?”

“What does that mean?”

“A long way south of the city.”

“No… I haven’t.”

“Well when you go down there you’ll find out what happens. In the meantime, take my word for it. The longer we leave the track laid south of the city, the more risk there is of it becoming unusable.”

There was still no sign of the hired men, and Malchuskin left me and went over and spoke to two more Track guildsmen who had just come out of the city. In a while he returned.

“We’ll wait another hour, and if no one’s come by then we’ll second some men from one of the other guilds and start work. We can’t wait any longer.”

“Can you do that, use other guilds?”

“Hired men are a luxury, Helward,” he said. “In the past the track-laying was done by guildsmen alone. Moving the city’s the main priority and nothing stands in the way. If we had to, we’d have everyone in the city out here laying the tracks.”

Suddenly he seemed to relax, and lay back on the ground and closed his eyes. The sun was almost directly overhead and it seemed hotter than usual. I noticed that over to the north-west there was a line of dark clouds, and that the air felt stiller and more humid than normal. Even so, the sun was still untouched by clouds and with my body still sore from its beating I would rather lie here lazily than be working on the track.

A few minutes later Malchuskin sat up and looked northwards. Coming towards us was a large band of men, led by five of the Barter guildsmen wearing their regalia of cloaks and colours.

“Good… now we start work,” said Malchuskin.

In spite of his barely concealed relief there was much that had to be done before work could begin. The men had to be organized into four groups, and an English-speaking one appointed leader. Then bunks had to be allotted in the huts, and their possessions stowed away. Maichuskin looked optimistic throughout all this, in spite of the additional delays.

“They’re looking hungry,” he said. “Nothing like an empty belly to keep them working.”

They were indeed a dishevelled lot. They all had clothes of sorts but very few had any shoes, and most of them wore their hair and beards long. Their eyes were deep-sunken in their faces, and several sported stomachs swollen by lack of proper food. I noticed that one or two walked with discomfort, and one had a mutilated arm.

“Are they fit to work?” I asked Maichuskin quietly.

“Not properly. But a few days of work and a proper diet, and they’ll be O.K. A lot of tooks look like this when we first hire them.”

I was shocked by the condition they were in, and reflected that the local standard of living must be as bad as Maichuskin had made out. If this were so I could better understand the way resentment grew against the people of the city. I supposed that what the city gave in return for the labourers was a long way beyond what they were generally accustomed to, and this gave them a glimpse of a better fed, more comfortable life. As the city passed on, they would have to revert to their former primitive existence, the city meanwhile having taken of the people’s best.

More delays, as the men were given food, but Malchuskin was looking more optimistic than ever.

Finally, we were ready to begin. The men formed themselves into four groups, each headed by a guildsman. We set off for the city, collected the four track bogies, and headed south down the tracks in grand style. To each side of the rails the militiamen continued their guard, and as we crossed the ridge we saw that down in the valley we had recently vacated there was a strong guard around the track buffers.

With four track-teams now at work there was the additional incentive of competition I had noticed before. Perhaps it was too early for the men to respond to this, but that would come later.

Malchuskin stopped the bogie a short distance before the buffer, and explained to the group leader — a middle-aged man named Juan — what had to be done. Juan related this to the men, and they nodded their understanding.

“They haven’t the vaguest idea what they’ve got to do,” Malchuskin said to me, chuckling. “But they’ll pretend to understand.”

The first task was to dismantle the buffer, and move it up the tracks to a position just behind the city. Malchuskin and I had only just started to demonstrate how the buffer was dismantled when the sun went in abruptly and the temperature dropped.

Malchuskin glanced up at the sky. “We’re in for a storm.”

After this remark he paid no more attention to the weather, and we continued with the work. A few minutes later we heard the first distant grumble of thunder, and a short while after that the rain began to fall. The hired men looked up in alarm, but Maichuskin kept them going. Soon the storm was on top of us, the lightning flashing and the thunder cracking in a way that terrified me. We were all soon drenched, but the work continued. I heard the first complaints, but Malchuskin — through Juan — stilled them.

As we were taking the component parts of the buffer back up the track, the storm cleared and the sun came out again. One of the men began to sing, and soon the others joined in. Malchuskin looked happy. The day’s work finished with erecting the buffer a few yards behind the city; the other crews also stopped work when they had built theirs.

The next day we started early. Malchuskin still looked happy but expressed his desire to get on with the work as fast as we could.

As we tried to take up the southernmost part of the track, I saw at first hand the cause of his worry. The tie-bars holding the rails to the sleepers had bent, and had to be wrenched away manually, bending them beyond re-use. Similarly, the action of the pressure of the tie-bars against the sleepers had split the wood in many places — though Malchuskin declared they could be used again — and many of the concrete foundations had cracked. Fortunately, the rails themselves were still in a usable condition; although Maichuskin said they had buckled slightly, he reckoned they could be straightened again without too much difficulty. He held a brief conference with the other Track guildsmen, and it was decided to dispense with the use of the bogies for the moment, and concentrate on digging up the track before any more of it became distorted. As it was still some two miles between where we were working and the city, each journey in the bogie took a long time and this decision made sense.

By the end of that day we had worked our way up the track to a point where the buckling effect was only just beginning to be felt. Malchuskin and the others declared themselves satisfied, we loaded the bogies with as many of the rails and the sleepers as they would hold, and called a halt again.

And so the track-labours continued. By the time my ten-day period came to an end, the track-removal was well advanced, the hired men were working well as teams, and already the new track to the north of the city was being laid. When I left Malchuskin he was as contented as I had ever seen him, and I felt not in the least guilty about taking my two days’ leave.