Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(32)
The terrain outside the window had transitioned from rolling hills to sharp little mountains. They passed through a series of tunnels and emerged quite suddenly into the glare of sunlight scattering off waves. The enormity of the ocean made Elsa’s breath catch. Her mind struggled to accept that any world could contain such a vastness of water; Veldana’s little sea seemed nothing but a puddle by comparison. The distant horizon filled her with an awe bordering on dread.
They pulled up at a train stop, and while other passengers were busy disembarking, Leo grabbed her hand and led her across the train to an empty compartment on the other side. Elsa was too shocked at the sudden physical contact to protest; his touch felt almost electric against her palm, like the buzz of a finished worldbook.
“We don’t have time for sightseeing, but you should at least get a glimpse of Riomaggiore,” he said.
Bright-painted buildings rose up on two sides of a narrow valley, blocks of red and orange, salmon-pink and white. The train tracks bridged over a narrow, sea-green inlet lined with colorful rowboats. The surrounding landscape was a jumble of exposed gray cliffs and greenery, with a mountain rising up behind the town as if to shield it from the rest of the world.
The whistle blew, and Leo and Elsa returned to their compartment. The train followed the coast from there—sometimes passing through tunnels, sometimes clinging precariously to the cliffside, the blue-green ocean lapping at the rocks below.
Soon the train was pulling into Corniglia station, and Leo was standing to retrieve the carpetbag from the luggage rack. They stepped out onto the open-air platform. It was the lone construct down near the sea, at the foot of the steep slope leading up to the town. Unlike the first two fishing towns they’d passed through, Corniglia was built atop a towering cliff.
“I’m afraid we have to proceed on foot,” Leo said. “The locals don’t have much use for hansoms in a village this size. Will you be all right?”
Elsa looked up. A broad set of brick stairs switchbacked up the cliff side. It was, admittedly, a climb of perhaps a hundred meters, but it wasn’t as if he were asking her to scale the bare rock. “It’s not a problem.”
“Are you sure?” He gave her a worried look.
His skepticism irked her; she was Veldanese, not some soft highborn lady. “There are stairs. I doubt they were built for their aesthetic appeal.”
So they climbed. Despite her confidence, the corset was more of a hindrance than she’d expected, and Elsa felt quite winded by the time they reached the village at the top. The brightly painted houses clung together in tight, precarious clusters on either side of a main road that ran the length of the town. It took them only a minute or two to cross the width of the narrow village.
Terraced vineyards dominated the valley on the other side, and so they descended into a landscape of stone walls, rough-hewn steps, and verdant grapevines displaying clusters of tiny young grapes. It all looked startlingly overengineered to Elsa’s eye. Corniglia itself couldn’t have held more than two or three hundred people—close to the population of her own village in Veldana—but they had practically rebuilt the entire landscape by hand in order to grow sufficient crops.
“Why would anyone put a town here? Seems unaccountably foolish, to build on such unforgiving terrain.”
“This isn’t Veldana, we can’t just create more arable land when we run out of space. We have to work with what we have,” Leo said. “Besides, most of these families have probably lived here for centuries. A thousand years ago, somebody decided the remote location would be a good defense against, I don’t know, Ostrogoth raiding parties or something, and ever since then, they’ve kept living here because this is their home.”
Elsa tried to digest this idea, tried to think of cities like Paris and Amsterdam and Pisa as accumulations of their history, the strata of historical events layering atop one another over the long years. Pivotal moments with lasting consequences that no one could predict. It made her head hurt.
“Earth is weird,” she concluded.
As they crested the ridge on the far side of the valley and passed into the shade of trees, Elsa snuck a sidelong glance at Leo. He looked fresh and bright-eyed, as if their journey on foot hadn’t taxed him in the slightest. A trickle of sweat down the back of his neck was his only concession to the midday heat, his brown-and-gold-brocade waistcoat still buttoned. The climb hadn’t been too much of a challenge for her either, despite the corset, but Elsa often spent her days surveying Veldana and was well accustomed to getting places under her own steam.
They walked until Elsa could see the blue sea sparkling with sunlight between the tree trunks. Leo stopped at a small outcrop of sedimentary rock, its layers of deposition still obvious when viewed from the side, and set down the carpetbag. He hooked his fingers beneath the top layer of stone, and after a moment of flexing his biceps, it hinged up like the top of a storage chest.
“What—” Elsa said, coming over to look under the layer. There was a brass control panel with a keyhole fitted horizontally inside the hollowed-out rock. “Hidden controls?”
“Ah, yes…” There was a note of strain in Leo’s voice. “And I’d forgotten how heavy this thing is. Would you mind getting the key? In my left side pocket.”
Elsa reached into the pocket of his waistcoat; the key ring was stuffed in there beside his father’s pocket watch, and there was hardly room for her fingers. Through the fabric, she could feel the tense washboard muscles and the heat of his skin. She pulled her hand away quickly and felt her face flush as she fumbled with the key ring, looking for one that seemed a likely fit for the keyhole in the control panel.