The Sea Peoples(66)
“Cantcha’ read, lady?” the man said in an adenoidal accent, pointing to the exact change only stenciled on the glass fare-box.
Then he saw Toa. “And none of his . . .”
His voice trailed off as the big Maori scowled at him, and vanished entirely as Thora flipped him a gold coin. Instead of further argument he cleared his throat and announced to the world:
“Silver Street line—da North River Terrace!”
Pip took a seat where she could see out the large front windows of the vehicle, and keep in view the vehicle Castaigne and his party were on. Theirs lurched into motion with a clatter and an odd whining sound and a smell of ozone, accelerating faster than anything she’d ever been on except a funfair ride where you were pushed up to the top of a slope and then ran down under gravity. Then the speed settled down to something only moderately alarming, about what a good horse could manage for a few miles at a hand-gallop on easy ground, but it went on and on.
“This is like sailing broad reach with a strong steady wind on the starboard quarter,” she said.
Deor and Thora were behind her, and Toa was leaning on his shovel, treating swaying effortlessly with the motion of the vehicle. It was nothing much, when you’d ridden out hurricanes in the Timor Sea.
“That’s the only thing I can compare it to. Now some of the things Mummy said about life before the Blackout make more sense.”
“Yes,” Deor said. “Except that you can’t count on a favorable wind whenever you want it. That’s how they could have cities like this; unfailing machines to deliver the food for all these millions, from many miles away. A delay in getting silk or spices or dyestuff doesn’t matter that much except to the pockets of a few, but you have to bake bread every day.”
Pip shivered a little. “I’ve seen the ruins of Sydney,” she said. “With the drifts of bones still in the buildings. Everything failed them, in the end.”
Seeing a living city like those of the ancient world drove it home.
“Pretty,” Thora said, craning her neck to look ahead. “You only see this sort of thing in cities without walls around them.”
The car came to a halt with a screech of steel on steel and they disembarked at a little station that was, indeed, pretty; a broad river stretched northward, and there was a pleasantly cool breeze off it. The water was a bright blue riffled with white. Ships whose rigs she knew—brigs, schooners, yachts—shared the water with steam-propelled craft like something out of an ancient book, clumsy ferryboats, their decks swarming with people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white freight cars, big liners and tramps, dredgers, scows, and everywhere little tugs puffing and whistling.
“My goodness but it would be convenient to have those things to tow you out of harbor,” she said. “The times I’ve been stuck waiting for a favorable wind in a narrow estuary . . . and that’s how we ended up stranded in Baru Denpasar.”
Deor chuckled. “The times Thora and I have waited eating up our travel money while captains made excuses for not rowing us out,” he said.
“Sitting in port eats money a good deal worse for the one paying the wages and harbor fees,” she said, with the iron assurance of someone who’d grown up around merchant skippers, and had briefly been one herself. “But trying to beat up without enough room and getting caught on a lee shore are worse. Now let’s find Castaigne.”
A row of granite-paved, treelined squares and small parks ran along the riverfront, with landings for ferries and yachts; evidently the business side of sea-trade for this New York was conducted elsewhere, though there were plenty of sailors among the crowds of ordinary city-folk taking the air and enjoying themselves. The merchant crews were unmistakable to anyone who’d ever traveled with the breed, and the military ones all seemed to be in white bell-bottoms for some reason.
Cafés and open-air restaurants were scattered among the trees, and a military band in bright uniforms and plumed headgear was playing from a kiosk on the parapets, the oompah-oompah of a brisk march cutting through the murmur of the crowd.
Pip scanned, working backward methodically from the water and the range of low hills across it. It was Toa who spotted them, but then he had a higher vantage point.
“Over there, by the statue of the Paˉkehaˉ with the mean mouth and the nasty eyes riding around with a sword,” he rumbled quietly, not looking that way and not pointing; people noticed when you did that.
“Let’s split up into pairs and meet there,” Pip said. “Toa, you trail me and we’ll come in from behind—you’re the most conspicuous.”
“Like a whore at the vicar’s tea-party,” he said cheerfully, and drifted back.
In an inspired bit of business he occasionally prodded with his shovel at the dirt around trees and in the planters full of bright flowers, as if he were a gardener’s helper or something of the sort.
A few of the sailors, mostly the ones most obviously reeling from John Barleycorn or with companions of negotiable affection hanging on their arms or both, gave him hostile glances. Men, especially those who’d had a few drinks, often thought getting beaten bloody in some pointless quarrel would make them more desirable; she’d never quite understood why, since she felt the only reason for fighting was to kill or maim the other party as quickly as possible. None of these was quite drunk enough to pick a fight with a man of Toa’s size equipped with a shovel . . . particularly after they’d looked into his eyes for an instant, and got a gut-instinct revelation that he operated in exactly the same way.