The Radiant War

Chapter 7a

     “Tickets please,” said the Inspector in the tatty, threadbare uniform.

     He was swaying his way along the central aisle of the train carriage, holding onto the backs of the chairs to steady himself as the floor lurched under him to the rhythmic clattering of the iron wheels over the rails. He had to let go in order to take the ticket from the man in the stripy suit, hold it close to his eyes while he examined it and then cut out a tiny triangular piece with the clipper he held in his other hand. The train chose that moment to go over a particularly uneven section of track and the man had to spread his legs and lower his centre of gravity to prevent himself from being thrown to the floor. He managed to do this while maintaining most of his grace, though, returning to his full height as soon as the train settled down and proceeded smoothly again. The Brigadier guessed that he'd had quite a lot of practice on this particular section of track.

     The inspector handed the ticket back to the man in the stripy suit and moved on to the next passenger. “Tickets. Your tickets please.” A woman and a half raised sheep were the next to offer their tickets, and since they were several seats away from him the Brigadier returned his gaze to the view outside the window for a moment longer.

     They’d been passing through cattle country the whole day. The land here was flat. So flat that the horizon was a perfectly straight line where the straw coloured land met the pale blue sky. The soil was far too thin and stony for crops and so the land had been given over to cattle that roamed across the stubby grasslands, the herds of several neighbouring ranchers intermingling. When the train had been forced to slow to walking speed for some reason earlier that day, there had been cattle close enough for the Brigadier to see animals bearing the brands of several neighbouring ranchers standing side by side.

     The Brigadier wondered how long it took a rancher to separate his animals out from all the others when he wanted to take them to market or whatever. He knew almost nothing about cattle ranching, but now that he was passing through their country a thousand questions filled his head. How could such dry, barren looking land support such a large number of grazing animals? If two cows from different herds adopted a rabbit and raised it between them, to which rancher did the new cow belong? How did they deal with the depredations of rustlers? He imagined it would be quite easy for criminals to drive a wagon into that herd, kill one or two animals and skin them, removing the owner’s brands, before selling them to families too hungry to care where they came from. These problems, and a great many others, must all have been solved. Maybe not with complete success but well enough to allow the ranchers to survive. Try as he might, though, he couldn't imagine how.

     The train lurched again as it passed over another patch of uneven ground. The Brigadier had travelled on trains before, but never across such poorly maintained track. He wondered how long it had been since a team of engineers had passed this way to shore up the places where the flash floods to which this land was prone had washed the ground away from under the steel rails. He imagined the Inspector was wondering the same thing as he reached out to grab the back of a seat to steady himself and grabbed a young woman's shoulder instead. He apologised, then asked her for her ticket.

     The state of the track meant that the train was not making good speed. He'd been hoping that it would be going between fifty and sixty miles per hour, but he doubted if they were making more than thirty at the moment. That still meant they were travelling more then seven hundred miles in a day, though. They had travelled more than two hundred miles since he'd boarded the train that morning, and it would have taken him four days to travel that distance on horseback. What's more, the train didn't have to stop for rest and could keep on going all through the night, only having to stop to take on more coal and water. The longer he stayed on the train the more time and distance he was saving, and his horse was getting some rest back in the horse carriage . You couldn’t always count on finding someone willing to swap a tired horse for a fresh one, and in these troubled times you never knew when your life might depend on your horse having enough energy to carry you to safety. Even so, though, he wished the track was good enough to allow the train to reach its full speed. His mind kept insisting on making the calculations of how far they could have gone by now at sixty miles per hour, and the Princess needed him.