Noise and the Train, at Last

The Train arrived in Milldacken just last month. It was the first time I'd seen it this year. I usually spend the Winter in the Railway Regions, snugly ensconced in one of the smaller compartments on its not-quite-countable cars. I suppose I spent most of the Winter in the Railway Regions this year, too, but it wasn't quite so comfortable. Oh well. It was fun anyway.

This was, apparently, the first time the Train had been in Milldacken in several months. No one ever really knows where it's going to end up next - not even the Engineer. It's possible that some Wayfinders do, but they rarely tell anyone. Wayfinders are rare. They learn quickly not to advertise their abilities unless they want to be mobbed by eager customers.

I must admit, it was a relief to get out of Milldacken. I love it there, but it's nice to be able to hear again. Milldacken gets (impossibly) even noisier after the thaw. It started with the weather; the Spring lured everyone out with warm weather and butterflies, then turned on the hail. That was accompanied by the occasional late clump of ice smashing its way down from upstream.

Once the ice was done, sometime in early May, the migrations started. The loudest animals in the Railway Regions all pass through Milldacken in Spring. First to come were the spore-fish, which throw themselves over the falls and explode in midair. The pieces (eggs, spores, whatever you want to call them - a spore-fish's cells are identical, like a sponge) blow for miles in every direction before they reach the ground. People in Bannarbangle find tiny fish in their birdbaths and can't imagine how they got there.

After the spore-fish came the forfilated goolhowlers - big, ungainly birds, like purple flamingos - who sit on rooftops and whoop like a dozen drunk two-headed carpenters dropping sledgehammers on their toes. They apparently find this unspeakably romantic. In another month, their eggs will hatch, and their chicks will start trying out their own lungs in choruses of insatiable squawking. I won't be in Milldacken to hear them.

The goolhowlers were followed by the smacking turtles, the trumpeter elk, and the screaming day bats (relatives of the ordinary day bats in the Great Shwamp, but without the shyness and the famous cerulean fur. They don't come out of hibernation until it's good and warm. Most of them scream during the day, but there are half a dozen insomniacs who make sure no one sleeps at night either). The cicadas and cliff lions started their own courtship shrieking last week.

Under all this, of course, the city itself makes more noise than anything. The mills, loosed from the ice, rumble day and night until it feels like the air is going to crack. The bands in Milldacken - and there are a surprising number of them, possibly driven by the desire to be louder than their surroundings - tend to play in basements. Most of the noise is (relatively) muffled there. All the songs have the same rhythm. There is only one rhythm in Milldacken.

The Milldackeners communicate largely by sign language after April, unless they're loud enough to be heard over everything else. A surprising number of Hamjamser's most famous opera stars have come from Milldacken.

When the Train pulled up to the station, it was packed with people from Milldacken - not to mention all the nearby settlements too small to have a station - eagerly waiting to get on. There wasn't room in the station for anyone who wasn't getting on or off the Train; the rest of the townspeople crowded onto the terraces above the station tower and were promptly swamped in billows of white steam from the giant salamander steam engine. They didn't seem to care. I don't particularly care for crowds, so I waited on the roof with an aristocratic squirrel, her footmice, and a family of (non-screaming) bats. (They didn't seem to care for crowds either. The squirrel said she was allergic to them. She kept sneezing into a handkerchief the size of a postage stamp.) We came down quietly and got onto the Train once the platforms had cleared a bit.

Milldacken's Train station wasn't originally supposed to be one. The track happens to run along the face of the cliff below Milldacken, supported on thick iron beams driven into the stone. You can look up from the Train and see cliff lions staring at you from the ruins. (They prowl through the empty rooms on sucker-toed paws and hunt bats with their tongues, like frogs.) The tower was originally built just to raise the track from one stable of section of cliff to another - stone that's had tunnels carved in it can't support the weight of the entire Train, even if anyone was stupid enough to try to blow holes in the ruins, so there's only so much cliff that can hold track. The rails originally just went up in an open corkscrew there, wide enough for the Train to spiral around the outside. Milldacken was just a small village with three mills at that point. When it got bigger and wanted to build a station, the track-screw seemed like the perfect place for it. They just built it up through the middle. The foundations are a masterpiece of buttresses and cantilevering, cleverly concealing the fact that the station is built on more or less nothing at all. The tower is seven stories high and one room wide, really little more than a stack of boarding platforms connected by a large spiral staircase. It's built of tough, lightweight cheesestone imported from Tetravania; that's probably the only reason it stands at all. It's impossible to get anything that looks much like a block out of cheesestone, because of the bubbles, so the whole tower has a jigsaw-puzzle look to it. Nothing is square. It sways back and forth slightly in the wind. When the Train is wrapped around it, one car outside each floor, the sounds of grating stone and strained metal are nearly deafening. It sounds like the whole thing should collapse at any moment. Milldacken's engineers go over the whole thing every month, though, and if they say something isn't going to fall apart, it isn't going to fall apart.

Besides, it obviously hasn't yet.

The people on the Train are the same as ever. I didn't look around much - it was early in the evening, so all the Milldackeners piled on just as the other passengers were going to dinner, and all was chaos and noise inside. I just let myself be shoved along until I was swept into an unoccupied compartment. I did see the family of purple lizards that seem to live on the Train, though - I swear, there are more of them every year - and I could hear Lady Mallory, the Engineer, yelling something from the depths of the engine. The reptilian photographer and his stepdaughter, the professional risker, were tucked away in a quiet corner. I think I caught a glimpse of Trenchcoat Guy over the heads of the crowd.

I was joined soon after that by a traveling botanist with a suitcase full of collapsible umbrella-plants. He spent half an hour taking them out and unfolding them in the compartment - apparently, he plans to stay here for a while. He might have actually said as much; he kept up a constant running commentary in some rapid language composed mostly of the letter X. I couldn't understand a word. It's like a waterproof jungle in here. The light from the salamander lanterns* is green and leaf-dappled - I feel like I'm writing this in a moving forest. The wheels are rumbling under the floor. I don't know where we are now. I can look out the window and see mountains silhouetted against the stars; with all the leaves plastered against the glass, it feels like I'm looking in from outside.

It's good to be back on the Train. I've missed this place.


*The Train is home to several hundred salamanders that power the engine and more or less everything else; they sun themselves on the roof, their scales turned pitch-black to absorb sunlight, when they're not working. They get there and back through glass tubes on the walls and provide just enough light to read by at night.

The Spring Thaw

The thaw, when it came, was more spectacular than I could have imagined. What looked like whole icebergs came jostling down the unidentified river from the mountains above. Water fizzed around them and splashed in sparkling waves over the ice in their path. The river shrieked like a dragon with its tail stepped on when the icebergs reached it, leaping up in house-sized shards to join them. Spray and slivers of ice came down like rain from the empty blue sky. It was like a rockslide in crystal.

Every Milldackener strong enough to hold a pole was out on the banks of the river, fending off chunks of ice when they got too near the fragile houses and mill wheels. The prayers at the end of the Festival must have been answered; everyone agreed that this thaw was less destructive than any previous one. Only one building in the entire town was harmed. It lost its cupola to a tall chunk of ice that swooped over and snatched it on the way by. We watched the chunk all the way down the river, the cupola perched jauntily on its peak like a slate-shingled hat.

Once the main rush of ice was over, the pole-wielders followed the tail end of it down the river, gradually accumulating as we went. We crowded together on the cliff terraces to watch the last pieces of ice go over the falls. Each one seemed to hang in midair for a moment, like a breaching white whale with waves breaking over its back, before slowly starting to fall. Several of them hit outcroppings of rock on the way down and burst into spinning crystal fragments. There was a muffled boom whenever an intact one hit the riverbed (far below and still mostly dry) and exploded, bursting into chunks and sending spray and splinters of ice in every direction. It took a second or two for the sound to reach us at the top; it's a very high cliff.

There was a moment of silence after the echoes of the last explosion had died down. It was broken by a chorus of creaks and groans from above as all the mill wheels started turning again, shrugging off the last remnants of the ice that had held them since Autumn. A huge cheer went up from the crowds on the cliff. Laughing and talking over one another, they all hurried up the stairs and back to their individual mills; the machinery has a tendency to warp and rust over the Winter (not to mention rot, freezing, and hypothermiac woodworms), and newly-thawed mills have been known to tear themselves apart if no one's there to stop them. Eventually, I made my way back to the hotel, and the terraces were deserted.

It could have been just a trick of the mist and sunlight, but I could have sworn I saw the ice peacock from the caverns spread its wings at the edge of the waterfall and take off across the foothills. Perhaps it had just been waiting for its cage to be broken.

The Glacier Festival

Once again, I have missed the Moler Festival on Mount Moler. It was yesterday. I'm starting to doubt I'll ever get to it. I attempted to reach Mount Moler by kilopede last year, of course, but you know how well that worked.

It was worth missing it, though, to be in Milldacken for the Glacier Festival.

The Spring thaw arrives, as regular as clockwork (like everything in Milldacken), exactly three days after the river starts rising again. The first trickle arrived yesterday morning. The cryo-geologists and spelunkers that have been roaming the caverns under the ice all Winter noticed first, of course, and were packed and gone by sunrise.

That was the signal for the Festival.

The Glacier Festival is held in Milldacken every year, on the day the river starts coming back. This day is called the Eve of the Thaw. Anyone who points out that the actual eve of the thaw is two days later, or that a glacier and a frozen river are entirely different things, is immediately pelted with snowballs. It's a tradition.

Of course, the result of this tradition is that half the children in town spend the day running through the streets yelling, "it isn't a glacier, it isn't a glacier!" at the top of their lungs, at which the rest have no choice but to drop whatever they're doing and begin a snowball fight. It's a tradition, after all. No one expects to get much done on the Eve of the Thaw.

The Festival itself began at noon. Everyone went down into the tunnels in the frozen river, where the sunlight was blue and bubbles were trapped in the walls like insects in amber. This was the first time many of the children had been allowed into the tunnels. They ran around like mad, slipping or skating over the floor and exploring the spaces and strange sculptures carved by the river months before. Some brought ice skates; some didn't bother; some just fell down all the time and didn't seem to mind. One small mammal girl (mostly giant weasel, I think, but with six legs instead of four) practically flew through the tunnels, using only her paws, and slid nearly to the ceiling on tight curves.

Milldacken's family of salamander farmers had gone over the tunnels early that morning; they'd melted and refrozen the floor, making the uneven surface thick and smooth enough for skating, and blocked off all the dangerous and labyrinthine parts of the caverns with newly frozen ice. Several of the more artistic ones had made sculptures of their own. A salamander with enough training can focus its heat into a thin stream, which carves ice like a butter knife, or absorb heat quickly enough to freeze poured water before it hits the floor. No one can make ice sculptures like a salamander trainer. Overnight, the caverns had sprouted trees with crystal blossoms and snowball fruit, transparent animals sleeping inside bubbles in the walls, a full-sized model of the Train's engine, an ice palace with waterfall walls, a dragon made of ocean waves, a peacock with a tail full of prisms, and probably many more that I never found. They shone like diamonds in the frozen sunlight.

Eventually, everyone gathered in the largest cave to watch the sunset, which turned the ice deceptively warm shades of pink and gold and made me feel like I was inside a frozen peach. Nearly everyone there was a mammal or avian; the town's cold-blooded residents, for the most part, won't wake up for another month or two. There were a few reptiles and a spindle beetle in the caverns, but they were so tightly wrapped up that they looked more like pillows than people. They had salamanders or arctic rats stuffed in their pockets for warmth. Three large mounds of ice had been frozen onto the floor; people gradually piled wood on these, and I eventually realized that they were for bonfires.

While they were doing that, the children had the annual standing-in-the-water contest. This is an old tradition, dating all the way back to the nomadic clockmakers who founded Milldacken (and Jiligamant, though the clockwork there has mostly stayed small). The contest is simple: everyone puts a foot (or several feet) in whatever water is flowing through the caverns, mostly snowmelt from upriver, and whoever stays in the longest wins. There hasn't been a contest for adults for the last few generations. Apparently, in the last one, eight of the town's most stubborn men stayed in the water all night until it froze solid, after which their feet had to be thawed out with buckets of hot coals carefully (or not-so-carefully) placed by their extremely displeased wives. (This was before Milldacken was big enough to have a salamander farm.) The only ones allowed to compete now are the children, who will get out when their feet go numb (or, failing that, when their parents say so) and don't notice that the water is kept above frostbite temperature with the surreptitious use of salamanders. The winner this year was a small child with more fur than a mop; he or she (no one could tell) had to stand in the middle of the stream so the others could be sure that whatever paws were under all that fur really were in the water. The prize was a clockwork toy day bat with blue spots, which promptly disappeared into the winner's fur and stayed there for the rest of the evening.

Once the bonfires had gotten started, it was time for the feast. Everyone in the town crowded around the fires, armed with pointed sticks, and toasted whatever they happened to feel like toasting. (For the standing-in-the-water contestants, this included their toes.) For the most part, the carnivores brought sausages and fish, the herbivores squash and zucchini; Milldackeners eat more of those than anything else. I saw a lot of marshmallows being toasted too, though, as well as a plumpkin, a loaf of bread, an alarmingly large sump squid (they really do live everywhere), a dried apple, one or two cupcakes, a clump of spaghetti, and a brick. Hooks had been screwed into the ice above the largest bonfire. From them, the farmers from upriver hung spits and roasted a whole thugroffler (for the carnivores) and a 260-pound pinstripe squash (for the herbivores). The smell of all that food cooking at once was indescribable. I'm not even going to try. I've never felt so lucky to be an omnivore.

It took a while, but everyone eventually finished eating. Most of us stayed and sat around the bonfires, warm and stuffed. Many fell asleep. While everyone waited, the candle-lighters walked through the rest of the caverns, lighting every one of the hundreds of candles scattered through the ice. They became visible as the bonfires gradually died down. It was completely dark when we all got up and walked away from the ashes, parents carrying their children, all of us singing an old hymn of thanks for the Winter and the Spring, the mountains and the river. The Milldacken version has an extra verse praying for a safe thaw. The candles shone through the ice in every direction, making the tunnel walls glow flame-orange and ice-blue, shining like a kaleidoscope filled with a million stars.

Two days from now, the river will thaw, and every last trace of the Festival will be washed away. Where the caverns are now, there will be only water. They're starting to fill up already.

I went to bed last night feeling as if I'd just woken up from a dream. In two days, the only evidence to the contrary will be a few traces of bonfire ash and a little windup bat.

Milldacken

They say in the Railway Regions that if you want something to turn, you should build it in Milldacken. It's the milltown that began milltowns. At the edge of the cliff it's built on, the river is as strong as it gets before it leaps down to the foothills and turns placid and wavy, like a well-fed snake. You can hear the town's thousand waterwheels from miles away - though at this time of year, of course, only the waterwheels under the ice are still moving. They're loud enough by themselves. The sails of the inn's largest windmill go past my window every few seconds.

Milldacken isn't quite as much of an architectural hash as the beaver town of Fishrick, where the inhabitants are constantly dismantling roads, canals, and other people's buildings to use the mud in their own projects, but it's close. All the wheels and gears and drive shafts make you feel like you're in an enormous wood-and-stone clock. Everything is centered around machinery; if the best place to put a drive shaft is through the middle of a dining room, everyone will just get used to ducking when they serve the potatoes. There's hardly a single building that doesn't have some sort of mill on it.

Living in a city where everything turns, the Milldackeners design everything in circles. All the buildings are round. The streets are laid out in loops like irregular chain mail. There isn't a single local dance step that moves in a straight line. The railroad runs along the cliff and spirals around the tower of the Train station, which makes the whole building look like a large screw. (Ironically, it's one of the only things in Milldacken that doesn't turn.)

Being on the edge (quite literally) of the Railway Regions, Milldackeners can look out from the cliff here and see miles and miles across the Mountainous Plains. It's almost as good as the view from the Needle Tower. (Coincidentally, I could see the light of the Tower's beacon salamander above Sconth last night.) The buildings at the edge of the cliff go down almost forty levels of terraces in the rock before they run out of horizontal space and release the waterfall to roar its freedom out into emptiness. The cliff below Milldacken is honeycombed with the intricately carved ruins of an old cliff city, an abandoned labyrinth of tunnels and pillars and galleries in wet black stone. No one lives there anymore except bats and a few cliff lions. At this time of year, ice from the waterfall coats the outer ruins like a million years' cobwebs. The mills right on the edge of the cataract grow enormous tresses of ice in the Winter, like fossilized lace or upside-down cacti, which rip whole waterwheels off of buildings if given the chance. The edge millers go out every day, armed with pickaxes and spiked shoes, to check on them. They're not about to lose their wheels to giant felonious icicles.

It's even worse during the Spring thaw (which, apparently, is less than a month away). When its tributaries start flowing again, the entire river, frozen solid over the Winter, breaks up into chunks of ice the size of buildings. Teams of Milldackeners go out onto the bridges with long poles to push the ice into the center of the river. (There are bridges there, very high ones, but no buildings.) The shards grind over the cliff like giant teeth and plummet to the ground far below. Children line up along the terraces to watch them explode. If all goes well, the ice jostles its way through the town and only bites chunks out of the occasional bridge or shed; if not, it's been known to carry off whole buildings. Everyone who lives next to the river leaves until the worst of the thaw is over.

The townspeople seem to disagree about which river Milldacken is actually on; I've gotten a different answer from everyone I've asked. I've been told that it's the Kastel, the Rushel, the Glom, the Tanterill, and the Snail. One miller even said it was the Jagarmelt, which is ridiculous. You can't even SEE across the Jagarmelt this low in the mountains, much less build a city across it.

Before the tributaties freeze in the early Winter, the river carves out tunnels and caverns underneath the thick surface ice. They dry out as the water slows to a trickle. At this time of year, they're crawling with explorers, glacier climbers, cryo-geologists, and children (though most of them aren't allowed to go far into the caverns). Apparently, there's some sort of festival held under the ice just before the thaw. I hope the Train doesn't get here until after that.

Coming and Going

Well, I'm back, after another long and unexplained absence. At least I can make it a long and explained absence, if nothing else.

However a Wayfinder's abilities work - whatever it is that enables them to find any place, no matter how elusive - I think I must have the opposite. I've been lost in a single building for over a month. I spent Christmas in the Galleria (and there will be a whole post on that later), then wandered around for a few more weeks until I found the door. I could hardly believe it; I was starting to think I wouldn't get out until Spring.

I wonder, now, if the Galleria was just keeping me until I had given it enough paintings. Artists and architects are its life; I can't imagine it would be eager to let them go, especially the traveling ones, who may never find their way back.

When I left, I found Plack sitting right by the door and eating grass. He looked extremely bored. Once he saw me, he let me know that he had, in fact, BEEN extremely bored, and what had taken me so long? I explained that I had gotten lost; he snorted, as if that was only to be expected, and walked away without another word.

We left Jijangola completely unnoticed. Everyone was inside, lost in their own creations, and wouldn't have been interested if they had seen us. It was starting to snow as we left. So much for reaching the Train before the first snowfall... Oh well. The Jijangolans have never gotten around to building a Train station (the foundations of one are gradually being engulfed by the outskirts of the Galleria, but the builder seems to have lost interest before laying any track. Someone else is busy covering the gap-toothed bricks with red and white tiles).

After leaving Jijangola, we wandered through the Trackless forests of the Railway Regions for another month or two, looking for a Train station. We managed to miss every single one of the little foothill towns; the few small villages (and one slug farm, of course) that we passed through were too small to afford a station. Some of them were little more than a collection of cabins. However little room they had, though, they were always just as welcoming as everyone else in the Railway Regions. A blanket on the floor of someone's root cellar is much more comfortable than sleeping outside in January. Plack and I both grew our Winter coats a few weeks after leaving Jijangola, so we were rarely too cold, but it's been a bit too wet in the Regions this year to sleep outside. I can't even imagine what it would have been like if we'd come in through the Great Shwamp instead of the foothills.

We arrived yesterday, tired and muddy from months of travel, in Milldacken. The whole city rumbles day and night - even now, when the river's mostly frozen - but it's still relaxing, if only because it has a Train station. No more trudging through the snow for me. It also has a post office (few postbirds visit Jijangola, as the people there are mostly uninterested in the outside world), so I can finally write again.

Unfortunately, reaching the Train does not put an end to trudging through the snow for Plack. The Train hasn't arrived yet, but there's no need for him to carry my luggage when I'll be able to just cram it safely into the baggage rack in my compartment. I doubt turnstile trolls will be a problem on the railroad.

We said goodbye this morning. Plack said that it had been an interesting trip, if nothing else, and that I was less annoying than he'd expected. (I think that's a good thing.) He even let me draw a sketch of him after I'd taken the luggage off.

The last I saw of him, he was leaving with a large samoval (why do I keep saying that? They're all large), whose luggage consisted mostly of a gigantic baritone balinga in a leather case. Plack did not look happy.

Well, he never does, really, but I'll miss him anyway.