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She had thought that as she grew older she would grow more certain of herself and what she wanted to be. But now, this new Marya, what does she want?
Above all, do not attempt the journey unless you are certain of your own evenness of mind. Outside on the platform porters and
It is said that there is a price that every traveller through the Wastelands must pay. A price beyond the mere cost of a ticket on the train.
There is a man watching birds from the farthest window in the observation car. Azure-winged magpies—Cyanopica cyanus—burst from willow trees as the train roars past, the long feathers of their tails iridescent in the afternoon sunlight.
When Henry Grey looks at a living thing he sees it as a system of vessels, connected to each other in a pattern of infinite skill. He wants to get closer, longs to touch each quickening of sinew and twitch of muscle, to feel the pulse of life beneath his fingers.
They are waiting for him to reveal their secrets. He feels their urgency. He has always felt it—the natural world waiting for him, challenging him. When he looks Heavenwards every bird is writing on the sky in words he longs to understand. Beneath his feet the earth is fat with promise.
When else are we to have so many hours and days released from the burdens of yet another art gallery, yet another museum, yet another statue by some long-dead sculptor which one cannot possibly leave without seeing?
the passengers do not want mysticism, they want modernity. There is no place for these rituals anymore, said the Company.
Third Class smells of sweat, anxiety, food already on the turn.
Members of the Society for the Study of the Changes in Greater Siberia—the Wastelands Society, as it is more commonly known—often travel on the train, and the crew have always felt a certain sympathy with them, recognizing a shared preoccupation,
crow is a sign of sin, the crew say. When the changes began, crows were the only birds that would fly over the Wall, eating carrion from the changed lands, returning with trinkets or bright stones clutched in their claws. This is why people in the north of China throw stones at them; they are tainted.
The very rich do not only buy estates and fine trinkets, thinks Marya, they buy certainty. They buy the conviction that this journey holds no danger for them. She envies them their confidence.
I have heard that an overabundance of imagination is a dangerous thing on this journey.”
for those of you who wish to join us—at the Moscow Exhibition, where this very train will form the centerpiece of our Company’s display, a tribute to our work and a symbol of our confidence as we enter the new century.”
“One wonders if such hubris is earned,” she says. The silk merchant’s lips twitch. He
The afflicted may be convinced they are pursued, or that they must immediately exit the train. They may forget themselves, their name, their purpose for being on the train at all. Although they may be brought back to themselves, with prompt treatment, not all are so fortunate. There are no physical signs of the sickness; it is more insidious than that—a slipping of the mind,
have read the guidebooks,” she says, and is annoyed by the defensiveness in her voice. The girl shrugs. “They don’t prepare you for what it’s like. Not even Rostov, and he’s quite good on most things. The rest of them are charlatans.”
“It’s more dangerous if you’ve read their books than if you haven’t.”
“It’s the brightness that matters. People say that you should take something sharp and prick yourself with it, but I think what you really need is something that’s sharp on your eye.”
“Glass is alchemy made solid. It is sand and heat and patience,” her father would say, when he was feeling poetic. “Glass can trap light, use it, shatter
is stronger than she looks. Stronger than she feels. She remembers the furnaces in the glassworks, the way her father plunged the glass into the burning heart of them.
On the Forms and Classifications of Mimicry in the Natural World. He picks it up to feel its solidity, the weight of all those hours lying unmoving on the grass to observe the bees in his garden and to prove, for the first time, that some were not bees at all but syrphidae, hoverflies—the weak taking on the guise of the strong, the mimicking of a more perfect form.
It was human nature, after all—the desire to map, to collect, to understand. But none of the explorers ever returned,
Isn’t that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.
“It is strange,” says the widow; “though I have read about it so much, the Wastelands, I hadn’t expected … It is the reminders of the human, of ourselves that…”
Reminders of what can go wrong,
The moon rises and the water turns to silver. It is hard not to think of the darkness beneath it, and what may be living there, in the depths where the light never shines. I advise the cautious traveller to limit the time they spend observing it.
is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.
This lake—” He looks out of the window and catches a flash of silver, the silhouette of a tree thrown into relief upon it. “This lake may be fatal to human incursion but who are we to say there are not creatures who swim and thrive within its waters?” A mirror of the Heavens—is
“Meaning. Why must we think that an absence of order equates to an absence of meaning? Is it not meaning enough that we should wonder? Is that not what God demands of
“And so reveal in water and in sky, the mirror of the Heavens and the window of His eye.”
And it is understandable that recent events have made certain of their members believe that it is no longer possible, nor indeed right, that the Wastelands should be studied at
and there is nowhere for a stowaway to hide.
On any steam train, water is a constant, pressing need. On the Trans-Siberian Express it is an obsession. The train is always thirsty. It gulps down water in an endless, bottomless greed. It drinks and drinks, and the largest tenders made could not hold enough to see it through the long spaces of the Wastelands,
it walks across her hand it leaves a trail of what look like scales, silvery and dry.
They wear their glamour so lightly they affect to be unaware of it, but their table is the loudest and liveliest at dinner, and in the saloon car in the evenings the other passengers turn toward them like flowers seeking the sun.
She shines, in her fine dresses and golden hair, but it is a brittle, fragile shine, as if she has no confidence in it herself. Just beneath the LaFontaines is the Countess, on account
“He tells me that it is not too late to repent of my decadent ways, though I fear that he is underestimating my advanced years,” the Countess confides to Marya, over a pot of tea. But Marya can’t help but find his presence unsettling. Perhaps,
and hasn’t she known it all along? Hasn’t she been hiding the truth from herself? Not a scared, lost stowaway, in need of protection, but a Wastelands creature, a not-quite-girl.
“This name you have given to it. As if there is nothing out there. As if it has been emptied, left behind, when it is full of living, thinking things.”
“Everything out there is alive,” Elena says, “everything is hungry, everything is growing, changing.
“Regulation in all aspects, that is the key to your health—the regulation of diet, of behavior, of emotions.”
“There is a game,” Weiwei says, after a while. A game of silence and stealth, of watching and waiting. “You will be good at this. But I must warn you, for all your stalking through the marshes, I am good at it too.” It is a game of distraction, because she does not know what else to do.
“The passengers aren’t completely stupid, they know something’s wrong, and they don’t trust the Crows any more than we do.”
eight, nine of them, taller than the silhouettes of the trees. She has never seen them before, never known that there are creatures like this, going about their slow, secret lives as the train passes by, and above the roar of the rails they hear a sound, mournful and low, and Weiwei thinks—they are singing. And she realizes that she had never thought
The turquoise sky of the past few days has turned a pale, churning gray. Empty of birds, it feels lower, heavier than it has done before, as though a thick veil is descending onto the trees below. How will she go back home after this?
You cant go home again
And in his mind all is well, she thinks, for it is right that the women should be fearful and the men should be brave.
Marya has read about it too, in Rostov’s guide. Named for the rage of a peasant boy whose village was burned by the Tsar. The boy wept at the loss of his home and fields, and his tears turned to fire when they fell on the ground. After this, when the Tsar harmed the land, the fire would return, presaging disaster.
the truth is that she feels it too. A deliberateness, as if the storm is thinking.
There are those who embrace what they see as the pure irrationality of Greater Siberia, who find that its chaotic profusion of forms chimes with their own ideas of anarchy, nihilism, freedom. But we must not dismiss this as the trifling indulgences of the young—there
