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Back Beyond the Burn Line Save as PDF
Chapters (66)
  1. Copyright
  2. Contents
  3. Epigraph
  4. Part One
  5. 1.
  6. 2.
  7. 3.
  8. 4.
  9. 5.
  10. 6.
  11. 7.
  12. 8.
  13. 9.
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  16. 12.
  17. 13.
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  22. 18.
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  28. 24.
  29. 25.
  30. 26.
  31. 27.
  32. 28.
  33. 29.
  34. 30.
  35. 31.
  36. 32.
  37. Part Two
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  39. 2.
  40. 3.
  41. 4.
  42. 5.
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  45. 8.
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  48. 11.
  49. 12.
  50. 13.
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  63. 26.
  64. 27.
  65. 28.
  66. By Paul McAuley:

‘And people who are strange – people like us – should stick together. I can’t promise much in the way of payment, but it will be a lot better than breaking rocks in a Union camp,’ Pilgrim said.

‘Tell me some more about this place they’re sending you,’ Gentle said. ‘Tell me everything you know.’

13.

The original territory claimed by Pilgrim’s tribe was on the ragged, perilous west coast of the far south. Always a marginal land, it had become even more so as the climate cooled and changes in ocean currents brought freezing water from the icelands beyond the continent’s crooked tip. Summers grew wetter and cooler; winter snows came ever earlier; catches from fishing, the principal source of income, fell drastically. At last, a little over a hundred years ago, most of the tribe moved north, to land they had been granted at the edge of the great mountain range that ran down the western side of the Union, but a small number of holdout families remained, and the tribe still possessed title to its old Hearth and the land around it.

Pilgrim and Gentle, escorted by Blessed, took more than half a moonspan to reach the place. A series of train journeys took them west and south through desert pinched between sea and sere mountains. Desert at last gave way to grassland and grassland to forest, and at the little city of Fortunate Valley they embarked on a trading ship that hugged the rocky coast as it travelled south, delivering food and goods to settlements, taking on animal hides and salt meat, salt-cured fish and tanks of live crabs and lobsters, and at last slouching into the harbour of the little town of Stonehaven near the end of a dim cold day, flurries of sleet blowing across the black water and revealing and obscuring a scatter of houses along the shore. After the ship docked, Blessed hugged Pilgrim and pressed his hands together and bowed to Gentle, who was so pale he was almost transparent, having been seasick the entire voyage. ‘I’ll see you in a year,’ Blessed promised them, and they picked up their scant belongings and walked down the gangplank to the bleak shore of their exile.