Age of Heroes Read Online Free Page A

then continued onward and upward to its terminus, El Parque station, where the two men alighted.
    Young had proposed a hike into the forest, which sounded okay to Anthony as it was more adventurous than turning around and going back, which was what the great majority of the train passengers did. Young had brought a rucksack loaded with provisions, and they were both of them dressed for the conditions – walking boots, puffer jackets, thermal gloves. They strode off towards the treeline, Young setting a forthright pace, Anthony ably keeping up.
    For the first kilometre or so, Anthony talked about how the railway line had originally been built to serve the penal colony which had been established in Ushuaia in 1896. The trains had brought timber down from a forestry camp so that the prisoners, used as forced labour, could erect houses and help expand the town.
    “Funny how a symbol of one era’s suffering becomes another’s jolly daytrip jaunt,” Young commented.
    Anthony chuckled. “I might use that line in my piece.”
    “As long as you tell everyone who said it.”
    “Never. I’m a writer. I steal. I don’t give credit. Everything is fodder for my prose – even people.”
    “Bastard.”
    “At least it suggests the world is getting better.”
    “What, shamelessly pilfering some other bloke’s words of wisdom?”
    “No. A prison railway becoming a tourist attraction. The present transcending the past. Suffering giving way to leisure.”
    “Bollocks,” said Young. “The world’s just the same as it ever was. Something improves somewhere, something else turns to shit. For every peace treaty that’s signed, another war breaks out in a different place. For every dictator who gets overthrown, some other extremist regime pops up and embarks on a genocide.” He held up his palms and waved them like the sides of a scales: left up, right down; right up, left down. “It all evens out. Checks and balances, yeah?”
    “I like to think there’s an upward trend nonetheless,” said Anthony. “Continual progress. I take the long view. Life is markedly more pleasant and comfortable now, for the majority, than it was even just a century ago. That’s an objective, provable, quantifiable fact. People are living longer, they’re healthier, there’s more to eat, more free time...”
    “Yeah, but at what cost? The cushier it gets for us, the faster we bring on climate change. The more we consume – the more of us there are doing the consuming – the bigger a mess we make of the environment. All the oil, the plastics, the heavy metals, the agrochemicals, the manufacturing... We’re dooming ourselves, shitting the bed we lie in, but it’s okay, doesn’t matter, as long as we’ve all got pizza delivery and smartphones and the latest app. Speaking of which...”
    Young produced an iPhone and took a map reading.
    “Don’t want to get lost, do we now?”
    “For someone who bemoans how consumerism is destroying the planet,” Anthony said, “you seem to like your tech.”
    “I never said I was consistent.”
    They hiked on in silence for a while, the only sound their feet crunching snow. Roy Young, Anthony thought, was an interesting individual, much more complex than he appeared. On the surface, he was affable, competent, droll, but there were dark undercurrents running beneath. If he had once been military – and Anthony knew what to look for and was sure he had been – then he would have been the type who thought hard about every decision, the type who might even question orders if he felt they didn’t serve the best interests of himself and his brothers-in-arms.
    Anthony knew of another ex-soldier who had not been good at taking orders – a war hero who had, indeed, argued with his general and refused to fight for several days; one of the things that had earned the war hero enduring fame. He even inspired a saying: ‘to sulk in your tent’.
    Achilles.
    Funny. Anthony hadn’t thought about Achilles in