Iron Council - China Mieville [119]
Airships went over. Quick now, Ori thought. A wedge of men and women came through the crowd, coalescing out of randomness and moving with sudden purpose. They bundled around one man whom they pushed to the brick shed become a stage, where he vaulted up and was joined by someone Ori recognised, a Caucusist, from the Proscribed.
“Friends,” the man shouted. “We’ve someone wants to talk to you, a friend of mine, Jack,” and there were humourless smiles. “He wants to tell something of the war.”
They had so little time. Militia spies would be running to their contacts. In the thaumaturgic listening post in the Spike, the echelon of communicators and communicatrices would be blinking fast and trying to decipher from the city’s welter of cognition which illicit topics were being spoken. Quick now, Ori thought.
Looking behind him to gauge the size of the crowd, Ori was surprised to see Petron. The Nuevist was lacing his art activism with real dissidence, was risking more than late fighting in Salacus Fields. Ori was impressed.
There were Caucusists everywhere. Ori saw someone from the Excess, from the Suffragim; he saw an editor of Runagate Rampant. This speaker was not affiliated, and all the factions of the unstable, chaotic, infighting and comradely front had to share him. They were vying for the man.
“He has things to say,” the Proscribed man was shouting. “Jack here . . . Jack here is back from the war.”
There was an utter sudden hush. The man was a soldier. Ori was poised. What was this, this stupidity? Yes there was press-ganging and military Remaking, but whatever his history, this man was, formally at least, militia. And he had been invited here. He stepped forward.
“Don’t fret about me. I’m here, I’m here to tell you, of, of the real,” the man said. He was not a good speaker. But he shouted loud enough that all could hear him, and his own anxiety kept the crowd there.
He spoke fast. He had been warned he would not have long. “I ain’t spoken before to people like this,” he said and they could hear his voice trembling, this man who had carried guns and killed for New Crobuzon.
The war’s a lie (he said). I got my badge. (He drew it out by his fingertips as if it were dirty. City finds that he’s a dead man, thought Ori.) Months on them ships, we went through the Firewater Straits, on till landfall, and we thought we’d have to fight on the seas, we was trained to, sailor-soldiers, ‘acause them Tesh ships were out for us, we saw them and their weapons in flocks circling but they ain’t seen us, and it ain’t all city-loyal, the militia, not now, us from Dog Fenn on that ship were there because there ain’t no other jobs to do. Let loose and told to go liberate them Tesh villages.
They don’t want us. I seen things . . . What they done to us. What we done back. (There was a restive stirring somewhere in the streets and a brief incoming of Caucus scouts handslanging frantically to the Proscribed man and he whispered to the speaker. Ori got ready to run. The militia renegade gabbled in anger.) It ain’t no war for liberty, nor for the Teshi, they hate us and we, we fucking hated them I tell you, and it was a, it’s carnage there, just plain murder, they sending their children out stuffed full of hex to make us melt, I had my men melt on me, and I done things . . . You don’t know what it is, in Tesh. They ain’t like us. Jabber, I done things to people . . . (The Proscribed man hurried him, pulled him to the shed’s edge.)
So screw the militia and screw their war. I ain’t no friends to the damn Teshi after what they done but I don’t hate them half so much as I hate them. (He pointed at the basalt column-palace of Parliament, prodding the sky with tubes and tuskish jags, profane and arrogant.) Anyone needs dying it ain’t some damn Tesh peasant, it’s them, in there, who got us here. Who’ll take them out?