Iron Council - China Mieville [131]
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There had been marshland. Camouflaged fens where what seemed earth and crabgrass became suddenly only a layer of plant on thick water. The Iron Councillors laid down rock fragments, pontoons, sunk pillars quickly cut from woods. They saw copses of stumps weathered by more than two decades and interspersed with neonate trees, where they had taken timber on their way out. The Iron Council moved slowly on rails just above or just below the water. The train became a sedate creature of the shallows. Below it, around it, came noises of bolotnyi and bog-things.
Pomeroy laid tracks. Elsie went with the foragers. Qurabin came at night to the travellers and told them things she or he had found in the hills and swamps. Secret things. In the monk’s slow surrender to the cost of revelations, Cutter sensed a sadness, a coward’s eagerness to die. Qurabin had lost everything and was dissolving into the world with pointless worship.
Drogon the whispersmith was a guard. One of the gunmen who watched the Council in its gushing steaming progress. Cutter was with Judah—he would not let him go. They put down tracks together.
Judah was a fairy tale. The children would come to watch him, and not only them but men and women who had not been born when the Iron Council crossed the world. He was kind. He would make golems for them, which delighted them. They had all heard of his golems. They sang to him once, around a fire, as vaguely animal trees tried to shy from the sound.
They sang Judah a story of Judah. They sang in chanty counterpoint about when he fixed the soldiers with a mud monster and saved the Iron Council, and then how he went into the desert and made an army, and then how he went to the under-hill court of the king of the trow and made a woman out of the princess’ bedsheet and how the sheet and trow had swapped places and how Judah Low had eloped with the troglodyte princess and gone across the sea.
At night Cutter pressed himself to Judah and the older man would sometimes respond, with his beneficent restraint. Cutter would push into Judah or open to him. On the nights they were not together, Judah was with Ann-Hari.
“I got your message,” Judah had said, the first night, when they arrived. “Your cylinder. Rahul’s voice. About Uzman. Long live.”
“Long live.”
Uzman died suddenly, she told him, a swift shutdown, of his organic or pipework tubes they never knew.
“You still have the voxiterator?”
“How many messages you got from us?”
“Four.”
“We sent nine. Give them to someone going to the coast to trade, to give to a ship, that says it’s going south, that might go through the straits, that might get past Tesh, that might get to Myrshock, and then to New Crobuzon. I wonder which ones you got.”
“I have them with me. You can tell me what I missed.”
They smiled at each other, a middle-aged man and a woman who looked much older, sunburnt and effort-lined, but whose energy was as great as his. Cutter was awed by her.
At the long first evening of introductions they met Thick Shanks. He was dethorned, and Judah hugged the brawny, greying cactus-man hard. There were others the golemist recognised and greeted with joy, but it was Shanks and Ann-Hari who filled him.
Others he knew lived quiet as farmers, had become nomads, trappers, hunters bushed with beards. There were newcomers at the head of the Council, with Ann-Hari.
Where she walked she was greeted. Thin and hard, lined, uglied perhaps by time but an astounding ugliness, vivid and passionate. As the train travelled it came to the factories, farmsteads, silos and halls that in the years had spread beyond the train. Ann-Hari would fetch down to walk wherever they stopped.
People gave her fruit, cakes of spiced game she shared among her entourage, a patrol of women, some seventy, some in their teens. Cutter saw the strange love in which she was held. She took Judah’s arm. They were a stately couple.