Iron Council - China Mieville [133]
It took him days to know that he was wrong. Something was very not the same. The painting was different, and the ploughing, knife-grinding, bookkeeping. These are new people, he thought. They ain’t the same as me. Cutter was terribly troubled.
For a horrible day he almost despised what he saw. He hated it for how it kept him out. For being not strange enough and being so strange. And then he knew that it was not the Council, it was—of course, of course—it was him.
I weren’t here when this was made. I didn’t make this like the old ones did; I weren’t born to it like the young. I didn’t make this place, so it didn’t make me.
“Was a long time coming here.” The travellers, Ann-Hari, and others of the guiding committee had spent an evening in the mess hall. A hammer-rhythm song telling the story of Iron Council’s journey west, recorded in snips on the antiquated voxiterator, was given to Judah: “Songs for the golem man.”
“I’ll tell you some real Council stories,” one man said when the eating was done. “Not that those was lies, but they left off some things. You should know everything.” It grew late and cold, and they picked at their flatbread as they listened. “Was a long time coming here,” he said and told them of the cacotopic stain, though he would give no details. “We got off light” was all he’d say. “Near a month by the edge of the madlands.”
He told them of more than two years sending out scouts across unknown unmapped land to be lost and many to die, squabbling over routes, learning techniques. The Council laying down tracks, blundering into wars. They had taken their train without intent between the ranks of feuding forest things that pattered them with darts and stones: animal-men accused them of invasion. The renegade train met representatives of half-heard-of countries: Vadaunk the mercenary kingdom; Gharcheltist, the aquapolis. The Iron Councillors learnt new languages, trade and politesse with brute and urgent efficiency. “Land went open after the cacotopos.”
Poor bewildered little New Crobuzoners. They felt, Cutter sensed, a kind of pity for their younger selves traipsing dogged across places they could not comprehend. They felt their pasts gauche. At the time they must merely have blinked and kept walking, kept hammering, apologising where they realised they trespassed. There had been sacrifices—severe, dreadful prices to pay when they passed unknowing into this or that little despotism, crossed some potentate or quasigodling thing. “We took the Council once into that forest and there was that magma-horse took all our coal. Remember? Remember when we lost them boys to that ghast thing that left glass footprints?”
A landscape that punished outsiders. They were picked off by animals, by cold and heat. They starved, were sent to shivering deaths by illness, died of thirst when their watercarts got lost. They made themselves learn, constructing their absconder railway.
And they had warred themselves, when they had to, against tribes who would not take offerings for the right to pass into their lands. There was a time, which the Councillors described briefly in shame—The Idiocy, they called it—when the train itself had been ripped by civil war, over strategy, over how to continue. The generals of the caboose and those of the foremost engine had lobbed grenades at each other over the long yards of train between, a week of guerrilla actions on the roofs of the cars, butchery in corridors.
“It was a bad winter. We was hungry. We was stupid.” No one could look up during that story.
But at last the grassland. They had mapped and made peace with the neighbours they found. “We got more maps than the New Crobuzon Library.” The train kept moving. At very last, way west, their scouts found the sea.
“The train’s our strength. We have to keep