Iron Council - China Mieville [200]
The Iron Council progressed through a landscape made of mist. The scarps and hillocks, the layers of trees seemed momentary thickenings of water in the air, seemed to curdle out of the vapour as the perpetual train came, and dissipate again in its aftermath.
They moved through scenery that was abruptly familiar, that jogged old memories. This was New Crobuzon country. Siskins went between dripping haw-bushes. This was a New Crobuzon winter. They were a few weeks away.
“We had a man once, years and years ago,” Ann-Hari said to Cutter. “When the Weaver came to us, before we was Council, and told us secrets. The man went mad, so he could only talk about the spider. He was like a prophet. But then he was boring, and then not even boring, just nothing. We didn’t even hear him, you see? We heard nothing when he spoke.
“You’re like that. ‘Turn back, turn back.’ “ She smiled. “We don’t hear you no more, man.”
I’ve a mission, Cutter thought. I’ve failed. Knowing that his lover had expected it did nothing to stop his sadness.
He became a ghost. He was respected—one of the world-crossers, who had come to save Iron Council. His dissidence now, his insistence that the Council would die, was treated with polite uninterest. I’m a ghost.
Cutter could have left. He could have taken a horse from the township’s stables and ridden. He would have found the foothills, the deserted tracks, Rudewood, he would have come to New Crobuzon. He could not. I’m here now was all he could think. He would run only when he had to.
He had seen the maps. The Council would go on east leaving spike-holes and the debris of track-pressed shale, recycling the iron road, and would at last hit the remains of the railway scores of miles south of New Crobuzon. And there they would couple to what remained of the old tracks, and steam on, and within hours would approach the city.
Cutter would run when he had to. But not now.
“We are a hope,” Ann-Hari said.
Perhaps she’s right. The train will come, the last of the Collective will rise, and the government will fall.
In these damp wilds they were not the only people. There were homesteads, little wood houses built on hills, one every few days. A few acres of sloped and stony ground raked beyond the dark underhangs of hills. Orchards, root vegetables, paddocks of dirt-coloured sheep. The hill farmers and families of loners would come out as the Council took its hours to pass them. They stared, skin milky with inbreeding, in the deepest incomprehension at the great presence. Sometimes they would bring goods to barter.
There must be some tradetowns but the Council did not pass any. The news of them—of the rogue train appearing from the west, escorted by an army of fReemade and their children, all of them proud—crossed the wet country by rumour’s byways.
Word’ll reach New Crobuzon. Maybe they’ll come for us soon.
“Did you hear?” one toothless farmer woman asked them. She offered them applewood-cured ham, for what money they had (arcane westland doubloons) and a memento of the train (they gave her a greased cog that she took as reverential as if it were a holy book). “I heard of you. Did you hear?” She gave them proud passage through her paltry lands, insisting they carve their road through the middle of her field. “You’ll be ploughing for me,” she said. “Did you hear? They say that there’s trouble in New Crobuzon.”
Could mean the Collective’s done. Could mean it’s winning. Could mean anything.
There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. “The war’s over,” a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came