Iron Council - China Mieville [217]
New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.
He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.
“It’s better now,” she said. “But in the first weeks, gods.
“Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.
“Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills,” she said, “Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an annex: go in, you don’t come out, so they say. When they’re done asking questions.
“Some of us escaped.”
She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.
“We need to tell what happened,” she said. “It’s what we have to do. But if we tell the truth, those that weren’t here will think we’re lying. Exaggerating. So . . . do we make it less bad than it was, to be believed? Does that make sense?” She was very tired. He made her tell him all the story, everything about the fall of the Collective.
When he found out how long ago it had been it would have been easy for him to say to himself, There was no one to fight for the Council, but he did not. He did not because they could not know what might have happened, because it had not been allowed to. They could not know what Judah’s intervention had done.
There were ten thousand rumours in New Crobuzon about the Iron Council.
Cutter went often to the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead, to sit alone amid the art dedicated to the godling of patience. The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.
He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fenn had fallen, and taken chisels to several of the larger stones. With cheerful imprecision and disrespect they had made crude and quick and vulgar figures, lively and ugly, ground filthy and dissident slogans into their skins. They had ruined the meticulous boring and acid-work of the artists, preempting the erosion-sculptures with pornographic clowns. Cutter sat and leaned against a new stone figure stroking an oversized cock, carved out of what might have been intended as a swan or a boat or a flower or anything at all.
He did not remember much of that time in the hills. The grip of Rahul. Holding him while—did he flail? Did he cry? He suspected that yes he had cried and flailed. He had been held till exhaustion dropped him.
He remembered Ann-Hari walking, disappearing, not looking at him.