Iron Council - China Mieville [30]
After centuries of uncertainty and strange relations, the city had made understandings with the Witchocracy, and the passage of New Crobuzon ships through the Firewater Straits had been unhindered. So a sea-route was open to the grasslands and islands, the legendary places on the far side of the continent. Ships came back and said they had been to Maru’ahm. They sailed for years and brought back jewelled cakes from thousands of miles away, from the crocodile double-city called The Brothers. And then the piracy had begun, hard, and New Crobuzon came slowly to understand that it was being attacked.
The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased coming to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour that through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war.
Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newsposters. The Mayor had promised revenge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori heard, with “booze recruitment”—press-ganging.
It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on their doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of “temporary suspension of industry.” The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home.
Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them.
Hundreds of the returned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if at their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey.
“You know what this is!” he was shouting at them. “You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just didn’t want you to see . . .” He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlookers’ terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?
So many uncertainties, a spiralling-down of morale, fear in the city. New Crobuzon’s government had mobilised. For two, three years now it had been the time of the Special Offensive. There was more death and more industry. Everyone knew someone who had gone to war, or disappeared from a dockside pub. The shipyards of Tarmuth, that estuary satellite town, had begun to push out ironclads and submersibles and had spurred something of a recovery, and the mills and forges of New Crobuzon followed, war turning their gears.
Guilds and unions were outlawed capriciously, or restricted and emasculated. There were new jobs now for some of those grown used to pauperism, though competition for them was cruel. New Crobuzon was stretched out, pulled taut.
Every age had its social bandits. Jack Half-a-Prayer when Ori was a boy, Bridling in the Week of Dust, Alois and her company a century ago. Jabber himself, if one looked at it a certain way. Made strange by their