Iron Council - China Mieville [44]
For seconds he could not make sense of what he saw. The mounds were heaped-up carcasses, a charnel mass—blacked remnants of snouted ungulates, tusked, big and heavy as buffalo. They were encased in ash and crisped leaves. Roots spread out in their pebbled flesh.
“Vinhogs,” said Judah. “We’re in Galaggi. We’ve come so far.” The wind moved and hilltop dust and the burnings of olives, vines and vineleaves hurt their eyes. The dead animals rustled.
Pomeroy found a trench, where scores of men and women rotted. The decay of days had not yet disguised their crosshatched tattoos. Their pumice-colour skins were death-besmirched, stone jewels piercing them.
They were the wineherds. The clans, the Houses, nomads of this hot northern steppe, custodians of the vinhog coveys. They tracked them, protected them and, at harvest time, leapt in dangerous brilliant husbandry between the horns of the aggressive herbivores to prune the fruit that plumped on their flanks.
Cutter swallowed. They all swallowed, staring at the dead ragged with gunfire. Judah said, “Maybe this is House Predicus. Maybe it’s Charium or Gneura.” The vinhogs, the animal-hosts and their harvest, mouldered and burned away.
All day they walked swells of ruined land, through olive groves ground to nothing, and despoiled crop-herds, and great numbers of scorched cadavers from the winemaker tribes. A corral of the huge meat-birds gone to maggots. The soft spit of embers and the knock of dead wood surrounded them. On some corpses the specifics of murder were still clear. A woman, her skirt rucked up and stiff red; a big wineherd man, his belly flyblown, stabbed in both eyes. Rot made Cutter gag.
They found one vinhog alive, fallen in a stone basin. It shook with hunger and infection. It limped in circles and tried to paw the ground. Its skin was ridged with rootwork and a leaf-pelt from its symbiotic vines. Its lichen-grapes were wizened. Cutter shot it in pity.
“This is why the cactacae fought, down south,” said Pomeroy after a long silent time. “This is what they heard about. They saw the militia, thought this was what they’d get too.”
“Why this? Why this?” said Elsie. She struggled. “Galaggi ain’t Tesh land, it’s wild. These ain’t Tesh tribes.”
“No, but it’s Tesh they’re hurting,” Judah said. “Galaggi wine and oil goes through it. They aren’t strong enough yet to hit the city, but do this and you hit Tesh in the coffers.”
They were way beyond their mapped world. Tesh was there, two or three hundred miles south and west on the coastal plain. Cutter thought of it, though he did not know what it was he should picture. How should he think it? Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. Its moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince.
Thousands of sea miles from Iron Bay to the remote coast, to the foothold that New Crobuzon had established north of Tesh. The militia had to go past Shankell, past seas thick with piasa and pirates, through the Firewater Straits where the Witchocracy backed their Tesh neighbours. There were no land-routes across Rohagi’s wild interiors, no shortcuts. It was a desperately hard war to wage. New Crobuzon had to send ships across months of hostile waters. Cutter was awed at the brute vigour.
That night they ate unripe fruit they found unspoiled on a dead vinhog and made forlorn jokes about what a good vintage it was. Their second day on the vintners’ land they found wreckage of the marauders. The New Crobuzon militia had not had it all their way. It was the remains of a nashorn, a rhino ironclad and Remade into a veldt tank. Two storeys high, a raised arse-end gunnery, a piston-strengthened neck. Its horn was corkscrewed, a huge drillbit. The nashorn was burst and savaged with peasant weapons. Its gears and innards lay about it.
There were six militia dead. Cutter stared at the familiar uniforms in this unlikely place. The officers were killed with blades. There were wineherds’ sickles