Iron Council - China Mieville [48]
“It’s something about the rain,” he would say, “or thunder maybe, and . . . there’s a snake and a moon and bread.”
Elsie had spirits: the wineherds got drunk. They told a story in dance. At one point they performed a complex little double slap and turned to their audience with new faces—clannish thaumaturgy made them playfully monstrous, splayed their teeth like uncouth tusks. They gurned and pulled out their ears into batwings while the charm lasted.
The wineherds asked where they were going. Judah spoke in pidgin and pantomimed, told Cutter he had said they were looking for friends, for a myth, for something missing, for something they had to save, that would one day save them, for the Iron Council. The wineherds stared. Cutter did not know why they stayed. In the evenings, the wineherds and the travellers learned and taught a little of each other’s languages. Cutter watched Susullil close, and saw Susullil notice him.
It rained warmly each morning, as if the jungle sweated with them. They cut through lianas and the chaparral, and batted off mosquitoes and vampiric butterflies. At night they fell where they dropped their packs, dirty and exhausted and flecked with blood. Pomeroy and Elsie would smoke, and use their cigarillos to burn off leeches.
Their elevation rose and the forest changed, cooled gently and became montane. The canopy lowered. Ibises and sunbirds watched them. The wineherds cooked tree crabs. Behellua was nearly killed by a pangolin rex that whipped at him with its poisoned tongue. Rarely, when one of them became very tired, Drogon would ask permission, which all but Pomeroy gave, and would whisper them, telling them walk so they had to obey.
“Do you know where we’re going, Judah?”
Judah nodded to Cutter, conferred with Drogon, nodded again; but Cutter saw anxiety in him. He checked his compass and dampening maps.
Cutter felt a sudden and very great weariness, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him and wherever he went he dragged it after him. As if every new place he saw became infected by where he had been.
Pomeroy and Elsie renewed their lovemaking. Judah slept alone. Cutter listened, and saw Behellua and Susullil listening too, and then watched astonished as they chatted quietly in their wineland language and sitting up began offhandedly to masturbate in time, touching each other. They saw him watching and paused, and then he closed his eyes hurriedly as Susullil gestured to himself like someone offering a glass of wine.
In the morning Behellua was gone. Susullil tried to explain.
“Gone to tree town,” Judah said, after a long attempt. “There’s a township. Where those who’ve been displaced by the militia go. All the remnants from a clutch of villages, chelona, nomads from the bushveld. An outcast town in the forest. Where they found a god who can tell you anything you want to know. He says . . . Behellua’s gone, to tell them about . . . us.”
About you, Cutter thought. About what you done. To the militia. You’re coming to be a story. Even out here.
“So why’s he staying?” said Elsie.
“Judah done inspired him, didn’t he?” said Cutter quietly. “Inspires us all.” He did not speak unpleasantly.
Cutter was close behind Susullil. With night they came into a clearing, and had Susullil not pushed him aside, Cutter would have trudged into the fringe of mossy bones that telltaled a wake-tree. The tree’s willowy tendrils were feathered and bracken-thorned. He could not tell what animals had given their bones, but he could see that some were recent, without lichen.
A man—someone strayed from the deep forest—sat in the tree’s lower branches. His body and head disappeared into thicket. His legs dangled, swinging and kicking randomly from the attentions of the tree digesting him. Susullil stepped into the reach of the tree and Cutter wailed.
The wake-tree reached down with tentacle boughs that bloomed open with motion that might, almost, be nothing but the random waving of foliage. The wineherd rolled below the grab and flicked his sickle. He somersaulted and crawled back out of the anemone shadow.