Iron Council - China Mieville [49]
“Oh that’s disgusting,” Elsie said. Susullil was holding up the fruit that he had cut. It was small and browning, lumpy skinned. It took the rough shape of a human head. Of all the prey-fruit on the tree, Susullil had taken one of the humans.
Another cultural difference, Cutter thought that night as they sat around the fire and Susullil ate what he had taken. Pomeroy and Elsie, even quiet Judah, made revolted sounds. They would no more eat prey-fruit than dogshit. It turned Cutter’s stomach to see Susullil swallow and lie back to dream the dregs of the dead man’s mind. Susullil looked at him once, carefully, before he closed his eyes.
Pomeroy and Elsie withdrew, and Judah and Cutter talked a little more. When, finally, he lay down, Cutter caught Judah’s appraising glance and was certain Judah knew what he would do. He felt a familiar mix of emotions.
He waited many minutes until everyone but he breathed steadily with sleep, and their camp was very moonlit. When he touched Susullil to wake him and kissed him deeply, he could still taste the dead man on the wineherd’s tongue.
CHAPTER TWELVE
And then sunlight came through the thick and ropy canopy. Elsie and Pomeroy saw Cutter, lying close to Susullil. They gathered the camp without speaking or meeting Cutter’s eye.
If Susullil was conscious of their embarrassment, he made no sign of it, nor did he show Cutter any affection now night was gone. While Cutter rolled the blanket that had been a pillow for him and Susullil, Judah came to him and gave a slow beatific smile. A benediction.
Cutter burned. He swallowed. He stopped to stow his kit. He leaned in close and said quietly just for the somaturge: “I don’t, not now, not ever, need your fucking blessing, Judah.”
It was like the times in New Crobuzon he had been taking men home and met Judah in the street. In Cypress Row, in Salom Square Casbah. Once Judah had come to Cutter’s rooms early on a Shunday, and the door had been opened by the black-haired boy Cutter had woken up with. Then, as always when he saw Cutter’s partners, Judah had smiled with peaceable pleasure, with approval, even when Cutter pushed the young man aside and stood before Judah, closing the door behind him.
When Cutter went looking he found himself glancing backward in case Judah was there to see him.
Cutter imagined being an artist or a musician, or a writer or libertine pamphleteer, one whose life was a scandal, a Salacus Fields man, but he was a shopkeeper. A Brock Marsh shopkeeper whose customers were scholars. Brock Marsh was a strange and quiet district; its excitements were not those of the artistic southern bank.
In Brock Marsh, renegade hexes might make doors where there should be no doors. Entities cultured in thaumaturged plasm might escape and make the streets deadly, and debates could go murderous as rival thinkers sent bleakly charged ab-ions at each other. Brock Marsh had history and a sort of glamour, but there were no places for Cutter to find men. When there were familiar Brock Marsh faces in the southside inns he would not acknowledge them nor they him.
Cutter despised the dollyboys in their petticoats and painted faces, the aesthete inverts draped in flowers in the Salacus Fields night. He would scowl and walk the canalsides of Sangwine past the she-men whores to whom he did not speak. He would not go into bawdy houses, would not rent some man’s arse. Not anymore. He only rarely visited the warrens by the docks where those sailors who did not just make do at sea, but preferred it that way, would tout for men.
Instead he might perhaps once in a rare while push past crowds into certain inns with half-hidden entrances, thin rooms, thin bars and lots of smoke, older men watching each newcomer eagerly, men in groups laughing raucous as hell and others sitting alone and not looking up, and what women were there were men, dollyboys, or were Remades who had once been men and whose in-between status was a peccadillo to some.
Cutter was careful. Those he chose would never be too