Iron Council - China Mieville [60]
The stiltspear commune have tolerated and even welcomed him because of the time he saved two youngsters from some rearing glade predator. It came for him, he still believes, but veered for the little duo who when it rose hissing and slick with bog had frozen and whose camouflage glands had secreted thaumaturgons such that they might have been tree-stumps not silent children, but the creature had been too close to be dissuaded.
But Judah had shouted and banged together his specimen pot and cudgel, shockingly alien in the dim quiet of the bayou. He could not have frightened the thing—a towering amalgam of sea lion and jaguar and salamander with finned flanges that could have broken his skull—but he confused it. It had burrowed below the waterweed.
Since then, since the pair he saved had run home and sang the story in a quickly constructed cavatina to stress its truth, Judah has been tolerated.
The stiltspear do not often speak. Days can pass.
Their commune has no name. Its hutlets rise from the reeds and water and are conjoined with walkways and slung with hammocks, and other rooms are sunk in pits in the sodden ground. Insects the size of Judah’s fist amble through the air, purring like big stupid cats. The stiltspear will skewer and eat them.
Stiltspears’ coats of oily down bead with swamp muck. They move like wading birds. They are like birds, and like scrawny cats, with unmoving, near-unfeatured faces.
Sires sing worshipful lays if they are red sires and build tools and reed-houses and tend the mangrove farms if they are tan sires. The dams hunt, one leg at a time raising so slow they have dried by the time the spread-out claws emerge, so no drips trouble the surface as the asterisk of fingers come together into a stiletto that poises over its reflection. Until some fat fish or frog passes and everything is still and the hand lances back into the water and is instantly withdrawn, the fingers opened, the game spiked on the stiltspear’s wrist, a prey bracelet dripping blood.
Between houses, stiltspear young play with mud-made golems as children in New Crobuzon play marbles and shove-stiver. Judah makes notes, takes heliotypes. He is no xenologist. He does not know how to decide what is important. All these charms—the stiltspears’ instinct camouflage, their golems, their herbalist physic, their unsticking of moments—he wants to investigate.
He does not know the names of any or even if they have names, but there are those according to some faint specificity of physique he christens: Red-eyes and Oldster and The Horse. Judah asks Oldster about the mud figures. Toys, his informant says, or games: something like that. —So you’d no longer make them? Judah asks, and the stiltspear snorts and looks skyward in embarrassment. Judah no longer blushes at his gaffes. So far as he can tell it is a question of propriety not ability: it would be as inappropriate for an adult stiltspear to make the little figures as for a New Crobuzon adult to demand the lavatory like a toddler.
Judah accompanies the dams. They seem glazed with the daylight. They catch armfuls of shelled waterspider larger than Judah’s spread hands. They milk their silk, weaving webs between roots and submerged boughs, turning rivulets into fish-traps.
Judah sees something uncanny. A lithe musclefish jackknifes, lapis scales vivid. And then Judah hears a moment of song, a two- or three-layered stripped-down breath of rhythm, buh buh buh buh in quick intricate time, several dams together, and the musclefish is still. It is set in its coil, unmoving, frosted in place in the water, and a hunter spears it with her jag-hand and at the instant she stabs for it she and her companions cease singing and the musclefish twitches again but too late. Judah sees it happen again, days later,