Iron Council - China Mieville [67]
Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.
They stopped at a newly bloated township, and hawkers rushed for the train. They held up cheap food, cheap clothes, hand-printed gazetteers promising a bestiary and maps of the newly opening lands. They sold rail-end papers—Judah bought one, a roughly inked sheet The Wheelhouse, thick with errors in spelling and grammar. It was full of workers’ complaints, contumely about the failings of the Remade, scatology and hand-drawn pornography.
The rails angled southwest by churned mud and rubbish where a temporary town had been dismantled, on to rocks and grasslands. Once the train scaled a ravine on a new trestled bridge that swayed under them.
They switchbacked up inclines where they had to but mostly the train went straight—deviations were failures. Where stone reared it was split, become scree-edged furrows stained by smoke. To the west, mountains overlooked them. The Bezhek Peaks, girdled in shadow. When the train began to slow again, it was for the end of the line.
There were people in those wilds. Many women, in hill-dirted petticoats. Some carried children. Suddenly they were hundreds, in a tent city close to the bright rails. Streetwalkers bizarrely displaced to the desolate landscape.
The sun lowered and there were fires. Judah thought of the people left behind, the dead, diseased and killed, the children abandoned or smothered, buried by the line. They slowed past a herd of cattle, mongrel, stringy and subtly Remade, a grex breed. The box capra chew and live on what poor food there is, their cross-slit eyes betraying goat affinities. At last, ahead of the whoretown and the cattle, was the perpetual train.
Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. It was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a no-man’s-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-Lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.
Then there were days of trekking beyond the edge of iron. Judah’s party passed the carts of the tie-layers. Crews cut down copses, treated and shaped the slabs, piled them in mounds and hauled them. Beyond the ties, the roadbed was bare rock-shards. Walking the sleepers it had seemed a ladder across the earth: now it was a road. It furrowed through high land and rose above low. They were a long way behind the graders.
For five days they were alone but for birds. It was an uncanny, rangy interior of slopes and little rivers. The rocks that reared like stelae were wind-carved into unplanned bas-reliefs. The roadbed tracked like a huge ruin, like the remnants of a city wall. They heard noise, approached a mouth in rock.
Tunnel-cutters had ploughed a path through the talus. There was a camp of men by the hole, and more men emerged from stone’s innards, hauling carts of the hill’s litter. They were too far from New Crobuzon for any steam-excavators to reach them. And the rock was probably too hard, though it gave Judah pleasure to imagine one of the drill-nosed things, big as a carriage, emerging from the ground. The tunnellers were alone in the wilds with picks and blackpowder, digging routes for rails that would not reach them for months.
The Remade, with limbs become pistons and jackhammers, were deafened by their own labours. One was a man whose arms were replaced with the outsized splayed claws of a mole: there was no way he could scrape through this stone but the crews had made him a mascot, and he sat in the tunnel’s core and sang encouragement. TRT gendarmes guarded.
—Where you heading? said the superintendent.
—South. Cobsea, the plains.
—The swamps, said Judah’s survey partner.
—The swamps, the supervisor said. —Be a bloody laugh