Iron Council - China Mieville [68]
Judah smiled. His partner laughed. Seven weeks after that he would succumb to a wasting quag disease and leave Judah alone. Judah had thought of the heliotypes and etchings he had seen of the wetlands, the creatures emerging from the groves, the sodden plants, imagined them all set in mud made concrete, paralysed in place.
Their road ran out. They came to the graders, who dug where the land reared up, and took its excess, and poured it in where the land dipped down.
They cut a hill into receding shelves of industry. The landmass became steps, acrawl with roustabouts and pack animals. Loess dust gusted. Over the hours of work, the steps sank to the grade. There would be a ravine where the hill had been.
There are crews strung out like worry beads, Judah thought, across the downland.
Now Judah has come back. The perpetual train has caught him. It has breached the marshland.
The darker of the swamps spreads like a slick, but now it is intruded. There is a line drawn into its interior, buttressed with stone. The rails shine on it. Judah sees a split in the trees, and the black smoke of the train.
Supply trains come, weighed with sleepers and salted beef, with black iron rails. Judah could ride home to New Crobuzon. But a calm has settled him. Things are unfinished. He does not want to go back.
The saturated ground has stalled production, and the gangs have caught each other up: the graders, tie-men and the spikers before the perpetual train itself. Wyrmen scavenge. The camp followers have conjoined. A tent town has come behind the perpetual train. Beerhall tents, dancehall tents, cathouse tents, prefabricated buildings in cheap wood, circuses for the workers’ breaks.
—I was in there, Judah says to himself, looking into the fen. He says to himself, —I should go home, but, but . . . It is difficult for him to say why he does not. He is drawn to the grandeur of this intervention.
He goes back to the deserted stiltspear encampment. It is being eaten by itself, giving in to mud. A part of him wants to go deep and find the stiltspear in the middle of their shrinking wetland. But he is human, and the stiltspear kill humans now. He effects some inadequate communion. He feels hollowed out.
Judah watches the graders’ progress. He is like a seagull, a carrion-eater in the train’s slow slow wake. It and its tracks might progress only a few score yards each day in this merciless swamp. Autumn is speeding up.
The tent-town and its shanties at the boundary of the fens are a hub of commerce and crude industry. They are full of country runaways, workers not working, prospectors, the pistolled horse- wanderers who are growing in numbers across the plains opened by the iron road. Cactacae, vodyanoi, llorgiss, khepri, and races more arcane: crustaceans walking on two legs and cowled like monks, figures with too many eyes. Mercenary glory-hunters; canaille of scores of cultures.
—How can I just go back, Judah says to one as they throw bone dice, —with that thing, that train, there? How can I?
He is a tramp wandering the steam-and-piston town of the rails. There are thousands of men and women, many without work. A pitiable reserve army trudges behind the perpetual train. They beg when the gendarmes are not watching.
Judah makes golems from the trodden-down mud of the track-end. He cannot leave the tracks.
The villages they pass become rich and murderously violent—decadent, liquor-swilling, whore-filled and lawless—for the few days or weeks of the railroad, and then die. The towns live mayfly lives.
Sex is as much part of the iron-road industry as spiking, grading, herding and paperwork. A tent city of prostitute refugees from New Crobuzon’s red-light districts follows the rails and the men that set them down. The men call it Fucktown.
The train comes and changes everything. For centuries there have been communities by the scrags of forests. Wars between subsistence farmers and hunters, hermits and trappers; trade and treaties between the natives and settlers from dissident