Iron Council - China Mieville [76]
They go two days’ walk to a dying station, to the trains. They have third-class seats. Judah watches Ann-Hari watching the receding grass and buttes, the river they flank, the gashes, the darkness of tunnels. Hours in silence but for the complex rhythm of wheels, to the city he has not seen for many months, and that she has never seen.
He is back, and blinking like a countryman at New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari and he squat in a tent on a rooftop in Badside. They overlook the carcass of Grand Calibre Bridge, its pivoting section jammed, rusted immobile as it has long been, become only a breakwater.
All Ann-Hari’s fear went away with the miles, and there is nothing that will stop her learning New Crobuzon. Each day she comes back to him and tells him with excitement about the city.
She has never seen khepri before. —There are women here who’ve heads like bugs, she tells him. She visits the Ribs. —They’re bigger’n the biggest trees ever grew. They’re old and harder than stone, bones way up over the roofs, something dead and the whole city’s its grave.
Ann-Hari takes New Crobuzon’s trains, the five rails and their offshoots, from Abrogate Green in the east to Terminus, to Chimer’s End, to Fell Stop and the Downs. —There’s a shanty all falling down below a hill and the forest comes right up to it and the rails go on into the wood but the trains won’t go there.
There is a station in Rudewood on the useless tracks. It has > long been deserted. Judah knows of it, but has never seen it. Ann-Hari goes to the dangerous ghetto of Spatters, where the city’s few garuda live above the lowest of its subcitizens, and walks blithely through its stink and middened streets into the forest, and the overgrown remnants of the station, and comes back, taking the train to Dog Fenn to tell Judah. She is teaching him about New Crobuzon.
She tells him about the Fuchsia House, about BilSantum Plaza and the Gargoyle Park, the domed cactus ghetto, the zoological gardens, and many of these things he last visited in his youth if ever. She tells him all the races that she sees. She loves the markets.
Judah makes enough to eat, entertaining crowds with his hedge-magic golemetry. One day he makes a more sturdy figure from wood, with loose chain joints. He attaches strings to her limbs and now while his thaumaturgy makes her dance, he waggles a frame as if he is manipulating her. Judah makes noticeably more when punters think him a puppeteer than when they think he is animating matter.
In rooms by the Kelltree Docks, they are woken each morning by the sirens of factories and the slow stampede of the workforce. Ann-Hari meets dealers. She comes home with wide eyes and the acid smell of shazbah on her. She stays away some nights. When she is with Judah she sleeps with him and takes money from him.
She likes to walk. Judah walks miles with her, between onlooking houses, in the shadows of all the crossbred architecture. She asks him why things are built as they are, and he does not know the answers. Once he is with her as a khepri couple pass, their sashes plaited together, their headlegs rippling and sprays of bitter air emitted around them, their chymical whisperings. Judah feels Ann-Hari tense, and for the first time in his life he sees the strangeness of the khepri, hears the scissor-sounds their gnathic movements make. He sees the strangeness of everything.
It is boomtime. There is money, and there is competition for pavement change. Judah dances his puppets beside singers and instrumentalists, tumblers and artists in chalk.
It is winter but the city is freakishly warm. It is a languid season. In the red of tinted flares Judah’s golem performs for the students in Ludmead. The undergraduates are overwhelmingly young men, well-dressed uptown boys and a few studious clerks’ sons, but there are women among them, and even a few xenians. They walk by Judah’s high-stepping wooden dancer. He is only a little older than most of them.
Some give him stivers, marks and shekels: most give him nothing. One young man attuned to the figure’s movements