Iron Council - China Mieville [78]
The stronger the somaturge, the greater the mass they can control. Soon they are setting upper limits to weight. Nothing heavier than a large dog can fight. Judah wonders how much he could control if he chose.
As organisers, bookie and top golemachist, Pennyhaugh and Judah amass good money. Golem wrestling is noticed by New Crobuzon’s press, and there are many newcomers. Judah is growing bored. He only fights Loth and the Dandler now. He watches how they animate their constructions. He listens to their hexes. He fights enough to make money, but mostly he fights to learn.
Every time his golems move, Judah feels his connection to the stiltspear. —I want to know everything about this, Judah says. Pennyhaugh brings him to the university library, and shows him relevant texts. He reads the titles: Theories of Somaturgy, The Limits of Plasmic Range, Beyond the Abvital Debate. —I want to know everything, he says.
It is a sweet winter. Judah takes Ann-Hari ice-skating. She likes the way he is recognised by some they pass. —Swamp-Taught! one says. It makes Judah less happy.
They walk in the frost-glazed shopping streets of The Crow, which are strung with ropes of lights and winter flowers. They drink hot chocolate mulled with rum. Ann-Hari is not looking at him. Her eyes pass over his and she smiles, and it is a real smile, but she is not looking at him.
Good-bye, Judah thinks, and smiles back.
When snow comes, for a few hours it effaces all the edges of architecture: the tight-coiled cornices of old churches, dark stone buttresses and all the countless poured and moulded concrete and brick terraces, and workers’ cottages too mean or crude to have any style at all. They become undulations below snow; then they are themselves again, as they sweat off sleet.
Judah dresses in the exaggerated clobber of a street-success. When he walks, the Dog Fenn children run after him, with a few skinny cactus youths and leaping vodyanoi, and beg him to make golemachs for them. Sometimes he animates a squeezed-together handful of coins and lets it totter toward them, for them to watch and pick apart.
Ann-Hari has no interest in learning to read, but when she discovers that he plumbs the newspapers for the progress of the Transcontinental Railroad Trust, she demands Judah read to her every day she is with him (there are more and more days that she does not come home).
— . . . a brutal winter, he reads from The Quarrel. —Those men still in the swamp spend much of their time acurse at the cold, but they have at least the advantage that the stiltspear, perfidious wetland savages, have retreated and no longer harry them. Messages from the south suggest construction crews from Myrshock are, despite less punitive weather, making poor progress . . .
—What is Myrshock? Ann-Hari says. Judah stares. She knows nothing of the railroad’s shape, or its future.
He makes her a map. —Three branches, he says, drawing the upside down and slanting Y. —New Crobuzon. Myrshock on the coast of the Meagre Sea. Cobsea in the plains. A track out from each, meeting in the swamps. Five hundred miles down from New Crobuzon, half as much again to each of the others.
Judah disguises his own fascination with the rails as indulging Ann-Hari’s. He thinks of the men all the time; he thinks of what he’s seen, that community of hammer-swingers, intervening in the land.
The road has not yet forked. Reports tell of brief and costly strikes. Some writers argue that the TRT gendarmerie is defunct, unable to control its workforce or subdue the little principalities it comes to. The Mayor must end the subleasing of authority, they say. It is time for New Crobuzon’s militia to police the tracks. No one thinks this will happen. The government is against it.
—The strikers complain of the weather, Judah reads. —They strike against the chill. What would they have the TRT do? Does not the whole of the workforce, the overseers, the Remade, Wrightby himself, feel the same cold?
—No, says Ann-Hari.