Iron Council - China Mieville [82]
The perpetual train creeps forward with tiny turns of its wheels. Pushed and pulled by four hulks, diamond-stacks splaying and venting from yards up. Vastly bigger than the engines that ride New Crobuzon’s elevated railways. These wilderness versions wear cowcatchers, their headlamps burn vividly, and insects touch like fingertips against the glass. Their bells are like churchbells.
There comes an armoured car with a swaying guntower. An office on wheels, closed wagons for supplies, what seems a parlour, one at least that is blood-fouled, a rolling abattoir, and beyond that a very tall and windowed wagon painted with pinchbeck gilt, slathered with symbols of the gods and Jabber. A church. Four, five enormous carts with tiny doors and rows of little windows, triple-decked bunkrooms thronged with men. Under their own great weight the sleep-coaches sag in the middle as if they have sows’ bellies. There are flat cars, open and covered. And beyond them the crews. The music of hammers.
They are on a flat through the brush. The track-layers are speeding, closing the gap with the graders.
Judah is only one man walking beside the train. There is nothing to mark him except the sense that he is waiting. Judah is lifted. But there is sourness. He sees men and cactus-men muttering and the fear of the Remade tethered near their stockades. The foremen go armed. They did not used to.
Many miles ahead surveyors map out the land according to charts drawn a score of years before by Weather Wrightby and his crews, when the old man was a scout himself. Behind them, in the unland between the train and the explorers, graders make their fat raised line. And behind them the bridge-monkeys push trestles across impassable land, and the tunnellers keep cutting through their rocks.
All this is ahead. Judah carries ties.
This is how the laying goes. Early morning the hundreds of men wake to bells and breakfast in the dining car on coffee and meat from bowls nailed to tables, or eat in vague congregations along the tracks. First are the whole: the hard human labourers; cactus-men from New Crobuzon’s Glasshouse, a few renegades from Shankell.
Behind them, cuffed to their meal by guards, the Remade eat what is left. There are a few women among them, Remade with steam-driven integuments, iron-and-rubber or animal bulk. Those prisoners with boilers hexed to them are issued enough culm and low-grade coke to work.
The trains hang back. Horses or pterabirds or Remade bullocks drag carts from huge piles of rails along the line, to the last of the track, and back. The crews move for each other, industrial dancing. They quickstep in and down, and the hammering, and more rails come, and the carts refill and rejoin the extending road. Ten feet, hundreds of pounds of iron at a time, the road continues.
Jabber, what are we bringing? Judah thinks to see the work of all those many hundreds. What are we doing? He is awed by its raucous and casual splendour.
He sings songs to himself as he works, and invisibly he makes each cold rectangle of wood a limbless golem that for the tiny interval of its ablife strives to cross from the horse-hauled carriage of sleepers to the dust of the bed. Judah feels the thoughtless tugging from each piece, and it helps him. He carries more than he should. When the waterboys come from the train out of sight behind them there is a scramble to drink first, before dust and spit fouls the water. The many Remade wait.
Judah’s tent-mates like him. They listen to his stories of the swamps and tell him of labour troubles.
—Fuckin’ Remade been causin’ trouble too. Over food and that. And the whores’ prices goin’ up and up. Somebody said the money’s dryin’ back home. You know anything