Iron Council - China Mieville [87]
From behind the perpetual train comes a welling-up of shrieks as the insects reach the whores and few beggars who have come this far, the cattle, the economy stretched back on the rails.
Through the unhomely little forest. The graders are ensnarled with these skeletal trees. The earth has fought them and they have slowed. The graders meet the tunnellers and the bridgemen, the train and track-layers meet the graders, the whore and mendicant followers meet the train, and everything stops.
Land wrinkles into a lip of stone two hundred feet high, too steep for rails. The roadbed pushes into a gaping, almost-finished tunnel. Judah climbs the rise. On the other side it is sheer, edging a ravine. He can see the nearly finished bridge, girders emerging two hundred feet below him, marking where the tunnel will break through. There are men suspended in baskets, tamping charges into the holes they drill, hauled away as fuses spit.
There are Remade everywhere on the bridge. The scaffold reaches down to the crevasse bottom. The bridgemen wave up at the newcomers above. There is a great convivial joining.
Crews have worked months in the bone-coloured trees. They are like men made of the dust. The rust-eaters and the stokers on the huge engine are pied with the dirt of travel. Clerks and scientists lean from their cabs as the train stops; the wyrmen above wheel. The train’s semiferal cats highstep.
There is a huge celebration that night, the tunnellers and bridgemen delirious with new company. Judah drinks. He dances to the drone of the hurdy-gurdy with Ann-Hari, and she with him, and then with Shaun Sullervan, and with Thick Shanks. They smoke; they drink. Men are speechless from the cheap drugs and hexed moonshine they have concocted in stills.
There are differences in the crews. Judah sees how the tunnellers and the bridgemen who have been trapped so long in the badland that they have become part of it do not differentiate as his workmates do. That though the Remade here are billeted separately, and there is some effort made to segregate them, the punitive landscape here does not support divisions so strongly as among his own. It is as if the iron link to New Crobuzon conducts its prejudices. The iron-road Remade watch the local Remade. Judah sees them see, sees the gendarmes and the overseers see.
Judah and his team lay tracks into the tunnel, up to its clawed end. They move very slowly. The men who have lived like worms step aside into wax-smeared alcoves. They see by fires and lux hexes in the stone. Judah’s friends are cowed. They blink under the pale wide eyes of the diggers. The slap of their hammers is horrible and loud in that darkness.
There is nothing else for them to do. They clean the train, uselessly, scout the land a few miles, widen a well. But they cannot join the tunnellers, and they cannot build the bridge, and they can only wait, play cards, fuck and fight.
The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.
Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tunnellers are enraged. They have been working on promises, are owed months of backpay they thought the train would bring. The graders refuse to continue. It has been weeks since any trains from home have reached tracks’-end.
What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tunnel-headers gouge while the newcomers cut down dirty trees to make poor ties.
A tunnel-man is injured—an everyday terror in this blackpowder land, but he responds with an outrage as if it is the first time such a thing has happened. —Lookit, he says holding up his blooded hand. The red on the white dust that