Iron Council - China Mieville [88]
That night Judah goes to the hollow where the men who fuck men gather, and when he comes back Thick Shanks is waiting. —Meeting going on, he says. —Not us, them. He indicates the lights in the perpetual train’s guntower. —We got to think. They sending riders back along the line, telling Wrightby to send money now.
There is a fight the next day with sledgehammers, between two cactus-men so massive the overseers can only watch the vegetable men crush each other’s wood-fibre bones. —Something’s happening, says Ann-Hari to Judah. They sit on a blackened half-rock split by fire and cold water and the strikes of the biggest Remade man. —The girls are frightened.
A scattered few handwritten Runagate Rampants are left at the mouth of the hill. Each day and night another fight or some petty act of anger, a headlight of the perpetual train shattered, obscenities carved into the paint.
Daily the graders gather and refuse to cross the ravine. Their foremen find other work for them. The graders are not striking, but are refusing to do what they are supposed to. They will sweep away the detritus of the tunnel, and carry tools, but if they cross that cut they will be in perhaps the last part of their digging; they will be dragging the roadbed the last hundred-some miles to Cobsea. And they will not, not yet, not now while the iron road withholds their money. That would be a surrender.
And then there is a night. The length of the train and at the black of the tunnel there are fires. The roamstars are bright, crawling by their sedentary cousins. Judah has made a golem from thistles.
—What’s that?
Judah looks up. People are staring, heading up the rock hill. They seem pulled; they move in little stuttering steps.
—What is it? Judah says, but the man he asks only shouts and points up the hill. —Look look! he says. —Come, it’s there.
There is a noise along the ridgeback of the slope as if the stones and the very bushes are resonant, are singing an aberrant hymn. People on the incline shout and begin to scramble back again, in a river of scree. Falling men careen into their friends. Judah grips roots and keeps his feet.
The tremulous song, the sound of the wilderness anxious, is loud. There is a spider above him. No no that is not, that is not a spider that great shape that cannot be, it is the size of a tree, a fat tree with branches splayed in perfect symmetry that cannot be but that is what it is, it is a spider, so much bigger than the biggest man.
—Weaver.
—Weaver.
They say it. Their voices are beyond fear, quite stripped by awe.
Weaver. The spiders that are not gods but are nearly, that are something so other, so much farther than men or xenian, than dæmon, than archon, that they are unthinkable, their power, their motives, their meanings as opaque as iron. Creatures who fight murder die and reconfigure everything for beauty, for the intricacy of the web that is the world they see, a concatenation of threads in impossible spiral symmetry.
Songs about Weavers fill Judah’s head. Nonsense-fears for children—He promised me her hand in mine, / then smothered her in all his twine, / the Weaver swine—absurdities and pantomime foolery. Looking up at this thing glowing unlight or is it light over the rock edge he knows the songs for the atoms, the infinitely tiny specks of stupidity they are.
The Weaver hangs in complex stillness. Body tarry black, a teardrop globe, a glintless head. Four long legs angled down to end in dagger-feet, four shorter up, as if in the centre of a web, hanging in the air. Ten, twelve feet long, and now, what, what is it, turning slowly, slightly, as if suspended, and the world seems snagged. Judah feels a tug as if the world is tethered by silks the Weaver is gathering as it turns.
Judah makes a debased throat sound. It is dragged out of him by this Weaver’s unseen threads. It is a kind of unbidden worship.
All along the slope the men and women of the railway stand seared by what they see, and some try to get away and some stupid few crawl closer