Iron Council - China Mieville [97]
Torches move on the girders below them. The bridge builders have returned to work, without overseers.
—What did you tell them? says Judah.
—The truth, says Ann-Hari. —Told them they can’t stop. Told them this is a Remaking.
Sunup, after three days, the steam-spider Remade returns. He sucks up water before he can speak.
—They’re coming, he says. —Gendarmes. Hundreds. In a new train. A commandeered passenger train, he tells them, emptied of the sightseers and chancers come to explore the continent’s interior.
Most of the freeandwhole have run. Some are members of this new town, resentful of the Remade suddenly their equals but held by a deep query, by What will happen? They are part of this train-assembly, a gathering. There are some as committed as the Remade, part of the sabotage crews who go back to tear up the tracks behind them. Those drivers, firemen and brakers left teach the Remade.
They reverse through landscape they have altered. It was never stable, afflicted with life in hex tides. They go over places where the ground, when they cut it, was stone and that is now dappled lizard’s skin, bleeding milklike blood where rails are spiked. There are places where the earth has become like the cover of a book, and shards of paper spurt from the spike-wounds. They dismantle the rails to block their pursuers.
A reversed industry. They turn their expertise to the road’s dismantling, levering up spikes, shouldering rails and ties piles, scattering the stones. They plough up the roadbed and return home.
But—They took the barricade down, the scouts soon come and tell them. —They brought rails and sleepers. They’re building the track again. Within three days the gendarmes will reach the camp.
There are lights in the tunnel; there is industry.
—What did you do? Judah says.
—We’re finishing the tunnel, says Ann-Hari. —And the bridge. We’re almost through.
Her influence is spreading. Ann-Hari is more and less than a leader, Judah thinks: she is a person, a nexus of desires, of want for change.
The last yards of rock are being ground through in the dark wet mountain. Judah looks down at the bridge. The new work is something laughable, a quick flimsy lattice of metal and wood thrown up beyond the stumps of proper construction. It is ersatz; it is only just bridge.
Judah is one of a conclave—it surprises him—struggling for strategy. They meet in the hills: Shaun, Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks, Judah. But parallel to them, something raucous and collective is emerging.
Every night in the gaslamps the workers gather. First it was convivial—liquor, dice and liaisons—but as the gendarmes come closer, and as Uzman debates strategy in the overlooking ground, the parties change. The men of the train name each other brother.
Ann-Hari comes to the meeting and invades a man’s rambled contribution. A wedge of women push into the men. There are those who try to shout Ann-Hari down.
—You ain’t a worker on this road, a man says. —You ain’t nothing but a mountain whore. This ain’t your damn congress, it’s ours.
Ann-Hari speaks something base. She talks in ragged rhetoric of thrown-together exhortations—a speech that stops Judah. It seems as if it is the train that speaks. The fire holds still.
—not to speak. she says. —If I am not to speak who has the right?—What but on us? What but on the backs of me and mine have we built these rails? We are become history. There’s no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.
When she is done no one can speak for seconds, until someone mutters respect.
—Brothers, let’s vote.
Uzman tells them that whichever way they see it, whatever they claim to themselves, Ann-Hari is telling them to run. That’s not the answer. Are they afraid?
—Ain’t running, Ann-Hari says. —We’re done here. We’re something new.
—It’s running, he says. —Utopian.
—It’s something new. We’re something new, she says, and Uzman shakes