Iron Council (23 page)

—We are all spiders’ children, says the mad old man.

There are handwritten
Runagate Rampant
s on the rocks.

This is not three strikes, or two strikes and a half. This is one strike, against one enemy, with one goal. The women are not our opponents. The women are not to be blamed. No pay no lay they tell us, and that can be our slogan too. We will not lay another tie, another rail, until the money promised is ours. They say it, and we say it too.
We say: No pay no lay!

When the overseers and gendarmes realise that the disparate groups are not tiring of the strike, will not exhaust themselves with recrimination, there is a change. Judah feels it when he rises and sees the foremen moving with new purpose.

It is already hot, he is already sweating, when unbreakfasted he goes to the tunnel mouth with others from the idle workforce. The tunnellers are arranged like a fighting unit, and they carry their picks. The foremen and gendarmes are before them, with a corps of tethered Remade.

—Come on now, says an overseer. Judah knows him. He is the man they bring in to do unpopular things. There is a delegation from the prostitutes, twelve women walking close together, headed by Ann-Hari. The tunnellers begin derisive calls. The women only watch. Behind them all the train wheezes like a bull.

The overseer stands before the Remade. He turns his back on the strikers and looks at the motley Remade in their integuments
of foreign flesh and metal. Judah sees Ann-Hari whisper to Thick Shanks and another man, sees them nod without turning. They are staring at the Remade who have been gathered. One of them, a man with pipes that emerge from his body and enter it again, stares back at Thick Shanks and moves his head. He stands by a much younger man with chitined legs emerging from his neck.

—Pick up the picks, the foreman says to the Remade. —Go into the tunnel. Cut the rock. We’ll instruct you.

And there is a silence and no motion. The gendarmes have interposed between the strikers and the Remade.

—Take the picks. Go into the tunnel. Follow it to the end.
Cut it.

There is silence again a while. The men of the perpetual train know how the Remade are being used, and some begin to shout
scab, scab
preemptively. But the shouts die because none of the Remade are moving.

—Take the picks.

When there is no movement still, the overseer strikes with his whip. It lands loudly and with the blossoming of a scream. A Remade drops, hands to his opened face. There are fear noises, and some of the Remade start and begin to move but one of them makes a low command and they shudder and hold, except one who breaks and runs for the tunnel and shouts, —I didn’t want to and I won’t, you can’t make me, it’s a stupid plan, it’s a stupid plan.

The others do not look at him and he goes into the dark. The young man with the insect-leg tumours is shaking. He is looking hard at the ground. Behind him, the piped man is saying something.

—Take the picks. The overseer moves closer to the Remade.

Something rises in Judah. There is muttering and an anger around him.

—Take the picks or I’ll have to intervene to stop troublemakers. Take the picks and go in or—

People are beginning to shout now but the overseer speaks over them.

—or I will have to take action against . . . He looks slow and ostentatious over the terrified Remade, one by one, pauses while he looks at the piped man, the only one who even momentarily meets his eyes, then grabs the trembling boy, who cries and stumbles.
—Or I will have to take action against
this
ringleader, the overseer says.

There is a moment without speech or sound, and he motions two of the gendarmes, and as they move in the crowd begins to shout again, and the gendarmes beat the young man down.

And as if he were with the stiltspear singing, Judah sees in time gone thick. He watches the descent of the billy clubs, the fumbling of the boy who covers his head and his chitin embellishments. He has time to watch the moving of birds above them. He has time and a fascination for the faces of the crowd.

They are stricken and cannot look away. The piped Remade man who was the boy’s protector has his teeth set, the track-layers are opened up with pity, the tunnel-men stare in the shadow of the rockforms with bleak astonishment, discomfort, and everywhere Judah looks as the cuffs land and the gendarmes hold back the crowd he sees a
hesitation.
Everyone is hesitating and tensed and looking at each other and at the howling Remade boy and the batons and looking at each other again and even the gendarmes are hesitating, each blow taking a moment longer to land than the previous, and their colleagues raise their weapons in uncertainty and there is a swelling of voices.

Judah sees Ann-Hari, held back by her friends, scratching the air, and she looks as if she will die of rage. And people hover as if steeling to dive into something cold, look to each other still, wait, wait, and Judah feels the thing in him reach out, the oddness and the good in him reach out and push them, and it makes him
smile
even in this blooded heat, and they move.

It is not Judah who moves first—he never moves first—or the Remade with the pipes, nor Thick Shanks nor Shaun but someone quite unknown in the forefront of the tunnel-men. He steps out and raises his arm. It is as if he pushes through a tension that has settled on the world, breaks it and pours out into time like water breaching its meniscus and others come with him, and there is Ann-Hari running forward and the Remade intervening to hold back the nightsticks and whips of the gendarmes, and Judah himself is running now and wrapping his work-hardened arms around the throat of a uniformed man.

Judah’s ears are stopped with a hot tinnitus, and all that he can hear is the beat of his own rage. He turns and fights as he has learnt to fight in brawls along the sides of the rails. He does not hear but feels the firing of guns as shoves in the air. Energy boils in him in hexes, and when he grips a gendarme, in a moment of instinct he makes the man’s shirt a golem that wriggles on his body. Judah runs and fights, and what he touches that is lifeless he gives instants of ablife and makes obey his orders, to struggle.

The gendarmes have flintlocks and whips, but are outnumbered. They have thaumaturges, but they are not the militia: there are no spit gobbets of energy or transformations on the strikers, only base charms the railroaders can match and survive.

There are more cactus-men among the track-layers than there are cactus overseers. They run huge through the TRT guards and lay green fists on them, breaking them easily. They shield their friends; the gendarmes are not carrying rivebows that can slice them apart.

The piped Remade man drags the body of the insect-altered boy. The man pulls coal from his pocket and smears it into his mouth, leaving his lips black. He runs. The gendarmes who can still move are retreating. Others litter the ground, beside broken Remade and free men. It is so fast.

Judah is running. He drips. Gendarmes swing their weapons and are overcome by Remade out of shackles. They shoot and Remade fall. By the train, the gendarmes are regrouping.

—We have to—Judah shouts, and the piped Remade man is
beside him and nodding and shouting too, and there are those
who obey him: Remade and free whole men and women, there is Ann-Hari, there is Shaun, and they take their orders from this nondescript Remade man.

—You, he says to Judah. —With me.

They round the curve through dead trees and there is the perpetual train. It breathes its smoke and it spits steam as they come closer in mangy army. Its cowcatcher is splayed like ruined teeth. Its chimney flares, seems a funnel sucking up the energy of the sun. And all over figures jump from it and to it, from the bunks on its roof, from the trucks where the free men sleep, from all of it, staring as those who approach, gendarmes and strikers, shout. The two sides try to win them over as they run.

—they, they—

—get
down,
it’s the bastard Remade—

—they shot us
down,
they beat us—

—disperse you bastards or I’ll godsdamned shoot—

—stop them, Jabber, fuck
stop
them fuck’s sake—

The gendarmes fringe the train in raggedy formation, guns out, and the surge of the curious and the angry strikers—tunnellers, prostitutes, Remade—skitters to a stop. The gendarme retreat to their teetering guntower.

Now there is a long moment between a standoff and a confusion. Ann-Hari and the piped man approach. He looks emotionless. Ann-Hari does not. Behind them is a pitching army of Remade. They do not march, they shake their legs, some still ringed by the fringes of shackles opened with stones and stolen keys. They do not march, they almost fall with every step, and the sun makes them vivid in mongrel colours. The sun cuts sharp edges around the weapons they have made.

They raise slivers of the fence that has contained them. They swing the chains that tethered their feet. They grip shivs, pot shards embedded in wood. There are scores, and then hundreds of them.

—Jabber who let
them
out, what you
done
? someone shouts hysterically.

The thing in Judah swells up to see them. It bloats him; it moves like a baby in his belly. Judah shouts for them, a welcome, an alarum.

Men on all fours become bison-men, carrying men wrapped about with limbs, and women walking on elongated arms made of animals’ parts, and men stamping on piston legs like jackhammers come alive, and women all over whiskers, or with finger-thick tendrils feeling through their skin, and tusks stolen from boars and carved from marble, and mouths become interlocked gears, and switching tails of cats and dogs frilling waists like skirts and sweating in inks from Remade glands and astream with a rainbow mess, and this aggregate of criminals, this motley comes closer in freedom.

The gendarmes have withdrawn. They are in their armoured cab,
in the guntower. Some have grabbed mules and horses from the tracks’-end corral and gone.

—No no no.

Many among the tunnellers and the track-layers are aghast at the freeing of the Remade. No one is sure who did it, how. Some stolen keys, a moment that went through the kraal of tethered criminals (though still there are a few who will not emerge, who cling to their irons).

—This ain’t what we’re here for. This ain’t what this was. A tunneller is shouting at Shaun Sullervan, disdaining to speak to Ann-Hari or the host of Remade stretching their limbs. —I didn’t want that boy to be beat, it ain’t nothing he’d done, but this is
stupid.
What are you going to fucking do? Eh? We have . . .

He looks at the blinking Remade, who stare at him. He twists a little.

—No offence, mates. He is speaking to the Remade now.
—Look, it ain’t my fucking business. You seen we won’t let them beat you down no more. But, but, you can’t, you got to go back, this is . . . He indicates the guntower.

It is late. There is a siege and a strange siege calm.

—People have fucking
died,
the man says. —They’ve
died.

The boy with the insect additions is dead. Other Remade were dropped by bullets. A cactus-man was split by a moment of flying wood. Gendarmes have been piled up, broken on mallets, on spikes, on the ersatz weapons of the railroad. There are dazed mourners by trench graves.

Hunters return. Prostitutes sit on rocks in that deserted middle of the world and watch the train. Its firemen and brakemen agitate as the giddy Remade fill the boiler and pull levers and those with boilers of their own steal the high-grade coke. People mill bewildered and ask each other what has
happened.
They look at the sun and the shifting tree corpses and wait for someone to come into control.

A strange angst because there is such calm here now and it cannot sustain. The gendarmes have taken the guntower and one other car: the Remade have the rest of the train. The iron tower cracks in the heat, and the weapon at its top swivels.

The free men want to treat Shaun and Thick Shanks as leaders of a Remade rabble, but Ann-Hari stands with them, and with the pipe-woven man, whose name Judah learns is Uzman, and with other Remade.

—Take your boys back in. What you think they’re doing
in there? the free workers’ speaker says. He points at the tower.
—Getting ready is what. To take you. Now, we made our point.
If you go back now, they’ll pay us up, and there’ll be no, no penalties . . .

He speaks to Shaun, but it is Uzman answers.

—You’ll get your money, and you’re telling us to give this back? The train?

He laughs, and the craziness of what the free men are asking
is very evident. They want these Remade to unfree themselves. Uzman laughs. —We ain’t decided yet what we do here, he says.
—But we decide.

There are shouted arguments like street meetings, out of the guntower’s lines, between Remade with Remade, layers, rust-eaters
together, the tunnel-men. From the guntower come noises of industry. The strikers watch from behind blockades. The moon is split near exactly in half. It is waning. In its light and the lanterns’ and the phosphor of lux hexes, the men and women of the perpetual train gather.

—We can’t just wait, says Thick Shanks. —People are running already. Gods know how many gendarmes got out—too many horses are gone. Hand-trucks. And it ain’t just the overseers leaving, Uzman. We have to make them give in.

—Give in
what
? Ann-Hari speaks. The thing in Judah moves. —Give in what? What do you want from them, chaver? They’ve nothing to give us. They’re still scared—that’s why they’re in that tower—but when they start having to throw their shit out over the parapets, they’ll come out gunning.

They raise their voices. The crowd turns to them, slowly.

—We make
demands,
Thick Shanks says. —They’ll bring reinforcements. We have to have demands ready.

Shaun says, —Like what? You want them to free the fucking Remade? Ain’t going to happen. Recognise the new guilds? What is it we want?