Iron Council (24 page)

—We have to link it up, Thick Shanks says. —We send our
own
riders back to New Crobuzon, talk to the guilds there, make
joint
demands. If we can get them to back us—

—You’re dreaming. You think they’ll do that? For us?

—We have to take control of this. This is
ours, now,
says Uzman.

Someone jeers and makes a noise about the godsdamned Remade. Ann-Hari shouts, and in her agitation her arcane hill Ragamoll asserts itself.

—Shut up, she says to the heckler. —You curse the Remade, as if it make you better. Why we here? You fought. You—she gestures at the tunnellers—you struck. Against
us.
Her lieutenant prostitutes nod. —But why did you fight the gendarmes? Because
they,
they Remade, wouldn’t scab. They
wouldn’t.
They took beating for you. To not break
your
strike. And they did it for
us.
For
me.

Ann-Hari reaches out and grips Uzman and pulls him to her, he acquiescing with surprise. She kisses him on his mouth. He is Remade: it is a vivid transgression. There are shocks and exhalations, but Ann-Hari roars.

—These Remade strike for
us,
so
you
won’t be broken. You strike against us and we against you, but these Remade are on
both
our damn sides. You
know
it. You fought for them. You scorn them
now
? They
won
you your damn strike, and
ours too,
even though we strike against each other. She kisses Uzman again. Among the prostitutes, some are aghast and others are cheering. —I tell you, Ann-Hari says, —if anyone deserves service on
credit,
it’s the damn Remade.

The prostitutes closest to Ann-Hari and most militant seek out Remade ostentatiously to touch.

—We have to link up, shouts Thick Shanks, but no one is listening to him. They are listening to his friend Ann-Hari. Judah makes a golem out of the dust.

It is deep night but very few are sleeping. Judah’s golem is taller than he, held together with oil and dirty water. The old man become the Weaver’s prophet stands behind Ann-Hari and shouts obscure praise to her while she and Thick Shanks argue.

A gendarme comes to them from the direction of the train. He waves a truce flag. —They want to talk, says a woman on chitin wheels.

—Wait, he shouts as he walks. —We want to end this. No recrimination. We’ll talk to the TRT, get the money through. Everyone wins. You, Remade, we can talk. End your peonage early, maybe. We can talk about everything. Everything’s open.

Ann-Hari’s face is a joy of anger. The man cowers from her and she passes him and runs in the direction of the train, followed by Remade, Thick Shanks and Uzman, and Judah, who slaps his golem on its arse as if it is a baby and shocks it, hexes it into motion. It astonishes those it passes.

Shanks is shouting to Ann-Hari, —Wait wait, what are you going to do?
Wait.
And Uzman is urging something too, but where the Remade besiegers hide behind their stockades she simply steps into view of the gendarmes in the tower. She takes a man’s flintlock.

Uzman and Shanks are shouting at her but she is walking on into the no-man’s-land by the train. Only Judah’s golem goes with her. The tower’s guns swivel toward her. Inexpertly she brings up the flintlock. She stands with the oily dirt man, the two of them alone.

—No deal with you bastards, she shouts, and pulls the trigger, though bullets cannot penetrate the cladding. As the shot sounds, Remade run forward to protect her and Judah hears the captain at the tower’s top screaming something at his own men and it could be
hold
or
fire.
Judah has his dirty golem step before Ann-Hari as first one and then a sudden percussion of the gendarmes’ guns sound.

Everyone drops but Ann-Hari and the golem, and there are screams and blood. The gunshots dwindle. Three people lie unmoving. Others, mostly Remade but whole too, are shouting for help. Ann-Hari is still. The golem is pitted where bullets have stopped in its dense substance.

—No no no, the captain is shouting. —I didn’t—but the Remade will not wait now. They roar. Someone pulls Ann-Hari back, and Judah sees her, and she is
smiling,
and he feels himself smiling too.

There is a little war. —What are you
doing
? Shanks screams at Ann-Hari but it is a pointless question now. Gendarmes, free workers, prostitutes and Remade skirmish, and two sides assert: the Remade and their friends; the gendarmes and those opposed to this exultant hysteria. Judah is afraid of it, but he never unwishes this violent child’s birth.

Remade attack the tower with guns, crude bombards and their swing-hammer limbs. They fire stone slabs and track-ends that make the tower ring. A man beside Judah, whose chin wears a fringe of crabs’ pincers, dies suddenly from gendarme shot. Judah has his golem move slowly around the belfry, disaggregating in bullet-slugs of its earth flesh.

He does not hear the shot from the heavy gun above. An overturned curricle is at one moment a cart with men and women leaning between its spokes and then is an eruption, a fire expansion of burnt knife-edged wood and blood uncoiling above a cavity bleeding smoke. Judah blinks. He sees detritus. He sees that the dark thing acrawl toward him leaving a mollusc trail is a woman, her skin blacked and redded, ink craquelure on meat. He wonders that she does not make a sound as her hair burns then knows he cannot hear. His ears sing. The barrel of the gun exhales like a languid smoker.

It turns. The rebel Remade, prostitutes, and those of the free who are with them run to escape its range.

Judah stands. Slow. Steps up, and makes his golem move. The gun motors with unoiled imprecision. The golem presses its filthy self against the freightcar. It reaches up, echoing and exaggerating Judah’s little motions, pulls itself up, leaving a smear of its corpus.

The towertop gun fires again. It stabs oily smoke, and the railroad cut and the people on it, yards away, bloom. The golem ascends the tower, stamping on buttresses, on gutters. It uses the very guns that gendarmes angle down at it as handles and steps. It disregards itself, as no sane or sentient thing could, sheds itself in scabs and diminishes as it rises, but it is near the top now, weakened with sticks and railway spikes protruding from its gravel-grease skin, its very legs falling from it to land formless as excrement. The gun swivels and Judah has the golem probe its arm deep into the barrel.

It reaches to its shoulder. The gun is blocked by hex-bound golem dirt. It fires and there is a strange motion, a shuddering backward. The barrel splays in strips, the golem is a rain of filth. Ignited air and smoke fill out, the tower rocks, its tip glows and is punched brutally open, its roof unclenches into metal fingers.

Rank billows plume in a great cough, and a dead man falls from the shatter. The corpse of the gun sways. Judah is spattered with his golem’s remnants. The rebels are cheering. He cannot hear them but he can see.

The renegades take the train. The gendarmes throw out their guns and come out bloody, eyes seared and dripping.

—No, no, no, Uzman shouts. He is eating coal, and his biceps are swelling. With Shanks and with Ann-Hari, and with other faces that Judah now knows, the Runagaters try to stop the beatings when they look like becoming killing. They take away knives. People shout but cede to them. The gendarmes are chained where the Remade were.

—What now? Everywhere Judah goes he hears it.

It is the Remades’ train. They make flags for their new sudden country and wave them from the burst guntower. No one sleeps that night. The tunnellers’ overseers disappear into the barrens, and many men go with them, and some prostitutes.

—Send word back for gods’ sake, Thick Shanks says. —We have to make links, he says, and Uzman nods. Around them are other leaders of the sudden mutiny. They make their points in untrained passionate language. They decide things.

Ann-Hari tells everyone, —Not backward, we don’t go back, we go out. And she points into the wilderness.

They choose messengers. Riders. A Remade sutured to steam-and-piston legs like spread-out fingers that run with tremendous shuddering up slopes of rock, his man-torso aflail like an unwilling passenger. Another, a muscled man made a strange six-limbed thing: he is joined below his abdomen to the neck of a great bipedal lizard, one of those the badland nomads half-tame to ride. He stands high on two back-bent legs before a stiff tail, clawed forearms just below his human skin. He has been a scout for months, ridden by a gendarme with a gun to his back.

—Go, says Uzman. —Stay by the tracks. Out of sight. Get to the towns. Get to the workcamps, get to Junctiontown. And Jabber and fuck, get to New Crobuzon. Tell them. Tell the new guilds. Tell them we need help. Have them come. If they support us, down tools for us, we can win this. Remade and free—bring them all.

—Uzman, they say and nod, as if his name itself is an affirmative.

The horse riders go in wheels of dust, the steam-insect man in an instant of scuttling speed. The gnarled and reptile-paced man accelerates over shreds of heather by the roadbed. Birds and other things that fly watch them. The ones that are not birds veer with the zigzag spasms of fish in the sea.

The prostitutes let some men come to them in strict conditions, unarmed, guard-women nearby. Since Uzman and Ann-Hari, some of them have even been with Remade.

—New Crobuzon’s full of it, Ann-Hari says. —Whole-and-
Remade fucking. What happens when someone gets the punishment factory, what, always his wife leave him?

—Supposed to. It ain’t decorum.

—They doing it all over the city, like they doing cross-sex, khepri, human, vods.

—True, Judah says. —But you ain’t supposed to admit it. These women . . . your women . . . they’re letting us see.

She looks to the moon. She lets the moon go over her. She watches its last light over the skeletal bridge. —City guilds can’t help us here, she says. —This is new.

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 his head.