Iron Council (33 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There had been marshland. Camouflaged fens where what seemed earth and crabgrass became suddenly only a layer of plant on thick water. The Iron Councillors laid down rock fragments, pontoons, sunk pillars quickly cut from woods. They saw copses of stumps weathered by more than two decades and interspersed with neonate trees, where they had taken timber on their way out. The Iron Council moved slowly on rails just above or just below the water. The train became a sedate creature of the shallows. Below it, around it, came noises of bolotnyi and bog-things.

Pomeroy laid tracks. Elsie went with the foragers. Qurabin came at night to the travellers and told them things she or he had found in the hills and swamps. Secret things. In the monk’s slow surrender to the cost of revelations, Cutter sensed a sadness, a coward’s eagerness to die. Qurabin had lost everything and was dissolving into the world with pointless worship.

Drogon the whispersmith was a guard. One of the gunmen who watched the Council in its gushing steaming progress. Cutter was with Judah—he would not let him go. They put down tracks together.

Judah was a fairy tale. The children would come to watch him, and not only them but men and women who had not been born when the Iron Council crossed the world. He was kind. He would make golems for them, which delighted them. They had all heard of his golems. They sang to him once, around a fire, as vaguely animal trees tried to shy from the sound.

They sang Judah a story of Judah. They sang in chanty counterpoint about when he fixed the soldiers with a mud monster and saved the Iron Council, and then how he went into the desert and made an army, and then how he went to the under-hill court of the king of the trow and made a woman out of the princess’ bedsheet and how the sheet and trow had swapped places and how Judah Low had eloped with the troglodyte princess and gone across
the sea.

At night Cutter pressed himself to Judah and the older man would sometimes respond, with his beneficent restraint. Cutter would push into Judah or open to him. On the nights they were not together, Judah was with Ann-Hari.

“I got your message,” Judah had said, the first night, when they arrived. “Your cylinder. Rahul’s voice. About Uzman. Long live.”

“Long live.”

Uzman died suddenly, she told him, a swift shutdown, of his organic or pipework tubes they never knew.

“You still have the voxiterator?”

“How many messages you got from us?”

“Four.”

“We sent nine. Give them to someone going to the coast to trade, to give to a ship, that says it’s going south, that might go through the straits, that might get past Tesh, that might get to Myrshock, and then to New Crobuzon. I wonder which ones you got.”

“I have them with me. You can tell me what I missed.”

They smiled at each other, a middle-aged man and a woman who looked much older, sunburnt and effort-lined, but whose energy was as great as his. Cutter was awed by her.

At the long first evening of introductions they met Thick Shanks. He was dethorned, and Judah hugged the brawny, greying cactus-man hard. There were others the golemist recognised and greeted with joy, but it was Shanks and Ann-Hari who filled him.

Others he knew lived quiet as farmers, had become nomads, trappers, hunters bushed with beards. There were newcomers at the head of the Council, with Ann-Hari.

Where she walked she was greeted. Thin and hard, lined, uglied perhaps by time but an astounding ugliness, vivid and passionate. As the train travelled it came to the factories, farmsteads, silos and halls that in the years had spread beyond the train. Ann-Hari would fetch down to walk wherever they stopped.

People gave her fruit, cakes of spiced game she shared among her entourage, a patrol of women, some seventy, some in their teens. Cutter saw the strange love in which she was held. She took Judah’s arm. They were a stately couple. The Iron Councillors would cheer and tell Judah how welcome he was, give the others food and drink, kiss their cheeks. They shouted in strange accents: New Crobuzon gone skewwhiff.

The perpetual train was town hall, church and temple. It was the keep. It whistled as it went, prowling the perimeter of its land of peasants, hunters, surgeons, teachers, drivers of the train. There were cactus-men and a very few cactus-women, and a handful of vodyanoi, the dowsers and diviners and their children. The sky was full of scudding wyrmen. The oldest of them had forgotten New Crobuzon; the youngest had never seen it.

Other races were there in little clutches: though New Crobuzon Ragamoll was the main tongue, there were those who cough-talked in arcane tonal systems. Immigrants to this track-layers’ land. The young were whole, of course, born without Remaking, but of those humans in their forties and above, most were Remade. They
were the first Councillors. Those who had made the Council.

The spectre of the roadbed climbed slopes.
Look, there.
Veins through the stone.
Ain’t this where we lost Marimon? On the crag yonder? It went up too fast and—
They paused, respectful, where topography reminded them of the long-dead.

Most hill animals fled the Council, but there were those airborne and rock-running predators who picked off stray travellers—mouthed things the size of bears that stalked sheer walls on pads or adhesive pulvilli, skin-winged tentacular masses on goat legs. Cactacae, with no meat smell to goad carnivores, were the best guards.

Where they could they retraced the Council’s path. Sometimes they had to cut new paths. With powders synthesised in their made laboratories they broke through the matter of mountains. There were crag-ends and cliffs where the bridges they had made years before remained. Councillors would clamber out to test them, their footsteps echoed by crepitus as boards moved against each other. Many were fallen. Split wood lay weathered, mulched by insects, while above plank girders stubbed from hills.

They moved on quickly thrown-down tracks, on tracks already waiting scrubbed of rust. Where they reached cliff walls, they might see the scar of the old roadbed meander miles out of the way, while before them was a tunnel, crude but tall enough to take them. Over the years of the Council, battalions of tunnellers had come, in shifts, to cut passages, in case a quick return might one day be needed.

On the third day after their arrival, there was a trading. Striders raced in their stiff-legged, dimensionally disrespectful way through grass that did not move as it should at their approach. They laid before the Council’s traders their arcane wares: a coagulum of hairs, phlegm and gemstones, some earth-spat bezoar.

“All sorts of ju-ju in that,” a Councillor muttered to Cutter. Iron Council was privy to alien magics.

“If you can find us, you can trade with us.” Grain, information, meat and engineering know-how. Above all Iron Council traded its experts’ knowledge, selling them for a time, to dealers from The Brothers, from Vadaunk, from travelling tribes.

There were no cognates of this life. There was nothing like this. Cutter was agitated. He could not remember a time he had not known of the Council. As a child it was a strange story, as an older boy an adventure, as a man come to politics it had been some kind of possibility. And now he was here and though he could not have quite expressed his disappointment, he felt it.

He could not map the alterity he felt. He raged silently that he could see little in this life he had not seen before, and that yet each moment those he watched were farming, looking after animals, writing, arguing and helping children and performing a thousand actions he had seen all his life, they looked and felt like new things. He could not understand why this man stripping and repainting the train was doing something Cutter had seen before.

Except for some used for trading beyond the rails, there was no money. That angered him somehow. He had never seen why insurrectionists should want to mimic those old village fiefdoms in the badlands where landworkers never saw coin but took what the local big-man gave them. The cashless economy irritated him as an affectation. It made no difference whether it was for coin—painting was up-down with a brush, money or not.

It took him days to know that he was wrong. Something was very not the same. The painting was different, and the ploughing, knife-grinding, bookkeeping.
These are new people,
he thought.
They ain’t the same as me.
Cutter was terribly troubled.

For a horrible day he almost despised what he saw. He hated it for how it kept him out. For being not strange enough and being so strange. And then he knew that it was not the Council, it was—of course, of course—it was him.

I weren’t here when this was made. I didn’t make this like the old ones did; I weren’t born to it like the young. I didn’t make this place, so it didn’t make me.

“Was a long time coming here.” The travellers, Ann-Hari, and others of the guiding committee had spent an evening in the mess hall. A hammer-rhythm song telling the story of Iron Council’s journey west, recorded in snips on the antiquated voxiterator, was given to Judah: “Songs for the golem man.”

“I’ll tell you some real Council stories,” one man said when the eating was done. “Not that those was lies, but they left off some things. You should know everything.” It grew late and cold, and they picked at their flatbread as they listened. “Was a long time coming here,” he said and told them of the cacotopic stain, though he would give no details. “We got off light” was all he’d say. “Near a month by the edge of the madlands.”

He told them of more than two years sending out scouts across unknown unmapped land to be lost and many to die, squabbling over routes, learning techniques. The Council laying down tracks, blundering into wars. They had taken their train without intent
between the ranks of feuding forest things that pattered them
with darts and stones: animal-men accused them of invasion. The renegade train met representatives of half-heard-of countries: Vadaunk the mercenary kingdom; Gharcheltist, the aquapolis. The Iron Councillors learnt new languages, trade and politesse with brute and urgent efficiency. “Land went open after the cacotopos.”

Poor bewildered little New Crobuzoners. They felt, Cutter sensed, a kind of pity for their younger selves traipsing dogged across places they could not comprehend. They felt their pasts gauche. At the time they must merely have blinked and kept walking, kept hammering, apologising where they realised they trespassed. There had been sacrifices—severe, dreadful prices to pay when they passed unknowing into this or that little despotism, crossed some potentate or quasigodling thing. “We took the Council once into that forest and there was that magma-horse took all our coal. Remember? Remember when we lost them boys to that ghast thing that left glass footprints?”

A landscape that punished outsiders. They were picked off by animals, by cold and heat. They starved, were sent to shivering deaths by illness, died of thirst when their watercarts got lost. They made themselves learn, constructing their absconder railway.

And they had warred themselves, when they had to, against tribes who would not take offerings for the right to pass into their lands. There was a time, which the Councillors described briefly in shame—The Idiocy, they called it—when the train itself had been ripped by civil war, over strategy, over how to continue. The generals of the caboose and those of the foremost engine had lobbed grenades at each other over the long yards of train between, a week of guerrilla actions on the roofs of the cars, butchery in corridors.

“It was a bad winter. We was hungry. We was stupid.” No one could look up during that story.

But at last the grassland. They had mapped and made peace with the neighbours they found. “We got more maps than the New Crobuzon Library.” The train kept moving. At very last, way west, their scouts found the sea.

“The train’s our strength. We have to keep it strong.” They could never have the train stand still. It would have been a betrayal. They knew—they always knew—that when they found the place where they could rest, where the land would support them, even then they would never let the train fall still. They worshipped it, in a profane way. They reshaped it, made it monstrous, kept its engines primed, able to power on anything that would burn. They had built a life.

Years. Throwing up structures as they needed them. Their town had grown. And nomads and lost adventurers of all races came to join the renegopolis. The Iron Council.

The town and its government were one. Its delegates, its committee were voted on by catchments based on work and age and random factors. There were vicious arguments, methods of persuasion not always admirable, a hinterland of democracy, patronage and charisma. There were those who advocated moving; those who said the wheels should stop. There had been factions within factions in the early years, over methods of industry and agriculture. They had continued to build life, delegating, being delegates, arguing, voting, disagreeing and making things work.

“Before, I was an oiler,” the storyteller had said. “I oiled the wheels.”

“And you know why I’m here,” Judah had said. “Now it’s time for you to reach a new decision. It’s time for you to leave. To move again.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Civilisations had been in the tablelands through which they passed, in this strange puna. The Iron Council, tracking back in head-on collision with its own history, passed through ruins.

Something that had perhaps once been a temple, a town of temples. In the shadow of a cratered ziggurat they laid their tracks, and the vent of their engines rose over the vines. They drove home spikes and split corroded marble gods in the rootmass. The Iron Council made the dead home shiver with hammer-blows. It sooted the bas-reliefs of battles in heaven. The Iron Council cut through the ivy-clotted city, towers gone to moulder.

“I know a man from a long time gone,” Judah had said to the committee. “We used to be partners. He was a government man for a time, works for some big concern now, but still has his ears open. He and me have history, and sometimes he needs golems for his work. And when he comes to me for that, we talk.”

Judah had told Cutter of these strange conversations, Pennyhaugh half-crowing at Judah, become his enemy, but them still drinking together. Not debates but performances. “I only see him because he gives me information, and I can give it to the Caucus,” Judah said. “And I don’t know . . . I don’t think he’s stupid enough just to sound off. It’s some kind of
gift.
”

The committee listened. There were the middle-aged, and Remades who remembered New Crobuzon, women who had once been the camp’s whores: but more than half the delegates were young, had been children or unborn when the Council was made. They watched Judah speak.

“There are always rumours. I asked him, like I know how to
do, so he thinks he’s offering it to me. He told me what was happening. You know there’s war against Tesh.” They did not know the details, but so big a war as this made Bas-Lag shudder, and stories reached the Iron Council by bush-adventurers.

“There’s slaughter in the Firewater Straits: they call it the Sanguine Straits now. They broke the Witchocracy’s thalassomach
hex, and the navy’s pushing ships through, all the way around the coast. Thousands of miles. But another expedition set off, weeks back. Below the warships. Ictineos. Maybe grindylow-led, I don’t know. But they’re coming. It’d take a long time, but they must be nearly here. Might have made landfall.

“They never forgot you in the city, you know. They never forgot Iron Council. Long live. People whisper the words. Your name’s on walls. Parliament never forgave you, never forgot what you done. And now they know where you are.”

He had waited for their alarm to subside.

“You couldn’t stay hid forever. You knew it. I don’t know how they know. Godspit, it’s been more’n twenty years, it could be anything. A wanderer tells another tells another tells another: it could have been one of your own, finding their way back to New Crobuzon, caught and interrogated. It could be a spy.” He spoke over the noise that spurred. “Far-seeing on a new scale. I don’t know. Point is they
know where you are.
They found you. I don’t even know how long they’ve known. But
they’d
never get a troop across the
cacotopic stain, or through the Galaggi Veldt and forests and
whatever—
we
had Qurabin.”
But we didn’t at first, Judah,
Cutter thought.
What were you planning to do?
“But with the war, that’s changed. Because the Firewater Straits are open.

“They’re coming
all the way round,
by sea. They’re trying to get past Tesh, up past Maru’ahm, and they’ll land on the edge of the grasslands. They’ll come at you not from the east but the
west.
They could never do that till now.

“Sisters, Councillors, comrades. You’re about to be attacked. And there’ll be no quarter. They’re coming to destroy you. They can’t allow you to continue. You
got away.
And sisters . . . now more than ever they need to finish it.”

It was hard for Judah to make the Councillors understand about the chaos in New Crobuzon. The older ones remembered their own strikes and the great shucking off in which they culminated, but New Crobuzon itself was an old old memory and thousands of miles away. Judah tried to make the troubles live to them. “There is something happening,” he said.

“They have to bring you back in pieces. So they can say to the citizens,
See what we done. See what we do to them as tries to rise.
See what’s been done to your Council.

“They’re coming to destroy you. It’s time to move, to relay the tracks. You have to go. You could go north—I don’t know. Take it up to the tundra. An ice-train with the bear-riders. Up to the Cold Claws. I don’t know. Hide again. But you have to go. Because they’ve found you, they’re coming for you, and they won’t stop till you’re gone.”

“Yeah, they could hide,”
Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, sudden and insistent.
“Or there’s another possibility. They could come back. Tell them they have to come back. Tell them.”

He did not whisper it as an instruction, but he spoke so urgently, with such sudden fervour, that Cutter obeyed him.

For days the Council was stunned enough that it could not plan. It had no sentimentality about its sedentary town. They had always insisted that the train was where they lived, that other buildings were only annexes, cabs without wheels. But the resources they had accrued over years, hard-won, would be missed.

“We should stay. We can take whatever comes,” the younger Councillors declared, and their parents, the Remade, strove to tell their children what New Crobuzon was.

“This ain’t a band of striders,” they said. “This ain’t horse-thieves. This is a different thing. Listen to Low.”

“Yeah, but we’ve techniques now, that, no disrespect to Mr. Low, he don’t know about. Moss-magic, cirriomancy—does he know about them?” Thaumaturgy learnt from arcane natives. Their parents shook their heads.

“This is New Crobuzon. Forget that. It ain’t like that.”

Judah unwrapped the braced mirror that Cutter had brought him. “There’s only one,” he said. “The other’s broken and without it this isn’t a weapon. But even if we had another, it wouldn’t be enough. You have to go.”

They had sent the cleverest of the wyrmen to watch the coast hundreds of miles off. A week passed. “Found nothing,” the first said when it came back, and Judah had grown angry. “They’re coming,” he said.

He refused to advise anything specific. Drogon, though, had become maniacal in his desire for the Council to return. He told the Councillors again and again that it was their duty to return. It was a strange fervour.

Cutter went to dances. The raucousness of them calmed him, the drunk young men and women kicking to peasant waltzes. He swapped partners and drank and ate their drugged fruit. He went with a tough young man he could grab and handfuck and even kiss so long as it was some kind of boys’ play, not sex but wrestling or somesuch. Afterward, wiping his hand, he found the man talkative about what Iron Council should do.

“Everyone knows we’ll leave,” he said. “What, we going to ignore Judah Low? And some say go up and some say down, and no one’s sure which way we’ll head, but me and more and more others, we’ve another plan. We been thinking. We say don’t go north or south, we say go
east.
Back along the tracks we left. We say it’s time to go home. Back to New Crobuzon.”

It was not Drogon’s doing, Cutter realised. It was a native desire.

“I think something is coming,” Qurabin said, a disembodied voice.

Drogon said,
“They know it’s coming. And more and more of them want to head for New Crobuzon.”

“No,” Judah said. Cutter saw many things in him: a pride, a fear and anger, exasperation, confusion. “No, they’re insane. They’ll die. If they can’t face one New Crobuzon battalion, how’ll they face the city? It don’t make any sense to run from the militia to the militia. They can’t come back.”

“That ain’t what they’re banking on. You fired them up, didn’t you? With all your talk about what’s happening. They think they might tip the balance, Judah. And I think they might be right. They want to return to crowds, throwing petals at the rails. They want to come home to a new city.”

“No,” said Judah, but Cutter saw excitement in Pomeroy, in Elsie. He felt something of it through his own sardonics and reserve.

There was a clamour to go back. “It’s a matter of speed,” one old Remade woman said. “When we come here we laid down spare iron, so as if we needed to get away, they were waiting. Well, we’ve people coming for us now, and we’ve a lot of miles between us and safety, and we need speed. Them tracks is waiting. A mile here, two there. Be idiocy not to use them.” She pretended pragmatism.

Judah argued, but he was proud, Cutter saw, of his Council’s desire to return, to be something in this New Crobuzon moment. He wanted to dissuade them out of fear, but he wanted not to—Cutter saw this—for a sense of history.

“You don’t know,” he said, and he spoke gently. “You don’t know what it’ll be, what’ll be happening there. We need you to survive. It’s more important than anything. I’ve been your damn bard, and I need you to survive.”

“This ain’t—forgive me, Mr. Low, with all respect—this ain’t about what you need but what we need. We can’t take the bastards on their way, so if we’re to run, let’s make our running something. Let’s get word to New Crobuzon. Tell them we’re coming home.” That was a young man born five years after the Council, raised in the grasses.

Ann-Hari stood. She began to declaim.

I am not New Crobuzon born,
she told them, and expounded her life in brute oratory. “I never knew I could have a country: Iron Council is my country, and what do I care about New Crobuzon? But Iron Council is an ungrateful child, and I ever loved ungrateful children. New Crobuzon deserves no gratitude—I been there and I know—and we are the child that freed ourselves. No other did. And all the other children are ungrateful now, and we can help them.”

To Cutter it was as if Judah’s party had liberated the Iron Council, had uncoupled it from some restraint, that it was taken by a tendency long immanent. Whatever reasons they gave, the Councillors arguing to go back seemed to voice something embedded, that they had wanted a long time. They were avid at the insurgency Judah described.

When he tried to think it in words, Cutter could not make
it clear. They had come—he had come—so far, at such cost, to
warn the Council that it should
flee:
how could it possibly face the city?

But though he could not express it, Cutter felt the logic of return. He felt it swell as Ann-Hari spoke, and he was not the only one.

The Councillors cheered her and shouted her name, and shouted “New Crobuzon.”

Elsie and Pomeroy exulted. They had never expected this. Qurabin made a sound of pleasure, no more supportive of New Crobuzon than of the Tesh who had betrayed the monastery, and impressed by the Councillors and their welcome. Qurabin was glad to be part of whatever exertion this would be. Drogon was delighted. Judah was silent, proud and frightened.

Cutter saw Judah’s fear.
You need it to be a legend, don’t you?
he thought.
This troubles you, this it-coming-back. You love it for wanting to, but you need it safe, the thing you made. Something we can dream of.
Judah would do anything for the Iron Council, anything at all. Cutter saw that. Judah’s love for it was complete.

They took the town down, broke their mud-and-wattle, their meeting houses, turned them to dust. They gathered what crops they could. There were plenty of those among the Councillors who were outraged.

The perpetual train, even with its new rolling stock in the strange materia of the wide lands, its rough wood and mineral cars, could not contain all the Councillors. There were hundreds who would be, again, camp followers, nomads in the train’s trail. A few would not come. Some went for the hills, or insisted they would stay as farmers in the settled land, surrounded by remnants of the torn-up iron road.

“You’ll die,” Judah told them, “when they come.” And they responded with bluff and bravado. It would come to nothing, Cutter thought, when the New Crobuzon Militia appeared, its most powerful and well-armed squads, to where they thought they would find their quarry and instead met fifty aging farmers. He watched them, knowing they were dead.
May they kill you quick.

Cutter did not know if Ann-Hari and Judah were lovers, but they loved one another in a deep and simple way. He was jealous, yes, but no more than of the other people Judah loved. Cutter was used to this thing so unrequited.

Judah was with Ann-Hari the night before the Iron Council
left its grassland sanctuary. Cutter was alone, holding himself and remembering the night he had tussled with the muscular young man.

The next day they gathered: there was Cutter in the outskirt land where wild grass was crushed by the train and by the farmers. And there brawny Pomeroy swinging his weapon playfully, like a scythe, and Elsie her arm around her man’s waist, and Drogon in his brimmed hat leading the mount he had persuaded the horse-
husbanders of the Iron Council to give him, his lips moving and Cutter not sure to whom he spoke, and there the grass fluttered as Qurabin moved along secret ways revealed by his or her strange godling, and out ahead arm-in-arm walked Ann-Hari and Judah Low, investigated by the insects of the morning.

Behind them the Iron Council came. They would fall into line soon, would help lay tracks, help break the stone and wind through the sarsen blocks of the lowlands, but for now they walked ahead. The ellipse of iron was unwinding, the Councillors were track-
layers again. And scouts and water dowsers, hunters and graders, but above all layers of track, who uncoiled the edge of their town and put it down again in a straight line, back along land that bore still the faint trace of their arrival.

Way to their west came predatory militia, soldiers wanting only to destroy them. The Iron Council shuddered, and went on, went east, headed for New Crobuzon, home.