Iron Council

by China Miéville

  We ain’t though. There’s a damn reason for all our travels.

  “It must be nearly Sinn, ain’t it?” he said. “Or is it already? I’ve lost track.” They tried to work through the weeks on their fingers.

  One night Judah made four little figures from the earth, and with muttered cantrips he had them dance while his companions clapped to give them music. When they were done he had them bow; then they fell back into earth.

  He said: “I want to tell you all that I’m grateful. I want you to know that.” They drank a toast in water. “I want to tell you . . . we’ve been going so long, it’s like the journeying’s what it’s for. But that’s not so.

  “I don’t even know for sure if you believe in the Iron Council.” He smiled. “I think you do. But maybe for some of you it isn’t even about that anymore. I think you’re here because of the time in the claphouse, Elsie,” he said, and she met his eyes and nodded. “I know why you’re here,” he said to Cutter.

  “Even you, maybe, Drogon . . . A stravager like you . . . Myths and hopes are your currency, right? That’s what you trade in; that’s what keeps horse-tramps moving. Are you here because you think Iron Council’s like the Marzipan Palace? Are you looking for a heaven?”

  “It’s not why I’m here, Judah Low,” said Pomeroy. Judah smiled. “You mean the most to me, Judah, I’d die for you, but I’d not die now. Not with what’s happening in New Crobuzon. There’s too much at stake. I’m here because of what you say’s coming for the Council. And because I think you can stop it. That’s why I’m here.”

  Judah nodded, and sighed. “That’s what I want to say. This is greater than any of us. Iron Council . . .” He was silent for very long. “It’s tough, because that’s how it’s had to be. But it’s the Council. It’s Iron Council. And the governors of New Crobuzon—I don’t know how—they’ve found it. My contact, my erstwhile friend, he had every reason not to tell me but he did, thank Jabber. They’ve found it, after all this time. Long enough that plenty of citizens aren’t sure it ever existed, and thousands more think it’s long gone.

  “Chaverim . . . friends . . . We’re going to save Iron Council.”

  The next day Qurabin had a long conversation with the Moment. The unfindable monk cried, supplicated, made a desolate sound.

  At last Cutter spoke. “Monk,” he said. “Monk, what happened? Are you there? Are you gone?”

  “It’s not hidden anymore,” Qurabin said in a voice that was deadened. “I know where to find it. But it cost . . . I lost my own language.”

  Qurabin had been left only with Ragamoll, the brash infant tongue of the travellers.

  “I remember my mother,” Qurabin said quietly. “I remember what she whispered to me. But I don’t know what it means.” There was no horror in the voice. Only a passionless assent. “One thing is lost, another found. I know where to go.”

  They went uncanny routes. The sky’s colour fluxed.

  It was a Chainday when the plain fell away and they realised they had been rising a long time; the ground had angled and they walked a hackberried butte in thin air. Before them was a basin in red laterite, a canyon that widened into land too vast to be a valley, where the continent had shrugged itself apart. From behind one long stone fin, black smoke was spoiling the air.

  Judah stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fumes that did not come from grassfires and howled. A noise of such pure feral joy it was as if he was thrown back through history, as if no human, no sentient thing, should feel such absolute emotion. Judah bayed.

  He did not slow. He descended fast and did not wait for his companions but headed off along faint foot-lines in the prairie. Cutter caught him up but did not try to speak. Thick light like syrup went across the sierra.

  Someone shouted at them and they were taunted by echoes. A query, a command in several different languages, in rapid change. And then their own. Ragamoll, nearly two thousand miles from home. Cutter gasped. Three figures stood from some hide.

  “Hold it, hold it,” one shouted. “Speak Ragamoll?”

  Cutter showed he was not holding his weapons. He nodded his head in strange delight. The young man spoke with a hybrid accent, something else shaping his phonemes beside the familiar snarl of the south city, of Dog Fenn, of backstreet New Crobuzon.

  Judah was running toward the three: a woman, and a man, and a gnarled cactus. The sun was going down behind them, so they were shadowed, and Cutter could see them only as cutouts. Stumbling toward them his arms upraised, Judah must be drenched in late-day light as they saw him, awash with it, creasing his face against it, ambered. Judah was laughing and shouting.

  “Yes, yes, yes, we speak Ragamoll!” he said. “Yes, we’re of your party! Sisters! Sisters!” He gave that cry again and was so clearly no threat, so obviously in a delirium of warmth and relief that the human guards stepped forward and opened their arms to him, to receive him as a guest. “Sisters!” he said. “I’m back, I’m home, it’s me. Long live Iron Council! Gods and Jabber and, and, and in Uzman’s name . . .” They started at that. Judah embraced them one by one, and then he turned, his eyes streaming, and smiled without mediation, without face, a smile Cutter had never seen him wear.

  “We’re here,” Judah said. “Long live, long live. We’re here.”

  anamnesis

  THE PERPETUAL TRAIN

  With each step water and the roots of waterweeds snag him. It is years ago and Judah Low is young and in the wetlands.

  —Again, he says. That is all. There is no please and no need for it. This language is deep-structured with courtesy. To be rude takes effortful and irregular declensions.

  —Again, he says and the stiltspear child shows him what it has made. Its eyebrows flex in what he knows to be a smile and it opens its hand and a stiltspear toy made of mud and waterlilies stands between its fingers. The child pinches it to shape and sings to it in a tiny wordless trilling, and makes it move. The figurine has only one motion, flexing and unflexing its stem legs. It does it several times before bursting.

  They stand at the edges of wide space edged with gnarly treelife and intricately fronded byways, random canals. Boughs hide passages, and vegetation is so thick and so heavy, so saturated with the water of the swamp it is glutinous, it is like a viscid liquid dripping from the branches and briefly coagulates in the shape of leaves.

  The swamp mimics all landscapes. It opens into meadows and it can be forest. There are places where mud solidifies enough to pile into swamp-mountains. Tunnels below the rootstuff, floored in water, pitch and labyrinth. There are dead places where bleached trees jut from rank water. Tribes of mosquito and blackfly come to Judah and bleed him terribly.

  To Judah the fen air is not oppressive. It is like a caul. In the months he has lived there Judah has learnt to feel cosseted by it. For all his bites gone septic and his diarrhoea, he loves the swamp. He looks up through clouds thin as watered milk, to a late sun. He feels himself greened, mildewed and inhabited by infusoria, a host, a landscape as well as a life.

  The child dips its hand with the grace of its species. Its fingers are radial from its little palm, a star. It clenches in its way: hinges its tapered digits like the petals of a closing flower, into a point. Nails concatenate, its hand become a spearhead.

  The stiltspear young walks quadruped from Judah Low. It turns its head on a neck that is all sinews and wordlessly queries whether he will come, and he does, with the slushing clumsiness that the stiltspear indulge as if he is neonate.

  When the child walks, its limbs precisely pierce the water. Judah Low seems to drag the swamp with him and scar it with a wide wake. He is lucky the dams and sires of this stiltspear piglet let him go with it, as every moment he walks he attracts attentions it would be better to avoid. The black caiman and constrictors must hear his passage as the thrashes of something wounded.

  The stiltspear commune have tolerated and even welcomed him because of the time he saved two youngsters from some rearing glade predator.
It came for him, he still believes, but veered for the little duo who when it rose hissing and slick with bog had frozen and whose camouflage glands had secreted thaumaturgons such that they might have been tree-stumps not silent children, but the creature had been too close to be dissuaded.

  But Judah had shouted and banged together his specimen pot and cudgel, shockingly alien in the dim quiet of the bayou. He could not have frightened the thing—a towering amalgam of sea lion and jaguar and salamander with finned flanges that could have broken his skull—but he confused it. It had burrowed below the waterweed.

  Since then, since the pair he saved had run home and sang the story in a quickly constructed cavatina to stress its truth, Judah has been tolerated.

  The stiltspear do not often speak. Days can pass.

  Their commune has no name. Its hutlets rise from the reeds and water and are conjoined with walkways and slung with hammocks, and other rooms are sunk in pits in the sodden ground. Insects the size of Judah’s fist amble through the air, purring like big stupid cats. The stiltspear will skewer and eat them.

  Stiltspears’ coats of oily down bead with swamp muck. They move like wading birds. They are like birds, and like scrawny cats, with unmoving, near-unfeatured faces.

  Sires sing worshipful lays if they are red sires and build tools and reed-houses and tend the mangrove farms if they are tan sires. The dams hunt, one leg at a time raising so slow they have dried by the time the spread-out claws emerge, so no drips trouble the surface as the asterisk of fingers come together into a stiletto that poises over its reflection. Until some fat fish or frog passes and everything is still and the hand lances back into the water and is instantly withdrawn, the fingers opened, the game spiked on the stiltspear’s wrist, a prey bracelet dripping blood.

  Between houses, stiltspear young play with mud-made golems as children in New Crobuzon play marbles and shove-stiver. Judah makes notes, takes heliotypes. He is no xenologist. He does not know how to decide what is important. All these charms—the stiltspears’ instinct camouflage, their golems, their herbalist physic, their unsticking of moments—he wants to investigate.

  He does not know the names of any or even if they have names, but there are those according to some faint specificity of physique he christens: Red-eyes and Oldster and The Horse. Judah asks Oldster about the mud figures. Toys, his informant says, or games: something like that. —So you’d no longer make them? Judah asks, and the stiltspear snorts and looks skyward in embarrassment. Judah no longer blushes at his gaffes. So far as he can tell it is a question of propriety not ability: it would be as inappropriate for an adult stiltspear to make the little figures as for a New Crobuzon adult to demand the lavatory like a toddler.

  Judah accompanies the dams. They seem glazed with the daylight. They catch armfuls of shelled waterspider larger than Judah’s spread hands. They milk their silk, weaving webs between roots and submerged boughs, turning rivulets into fish-traps.

  Judah sees something uncanny. A lithe musclefish jackknifes, lapis scales vivid. And then Judah hears a moment of song, a two- or three-layered stripped-down breath of rhythm, buh buh buh buh in quick intricate time, several dams together, and the musclefish is still. It is set in its coil, unmoving, frosted in place in the water, and a hunter spears it with her jag-hand and at the instant she stabs for it she and her companions cease singing and the musclefish twitches again but too late. Judah sees it happen again, days later, a little near-silent choir, a muttered hum that for a moment keeps prey still.

  Freshwater dolphin pass in deeper channels. They are ugly, inbred-looking things. The snorts of a sarcosuchus spook them. The stiltspear young try to teach Judah to make a mud-figure of his own. They have decided he is a child like them. His models are desperately crude and make them breathe the sighs that are their laughs.

  When they sing to their statuettes he tries good-humouredly to copy them, knowing he can only be a clown and, performing with good grace, —Shallaballoo, he says. —Callam callay cazah! And of course nothing happens, of course all the stiltspear children set their mud walking and his own folds sticky on itself and collapses.

  It is the end of summer and the paludal air is stretched thin. Shots sound. With the distant percussion of the rifle every stiltspear freezes in camouflage and for seconds Judah is alone in a copse of sudden trees. With silence the swamplanders slowly return to their appearance. Every one of them looks at Judah.

  There are hunters, draped in the little corpses of swamp mammals. They are exploring and collecting in the bogland.

  Judah passes one within ten yards, but he has become local, so the man does not hear or see him, only hefts his rifle and looks stupidly past Judah to the watercourses. Another man is sharper. He aims directly at Judah’s chest in expert motion.

  —Godsdamn blast, he says. —Came near to killing you. There is a cautious look to him as he makes out Judah’s clothes and his swamp-pallor. He thumbs a way north. —They out that way, ‘nother three four miles, be there by sundown, he says.

  The bayou animals are quiet. There is not the chittering and faint scuttle and splash. Judah slows. This is a hinge moment and though there is none to blame for getting him here save himself, he must close his eyes and think on what will be and what has been. He will not let the moment finish: by ornery bastard will he hangs onto it, like a dog worrying a man, till time drags itself away bleeding and Judah is back and sadder.

  —Oh now, he says. He is some misbegot thing in time. There is a shudder.

  There is a lip of earth, a jetty. There is a clearing at the edge of a big muskeg, flat and detritus-studded acres of gently moving liquid. There is a new trail through dripping trees, to a huddle of tents and wagons, sod huts roofed in moss on the tamed ground. There are shots.

  Judah carries a present in his pack and a posy of swampflowers. He sees a party of men in besmirched white shirts and thick trousers. They investigate charts and are squinting at obscure instruments. They boil kettles of food over fires that roll off oily smoke like squid-ink billows. They half-greet Judah. He must look like some mud-and-slurry spirit. The Remade pack-animals tread uneasily as he approaches.

  The leader stands. An older man, still scrawny and tough as a dog. Judah looks only at him, follows him into his tarpaulined room.

  Light grubs dimly through the canvas. There is simple darkwood furniture, a cabinet that will fold out to a bed, in the tight confines.

  The old man smells the battered bouquet. Judah becomes confused—he has forgotten his city manners. Should he be giving flowers to this aging man? But the man responds with grace, smelling the still-beautiful blooms and putting them in water.

  He is poised. His hair is white and gathered in a precise pigtail. He has very vivid blue eyes. Judah rummages in his bag (the bodyguards stiffen and raise pistols) and brings out a figurine.

  —This is for you, he says. —From the stiltspear.

  The man receives it with what seems very genuine pleasure.

  —It’s a god, Judah says. —They don’t do so much by way of art or carvings. Only little simple things.

  It is a rope-swathed ancestor spirit. This one Judah made himself. The man looks into its swaddled face.

  —I want to ask you something, Judah says. —I didn’t know you’d be here yourself . . .

  —Always, when we break new ground. This is holy work, son.

  Judah nods as if he has been told something precious.

  —There are people in the swamp, sir, he says. —I’m here for them, I guess.

  —Do you think I don’t know that, son? Think I don’t know why you’re here? That’s why I’m telling you this is holy work we’re doing. I’m trying to save you sorrow.

  —They aren’t as you’d think from Shac’s bestiary sir . . .

  —Son I respect the Potentially Wise more than most but you don’t need to tell me. It’s a long time since I’ve thought it, ah, accurate shall we say. That’s not at issue.

  —But sir. I need to know, what
I want to know is how . . . is exactly where you think you might go because there are, these people, these stiltspear, they, they . . . I don’t know as they could face what you might bring here . . .

  —I wouldn’t mean no harm but I by gods and by Jabber will not turn away now. There is nothing harsh to his voice but the fervour makes Judah cold. —Understand, son, what’s coming. I have no plans for yon stiltspear, but if their way intersects with mine then yes, my way will crush them down.

  —Do you know what you see here? he says. —Every one of us here, and every one coming, the dustiest navvy, each clerk, each camp whore, each cook and horseman and each Remade, every one of us is a missionary of a new church and there is nothing that will stop holy work. I mean you no unkindness. Is that all you have to say to me?

  Judah stares at him in terrible sadness. He works to speak.

  —How long? he says at last. —What are the plans?

  —I think you know the plans, son. The old man is calm. —And how long? You need to ask the downs. And then you need to ask the gods and spirits of yon fen how much good clean grit they can eat up.

  He smiles. He touches Judah’s knee.

  —You sure there’s nothing else you’d like to tell me? I had hope of hearing other things from you, but you’d have spoken them by now. I want to thank you for the god you gave me, and I’ll be obliged if you’ll go to your stiltspear people and tell them that they have my deepest most respectful gratitude. You know I’ll be seeing them soon, don’t you?