He points to the wall, to a map that shows all the land from New Crobuzon to Rudewood, to the swamps and on to the port of Myrshock, and some hundreds of miles into the continent, into the west. Details are vague: this is debated land. But Judah can see the crosshatched levelling in the heart of the swamp.
—I know what I see, the old man says and there is real kindness in his voice. —I have in my time seen enough men go native. It’s an affectation, son, whatever you think now. But I won’t lecture you. There’s no recrimination. I will only tell you that history is coming, and your new tribe best move from its path.
—But dammit, says Judah. —This isn’t empty land!
The old man looks bewildered. —What they have, what they’ve had lying there for centuries in that marsh, whatever it is, it’s welcome to face the history I bring, if it can.
Back in deep waterland among the stiltspear, Judah does not know what to say. The fronds gather behind him, a closure he knows is a lie.
The children try to make him learn their golems again. He has never affected the smallest glamour before, has thought himself without talent. A stiltspear elder approaches while he strains, and touches Judah’s chest. Judah opens his eyes, feels things move in him. Whether it is the touch, the air of the swamp, or the raw things he has been eating, he feels a facility he never has, and in astonishment he sees that just faintly he can make his mud model move. The stiltspear children give little hums of acclaim.
—There are some coming, he says at night. The stiltspear only stare politely. —There are men coming and they will fill your swamp. They will split your wetlands, and diminish them.
Judah recalls the map. A neat trisection. Ink that will come to be a changed land, millions of tons of displaced scree and a devastation of the trees.
—They will not stop for you. They will not move for you. You must go. You must go south to where the other clans hunt, deeper, farther away.
There is nothing for a long time. Then the monosyllables of stiltspear gently.
—It is where the other clans hunt. They do not want us.
—But you must. If you do not go you will see what the men will bring. The clans must come together and hide.
—We hide. When the men come we shall be trees.
—It will not be enough. The men will make the land dry. They will cover your village.
The stiltspear look at him.
—You must go.
They will not.
In the next days Judah chews his fingernails. He eats with the stiltspear and watches them and heliotypes their activities and notes them, but with a waxing sickness he feels now that it is for their remembrance.
—There have been fights, they tell him when he demands to know of their wars. —We fought another clan three years ago and many of us were killed.
Judah asks how many and the stiltspear holds up its hands—this one has seven fingers on each—opens and closes them and holds up one more finger. Fifteen.
Judah shakes his head. —Very many, very very many more will be killed if you do not go, he says, and the stiltspear shakes its head too—it has learnt the motion from him and uses it with pride.
—We will be trees, it says.
Judah can make his mudling dance. Each day he is stronger at it. Now he makes foot-tall figures from the clay and peat. He does not know what it is he makes happen or how the stiltspear children have taught him or what the adult put in him, but his new capabilities delight him. His little model can beat others now, at the golem circus they play.
It is his only pleasure, and he hates that it feels like an evasion. Once or twice more he begs the stiltspear to come with him to the deeper swamp. It degrades him that he cannot find the words to move them. It is their culture, he says to himself, it is their way, it is their nature. They—not he—are to blame. But he does not believe his own thought.
He feels pinioned by history. He can wriggle like a stuck butterfly but can go nowhere.
There are more reverberations and the explosions from hunters’ guns are audible throughout the days. Judah understands something. He watches the stiltspear corner a calf-thick amphibian, and together sing-breathe the uh uh uh uh uh rhythm and for half a second the newt-thing petrifies midflick, held in time made thick, and Judah realises the rhythm they have sung is an echo of the children’s mud-golem song. The same, made vastly more complex, given several parts.
He is obsessed with the chant. He wants to preserve the moments of its utterance, congeal the sounds, strip them down. He can only time them as closely as he can and write them to work out their relations.
Judah works fast. He feels a knot tying in him. His near-friend Red-eyes helps him. —We make shapes that move. All of us: young one way, hunters another. And Judah sees that the children’s chants are only mimicry; it is their hands that make their golems. The rhythm of the hunters does the work of the children’s pinching fingers. Both intercessions are of a kind.
There is a noise of industry, far off. A growled rhythm.
The first stiltspear to die is a young too confused to control its camouflage. It is shot by a hunter frightened by the rapid flickering between states of a four-footed animal thing and what seems a rotting tree. He does not know what he has killed and it is only chance and neophobia that he does not eat the child. The clan find the little body.
They’ve reached the lake, Judah thinks. He imagines uncountable wagonloads of nothing, of soil, stone and dirt bloating the swamp.
The time is now. To make his new clan go deep and disappear. There is no other time for this. He has been beaten down. Though every night he says again what he has said—you must go, it is not safe, more will die—he has given up. He is disengaging. An observer again.
The stiltspear debate quietly. Their food grows scarce. The fish and the food-animals are fleeing or being choked. There is venom in the swamp, the runoff of a thousand men and women, the slurry from latrines and cleaning crystals, from black powder, from make-do graves.
There is another death, a lone dam surprised. The roar of industry is always audible.
A party of stiltspear hunters return and try to say what they have seen. A drained core, something approaching. By now there are steam shovels, Judah knows, ever-growing gangs.
—One tried to hurt us, a stiltspear says, and it shows the company the gun it has taken. It is stained with human blood. They have killed, and Judah knows then it is over and done. The time is finished. They do not see it. The sun is dead for them. There is nothing left. He is frantic to learn, to preserve these people in his notes, to salute them.
After that kill the stiltspear become prey.
The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.
Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.
They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.
Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.
—Go deep, J
udah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.
They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.
—I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.
There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.
One day Judah rises and gathers all he has—notes, specimens, heliotypes and drawings—and walks out of the village, through water maze to the new industrial zone. He is unstuck. The moment has passed him.
There is a foreman at the edge of a new clearing, shouting at his crews. Judah stares. They are crude and small and hubristic, but they are reshaping the land.
The foreman nods at Judah as he passes, and tells him, —This ain’t no fuckin’ godsdamned fuckin’ lake this piece of shit is a devil. He gobs into the black water. —Eats and eats every godspitting ton of shite we put in it. It don’t have no bottom.
Axemen and flagmen, chainmen, hunters, engineers cutting trenches; cactus-people, vodyanoi, men and Remade. They work with spades and saws, picks, barrows. The swamp is thinning.
Man after man, Remade, cactus, comes with cart full of gypsum and gravelled earth and tips it from the new quay. A steam shovel spastically drops its loads. Ballast is swallowed. Waterweed and the pelage of leaves and dust is gone, the muskeg’s camouflage is defeated, its water uncovered in a spreading ring. Barrow after barrow is sucked down with a throat noise.
—See? See? the foreman says. —This godsdamned thing’s deeper than a whore’s cunt.
This was quagmire once, where mud would wrestle you in as vigorous as the constrictors. Stone hauled from the foothills rises in blocks, lapped by the thick water. They are bulwarks that hold in gravel and earth. Dry land is cut out. A road of matter has been excised, a swath of tamaracks, mangroves, runt grasses and the de-bris of spatterdock. It is a ribbon of flattened earth a score of yards wide and endlessly long, sweeping backward through wet thickets, purged of trees, tended by haulers and hewers as far as Judah can see.
There is a stretched-out tent-town. Carts are carried by mules Remade to swamp things, amphibian. Judah walks the raised road. Stumps stubble the ground, and beyond them the fingers of the swamp move. Pumps howl and drain the waterways, make them mudflats, and then these mudflats become beds for new stones. There are gangs of cactus-people, their muscles moving hugely beneath spined skins.
And there are many Remade. They do not look at the whole men, free workers, the aristocracy of this labour.
The Remade are always various. All Judah’s life. Their bodies made impossible. On the roadbed there is a man whose front pullulates with scrawny arms, each from a corpse or an amputation. Chained to him a taller man, his face stoic, a fox stitched embedded in his chest from where it snarls and bites at him in permanent terror.
Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man—or is it a woman?—whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey’s paws so they reach out from below their own waists.
The Remade haul, their overseers watching and sometimes whipping. The roadbed goes back forever through the trees.
—My stiltspear friend, the old man says. He welcomes Judah.
—My stiltspear friend, it’s good to see you. Are you come back to us? Judah nods. —I’m glad, son. It’s best. How are your clan?
Judah looks up coldly but he sees no crowing. The question is not a provocation. —Gone, Judah says. He feels his failure.
The man nods and purses his lips. —And will you show us their homestead? he says. —I want to take it down. It’ll be unacceptable if there’s a place for them to come back to. There’ll be a town here, you know. Yes there will. We sit on the subsoil of Junctiontown or Forktown or Palus Trifork, I’ve not yet decided. And I could make the stiltspear village a museum, so a half-day’s hike from the Plaza di Vapor visitors could go to see it. But I’m of a mind to raze it. So will you show me where it is?
If it is left there will be stiltspear who will want to return; children will try to find their old playgrounds.
—I’ll show you.
—Good lad. I understand and I admire you. You’ve come through something and I respect that. Did you find what you wanted? I remember when first we spoke. When I hired you, you remember. I wanted something from you but I always thought you wanted something from the swamp, or the stiltspear. Did you find it?
—Yes. I did.
The old man smiles and holds out his hand, and Judah gives him the sheafs of maps, of notations, of fen-lore. The old man does not say how late the information is. He flicks through it but does not say how poor it is, how inadequately Judah has kept his part of the wage-bargain. Another man comes in and speaks rapidly about a dispute, a failing deadline. The old man nods.
—We have so many problems, he says. —The foremen are angry with the city’s magisters. They have no sense of what we’re doing; they send us Remade with no capabilities. Our pilings are breaking. Our retaining walls buckle, our trestles collapse. He smiles. —None of this surprises me.
—Welcome back, he says. —Now, are you on my payroll? Will you go back to New Crobuzon? Or stay? We’ll speak. I have to go. We’ve been so long here, with the flat behind us, the rust-eaters have caught us up. They’ve reached the trees.
Yes, there they are. Only a short time along the roadbed, which is flatter and more finished the farther back Judah goes. It has a beauty, this trained land. An oddity, this road at which the swamp claws.
A corner and a new workforce is there. Cosseted by diminished trees, like the crew that flattens the fenland but moving with unique rhythm, a syncopation of construction.
A crowd unfolds toward him. There is a rapid thudding as sleepers are dropped and then a sound like something being sliced as girders unroll from a flatcar, crews Remade and whole picking them up with tongs, a baffling dainty motion, letting them down as sledge-wielding brawnies step in and timed as perfectly as an orchestra hammer the ties and rails. Behind them all something huge and noisy vents and watches their efforts, and edges constantly forward. A train, deep among the mangroves.
It was months earlier that he first met the old man. Weather Wrightby. Crazyweather, Iron Wright. In the offices of TRT, at the recruitment meetings, with all the other young men in starch and braces.
University boys, clerks’ sons, the adventurous rich and aspirational young men like Judah, Dog Fenn and Chimer apprentices bored by their work, fired by children’s stories and travelogues.
—I have wanted this for decades, Wrightby said. He was compelling. The recruits were respectful of this man nearly three times their age. His money did not diminish him. —Twice I went west finding routes. Twice, sadly, I had to come home. There’s a crossing that’s still to be done. That’s the big task. This that we do now is only a start. A little tinkering southerly.
A thousand miles of track. Through rottenstone, forests and bog. Judah was cowed by Wrightby’s fervour. This undertaking is so vast it could bankrupt even such a wealth as his.
Wrightby had felt him, sounded his chest like a doctor. Handed out commissions, put teams together. —You can report to us from the swamps, boy. It’ll be tough terrain. We need to know what to expect.
That is how Judah got here.
The first journey from New Crobuzon. A team: engineers, gendarmes, scholars and rugged scouts who had looked at long-haired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed
town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails.
Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.
It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-
surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.
The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.
They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.
—Frenzy, said one man. —Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.
—Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. —Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.
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