Iron Council (10 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A week they went north and northwest into greening. It was exhausting. The plains buckled. Sloughs and cenotes in the landforms grew deeper, and hills flecked with chaparral and heat-stunted trees. They walked gulches. Three times the whispersmith showed them they had found their way unknowingly onto a trail, that they walked in the ghosts of footprints.

“Where do we go?”

“I know where it is,” Judah said. “In what part.” He checked maps, and conferred with Drogon, the plains-traveller. Judah rode with an implacable wilderness calm.

“Why are you here?” Judah said to Drogon. The susurrator answered straight into Judah’s ear. “Yes,” said Judah, “but that tells me nothing.”

“He ain’t doing it to you now,” Cutter said. “He can take you over with his bloody voice. At least twice that’s how he kept us alive.”

Cougars and githwings eyed them from the low hills or the air, and the party sounded their weapons. Copses of waxy plants like bladed succulents menaced them, moved not by breeze.

“See there.”
Drogon’s whisper. He hauled the accoutrements of nomadism. He was a man of these ranges, anxious without a horse. He pointed to things they would not have seen.
“A village was there,”
he said; and yes, they learnt to see it in the ground, walls and foundations sketched in regolith, a landscape’s memory of architecture.
“That ain’t no tree,”
he said, and they realised that it was the barrel of some ancient gun or gunlike thing, swaddled in ivy and the scabs of weather.

One night while the others slept off their gamy supper, Cutter sat up hours before dawn and saw that Judah was gone. He rifled stupidly through Judah’s bedcloth as if he might find him there. The whispersmith looked up, his face soured to see Cutter needily gripping Judah’s wool.

Judah was off in the direction the wind was going, in a little hillside rincon. He had taken from his pack a cast-iron apparatus, so heavy a thing Cutter was astonished he had brought it. Judah motioned Cutter to sit by the voxiterator. One of his wax cylinders was inserted, and his hand was on the crank.

He smiled. He replaced the plectrum-needle at the top of the grooves.

“You may as well,” he said. “Seeing as you’re here. This keeps me going.” He turned the handle and in the sputter and random tuts from the trumpet, a man’s voice sounded. It was bled of bass, and it sped and slowed gently as the crank’s pace varied, so his inflection was hard to gauge. The wind took the voice as soon as it emerged.

“. . . don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family sister so I thought you should hear this from family not wrote down fact is he’s dead Uzman’s dead and gone I’m sorry you’ve to hear it like this I’m sorry you’ve to hear it at all truth is weren’t a bad passing mind he was at peace we buried him ahead and now he’s in our tracks there was those said we should put him in the cemetery but I weren’t having that I said to them you know it ain’t what he wanted he told us do it right do it like it used to be done so I made them we’re mourning him he told us not to don’t mourn organise he said when we was fighting they told me and after the stain he told us don’t mourn celebrate but sister I can’t help it we’re allowed to mourn you mourn sister go on you mourn and I will too it’s me it’s Rahul I’ll say good-bye . . .”

The needle snapped stop. Judah was crying. Cutter could not bear it. He reached out, faltered when he saw that his touch would not be welcome. Judah did not sob. The wind sniffed them both like a dog. The moon was faint. It was cool. Cutter watched Judah weeping and he hurt, he was fervent to hold onto the grey-haired man, but he could do nothing but wait.

When Judah had finished and wiped himself dry he smiled at last at Cutter, who had to look away.

Cutter spoke carefully. “You knew him, the one he’s talking about. I see. Whose was that message? Whose brother was that?”

“It’s for me,” said Judah. “I’m the sister. I’m his sister, and he’s mine.”

Hills rose shallowly, pelted with flowers in regal colours. Dust stuck to Cutter’s sweat, and he breathed air thickened with pollen. The travellers stumbled through strange landscape, weighed down by dirt and the sun as if they had been dipped in tar.

They tasted carbon. Somewhere above the bluffs before them the sky was discoloured by more than summer. Lines of dark smoke were drawn up and dissipating. They seemed to retreat like a rainbow as the party approached, but the next day the smell of burn was much stronger.

There were paths. They were entering inhabited lands, and approaching the fires.
“Look there!”
said the whispersmith to each of them in turn. On downs miles off there was movement. Through Drogon’s telescope Cutter saw that it was people. Perhaps a hundred. Hauling carts, hurrying their meat-beasts: fat cow-sized birds, thick and quadruped, scrawny featherless wings stumping as forelegs.

The caravan was decrepit and desperate. “What’s happening here?” Cutter said.

At noon they came somewhere the earth had split, and they walked the bottom of arroyos much higher than houses. They saw something dun and battered, bound, like a giant brown-paper parcel in string. It was a wagon. Its wheels were broken and it leaned against the rock. It was split and burned.

There were men and women around it. Their heads were stove in or their chests opened up and emptied by bullets, the contents spilt down their clothes and shoes. They sat or lay in neat order where they had been killed, like a troop waiting instructions. A company of the dead. A child spitted on a broken sabre huddled at their front like a mascot.

They were not soldiers. Their clothes were peasants’ clothes. Their belongings littered the chine floor—irons, pots and kettles, all alien designs, cloth made rags.

Cutter and his companions stared with their hands at their lips. Drogon wrapped his kerchief around mouth and nose and went into the deads’ stench through the billows of insects that ate them. He took a wooden spoke and poked at the bodies so carefully he looked almost respectful. They were sunbaked, their skins cured. Cutter could see their bones in ridges.

The cart listed as Drogon leaned in. He squatted and looked
at the wounds, probing them as the others watched and gave off sounds. When the whispersmith took gentle hold of the sabre that protruded from the child, Cutter turned away so he would not see the dead boy move.

“Days gone,”
Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, even as Cutter kept his back to the investigation.
“One of your’n. This is New Crobuzon issue. This is a militia blade.”

It was militia bullets killed them, a militiaman or a militiawoman who ran the child through. Militia knives tore through their wagon; New Crobuzon hands had thrown their belongings down.

“I told you.” Judah spoke very quietly.

Can’t we get out of here?
Cutter thought.
I don’t want to talk in front of them.
He looked up, breathing fast, saw Pomeroy and Elsie holding each other.

“In my letter, Cutter. You remember?” Judah held his gaze. “I told you I was going because of this.”

“We’re near the outskirts of Tesh lands,” Cutter said. “This don’t mean the militia are onto the Iron Council.”

“They’ve a base by the coast, from where they send these squads out. This . . . work . . . This is only half of what they do. They’re going north. They’re looking for the Council.”

Beyond the dead was open country. They knew that the militia that had done this to these runaways might be close, and they moved carefully. Cutter saw those patient dead when he closed his eyes. Drogon took them on a path through the sagebrush. On the hills ahead were scraps of farmland, of a half-wild, scrubby kind, from where the smoke came.

It was a day to the depredation. The air was clogged with smouldering. They entered the first little field with their guns drawn.

Through ridges of turned-over earth into what had been a copse of olives. They trod over the spread claws of roots where the little trees had been torn down. Drying olives scattered like animal pellets. There were craters, where stumps were made carbon sculptures. There were bodies cooked down to skeletons.

There had been huts, and they were burnt. On a plain of scrub and drying creeks were mounds of black rubbish that smoked like slag. A rank, meat and sweet smell. Cutter hacked through dried summer boscage.

For seconds he could not make sense of what he saw. The mounds were heaped-up carcasses, a charnel mass—blacked remnants of snouted ungulates, tusked, big and heavy as buffalo. They were encased in ash and crisped leaves. Roots spread out in their pebbled flesh.

“Vinhogs,” said Judah. “We’re in
Galaggi.
We’ve come so far.” The wind moved and hilltop dust and the burnings of olives, vines and vineleaves hurt their eyes. The dead animals rustled.

Pomeroy found a trench, where scores of men and women rotted. The decay of days had not yet disguised their crosshatched
tattoos. Their pumice-colour skins were death-besmirched, stone jewels piercing them.

They were the wineherds. The clans, the Houses, nomads of this hot northern steppe, custodians of the vinhog coveys. They tracked them, protected them and, at harvest time, leapt in dangerous brilliant husbandry between the horns of the aggressive herbivores to prune the fruit that plumped on their flanks.

Cutter swallowed. They all swallowed, staring at the dead ragged with gunfire. Judah said, “Maybe this is House Predicus. Maybe it’s Charium or Gneura.” The vinhogs, the animal-hosts and their harvest, mouldered and burned away.

All day they walked swells of ruined land, through olive groves ground to nothing, and despoiled crop-herds, and great numbers of scorched cadavers from the winemaker tribes. A corral of the huge meat-birds gone to maggots. The soft spit of embers and
the knock of dead wood surrounded them. On some corpses the specifics of murder were still clear. A woman, her skirt rucked up and stiff red; a big wineherd man, his belly flyblown, stabbed in both eyes. Rot made Cutter gag.

They found one vinhog alive, fallen in a stone basin. It shook with hunger and infection. It limped in circles and tried to paw the ground. Its skin was ridged with rootwork and a leaf-pelt from its symbiotic vines. Its lichen-grapes were wizened. Cutter shot it in pity.

“This is why the cactacae fought, down south,” said Pomeroy after a long silent time. “This is what they heard about. They saw the militia, thought this was what they’d get too.”

“Why this? Why this?” said Elsie. She struggled. “Galaggi ain’t Tesh land, it’s wild. These ain’t Tesh tribes.”

“No, but it’s Tesh they’re hurting,” Judah said. “Galaggi wine and oil goes through it. They aren’t strong enough yet to hit the city, but do this and you hit Tesh in the coffers.”

They were way beyond their mapped world. Tesh was there, two or three hundred miles south and west on the coastal plain. Cutter thought of it, though he did not know what it was he should
picture. How should he think it? Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. Its moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince.

Thousands of sea miles from Iron Bay to the remote coast, to the foothold that New Crobuzon had established north of Tesh. The militia had to go past Shankell, past seas thick with piasa and pirates, through the Firewater Straits where the Witchocracy backed their Tesh neighbours. There were no land-routes across Rohagi’s wild interiors, no shortcuts. It was a desperately hard war to wage. New Crobuzon had to send ships across months of hostile waters. Cutter was awed at the brute vigour.

That night they ate unripe fruit they found unspoiled on a dead vinhog and made forlorn jokes about what a good vintage it was. Their second day on the vintners’ land they found wreckage of the marauders. The New Crobuzon militia had not had it all their way. It was the remains of a nashorn, a rhino ironclad and Remade into a veldt tank. Two storeys high, a raised arse-end gunnery, a piston-strengthened neck. Its horn was corkscrewed, a huge drillbit. The nashorn was burst and savaged with peasant weapons. Its gears and innards lay about it.

There were six militia dead. Cutter stared at the familiar uniforms in this unlikely place. The officers were killed with blades. There were wineherds’ sickles on the ground.

The land was full of scavengers. Dead-eating fox-things dug
at the earth. That night Drogon woke the travellers with a shot.
“Ghul,”
he whispered to each in turn. They did not believe him, but in the morning its corpse was there: grave-pale and simian, its toothy mouth wide, blood drying on its eyeless forehead.

There was the start of a cooling as they went north, but only the very start. In the heat, among the ghuls and the dead and the dizzying smell of rotting fruit and the smoke, in a land become a torn-up memory of itself, Cutter felt as if he were walking in the outskirts of some hell.

In days through rugged transverse rises, a haze of forested hills became just visible to the north, and Judah was elated. “We’ve to go through that,” he said. “It’s the end of the veldt; it’s the far edge of Galaggi.”

Behind them the earth was broken by the tracks of militia. They had passed out of that crushed zone of husbandry and feral wine, those few score of miles once worth something. This was a wetter reach of hills all summered, copper and slick. It rained warm rain—virga that did not reach the ground.

They were in places only antique sages and adventurers had been. They had heard about these strange reaches—patches of ice in deep summer, the hives of dog-sized termites, clouds that fossilised into granite. On a Dustday, new smoke and a smell reached them. They climbed slopes of scree and breccia to see the scrubland all the miles to the forest, and something burning before them. One by one they let out sounds.

A few miles off. A chelona. Its titan legs were splayed, its plastron flattened to the ground. Its sides rose vastly, and from halfway up were gnarls of carapace-matter coaxed over generations into overhangs and towers, the walls of a keratin village. The great tortoise was more than a hundred yards long, and over the centuries of its life it had accreted on its back a many-layered jag township. Brittle outgrowths of its scute had been grown and carved into blocks, ziggurats and spires, their planes and lines imperfect, cut with windows, belfries connected by rope bridges, coursed with horny streets and tunnels; everything made, paved and walled in the mottlesome tortoiseshell. The chelona was dead and on fire.