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.