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-