CHAPTER TWELVE

And then sunlight came through the thick and ropy canopy. Elsie and Pomeroy saw Cutter, lying close to Susullil. They gathered the camp without speaking or meeting Cutter’s eye.

If Susullil was conscious of their embarrassment, he made no sign of it, nor did he show Cutter any affection now night was gone. While Cutter rolled the blanket that had been a pillow for him and Susullil, Judah came to him and gave a slow beatific smile. A benediction.

Cutter burned. He swallowed. He stopped to stow his kit. He leaned in close and said quietly just for the somaturge: “I don’t, not now, not ever, need your fucking blessing, Judah.”

It was like the times in New Crobuzon he had been taking men home and met Judah in the street. In Cypress Row, in Salom Square Casbah. Once Judah had come to Cutter’s rooms early on a Shunday, and the door had been opened by the black-haired boy Cutter had woken up with. Then, as always when he saw Cutter’s partners, Judah had smiled with peaceable pleasure, with approval, even when Cutter pushed the young man aside and stood before Judah, closing the door behind him.

When Cutter went looking he found himself glancing backward in case Judah was there to see him.

Cutter imagined being an artist or a musician, or a writer or libertine pamphleteer, one whose life was a scandal, a Salacus Fields man, but he was a shopkeeper. A Brock Marsh shopkeeper whose customers were scholars. Brock Marsh was a strange and quiet district; its excitements were not those of the artistic southern bank.

In Brock Marsh, renegade hexes might make doors where there should be no doors. Entities cultured in thaumaturged plasm might escape and make the streets deadly, and debates could go murderous as rival thinkers sent bleakly charged ab-ions at each other. Brock Marsh had history and a sort of glamour, but there were no places for Cutter to find men. When there were familiar Brock Marsh faces in the southside inns he would not acknowledge them nor they him.

Cutter despised the dollyboys in their petticoats and painted faces, the aesthete inverts draped in flowers in the Salacus Fields night. He would scowl and walk the canalsides of Sangwine past the she-men whores to whom he did not speak. He would not go into bawdy houses, would not rent some man’s arse. Not anymore. He only rarely visited the warrens by the docks where those sailors who did not just make do at sea, but preferred it that way, would tout for men.

Instead he might perhaps once in a rare while push past crowds into certain inns with half-hidden entrances, thin rooms, thin bars and lots of smoke, older men watching each newcomer eagerly, men in groups laughing raucous as hell and others sitting alone and not looking up, and what women were there were men, dollyboys, or were Remades who had once been men and whose in-between status was a peccadillo to some.

Cutter was careful. Those he chose would never be too handsome: who knew if they were militiamen on honey-trap duty offering a stint for Gross Depravity to any who approached them, or if their squad outside might indulge in an ad hoc punishment of beating and rape.

Neither ashamed nor indulgent, Cutter would simply wait, hating the place and feeling provincial for that, until someone like him came in.

It was twelve years since Cutter had met Judah Low. He had been twenty-four, angry much of the time. Judah was fifteen years his senior. Cutter had quickly loved him.

They hardly ever touched. No more than a few times each year, Cutter had been with Judah Low, every time because of his insistence, never quite begging. More often in the early days, until Judah had become harder and harder to persuade. It seemed, Cutter thought, less a waning of whatever desire was there in Judah than something more thoughtful, to which Cutter could not give words. Each time they were together Cutter felt very strongly that from Judah it was an indulgence. He hated it.

He knew Judah went with women too, and he supposed perhaps with other men, but from what he imagined and heard it was no more often, with no more or less enthusiasm than Judah had for their own encounters. I will make you cry out, Cutter thought as they sweated together. He went at it with passion bordering violence. I will make you feel this. Not with vindictiveness but a desperation to inspire more than kindness.

Judah had taught him, put money into his business, taken Cutter to Caucus meetings for the first time. When Cutter understood that their sex would only ever be an act of patrician friendship, profane and saintly generosity, would only ever be a gift from Judah, he tried to bring it to a close, but could not sustain the abstinence. As he grew he left behind some of his young man’s snarling, but there was anger he would not slough off. Some the Caucus directed at Parliament. Some, beside the fervent love he felt for him, would always be raised by Judah Low.

“Cutter, chaver,” Pomeroy had said to him once. “I don’t mean it badly, excuse me asking, but are you… omipalone?” Pomeroy said the slang inexpertly. It was not a bad term and it was meant almost kindly-a playground nomenclature. Cutter wanted to correct him- No, I’m an arsefucker Pomeroy -but it would have been cruel and a complex affectation.

All the chaverim had known for a long time and studiously did not judge Cutter, but only, he had twice been told, because good insurrectionists did not blame victims for being distorted by a sick society. He did not bring it up but nor would he by Jabber apologise or hide.

They knew Judah lay with him, but to his anger there were no careful hesitations around the older man, even on the day they came to a meeting wearing each other’s clothes.

“It’s Judah. ”

When Judah did it, sex was not sex any more than anger was anger or cooking was cooking. His actions were never what they were, but were mediated always through otherworldly righteousness. Cutter was an invert but Judah was Judah Low.

Elsie and Pomeroy were shy with Cutter, now. Travel did not allow awkwardness: soon they were gripping hands with him and hauling him and being hauled down loose and rooted banks.

The encounter had little effect on Susullil. He seemed neither to regret it nor to court a repeat. Cutter was self-deprecating enough to find humour in that. Three nights on, Cutter went to him again. It was an awkward coupling. Cutter had to learn his partner’s proclivities. Susullil liked to kiss, and did it with a novice’s enthusiasm. But he would only use his hands. He reacted to Cutter’s insistent tonguing descent with distaste. Cutter tried to present his arse, and when the nomad finally understood he laughed with sincere hilarity, waking the others, who pretended to sleep.

They became inured to strange fauna. Things like limbed fungus that made sluggish progress half-climbing half-growing on bark. Chaotic simians that Pomeroy called “Hell’s monkeys,” clutches of gibbon limbs exploding from conjoined cores, in varying numbers, that brachiated at insane speed.

“You know where we are, yes?” Cutter said to Judah and to Drogon.

The woodland density was lessening. Rain kept coming, and it was cooler. The air was less like steam, more like mist. “We’re still on the paths,” Drogon said. Do you know where we’re going? Cutter thought.

When they heard something approach they held up their guns; but there was shouting, no attempt to hide, and Susullil answered excited and accelerated. When the others reached him he was slapping hands with Behellua, and behind him were two cowed-looking men in forest camouflage who nodded careful greeting.

The returned man smiled at the travellers. The wineherds talked.