Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tunnels, it collects and rolls in a bolus of pollution over the lip, and retreats back out of the hood and the pipe. The smoke crawls from the pot with evanescent limbs like monkeys’ or lions’ that retract again and emerge, and the cloud stands as a two- three- four- one- none-footed hulk of moiling and it steps or rolls or flies against the wind at the bounty hunter, following Judah’s agonised direction.
He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he cannot but breathe the golem’s substance, and his inhuman skin and the delicate membranes within him pustulate and break apart and he drowns on his liquescent lungs.
When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.
Judah does not know how much of the trow town the smoke has envenomed. He knows this is only one day. He knows the Arrowhead Concerns will have the TRT send another bounty hunter to this boneyard and will find the detritus of this failed poisoning, this dead. Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.
The trow will die. If he could leave something behind for them. If he could give these rocks a guardian shape and make it wait, to wake when it is needed. The bounty hunter’s unhorse runs from him and into rock, leaving an animal-shaped bruise of lichen.
I’m done here, thinks Judah. His hand trembles; he trembles. I’ve done in a man or something that looks like a man. He is exhausted with the effort of his somaturgy, of sustaining the thing’s shape, of killing. He shakes with fear and awe at what he has done, that he could do such a thing, that he could make a golem not from clay but from heavy air. I’m done out here in these wilding lands. They’re wilding because we’re here. He cannot believe what he has been able to do.
Judah scatters the pots and the guttering fire. He turns back for the iron road.
In something like a fugue he is taken by the wake of the trains. He meets the roadbed in some utterly lonely place. His horse is tired. It shivers in snow-dust. Judah goes to the hills, to a village overlooking the track labourers.
Though the men are provided for, though even so far from tracks’-end there is a tribe of prostitutes in their tent brothels, men from the grading teams and the rock-crushers come up sometimes to the tiny village of goatherds where Judah sits and watches. The local girls go with the New Crobuzon men, though their families impotently disapprove and fight and get beaten down. The villagers tend their wounded and weather these intrusions. -What can we do? they say. They are blighted by forbearance, by restraint.
A new calm has embedded in Judah since the line was cut into his swamps. He looks at the world through glass.
He becomes some kind of storyteller of the city to his goatherd hosts. They let him live in the wickiup encampments. They are grateful that he is not as brutish as the men of the perpetual train. They ask him questions in their barbarous Ragamoll.
– Is true the road make milk sour?
– Is true it kill young in the womb?
– Is true it make fish in river bad?
– What’s name of the road?
– I was at its end, Judah says. What is the name of the road? The question startles him.
He has found a young woman from the hillside peasants who lies with him. Her name is Ann-Hari. She is several years younger than he, farouche and pretty. He thinks of her as a girl though her enthusiasms and her stare sometimes seem to him more adult and calculating than ingenue.
Judah wants her with him. Ann-Hari is lost to her family and her village. There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets.
Ann-Hari is not Judah’s; he cannot keep her. He first finds her when she is flushed by the road, and she takes him and discards her virginity with eagerness he knows has little to do with him. For the few days that she is only his he tries to make it as much as he can; he tries to give the arc of a life’s love. It is not an affectation but a role; he gives himself over. She is looking over his shoulder while she straddles him, for something else-not even something better, but else, more. She makes friends. She comes to him in the village smelling of other men’s sex.
Her clipped Downs Ragamoll is changing. She uses city slang, steals it from the hammermen. Judah can see the calm and ruthless intelligence under her giddiness, her voracious acquisition. He shows her the golems he can make, that still grow in strength and size. She is entertained but no more than by a thousand other things.
There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos: some even try to go with the camp’s prisoners, the shackled Remade. The Remade are terrified by this, and go to their overseers.
One cold night Ann-Hari comes to Judah terrified, blackened, bloodied and welted. There has been a fight. A gang of prostitutes has gone from tent to tent. They have pulled apart any lovers they find, overwhelming the outraged men by numbers, holding them, checking the face and voice of each woman. Those that are locals taking no pay, they have hauled outside and decorated with engine oil and feathers. The gendarmes have sympathies with the working girls, and they let them carry on.
Ann-Hari was rutting a man at the edges of camp when the raucous whores’ justice caught her. She fought back. She punched with all her peasant strength. She knocked three of them down, jabbed out with a little gimlet that punctured an older woman’s stomach. Ann-Hari ran from her whitening victim.
Judah has never seen her so meek. He knows that this is only a small thing. No one has died, and likely will not-the blade is tiny. Now the locals know the rules, and no one will remember Ann-Hari who fought back. But the fear this sudden violence has left in her does not fade, and a part of Judah is glad, because now she is afraid to stay he can persuade her to come with him. He wants out of the wilderness; he wants to buckle the iron road closed behind him, go home; and he wants another’s eyes through which to see.
They go two days’ walk to a dying station, to the trains. They have third-class seats. Judah watches Ann-Hari watching the receding grass and buttes, the river they flank, the gashes, the darkness of tunnels. Hours in silence but for the complex rhythm of wheels, to the city he has not seen for many months, and that she has never seen.