Iron Council

Instead he might perhaps once in a rare while push past crowds into certain i

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.

When at last Susullil turned he spoke carefully to Judah, though they all understood some now. “He’s come from the forest town,” Judah said. “They want help. Something’s coming for them… wiping them out. Behellua told them about us, what we did for them. They think we’ve powers. They’re offering something. If we help them…” He listened again.

“If we help them their god will help us. Will give us what we need. They say their god’ll tell us the way to the Iron Council.”

Hiddentown was huts in a clearing. Cutter had visioned an arboreal metropolis, with raised walkways between boughs and children spiralling down vines from the leaf sky.

At the edges of the village were attempts at stockades. Hiddentowners in forest-coloured clothes stared at the travellers. Much of the village was tents tarred or painted with gutta-percha. There were some warped wood huts, damp fires, a midden pit. Most of the inhabitants were human, but several of the child-high insects scuttled through the mud trails.

They were making quarters of their own in the corners of the town. They were chitin gardeners. They herded millions of insects, arachnids and arthropods, nurturing them through quick generations till they had colossal numbers of pinhead-sized ants, foot-long millipedes, and crawling wasps of countless species. With strange techniques they turned their flocks into walls, pressing them gently together, merging them and smoothing them, squeezing the still-living, conjoined mass of chitin-stuff into a kind of plaster. They made bungalows and burrows of their living mortar, feeding it carefully, so the tiny lives that made it did not die, but wriggled, embedded and melted with others, become architecture, a ghetto of living houses.

The human Hiddentowners spoke Galaggi in various forms, and here and there Tesh, and made a mongrel language. The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.

Cutter supposed those refugees who could look after themselves would not waste time with this settlement. Hiddentown was a convocation of the hopeless. No wonder they were desperate. No wonder they were such simple meat-stuff for some beast.

Jabbered at and bowed to with cursory politesse, the travellers were hustled to a long-hut with a tower of stakes, a rude minaret in split wood. It was a church, symbols cut and stained in the walls. There were tables with blades of mirror on them, papyrus. A robe of fine black wool. The chief left them.

For some seconds there was silence. “What are we fucking doing here?” Cutter said.

There were echoes; shadows moved that should not have been there. Cutter saw Elsie shiver. They moved into a circle, back-to-back.

“There’s something,” Elsie whispered. “Something’s here…”

“I am here.” The voice was throaty and snarled. They dropped with bushrangers’ speed. They waited.

“What are you?” Judah said.

“I’m here.” It was accented, glutinous as if words were congealing in a throat. There was a movement they could not follow. “They brought you here for my blessing, I think. A minute. Yes, yes they did. And to tell you what to do. You’re here to hunt for them.”

Drogon pointed at the table. The woollen robe was gone.

“You speak our language,” said Cutter.

“I am a little god but still a god. You are champions. That’s the idea, you know. Did you reckon yourselves champions ?” The voice seemed to bleed from the walls, seemed to be in several places.

“That’s what they have in mind, yes,” said Pomeroy. “What’s wrong with that?” He circled slowly, a pugnacious godless man in the presence of a god. Drogon was turning his head by little increments, his lips moving.

“Nowt,” the voice said. “At all. Only… a waste of your efforts, really. You, mmm, you, you have a little daughter, by a whore in a place called Tarmuth. You should go. This town’s doomed. Save them from this, there’ll be another thing to get them.”

Pomeroy’s mouth worked. Elsie watched him. She kept her face motionless.

“So why are you here?” said Cutter.

“Because this is my town I had them build for me. They want me. Mmm, you, you aren’t sure of your Caucus, are you, shopkeeper?”

Cutter was stricken. The others looked at him. Drogon’s head jerked forward. He made a motion like spitting. The disembodied voice gave a hard gasp. There was a commotion, something fell and there was puking, the substance of things jerked and then, shaking with effort, someone cowled rose from behind the table. A thin and jaundiced face, deep lines and shaven head, mouth adrip with vomit, staring in horror.

She or he stood for moments, quivering as if in ice, then retched and ran across the room to a pillar, behind it and out of sight. Cutter followed, and Pomeroy went the other way; but they came to each other and found nothing. The figure had disappeared.

The voice returned, angry and afraid.

“You never do that to me again, ” it said. Drogon was speaking secretly into Cutter’s ear.

“Found it. Guessed where it was and whispered to it. Ordered it. ‘Don’t read us,’ I said. ‘Show yourself,’ I told it.”

“Wait, whispersmith,” Cutter said. “Fucking god, eh?” he said to the room. “What’s your name? How do you speak our tongue? What are you?”