[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.—These Remade strike for us, so you won’t be broken.You strike against us and we against you, but these Remade are on both our damn sides.You know it.You fought for them.You scorn them now? They won you your damn strike, and ours too, even though we strike against each other.She kisses Uzman again.Among the prostitutes, some are aghast and others are cheering.—I tell you, Ann-Hari says, —if anyone deserves service on credit, it’s the damn Remade.The prostitutes closest to Ann-Hari and most militant seek out Remade ostentatiously to touch.—We have to link up, shouts Thick Shanks, but no one is listening to him.They are listening to his friend Ann-Hari.Judah makes a golem out of the dust.It is deep night but very few are sleeping.Judah’s golem is taller than he, held together with oil and dirty water.The old man become the Weaver’s prophet stands behind Ann-Hari and shouts obscure praise to her while she and Thick Shanks argue.A gendarme comes to them from the direction of the train.He waves a truce flag.—They want to talk, says a woman on chitin wheels.—Wait, he shouts as he walks.—We want to end this.No recrimination.We’ll talk to the TRT, get the money through.Everyone wins.You, Remade, we can talk.End your peonage early, maybe.We can talk about everything.Everything’s open.Ann-Hari’s face is a joy of anger.The man cowers from her and she passes him and runs in the direction of the train, followed by Remade, Thick Shanks and Uzman, and Judah, who slaps his golem on its arse as if it is a baby and shocks it, hexes it into motion.It astonishes those it passes.Shanks is shouting to Ann-Hari, —Wait wait, what are you going to do? Wait.And Uzman is urging something too, but where the Remade besiegers hide behind their stockades she simply steps into view of the gendarmes in the tower.She takes a man’s flintlock.Uzman and Shanks are shouting at her but she is walking on into the no-man’s-land by the train.Only Judah’s golem goes with her.The tower’s guns swivel toward her.Inexpertly she brings up the flintlock.She stands with the oily dirt man, the two of them alone.—No deal with you bastards, she shouts, and pulls the trigger, though bullets cannot penetrate the cladding.As the shot sounds, Remade run forward to protect her and Judah hears the captain at the tower’s top screaming something at his own men and it could be hold or fire.Judah has his dirty golem step before Ann-Hari as first one and then a sudden percussion of the gendarmes’ guns sound.Everyone drops but Ann-Hari and the golem, and there are screams and blood.The gunshots dwindle.Three people lie unmoving.Others, mostly Remade but whole too, are shouting for help.Ann-Hari is still.The golem is pitted where bullets have stopped in its dense substance.—No no no, the captain is shouting.—I didn’t—but the Remade will not wait now.They roar.Someone pulls Ann-Hari back, and Judah sees her, and she is smiling, and he feels himself smiling too.There is a little war.—What are you doing? Shanks screams at Ann-Hari but it is a pointless question now.Gendarmes, free workers, prostitutes and Remade skirmish, and two sides assert: the Remade and their friends; the gendarmes and those opposed to this exultant hysteria.Judah is afraid of it, but he never unwishes this violent child’s birth.Remade attack the tower with guns, crude bombards and their swing-hammer limbs.They fire stone slabs and track-ends that make the tower ring.A man beside Judah, whose chin wears a fringe of crabs’ pincers, dies suddenly from gendarme shot.Judah has his golem move slowly around the belfry, disaggregating in bullet-slugs of its earth flesh.He does not hear the shot from the heavy gun above.An overturned curricle is at one moment a cart with men and women leaning between its spokes and then is an eruption, a fire expansion of burnt knife-edged wood and blood uncoiling above a cavity bleeding smoke.Judah blinks.He sees detritus.He sees that the dark thing acrawl toward him leaving a mollusc trail is a woman, her skin blacked and redded, ink craquelure on meat.He wonders that she does not make a sound as her hair burns then knows he cannot hear.His ears sing.The barrel of the gun exhales like a languid smoker.It turns.The rebel Remade, prostitutes, and those of the free who are with them run to escape its range.Judah stands.Slow.Steps up, and makes his golem move.The gun motors with unoiled imprecision.The golem presses its filthy self against the freightcar.It reaches up, echoing and exaggerating Judah’s little motions, pulls itself up, leaving a smear of its corpus.The towertop gun fires again.It stabs oily smoke, and the railroad cut and the people on it, yards away, bloom.The golem ascends the tower, stamping on buttresses, on gutters.It uses the very guns that gendarmes angle down at it as handles and steps.It disregards itself, as no sane or sentient thing could, sheds itself in scabs and diminishes as it rises, but it is near the top now, weakened with sticks and railway spikes protruding from its gravel-grease skin, its very legs falling from it to land formless as excrement.The gun swivels and Judah has the golem probe its arm deep into the barrel.It reaches to its shoulder.The gun is blocked by hex-bound golem dirt.It fires and there is a strange motion, a shuddering backward.The barrel splays in strips, the golem is a rain of filth.Ignited air and smoke fill out, the tower rocks, its tip glows and is punched brutally open, its roof unclenches into metal fingers.Rank billows plume in a great cough, and a dead man falls from the shatter.The corpse of the gun sways.Judah is spattered with his golem’s remnants.The rebels are cheering.He cannot hear them but he can see.The renegades take the train.The gendarmes throw out their guns and come out bloody, eyes seared and dripping.—No, no, no, Uzman shouts.He is eating coal, and his biceps are swelling.With Shanks and with Ann-Hari, and with other faces that Judah now knows, the Runagaters try to stop the beatings when they look like becoming killing.They take away knives.People shout but cede to them.The gendarmes are chained where the Remade were.—What now? Everywhere Judah goes he hears it.It is the Remades’ train.They make flags for their new sudden country and wave them from the burst guntower.No one sleeps that night
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]