"China Mieville - Iron Council" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

China Mi├йville
Iron Council

Copyright ┬й 2004 by China Mi├йville

To Jemima, my sister

Erect portable moving monuments on the platforms of trains.
тАФVELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, Proposals

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For all their help with this book, I owe my deepest gratitude to Emma Bircham, Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Mic Cheetham, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter
Lavery, Claudia Lightfoot, Farah Mendelsohn, Jemima Mi├йville, Gillian Redfearn, Max Schaefer, Chris Schluep, and Jesse Soodalter. Huge thanks also to Nick
Mamatas and Mehitobel Wilson, and to everyone at Macmillan and Del Rey for all their work.
Though as always I am indebted to countless writers, for this book I must especially thank William Durbin, John Ehle, Jane Gaskell, Zane Grey, Semb├иne Ousmane,
Tim Powers, T. F. Powys, and Frank Spearman.



In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them. They are still, with fight-shouts setting their mouths. They are in
rough and trenches of rock, in forests, in scrub, brick shadows. They are always coming.

And in years long gone someone stands on a knuckle of granite, a clenched-up mountain fist. Trees cover the peak as if a spume of forest has settled. He is above a
green world while feathered and tough-skinned fauna speck the air below him and pay no mind.
Up past pillars of batholith is the path he has made, and abutting it tarpaulin bivouacs. There are men and fire, little neutered cousin to the conflagrations that fertilize
woodlands.
The man apart is in wind that frosts this old moment in place forever while breath cold-congeals on his beard. He consults mercury sluggish in its glass, a barometer and
inch-marked cord. He locates himself and the men with him above the belly of the world and in a mountain autumn.
They have ascended. Columns of men have faltered against gravity, tight-knotted dangling in the lee of silicate walls and corners. Servants of their equipment, they
have carried the brass, wood and glass oddments like dumb nabobs across the world.
The man apart breathes in the moment long gone, listens to the coughs of mountain animals, the beat of jostling trees. Where ravines are he has plumbed lines to bring
them to order and know them, has marked them and annotated his drawings, and learning the parameters of the peneplain or open-sided corries, the tributary canyons,
creeks, rivers and fern-scruffed pampas, he has made them beautiful. Where pines or ash are tethered and he notes the radius of a curve, the land humbles him.
Cold takes six of his men and leaves them white and hard in make-do graves. Githwings rinse the party with blood, and bears and tenebrae leave them depleted and men
broken and crying unfound in darkness and mules fall and excavations fail and there are drownings and indigens who trustlessly murder but those are all other
moments. In this long-gone time there is only a man above the trees. West, mountains block his way, but in this moment they are miles yet.
Only wind speaks to him, but he knows his name is raised in abuse and respect. His wake is disputation. In the built hilltops of his city his endeavours split families.
Some say they speak for gods and that he is proud. He is an insult on the worldтАЩs face and his plans and route are an abomination.
The man watches night colonise. ( It is a long time since this moment. ) He watches the spits of shadows, and before he hears the tin clatter of his men at supper or
smells the cooked rock vermin he will eat with them, there is only he and the mountain and the night and his books with renderings of everything he has seen and
measurements of these disinterested heights and his want.
He smiles not cunning nor sated nor secure, but in joy because he knows his plans are holy.

Part One
TRAPPINGS
CHAPTER ONE
A man runs. Pushes through thin bark-and-leaf walls, through the purposeless rooms of Rudewood. The trees crowd him.
This far in the forest there are aboriginal noises. The canopy rocks. The man is heavy-burdened, and sweated by the unseen sun. He is trying to follow a trail.

Just before dark he found his place. Dim hotchi paths led him to a basin ringed by roots and stone-packed soil. Trees gave out. The earth was tramped down and stained