Iron Council by China Miéville Page B

Ain’t that the truth? Too much of this—” Ori stuck out his tongue.
“—not enough of this.” He clenched his fist.
    “Hammer, don’t yammer,” the tramp said agreeably and ate a grilled tomato.
    “Is that what Jack said?”
    Spiral Jacobs stopped chewing and looked up slyly.
    “Jack? I’ll Jack you,” he said. “What you want to know about Jack?” The accent, that indistinct trace of something foreign, resonated for a second more loudly.
    “He hammered not yammered, didn’t he, Jack did?” Ori said. “Ain’t that right? Sometimes you want someone to hammer, to do something, don’t you?”
    “We had half a prayer with Jack,” said the old man, and smiled very sadly, all the madness momentarily gone. “He was our best. I love him and his children.”
    His children?
    “His children?”
    “Them as came after. Bully for them.”
    “Yes.”
    “Bully for them, Toro.”
    “Toro?”
    In Spiral Jacobs’s eyes Ori saw real derangement, a dark sea of loneliness, cold, liquor and drugs. But thoughts still swam there, cunning as barracuda, their movements the twitchings of the tramp’s face.
He’s sounding me out,
thought Ori.
He’s testing me for something.
    “If I’d been there a little older, I’d’ve been Jack’s man,” Ori said. “He’s the boss, always was. I’d have followed him. You know, I saw him die.”
    “Jack don’t die, son.”
    “I saw him.”
    “Aye like
that
maybe, but, you know, people like Jack they don’t die.”
    “Where is he now, then?”
    “I think Jack’s looking and smiling at you doublers, but there’s others, friends of ours, mates of mine, he’s thinking, ‘Bully for them!’ “ The old man clucked laughter.
    “Friends of yours?”
    “Aye, friends of mine. With big plans! I know all about it. Once a friend of Jack’s, always, and a friend of all his kin too.”
             
    “Who are you friends with?” Ori wanted to know, but Jacobs would say nothing. “What plans? Who are your friends?” The old man finished his food, running his fingers through the residue of egg and sucking them. He did not notice or care that Ori was there; he reclined and rested, and then, without looking at his companion, he shuffled into the overcast day.
    Ori tracked him. It was not furtive. He simply walked a few steps behind Spiral Jacobs, and followed him home. A languorous route. By Shadrach Street through the remnants of the market to the clamour of Aspic Hole, where a few fruiterers and butchers had stalls.
    Spiral Jacobs spoke to many he passed. He was given food and a few coins.
    Ori watched the society of vagabonds. Grey-faced women and men in clothes like layers of peeling skin greeted Jacobs or cursed him with the fervour of siblings. In the charred shade of a firegutted office, Jacobs passed bottles for more than an hour among the vagrants of Aspic Hole, while Ori tried to understand him.
    Once a group of girls and boys, roughnecks every one, a vodyanoi girl kick-leaping and even a young city garuda among them, came to throw stones. Ori stepped up, but the tramps shouted
and waved with almost ritualised aggression and soon the children went.
    Spiral Jacobs headed back east toward the Gross Tar, toward the brick holes and the Griss Fell shelter that were as much as anything his home. Ori watched him stumble, watched him rifle through piles of rubbish at junctions. He watched what Jacobs picked out: bewildering debris. Ori considered each piece carefully, as if Spiral Jacobs was a message to him from another time, that he might with care decrypt. A text in flesh.
    The wiry little figure went through New Crobuzon’s traffic, past carts piled with vegetables from the farmlands and the Grain Spiral. Hummock bridges took him over canals where barges ferried anthracite, and through the afternoon crowds, children, bickering shoppers, the beggars, a handful of golems, shabby-gentile shopkeepers scrubbing graffitied helixes and radical slogans from their