BooksBarbecue
Back Iron Council Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. Prologue
  2. Part One: Trappings
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Part Two: Returns
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Part Three: Wine Land
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train
  19. Part Four: The Hainting
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Part Five: Retread
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Part Six: The Causus Race
  28. Chapter Twenty
  29. Chapter Twenty-One
  30. Chapter Twenty-Two
  31. Part Seven: Stain
  32. Chapter Twenty-Three
  33. Chapter Twenty-Four
  34. Part Eight: The Remarking
  35. Chapter Twenty-Five
  36. Chapter Twenty-Six
  37. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  38. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  39. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  40. Chapter Thirty
  41. Part Nine: Sound and Light
  42. Chapter Thirty-One
  43. Chapter Thirty-Two
  44. Chapter Thirty-Three
  45. Part Ten: The Monument
  46. Chapter Thirty-Four
  47. Chapter Thirty-Five
  48. RUNAGATE RAMPANT. LUNUARY 1806.

Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train

Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train

With each step water and the roots of waterweeds snag him. It is years ago and Judah Low is young and in the wetlands.

-Again, he says. That is all. There is no please and no need for it. This language is deep-structured with courtesy. To be rude takes effortful and irregular declensions.

-Again, he says and the stiltspear child shows him what it has made. Its eyebrows flex in what he knows to be a smile and it opens its hand and a stiltspear toy made of mud and waterlilies stands between its fingers. The child pinches it to shape and sings to it in a tiny wordless trilling, and makes it move. The figurine has only one motion, flexing and unflexing its stem legs. It does it several times before bursting.

They stand at the edges of wide space edged with gnarly treelife and intricately fronded byways, random canals. Boughs hide passages, and vegetation is so thick and so heavy, so saturated with the water of the swamp it is glutinous, it is like a viscid liquid dripping from the branches and briefly coagulates in the shape of leaves.

The swamp mimics all landscapes. It opens into meadows and it can be forest. There are places where mud solidifies enough to pile into swamp-mountains. Tunnels below the rootstuff, floored in water, pitch and labyrinth. There are dead places where bleached trees jut from rank water. Tribes of mosquito and blackfly come to Judah and bleed him terribly.

To Judah the fen air is not oppressive. It is like a caul. In the months he has lived there Judah has learnt to feel cosseted by it. For all his bites gone septic and his diarrhoea, he loves the swamp. He looks up through clouds thin as watered milk, to a late sun. He feels himself greened, mildewed and inhabited by infusoria, a host, a landscape as well as a life.

The child dips its hand with the grace of its species. Its fingers are radial from its little palm, a star. It clenches in its way: hinges its tapered digits like the petals of a closing flower, into a point. Nails concatenate, its hand become a spearhead.

The stiltspear young walks quadruped from Judah Low. It turns its head on a neck that is all sinews and wordlessly queries whether he will come, and he does, with the slushing clumsiness that the stiltspear indulge as if he is neonate.

When the child walks, its limbs precisely pierce the water. Judah Low seems to drag the swamp with him and scar it with a wide wake. He is lucky the dams and sires of this stiltspear piglet let him go with it, as every moment he walks he attracts attentions it would be better to avoid. The black caiman and constrictors must hear his passage as the thrashes of something wounded.