The Scar (2 page)

Captain Myzovic gestured her to sit.

“Miss Coldwine,” he said as she settled herself. “I hope your quarters are satisfactory. Your food? The crew? Good good.” He looked down briefly at the papers on his desk. “I wanted to raise a couple of issues with you, Miss Coldwine,” he said, and sat back.

She waited, staring at him. He was a hard-faced, handsome man in his fifties. His uniform was clean and pressed, which not all captains’ were. Bellis did not know whether it would be to her advantage to meet his eyes calmly or demurely to look away.

“Miss Coldwine, we haven’t spoken very much about your duties,” he said quietly. “I will do you the courtesy, of course, of treating you like a lady. I must tell you I’m not used to hiring those of your sex, and had the Esperium authorities not been impressed by your records and references, I can assure you . . .” He let the sentence dissipate.

“I have no wish to make you feel uncomfortable. You’re berthing in the passengers’ quarters. You’re eating in the passenger mess. However, as you know, you are not a paying passenger. You are an employee. You have been taken on by the agents of the Nova Esperium colony, and for the duration of this journey I am their representative. And while that makes little difference to Sister Meriope and Dr. Tearfly and the others, to you . . . it means I am your employer.

“Of course you are not crew,” he continued. “I would not order you as I order them. If you prefer, I would only
request
your services. But I must insist that such requests are obeyed.”

They studied each other.

“Now,” he said, his tone relaxing a little, “I don’t foresee any onerous demands. Most of the crew are from New Crobuzon or the Grain Spiral, and those that aren’t speak perfectly good Ragamoll. It’s in Salkrikaltor that I’ll first need you, and we’ll not be there for a good week or more, so you’ve plenty of time to relax, to meet the other passengers. We sail tomorrow morning, early. We’ll be away by the time you’re up, I shouldn’t doubt.”

“Tomorrow?” Bellis said. It was the first word she had spoken since entering.

The captain looked at her sharply. “Yes. Is there a problem?”

“Originally,” she said without inflection, “you told me we would sail on Dustday, Captain.”

“I did, Miss Coldwine, but I’ve changed my mind. I’ve finished my paperwork a deal quicker than I expected, and my brother officers are ready to transfer their inmates tonight. We sail tomorrow.”

“I had hoped to return to town, to send a letter,” Bellis said. She kept her voice level. “An important letter to a friend in New Crobuzon.”

“Out of the question,” the captain said. “It cannot be done. I’ll not waste any more days here.”

Bellis sat still. She was not intimidated by this man, but she had no power over him, none at all. She tried to work out what was most likely to engage his sympathy, make him acquiesce.

“Miss Coldwine,” he said suddenly, and to her surprise his voice was a little gentler. “I am afraid the matter is in motion. If you wish I can give your letter to Lieutenant-Gaoler Catarrs, but I cannot in truth recommend that as entirely reliable. You’ll have the opportunity to deliver your message in Salkrikaltor. Even if there are no New Crobuzon ships docking there, there is a warehouse, to which all our captains have the keys, for access to information, spare cargo, and mail. Leave your letter there. It’ll be picked up by the next home-bound ship. It won’t be much delayed.

“You can learn from this, Miss Coldwine,” he added. “At sea, you can’t waste time. Remember that: don’t wait.”

Bellis sat on a little longer, but there was nothing at all that she could do, so she thinned her lips and left.

She stood for a long time under Iron Bay’s cold sky. The stars were invisible; the moon and its daughters, its two little satellites, were unclear. Bellis walked, tense against the chill, and climbed the short ladder to the ship’s raised front, heading for the bowsprit.

Bellis held on to the iron railings and stood on the tips of her toes. She could just see out, across the lightless sea.

Behind her the sounds of the crew faded. A way off, she could see two guttering red pins of light: a torch on the bridge of a prison-ship, and its twin in the black surf.

From the crow’s nest, or from somewhere in the rigging, from some indistinct spot a hundred feet or more above her, Bellis heard a strain of mouth-music. It was not like the imbecilic shanties she had heard in Tarmuth. It was slow and complex.

You will have to wait for your letter,
Bellis mouthed silently across the water.
You will have to wait to hear from me. You’ll have to wait a little while longer, until cray-country.

She watched the night until the last lines of division between shore, sea, and sky were obscured. Then, cosseted by darkness, she walked slowly aft, toward the constricted doorways and stooped passages leading to her cabin, a scrap of space like a flaw in the ship’s design.

(Later the ship moved uneasily, in the coldest hour, and she stirred in her bunk and she pulled the blanket up to her neck, and she realized somewhere below her dreams that the living cargo was coming aboard.)

I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus.

My skin’s taut with it, stretched till it puckers nor can I touch it without it rages. I’m infected. I hurt where I touch and I touch everywhere to make sure that I hurt that I’m not yet numb.

But still thank whatever makes these veins mine I’m full of blood. I worry my scabs and they brim I brim with it. And that’s a small comfort nor mind the pain.

They come for us when the air’s so still and black without not a seabird cries. They open our doors and shine lights, uncovering us. I am almost ashamed to see how we have surrendered, we’ve surrendered up to filth.

I can see nothing beyond their lights.

Where we lie together they beat us apart, and I wrap my arms around the spastic matter that twitches in my midriff as they begin to herd us.

We wind through tarry passages and engine chambers and I’m all cold to know what this is for. And I’m more eager, I’m quicker than some of the old ones bent double coughing and spewing and afraid to move.

And then there’s a swallowing up, I’m eaten up by the cold gulped down by darkness and gods fuck me blind we are outside.

Outside.

I’m dumb with it. I’m dumb with wonder.

It has been a long time.

We huddle together, each against the next man like troglodytes like myopic trow. They’re cowed by it the old ones, by the lack of walls and edges and the movement of the cold, by water and air.

I might cry gods help me. I might.

All black on black but still I can see hills and water and I can see clouds. I can see the prisons on all sides bobbing a little like fishermen’s floats. Jabber take us all I can see clouds.

Bugger me I’m crooning like I soothe a baby. That’s for me that coddling noise.

And then they push us on like livestock shuffling rattling chains, dripping farting muttering astonished, across the deck crippled under the weight of bodies and fetters, to a swaying rope bridge. And they hurry us along and over it, all our number, and each man pauses a moment in the middle of the low-slung passage between vessels, their thoughts visible and bright like a chymical burst.

They consider leaping.

Into the water of the bay.

But the rope walls around the bridge are high and there’s barbed wire hemming us in and our poor bodies are sore and weak and each man falters, and continues, and crosses the water to a new ship.

I pause like the others in my turn. Like them I’m too afraid.

And then there’s a new deck underfoot, scrubbed iron smooth and clean, vibrating from engines, and more corridors and clattering keys and after all another long unlit room where we collapse exhausted and changed over and raise ourselves slowly to see who our new neighbors are. Around me begin the hissed arguments and bickerings and fights and seductions and rapes that make up our politics. New alliances are formed. New hierarchies.

I sit apart for a while, in the shadows.

I’m still caught in that moment when I entered the night. It’s like amber. I’m a grub in amber. It snares me and damn but it does it makes me beautiful.

I’ve a new home now. I’ll live in that moment as long as I can, till the memories decay and then I’ll come out, I’ll come to this new place we sit in.

Somewhere pipes are banging like great hammers.

Chapter Two

Outside of Iron Bay, the sea was hard. Bellis woke to its slapping assault. She quit the cabin, picking her way past Sister Meriope, who was vomiting with what Bellis did not believe was just seasickness.

Bellis emerged into wind, and a great cracking as sails tugged like animals at their tethers. The enormous smokestack vented a little soot, and the ship hummed with the power of the steam engine deep below.

Bellis sat on a container.
So we’re off, then,
she thought nervously.
We’re heading out. We’re away.

The
Terpsichoria
had seemed busy while they were moored: someone was always scrubbing something, or raising a piece of machinery, or running from one end of the ship to the other. But now that sense of activity was increased by a huge factor.

Bellis squinted out across the maindeck, not yet ready to look at the sea.

The rigging teemed. Most of the sailors were human, but here and there a spined hotchi raced along rope crawlways and onto crow’s nests. On the decks men lugged containers and wound huge winches, shouting instructions in incomprehensible shorthand, threading chains onto fat flywheels. There were towering cactacae, too heavy and ungainly to climb rope but making up for that with their efforts below, with their strength, fibrous vegetable biceps bunching massively as they tugged and tied.

Officers in blue uniforms strode among them.

The wind blew across the ship, and the deck’s periscopic cowls crooned like dolorous flutes.

Bellis finished her cigarillo. She stood slowly and walked to the side, her eyes lowered, till she reached the rail and she looked up and out to sea.

There was no land at all.

Oh gods, look at it all,
she thought in shock.

For the first time in her life, Bellis looked out across nothing but water.

Alone beneath a colossal rearing sky, anxiety welled up in her like bile. She wanted very much to be back in the alleys of her city.

Slicks of spume spread fast around the ship, disappearing and reappearing incessantly. The water moiled in intricate marbled surges. It shifted for the ship, as it would for a whale or a canoe or a fallen leaf, a dumb accommodation that it might overturn with any sudden swell.

It was a massive moronic child. Powerful and stupid and capricious.

Bellis cast her gaze about nervously, looking for any island, any jag of coastline. At that moment, there was none.

A cloud of seabirds trailed them, plunging for carrion in the vessel’s wake, spattering the deck and the foam with guano.

They sailed without stopping for two days.

Bellis felt almost stupefied with resentment that her journey was under way. She paced the corridors and decks, shut herself in her cabin. She watched blankly as the
Terpsichoria
passed rocks and tiny islands in the distance, illuminated by grey daylight or the moon.

Sailors scanned the horizon, oiling the large-bore guns. With hundreds of ill-charted islets and trading towns, with an unending number of ships supplying the insatiable commercial hole of New Crobuzon at one end, Basilisk Channel was plied by pirates.

Bellis knew that a ship this size with an ironclad hull and New Crobuzon’s colors flying would almost certainly not be preyed upon. The crew’s vigilance was only slightly unnerving.

The
Terpsichoria
was a merchant vessel. It was not built for passengers. There was no library, no drawing room, no games room. The passengers’ mess was a halfhearted effort, its walls bare but for a few cheap lithographs.

Bellis took her meals there sitting alone, monosyllabic to any pleasantries, while the other passengers sat below the dirty windows and played cards. Bellis watched them surreptitiously and intensely.

Back in her cabin, Bellis took endless stock of what she possessed.

She had left the city in a sudden hurry. She had very few clothes, in the austere style she favored: severe and black and charcoal. She had seven books: two volumes of linguistic theory; a primer in Salkrikaltor Cray; an anthology of short fiction in various languages; a thick, empty notebook; and copies of her own two monographs,
High Kettai Grammatology
and
Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub
. She had a few pieces of jewelry in jet and garnet and platinum; a small bag of cosmetics; ink and pens.

She spent hours adding details to her letter. She described the ugliness of the open seas, the harsh rocks that poked up like traps. She wrote long, parodic descriptions of the officers and passengers, reveling in caricature. Sister Meriope; Bartol Gimgewry the merchant; the cadaverous surgeon Dr. Mollificatt; Widow and Miss Cardomium, a quiet mother and daughter transformed by Bellis’ pen into a scheming pair of husband hunters. Johannes Tearfly became the professorial buffoon pilloried in music halls. She invented motivations for them all, speculating on what might send them halfway across the world.

Standing at the back of the ship on the second day, by the morass of gulls and ospreys still bickering over the ship’s effluent, Bellis looked for islets but saw only waves.

She felt jilted. Then, as she searched the horizon, she heard a noise.

A little way from her the naturalist, Dr. Tearfly, stood watching the birds. Bellis’ face set hard. She prepared to leave as soon as he spoke to her.

When he looked down and saw her watching him coldly, he gave her an absent smile and pulled out a notebook. His attention was off her immediately. She watched as he began to sketch the gulls, paying her no mind at all.

He was in his late fifties, she guessed. His thinning hair was combed tightly back, and he wore little rectangular spectacles and a tweed waistcoat. But despite the academic uniform he did not look weak or absurdly bookish. He was tall, and he held himself well.

With quick, precise strokes, he marked out folded avian claws and the brute pugnacity of the seagulls’ eyes. Bellis warmed to him very slightly.

After a while she spoke.

It made journeying easier; she admitted that to herself. Johannes Tearfly was charming. Bellis suspected he would be equally friendly to everyone on board.

They took lunch together, and she found it easy to steer him away from the other passengers, who watched them intently. Tearfly was endearingly free of intrigue. If it occurred to him that keeping the company of the rude and distant Bellis Coldwine might lead to rumors, he did not care.

Tearfly was happy to discuss his work. He enthused about the unstudied fauna of Nova Esperium. He told Bellis about his plans for publishing a monograph, on his eventual return to New Crobuzon. He was collating drawings, he told her, and heliotypes and observations.

Bellis described to him a dark, mountainous island she had seen in the north, in the small hours of the previous night.

“That was North Morin,” he said. “Cancir’s probably off to the northwest right now. We’ll be docking at Dancing Bird Island after dark.”

The ship’s position and progress were matters of constant conversation among the other passengers, and Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.

Dancing Bird Island appeared just as the sun went down. Its volcanic rock was brick-red, and hunched into little peaks like shoulder bones. Qé Banssa clambered up the slopes of the bay. It was poor, an ugly little fishing port. The thought of setting foot in another resentful town imprisoned by maritime economics depressed Bellis.

The sailors without shore leave were sullen as their comrades and passengers disappeared down the gangplank. There were no other New Crobuzon ships at dock: nowhere for Bellis to deliver her letter. She wondered why they were stopping at this negligible port.

Apart from an arduous research trip to the Wormseye Scrub years previously, this was the furthest Bellis had ever been from New Crobuzon. She watched the small crowd at the dockside. They looked old and eager. Over the wind she heard a smattering of dialects. Most of the shouts were in Salt, the sailors’ argot, a found language riveted together from the thousand vernaculars of the Basilisk Channel, Ragamoll, and Perrickish, the tongues of the Pirate and Jheshull Islands.

Bellis saw Captain Myzovic climb the steep streets toward New Crobuzon’s crenellated embassy.

“Why are you staying on board?” said Johannes.

“I don’t feel any great need for greasy food or trinkets,” she said. “These islands depress me.”

Johannes smiled slowly, as if her attitude delighted him. He shrugged and looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain,” he said, as if she had returned his question, “and I have work to do aboard.”

“Why are we stopping here anyway?” said Bellis.

“I suspect it’s government business,” said Johannes carefully. “This is the last serious outpost. Beyond this the New Crobuzon sphere of influence becomes far more . . . attenuated. There are probably all manner of things to be attended to, out here.

“Luckily,” he said after a silence, “it’s none of our business.”

They watched the still-darkening ocean.

“Have you seen any of the prisoners?” Johannes asked suddenly.

Bellis looked at him in surprise. “No. Have you?” She felt defensive. The fact of the ship’s sentient cargo discomfited her.

When it had come, Bellis’ realization that she had to leave New Crobuzon had been urgent and frightening. She had made her plans in low panic. She needed to get as far away as she could, and quickly. Cobsea and Myrshock seemed too close, and she had thought feverishly of Shankell and Yoraketche, and Neovadan and Tesh. But they were all too far or too dangerous, or too alien, or too hard to reach or too frightening. There was nothing in any of them that could become her home. And Bellis had realized aghast that it was too hard for her to let go, that she was clinging to New Crobuzon, to what defined her.

And then Bellis had thought of Nova Esperium. Eager for new citizens. Asking no questions. Halfway across the world, a little blister of civilization in unknown lands. A home from home, New Crobuzon’s colony. Rougher, surely, and harder and less cosseted—Nova Esperium was too young for many kindnesses—but a culture modeled on her city’s own.

She realized that, with that destination, New Crobuzon would pay her passage, even as she fled it. And a channel of communication would remain open to her: regular if occasional contact with ships from home. She might then know when it was safe to return.

But the vessels that undertook the long, dangerous journey from Iron Bay across the Swollen Ocean carried with them Nova Esperium’s workforce. Which meant a hold full of prisoners: peons, indentured laborers, and Remade.

It curdled the food in Bellis’ stomach to think of the men and women locked below, out of the light, and so she did not think of them. She would have had nothing to do with such a voyage and such harsh traffic if she had had a choice.

Bellis looked up at Johannes, trying to gauge his thoughts.

“I must admit,” he said hesitantly, “I’m surprised I’ve heard no sound at
all
from them. I had thought they would be let out more often than this.”

Bellis said nothing. She waited for Johannes to change the subject, so that she could continue to try to forget what lay beneath them.

She could hear the bonhomie from Qé Banssa’s waterfront pubs. It sounded urgent.

Under tar and steel, in the damp chambers below. Food bolted and fought over. Shit, spunk, and blood congealing. Shrieks and fistfights. And chains like stone and all around whispers.

“That’s a shame, lad.” The voice was rough from lack of sleep, but the sympathy was genuine. “You’ll most probably get a hiding for that.”

Before the bars of the prison hold, the cabin boy stood looking mournfully at shards of pottery and spilt stew. He had been spooning food into bowls for the prisoners, and his hand had slipped.

“Clay like that looks strong as iron, till you drop it.” The man behind the bars was as filthy and tired as all the other prisoners. Bubbling from his chest, visible beneath a torn shirt, was a huge tumor of flesh from which emerged two long ill-smelling tentacles. They swung lifeless, deadweight blubbery encumbrances. Like most of the transportees, the man was Remade, carved by science and thaumaturgy into a new shape, in punishment for some crime.

“Reminds me of when Crawfoot went to war,” said the man. “Did you ever hear that story?”

The cabin boy picked greasy meat and carrots from the floor and dropped them into a bucket. He glanced up at the man.

The prisoner shuffled back and settled against the wall.

“So one day, at the beginning of the world, Darioch looks out from his treehouse and sees an army coming toward the forest. And bugger me if it ain’t the Batskin Brood come to get back their brooms. You know how Crawfoot took their brooms, don’t you?”

The cabin boy was about fifteen, old for his position. He wore clothes not much cleaner than the prisoners’. He looked the man full on and grinned
yes
, he knew that story, and the sudden change in him was so marked and extraordinary it was as if he were briefly given a new body. For a moment he looked strong and cocky, and when the smile went and he returned to the slop of food and pottery, some of that sudden swagger remained.

“All right then,” the prisoner continued. “So Darioch calls Crawfoot to him and shows him the Batskins on their way, and he says to him, ‘This is your fuck-up, Crawfoot. You took their stuff. And it happens that Salter’s away at the edge of the world, so you’re going to have to do the fighting.’ And Crawfoot’s bitching and moaning and giving it all this . . .” The man opened and shut his fingers like a talkative mouth.

He started to continue, but the cabin boy cut him off. “I know it,” he said with sudden recognition. “I heard it before.”

There was a silence.

“Ah well,” the man said, surprised by his own disappointment. “Ah well, I tell you what, son, I’ve not heard it for a while myself, so I think I’ll just carry on and tell it.”

The boy looked at him quizzically, as if trying to decide whether the man was mocking him. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”