The Scar (28 page)

This letter I write was burning in my pocket. I was carrying enough evidence to have myself and Silas executed for crimes against Garwater—which would doom New Crobuzon in the process. I was very afraid.

Pretending I had not seen Doul, I descended to the main gondola and took a post by the window, frantically watching the cirrus. I hoped that Doul would leave me be.

It was no good. He came to me.

I felt him standing by my table, and I waited a long time for him to go, to leave without speaking, his intimidation successfully completed, but he did not. Eventually, against my will, it seemed, I turned my head and looked at him.

He watched me silently for a while. I grew more and more anxious, though I held my face still. Then he spoke. I had forgotten how beautiful his voice is.

“They are called freggios,” he said.

“The scars: they’re called freggios.” He indicated the seat opposite me and inclined his head. “May I sit?”

What could I say to that? Could I say
No, I wish to be alone,
to the Lovers’ right-hand man, their guard and assassin, the most dangerous man on Armada? I pressed my lips together and shrugged politely:
It is no concern of mine where you sit, sir
.

He clasped his hands on the table. He spoke (exquisitely), and I did not interrupt him or walk away or discourage him with apparent lack of interest. Partly, of course, I was afraid for my life and safety—my heart was beating very fast.

But it was also his oration: he speaks like one reading from a book, every sentence carefully formed, written by a poet. I have never heard anything like it. He held my gaze and seemed not to blink.

I was fascinated by what he told me.

“They are both press-ganged,” he said. “The Lovers.” I must have gaped. “Twenty-five, thirty years ago.

“He came first. He was a fisherman. A water peasant from the north end of the Shards. Spent all his life on one or other of those little rocks, casting his nets and lines, gutting and cleaning and filleting and flensing. Ignorant and dull.” He watched me with eyes a darker grey than his armor.

“One day he rowed too far out and the wind took him. A Garwater scout found him and stole his cargo and debated whether or not to kill him, terrified, skinny little fisherboy. In the end they took him back to the city.”

His fingers shifted, and he began gently to massage his own hands.

“People are made and broken and remade by their circumstances,” he said. “Within three years the boy ruled Garwater.” He smiled.

“Less than three quartos after that, one of our ironclads intercepts a vessel—a gaudy recurved sloop—on its way from Perrick Nigh to Myrshock. One of Figh Vadiso’s noble families, it appears: A husband and wife and daughter, with their retainers, relocating to the mainland. Their cargo was stripped. The passengers were of no interest to anyone, and I’ve no idea what happened to them. They may have been killed; I don’t know. What is known is that when the servants were inducted and welcomed as citizens, there was one maid who caught the new ruler’s eye.”

He looked out into the sky.

“There are some who were there, on board the
Grand Easterly
, at that meeting,” he said quietly. “They say she stood tall and smiled crooked at the ruler—not like one trying to ingratiate herself, or one terrified, but as if she liked what she saw.

“Women don’t have it well in the northern Shards,” he said. “Each island has its own customs and laws, and some of them are unpleasant.” He clasped his hands. “There are places where they sew women shut,” he said, and watched me. I met his eye: I do not intimidate. “Or cut them, excise what they were born with. Or keep them chained in houses to serve the men. The isle our boss was born to was not so harsh as that, but it . . . exaggerated certain traits that you might recognize from other cultures. From New Crobuzon, for example. A certain sacralization of the woman. A contempt masked as adoration. You understand, I’m sure. You published your books as by B
.
Coldwine. I’m sure you understand.”

That shook me; I admit it. That he knew this much about me, that he understood my reasons for that harmless little piece of obfuscation.

“On the boss’s island, the men go to sea and leave their wives and lovers on the land, and no amount of custom or tradition can chain legs closed. A man who loves a woman with a fierce enough passion—or says he does, or thinks he does—aches when he leaves her. He knows intimately how strong, how powerful her charms are. He himself succumbed to them, after all. So he must lessen them.

“On the boss’s island, a man who loves strongly enough will
cut
his woman’s
face
. . .” We watched each other, unmoving. “He’ll mark her, to make her his, inscribe his property, notch it like wood. Spoil her just enough that no other will want her.

“Those scars are freggios.

“Love, or lust, or something, some combination, overtook the boss. He courted the newcomer and quickly claimed her, with the masculine assertiveness he had been trained into. And by all accounts she welcomed his attentions and returned them, and she was his concubine. Until the day he decided she was his entirely, and with a kind of clumsy bravado, he drew his knife after coitus and cut her face.” Doul paused, then smiled with sudden and sincere pleasure.

“She was still; she let him do it . . . And then she took the knife and cut him back.”

“It was the making of them both,” he said softly.

“You can see the disingenuity. He was a remarkable boy to have risen so high so fast, but he was still a peasant playing peasant games. I don’t doubt he
believed
it when he told her that it was for love that he cut her, that he did not trust other men to resist her, but whether he did or not, it was a lie. He was marking territory, like a pissing dog. Telling others where his holdings began. And yet she cut him back.”

Doul was smiling at me again. “That was not expected. Property does not mark its owner. She did not fight him; while he marked her, she took him at his word. The blood, the split skin, the tissue and pain, the clot and the scar were for
love
, so they were hers to give as well as receive.

“Pretending that freggios were what he claimed they were, she changed them, and made them much more. Changing
them, she changed him, too. Scarred his culture as well as his face. They found solace and strength in each other, then. They found an intensity and a connection in those wounds, wounds made suddenly pure.

“I do not know how he reacted, that first time. But that night she stopped being his courtesan and became his equal. They lost their names that night and became the Lovers. And we had two rulers on Garwater—two who ruled with more single-minded purpose than one ever had. And everything is open to them. She taught him that night how to remake rules, how always to go further. She made him like her. She was hungry for transformations.

“She remains so. I know that better than many: the eagerness with which she greeted me and my work, when I first came.” He spoke very softly, thoughtfully. “She takes the scraps of knowledge newcomers bring and makes them . . . remakes them with a drive and zeal that’s impossible to resist. However much you may want to.

“They reaffirm their purpose every day, those two. There are new freggios all the time. Their bodies and faces have become maps of their love. It’s a geography that changes, that becomes more manifest, as the years move. One for one, every time: marks of respect and equality.”

I said nothing—I had said nothing for many minutes—but Doul’s monologue had come to an end, and he waited for me to respond.

“Were you not there, then?” I asked finally.

“I came later,” he said.

“Press-ganged?” I said, astonished, but he shook his head again.

“I came of my own will,” he said. “I sought Armada out, a little more than ten years ago.”

“Why,” I said slowly, “are you telling me this?”

He shrugged a very little. “It’s important,” he said. “It’s important you understand. I saw you—you’re afraid of the scars. You should know what it is that you see. Who rules us, their motivation and passion. Drive. Intensity. It is the scars,” he said, “that give Garwater its strength.”

He nodded and left me then, abruptly. I waited for several minutes, but he did not reappear.

I am deeply perturbed. I do not understand what happened, why he spoke to me. Was he sent by the Lover? Did she instruct him to tell me her history, or was he operating on his own agenda?

Does he believe everything he told me?

The scars give Garwater its strength,
he tells me, and I am left wondering if he is blind to another possibility. Has he not noticed, I wonder? Is it coincidence that the three most powerful people in Garwater, hence in Armada and hence on the seas, are outlanders? That they were not born within Armada’s confines? That they grew to cognition and agency unconstrained by the limits of what is, what remains, and cannot but be a mess of old boats, a little town—even if the most extraordinary one in the history of Bas-Lag—and that they can therefore see a world beyond its petty robberies and claustrophobic pride?

They are not beholden to Armada’s dynamics. What are their priorities?

I want to know the Lovers’ names.

Except when he fights (I remember that, and it terrifies me), Uther Doul’s face is almost motionless. It is compelling and a little tragic, and it is nigh impossible to tell what he thinks or believes. Whatever he says to me, I have seen the Lover’s scars, and they are ugly and unpleasant. And the fact that they bespeak some sordid ritual, some game for the emotionally arrested to play, does not change that.

They are ugly and unpleasant.

Chapter Twenty-two

Thirty-six hours after the aerostat had risen over Armada and headed away to the southwest, land began to appear beneath them.

Bellis had slept little. She was not tired, however, and rose before five on the second morning to watch the dawn from the stateroom.

When she entered, there were others already awake and watching: several of the crewmen, Tintinnabulum and his companions, and Uther Doul. Her heart sank a little at the sight of him. She found his manner—even more reserved and measured than her own—troubling, and she did not understand his interest in her.

He noticed her and wordlessly indicated the windows.

In the sunless predawn light, rocks were breaking the water
below. It was hard to judge the size or distance of the land formations. A scatter-pattern of stones like whales’ backs, none more than a mile across, few larger than Armada itself. Bellis could see no birds or animals—nothing but bleak brown rock and the green of scrubland.

“We’ll reach the island within the hour,” someone said.

The airship hummed with vague industry, with preparations that Bellis did not care to understand. She returned to her berth and packed quickly, then sat in the stateroom in her black clothes, her thick carpetbag at her feet. Deep within it, nestled in the folds of her spare skirts, was the little leather pouch and its contents that Silas Fennec had given her, along with the letter she was writing.

The crew were walking quickly back and forth, barking incomprehensible orders to each other. Those of them who were not working congregated by the windows.

The airship had descended considerably. They were only a thousand feet or so above the water, and the face of the sea had grown more intricate. Its wrinkles had resolved themselves into wave shapes and foam and currents, and the darknesses and colors of reefs and weed forests—and was that a wreck?—below.

The island was ahead of them. Bellis shivered to see it, laid out so stark in the hot sea. It stretched perhaps thirty miles long and twenty across. It was jagged with dust-colored peaks and little mountains.

“Sunshit, I didn’t think I’d have to see this place again!” said Hedrigall in Sunglari-accented Salt. He pointed at the island’s farthest shore. “There’s more than a hundred and fifty miles between it and Gnurr Kett,” he continued. “They’re not strong in the air, the anophelii. Couldn’t last more than sixty miles. That’s why the Kettai let them live, and trade with them through the likes of me and my old comrades, knowing they’ll never make the mainland. That—“ He jerked a thick green thumb. “—is a
ghetto
.”

The dirigibles were slanting, skirting the coastline. Bellis watched the island intently. There was nothing to see, no life apart from plants. With a sudden chill, Bellis realized that the skies were empty. There were no birds. Every other island they had passed had been a mass of shifting feathered bodies, the rocks that edged it smeared with guano. The gulls had surrounded every landmass in a little gusting corona, swooping to take fish from the warm seas, squabbling on thermals.

The air above the anophelii island’s volcanic cliffs was as dead as bone.

The aerostat passed over silent ocher hills. The inlands were hidden by a ridge of rock, a spine that ran parallel to the coast. There was a long silence broken only by the engines and the wind, and when someone finally did speak—shouting “Look!”—the sound seemed intrusive and defensive.

It was Tanner Sack, pointing at a little crabgrass meadow nestling in rocks, sheltered from the waves. The green was broken by a little clutch of moving white specks.

“Sheep,” said Hedrigall after a moment. “We’re nearing the bay. There must have been a delivery recently. There’ll be a few herds of them left for a while longer.”

The shape and nature of the coastline was changing. The stone spines and jags were giving way to lower, less antagonistic geography. There were short beaches of black shale; slopes of hard earth and ferns; low, bleached trees. Once or twice, Bellis saw farmyard animals, wandering feral: pigs, sheep, goats, cattle. Just a very few of them, here and there.

Inland a mile or two, there were ribbons of grey water, sluggish rivers oozing from the hills, intersecting and crisscrossing the island. The waters slowed over plateaus of flat land and burst their banks, diffusing and becoming pools and swampland, feeding white mango trees, vines, greenery as thick and cloying as vomit. In the distance, on the other edge of the island, Bellis saw stark shapes that she thought were ruins.

Below her there was motion.

She tried to track whatever it was, but it was too fast, too erratic. She was left with nothing more than an impression fleeting across her eye. Something had skated through the air, emerging from some dark hole in the rocks and entering another.

“What do they trade?” said Tanner Sack, without looking
away from the landscape. “The sheep and pigs and whatnot get
left here: your lot bring them and other stuff in from Dreer Samher, for the Kettai. What’s in it for them? What do the anophelii trade?”

Hedrigall stood back from the window and gave a curt laugh. “Books and intelligence, Tanner, man,” he said. “And flotsam and jetsam, driftwood, bits and pieces they find on the beach.”

There was more motion in the air below the dirigible, but Bellis simply could not focus on whatever it was that moved. She bit her lip, frustrated and nervous. She knew she was not imagining things. There was really only one thing the shapes could be. She was perturbed that no one else had mentioned them.
Don’t they see?
she thought.
Why does no one say anything? Why don’t I?

The dirigible slowed, moving against a faint wind.

Surmounting a ridge of rockland, it was buffeted. There was an explosion of breath and whispers, incredulous excitement. Below them, in the shadows of hills patched barren and lush in random patterns, was a rocky bay. Anchored in the bay were three ships.

“We’re here,” Hedrigall whispered. “Those are Dreer Samher vessels. That’s Machinery Beach.”

The ships were galleons, ornately picked out in gold, surrounded, enclosed by cosseting rocks that jutted into the sea and curled around the natural harbor. Bellis realized she was holding her breath.

The sand and shale of the inlet’s beach was a dark red, dirty like old blood. It was broken by weirdly shaped boulders the size of torsos and houses. Bellis’ eyes skittered over the dark surface, and she saw trails, pathways scored in the matter of the shoreline. Beyond the boundary of stringy boscage that edged the beach, the trails became more defined. They entered rocky elevations that rose slowly from the earth to overlook the sea. The air was broken by heat waves where the sun baked the stone, and trees like olives and dwarf jungle species specked the slopes.

Bellis followed the trails winding up the scorched hillsides until (her breath stopping again) her eyes came to rest on a scattering of light-bleached houses, dwellings that extruded from the rocks like organic growth—the anophelii township.

There was no wind in the bay. There was a tiny grouping of clouds like paint dots around the sun, but heat blasted through them and reverberated around the enclosed rock walls.

There were no sounds of life. The tedious repetition of the sea seemed to underline the silence rather than break it. The dirigible hung quietly, its engines powered down. The Samheri boats creaked and shifted nearby. They were empty. No one had come to greet the airship.

Scabmettler guards in their bloodclot armor kept watch with cactacae as the passengers descended. Bellis touched land, crouching beside the rope ladder, and ran her fingers through the sand. Her breathing was quick and very loud in her head.

At first she was conscious of nothing but the novelty of being on ground that did not sway. She remembered her land-legs delightedly, only realizing at that moment that she had forgotten them. Then she became aware of her surroundings again, and felt the beach beneath her closely, and for the first time registered its strangeness.

She remembered the naÏve woodcuts in Aum’s book. The stylized monochrome of the man in profile on the beach, broken mechanisms around him.

Machinery Beach,
she thought, and looked out across the dirty-red sand and scree.

Some way off were the shapes she had taken to be boulders— huge things the size of rooms, breaking up the shoreline. They were engines. Squat and enormous and coated with rust and verdigris, long-forgotten appliances for unknown purposes, their pistons seized by age and salt.

There were smaller rocks, too, and Bellis saw that these were shards of the larger machines, bolts and pipework junctions; or finer, more intricate, and complete pieces; gauges and glasswork and compact steam-power engines. The pebbles were gears, cogs, flywheels, bolts, and screws.

Bellis looked down at her cupped hands. They were full of
thousands of minuscule ratchets and gear wheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. Each particle of wreckage a grain like sand, hard and sun-warmed, smaller than a crumb. Bellis let them sift from her hands, and her fingers were stained the dark blood color of the shoreline—painted with rust.

The beach was an imitation, a found sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine.

When does this age from? How old is this? What happened here?
thought Bellis. She was too numb to feel any but the most tired awe.
What disaster, what violence?
She imagined the seafloor around the bay—a reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore.

She picked up another handful of machine-sand, let it dissipate. She could smell the metal.

This is the flotsam Hedrigall meant
, she realized.
This is a graveyard of dead devices. There must be millions of secrets moldering here into rust-dust. They must sift through it, and scrub it clean, and offer the most promising bits for trade—two or three pieces picked randomly from a thousand-piece puzzle. Opaque and impenetrable, but if you could put it together, if you could make sense of it, what might you have?

She stumbled away from the rope ladder, listening to the crunch of ancient engines underfoot.

As the last of the passengers descended, the guards kept careful watch on the horizon, muttering. A little way from Bellis, the pen of livestock had been winched to the ground. It stank like a farmyard, and its inhabitants sounded noisily and stupidly into the
still air.

“Close together and listen to me,” said the Lover harshly, and she was surrounded. The engineers and scientists had been scattering, dumbly running their fingers through the metal shale. A few, like Tanner Sack, had gone to the sea. (He had submerged briefly, with a sigh of pleasure.) For a moment, there was no sound except little breakers foaming on the rust shore.

“Now listen, if you want to live,” the Lover went on. People shifted, uneasy. “It’s a mile or two to the village, up those rocks overlooking this place.” They gazed up at them; the hillside looked empty. “Keep together. Take the weapon issued to you, but don’t use it unless you’re in immediate danger of your life. There are too many of us here, and too many untrained, and we don’t want to start shooting each other in panic. We’ll be flanked by cactacae and scabmettler guards, and they know how to use what they’re carrying, so hold fire wherever possible.

“The anophelii are fast,” she said. “Famined, and dangerous. You remember the briefings, I hope, so you know what we face. The menfolk are somewhere in that village, and we have to find them. A little way over there are the swamplands, and the waters. Where the women live. And if they hear or smell us, they’ll come. So move quickly. Is everybody ready?”

She indicated with her arms, and cactacae guards corralled them. They unlocked the animal pen, still attached like an anchor to the
Trident
by its chains. Bellis raised her eyebrow on seeing that the pigs and sheep wore collars and strained against leashes. The muscular cactacae held them in check.

“Then let’s go.”

It was a nightmarish journey from Machinery Beach to the hillside township. When it was done, and she thought back on it, days or weeks later, Bellis found it impossible to distinguish events into any coherent stream. There was no sense of time in her memories, nothing but snippets of images pieced into something like a dream.

There is the heat, which clots the air around her and stops up her pores and her eyes and ears, and the rich smell of rot and sap; insects in relentless profusion, stinging and licking. Bellis has been given a flintlock, and (
she remembered
) holds it away from herself as if it stinks.

She is herded, shuffling with the other passengers—the solitary hotchi’s spines bristling and relaxing in nervous alternation, the khepri headlegs squirming—surrounded by those whose physiognomy makes them safe: the cactacae and the scabmettlers, who drag the livestock after them. The one group is bloodless, the other full of blood so sensitive it protects them. They carry guns and rivebows. Uther Doul is the only human guard. He holds weapons in each hand, and Bellis would swear that whenever she looks at him they have changed: knife and knife; gun and knife; gun
and gun.

Looking out over the vine-smothered rocks and into clearings, down inland, over slopes of dense foliage and pools that look as thick as snot. Hearing sounds. Bursts of motion in the leaves, at first; nothing more offensive. But then the start of a horrible keening, impossible to pinpoint, as if the air itself is in pain.

The proliferation of that sound, all around them.

Bellis and her neighbors bump into each other, clumsy with terror and exhaustion and the wet heat, trying to watch all sides at once, and seeing the first signs of movement, shapes zigzagging through the trees like buffeted dust motes, always getting closer, an unstable mix of random motion and malign intent.