The Scar (3 page)

The prisoner told the story, quietly, interrupted by coughing and sighs for breath. The cabin boy came and went in the darkness beyond the bars, cleaning the mess, spooning out more food. He was there at the story’s end, when Crawfoot’s chimney-pot-and-china-plate armor shattered, cutting him worse than if he’d worn none at all.

The boy looked at the tired man, the story finished, and grinned again.

“Ain’t you going to tell me the lesson?” he said.

The man smiled weakly. “I reckon you already know it.”

The boy nodded and looked up for a moment, concentrating. “ ‘If it’s nearly right, but it isn’t quite, better to have none, than make do with one,’ ” he recited. “I always preferred them stories without the morals,” he added. He squatted down by the bars.

“Fuck but I’m with you there, lad,” said the man. He paused and held out his hand through the bars. “I’m Tanner Sack.”

The cabin boy hesitated a moment: not nervous, just weighing up possibilities and advantages. He took Tanner’s hand.

“Ta for the story. I’m Shekel.”

They continued.

Chapter Three

Bellis came out of sleep when they set sail again, though the bay was still dark. The
Terpsichoria
juddered and shivered like a cold animal, and she rolled to the porthole and watched the few lights of Qé Banssa move away.

That morning, she was not allowed onto the main deck.

“Sorry ma’am,” said a sailor. He was young, and desperately uncomfortable at blocking her way. “Captain’s orders: passengers not allowed onto main deck till ten.”

“Why?”

He shied as if she had hit him. “Prisoners,” he said, “taking a constitutional.” Bellis’ eyes widened fractionally. “Captain’s giving them a shot of air, and then we’ve to clean the deck—they’re awful dirty. Why’n’t you have some breakfast, ma’am? This’ll be done in a trice.”

Out of the young man’s sight she stopped and considered. She did not like the coincidence of this, so soon after her discussion with Johannes.

Bellis wanted to see the men and women they carried below. She could not tell if she was driven by prurience, or a more noble instinct.

Instead of heading abaft for the mess, she wound down side passages through dim space, past poky doors. Bass sounds traveled through the walls: human voices sounded like dogs barking. Where the corridor ended she opened the last door, onto a walk-in cupboard lined with shelves. Bellis looked behind her, but she was alone. She finished her cigarillo and entered.

Pushing aside dried-up, empty bottles, Bellis saw that an ancient window had been blocked by shelves. She cleared them of detritus and wiped ineffectually at the glass.

She started as somebody walked past the pane, outside, barely three feet away. Stooping, she squinted through the dirt, out over the ship. The enormous mizzenmast was before her, and faintly, she saw the main- and foremasts beyond it. Below her was the main deck.

The sailors were moving, climbing and cleaning and winding in their rituals.

There was a mass of others, huddled in groups, moving slowly if at all. Bellis’ mouth twisted. They were mostly human and mostly men, but they defied generalization. She saw a man with a sinuous three-foot neck, a woman with a skein of spasming arms, a figure whose lower quarters were caterpillar treads, and another with metal wires jutting from his bones. The only thing they had in common were their greying clothes.

Bellis had never seen so many Remade in one place before, so many who had been altered in the punishment factories. Some were shaped for industry, while others seemed formed for no purpose other than grotesquerie, with misshapen mouths and eyes and gods-knew what.

There were a few cactacae prisoners, and other races too: a hotchi with broken spines; a tiny clutch of khepri, their scarab headbodies twitching and glinting in the washed-out sun. There were no vodyanoi, of course. On a journey like this, fresh water was too valuable to use keeping them alive.

She heard gaolers’ shouts. Men and cactacae strutted among the Remade, wielding whips. In groups of two and three and ten the prisoners began to shuffle in random circles around the deck.

Some lay still, and were punished.

Bellis pulled her face away.

These were her unseen companions.

They had not seemed much invigorated by the fresh air, she reflected coldly. They had not seemed to enjoy their exercise.

Tanner Sack moved just enough to keep from being beaten. He moved his eyes in a rhythm. Down for three long steps, to keep attention from himself, then up for one, to see the sky and the water.

The ship was juddering faintly from the steam engine below, and the sails were extended. The cliffs of Dancing Bird Island moved past them fast. Tanner moved toward the port side, slowly.

He was surrounded by the men who shared his hold. The women prisoners stood in a smaller group, a little way off. They all wore the same dirty faces and cold stares as him. He did not approach them.

Tanner heard a sudden whistle, a sharp two-tone different from the scream of the gulls. He looked up, and perched on some bulky metal extrusion, scrubbing it clean, Shekel looked down at him. The boy caught his eye and gave Tanner a wink and a fast smile. Tanner smiled back, but Shekel had already looked away.

An officer and a sailor with distinctive epaulets conferred at the ship’s bow, huddled over a brass engine. As Tanner strained to see what they were doing, a stick slapped across his back, not hard but with the threat of much worse. A cactacae guard was bellowing at him to keep moving, so he picked up his feet again. The alien tissue grafted to Tanner’s chest twitched. The tentacles itched and shed skin like severe sunburn. He spat on them and rubbed the saliva in, as if it were unguent.

At ten o’clock precisely, Bellis swallowed her tea and went outside. The deck had been swept and scrubbed clean. There was no sign that the prisoners had ever stood upon it.

“It’s odd to think,” said Bellis a little later, as she and Johannes stood watching the water, “that in Nova Esperium we might be in charge of men and women who traveled with us on this very boat, and we’d never know.”

“That’ll never happen to you,” he said. “Since when does a linguist need indentured assistants?”

“Neither does a naturalist.”

“Not true at all,” he said mildly. “There are crates to be taken into the bush, there are traps to be set, there are drugged and dead carcasses to lug, dangerous animals to subdue . . . It’s not all watercoloring, you know. I’ll show you my scars some time.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” He was thoughtful. “I’ve a foot-long gash where a sardula got nasty . . . a bite from a newborn chalkydri . . .”

“A sardula? Really? Can I see?”

Johannes shook his head. “It got me . . . close to a delicate place,” he said.

He did not look at her, but he did not seem prudish.

Johannes shared his cabin with Gimgewry, the failed merchant, a man crippled with the understanding of his own inadequacy, who eyed Bellis with miserable lust. Johannes was never lascivious. He seemed to think always of other things before he had a chance to notice Bellis’ attractions.

It was not that she was seeking to be approached—she would spurn him quickly if he did court her. But she was used to men trying to flirt with her—usually only for a short time, until they realized that her cool demeanor was not an act they could persuade her to drop. Tearfly’s company was frank and unsexual, and she found it disconcerting. She wondered briefly if he might be what her father had called an invert, but she saw no more sign that he was attracted to any of the men on board than he was to her. And then she felt vain for wondering.

There was a glimmer of something like fear in him, she thought, when an insinuation hung between them.
Perhaps,
she thought,
he’s no interest in such matters. Or perhaps he’s a coward
.

Shekel and Tanner traded stories.

Shekel already knew many of Crawfoot’s Chronicles, but Tanner knew them all. And even those that Shekel had heard before Tanner knew variations of, and he narrated them all well. In turn Shekel told him about the officers and passengers. He was full of scorn for Gimgewry, whose frantic masturbation he had heard through the privy door. He found the vacantly avuncular Tearfly enormously dull, and he was nervous of Captain Myzovic, but blustered and told lies about him wandering the decks drunk.

He lusted after Miss Cardomium. He liked Bellis Coldwine—’Cold ain’t the fucking word, though,” he said, “for Miss Black-and-blue.”

Tanner listened to the descriptions and insinuations, laughing and tutting where appropriate. Shekel told him the rumors and fables that the sailors told each other—about the piasa and the she-corsairs, Marichonians and the scab pirates, the things that lived below the water.

Behind Tanner stretched the long darkness of the hold.

There was a constant scavenging fight for food and fuel. It wasn’t just leftover meat and bread: many prisoners were Remade with metal parts and steam engines. If their boilers went out, they were immobilized, so anything that might burn was hoarded. In the far corner of the chamber stood an old man, the pewter tripod on which he walked locked solid for days. His furnace was dead cold. He ate only when someone bothered to feed him, and no one expected him to live.

Shekel was fascinated by the brutality of that little realm. He watched the old man with avid eyes. He saw the prisoners’ bruises. He glimpsed peculiar double silhouettes of men coupling in consent or rape.

He had run a gang in Raven’s Gate, back in the city, and he was worried about what would happen to them now, without him. His first-ever theft, aged six, had netted him a shekel piece, and the nickname had stuck. He claimed that he could not remember any other name. He had taken this job on the ship when his gang’s activities, which included the occasional burglary, had attracted too much attention from the militia.

“Another month and I’d have been in there with you, Tanner,” he said. “Ain’t a lot in it.”

Tended by the ship’s thaumaturges and wyrdshipmen, the meteoromancing engine by
Terpsichoria
’s bowsprit displaced air in front of the ship. The ship’s sails bowed out to fill the vacuum; pressure billowed in from behind. They made good speed.

The machine reminded Bellis of New Crobuzon’s cloudtowers. She thought of the huge engines jutting over the Tar Wedge roofscape, arcane and broken. She felt a hard longing for the streets and canals, for the
size
of the city.

And for engines. Machines. In New Crobuzon they had surrounded her. Now there was only the little meteoromancer and the mess-hall construct. The steam engine below made the whole of
Terpsichoria
a mechanism, but it was invisible. Bellis wandered the ship like a rogue cog. She missed the utilitarian chaos she had been forced to leave.

They were sailing a busy part of the sea. They passed other ships: in the two days after they left Qé Banssa, Bellis saw three. The first two were little elongated shapes at the horizon; the third was a squat caravel that came much closer. It was from Odraline, as the kites it flew from its sails announced. It pitched wildly in the choppy sea.

Bellis could see the sailors aboard it. She watched them swing in the complex rigging and scramble the triangular sails.

The
Terpsichoria
passed barren-looking islands: Cadann, Rin Lor, Eidolon Island. There were folktales concerning every one, and Johannes knew them all.

Bellis spent hours watching the sea. The water so far east was much clearer than that near Iron Bay: she could see the smudges that were huge schools of fish. The off-duty sailors sat with their legs over the side, angling with crude rods, scrimshawing bones and narwhal tusks with knives and lampblack.

Occasionally the curves of great predators like orca would breach in the distance. Once, as the sun went down, the
Terpsichoria
passed close to a little wooded knoll, a mile or two of forest that budded from the ocean. There was a clutch of smooth rocks off the shore, and Bellis’ heart skidded as one of the boulders reared and a massive swan’s neck uncoiled from the water. A blunt head twisted, and she watched the plesiauri paddle lazily out of the shallows and disappear.

She became briefly fascinated with submarine carnivores. Johannes took her to his cabin and rummaged among his books. She saw several titles with his name on the spine:
Sardula Anatomy
;
Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools
;
Theories of Megafauna
. When he found the monograph he was looking for, he showed her sensational depictions of ancient, blunt-headed fish thirty feet long; of goblin sharks with ragged teeth and jutting foreheads; and others.

On the evening of the second day out of Qé Banssa,
Terpsichoria
sighted the land that rimmed Salkrikaltor: a jagged grey coastline. It was past nine in the evening, but the sky, for once, was absolutely clear, and the moon and her daughters shone very bright.

Despite herself, Bellis was awed by this mountainous landscape, all channeled through by wind. Deep inland, at the limits of her vision, she could see the darkness of forest clinging to the sides of gulleys. On the coast the trees were dead, salt-blasted husks.

Johannes swore with excitement. “That’s Bartoll!” he said. “A hundred miles north there’s Cyrhussine Bridge, twenty-five damned miles long. I hoped we might see that, but I suppose it would have been asking for trouble.”

The ship was bearing away from the island. It was cold, and Bellis flapped her thin coat impatiently.

“I’m going inside,” she said, but Johannes ignored her.

He was staring back the way they had come, at Bartoll’s disappearing shore.

“What’s going on?” he murmured. Bellis turned back sharply. The frown was audible in his voice. “Where are we going?” Johannes gesticulated. “Look . . . we’re bearing away from Bartoll.” The island was now little more than an unclear fringe at the edge of the sea. “Salkrikaltor’s
that
way—east. We could be sailing over the cray within a couple of hours, but we’re heading south . . . We’re heading
away
from the commonwealth . . .”

“Maybe they don’t like ships passing overhead,” Bellis said, but Johannes shook his head.

“That’s the standard route,” he said. “East from Bartoll gets you to Salkrikaltor City. That’s how you get there. We’re heading somewhere else.” He drew a map in the air. “This is Bartoll and this is Gnomon Tor, and between them, in the sea . . . Salkrikaltor. Down here, where we’re heading now . . . there’s nothing. A line of spiky little islands. We’re taking a very long way around to Salkrikaltor City. I wonder why.”

By the next morning, several other passengers had noticed the unusual route. Within hours, word spread among the cloistered little corridors. Captain Myzovic addressed them in the mess. There were almost forty passengers, and all were present. Even pale, pathetic Sister Meriope and others similarly afflicted.

“There is nothing to be concerned about,” the captain assured them. He was clearly angry at being summoned. Bellis looked away from him, out of the windows.
Why am I here?
she thought.
I don’t care. I don’t care where we’re going or how we damn well get there.
But she did not convince herself, and she stayed where she was.