China Mieville - The Scar

mast upon mast and sail and tower and

on and more

We are here

beside this forest

Godspit Jabber and fuck

a trick a trick of perspective

a city that moves and ripples and slops endlessly side to side

– Miss Coldwine someone says coldly but I cannot, not now I am looking , and I have put down my chest and I am looking

and someone is shaking Johannes’ hand and he stares at them bemused as they speak to him.-Dr. Tearfly, you are most welcome this is indeed an honor, but I am not listening because we are here we have arrived and look at it all look at it

Oh I’ll I’ll I could laugh or spew as my stomach yaws look we are here we are here

We are here.

There were lamps under the water. Green, grey, cold white, and amber globes of cray design, tracing the undersides of the city.

Light prickled on suspended particles. It came not only from the thousand knots of illumination but from corridors of early sunlight that angled down, picking out passages from the waves to the deep water. Fish and kree circled them and passed through them dumbly.

From below, the city was an archipelago of shadows.

It was irregular and sprawling and hugely complex. It displaced currents. Jags of keel contradicted each other in all directions. Anchor chains trailed like hair, snapped and forgotten. From its orifices billowed refuse; fecal matter and particulate, and oil eddying uneasily and rising in small slicks. A constant drool of trash fouled the water and was swallowed by it.

Below the city there were a few hundred yards of rapidly thinning light, then miles of dark water.

The underside of Armada was crisscrossed with life.

Fish eddied through its architecture. Fleeting newtlike figures moved with intellect and purpose between boltholes. There were wire mesh cages tucked into hollows and dangling from chains, crowded with fat cod and tunny. Cray dwellings like coral tumors.

Beyond the edges of the city, and below it at the far reaches of light, huge half-tame seawyrms corkscrewed and fed. Submersibles droned-rigid shadows. A dolphin made constant vigilant rounds. A moving ecology and politics were tethered to the city’s calcified base.

The sea around it resonated with noise made physical: staccato clicks and the vibrations of pounding metal, the swallowed sound of watery friction as currents rubbed against each other. Barks that dissipated when they reached the air.

Among those that gripped and dangled underneath the city were scores of men and women. They fumbled in dragged-out time, clumsy beside the elegant fronds and sponges.

The water was cold, and the topsiders wore rubberized leather suits and massive helmets of copper and tempered glass, tethered to the surface by tubes of air. They hung on ladders and guy ropes, poised precariously over an unthinkable space.

Stuck tight inside their helmets, they were cut off from sound, and each of them moved ponderously alongside their fellows, quite alone. They clambered like lice across a pipe that poked into the dim sea like an inverted chimney. It was a thriving patchwork of algae and shells in extraordinary shades. Weeds and stinging filigree smothered it like ivy and dangled out and down, fingering the plankton.

There was a diver whose chest was bare, from which two long tentacles extruded, waving in the current, but also according to their own faint inclinations.

It was Tanner Sack.

Pumping its tail, the dolphin plunged up past the edges of the city, out and up toward the light. He burst through decreasing water pressure and out into the air, jackknifing, suspended in spray, fixing the city with a cunning eye.

Below again, he curled back through striae of water. Huge shapes were dimly visible some way off, unclear through water and a shimmering of thaumaturgy. Patrolled by tethered sharks, they were not to be investigated. The eye could not focus on them.

There were no divers upon them.

Bellis came out of sleep to the sound of voices.

It was weeks since she had arrived in Armada.

Every morning was the same. Waking and sitting up, waiting, looking around her little room with an incredulity, a shuddering disbelief that would not stop. It welled up even stronger than the longing with which she missed New Crobuzon.

How did I get here? The question was constant in her.

She opened her curtains, gripped her windowsill, and stood staring out over the city.

When they had arrived, on the first day, they had stood huddled with their belongings on the Terpsichoria ’s deck, surrounded by guards, and by women and men with checklists and paperwork. The faces of the pirates were hard, made cruel by weather. Through her fear, Bellis watched carefully, and could make no sense of them. They were disparate, a mixture of ethnicities and cultures. Their skins were all different colors. Some were scarified in abstract designs; some wore batik robes. They looked as if they shared nothing except their grim demeanor.

When they stiffened suddenly into a kind of attention, Bellis knew their superiors had arrived. Two men and a woman were standing by the ship’s rail. The murderer-the grey-armored leader of the raiding party-stepped up to join them. His clothes and sword were now quite clean.

The younger man and the woman stepped forward to the swordsman. When Bellis saw them she could only stare.

The man wore a dark grey suit; the woman a simple blue dress. They were tall and held themselves with immense authority. The man had a trim mustache and an easy arrogance. The woman’s features were heavy and irregular, but the flesh of her mouth was sensual, the cruel cast of her eyes compelling.

What had made Bellis stare at them both with fascination and distaste, what commanded her attention, were the scars.

Curling down the outside of the woman’s face, from the corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. Fine and uninterrupted. Another, thicker and shorter and more jagged, swept from the right side of her nose across her cheek and curled up as if to cup her eye. And others, contoured to her face. They disfigured her ocher skin with esthetic precision.

Flickering her eyes from the woman to the man, Bellis had felt something curdle inside her. What fucking unhealthiness is this? she had thought uneasily.

He was adorned with identical, but mirrored marks. A long curved cicatrix down the right side of his face, a shorter flourishing cut below his left eye. As if he were the woman’s distorted reflection.

As Bellis watched the wounded pair, aghast, the woman spoke.

“You will have realized by now,” she said in good Ragamoll, projecting her soft voice so that everyone could hear, “that Armada is not like other cities.”

Is that a welcome? Bellis had thought. Was that all that the traumatized and bewildered survivors of the Terpsichoria were to be offered?

The woman had continued.

She told them about the city.

Sometimes she was silent, and without a pause the man would speak. They were almost like twins, finishing each other’s sentences.

It had been hard to listen to what they were telling her. Bellis was agog at the feelings she saw pass between the scarred man and woman every time they glanced at each other. Above all a hunger. Bellis had felt unstuck in time: as if she were dreaming this arrival.

Later, she would realize that she had absorbed much of what had been said, that it had passed into her and been processed at some level below consciousness. It came out as she began to live in Armada, against her will.