China Mieville - The Scar

Just as he had in the waking day, the chirurgeon showed him charts of his body, with red markings where work would be done, emendations marked out like corrections on a schoolchild’s copybook.

“Will it hurt me?” Tanner asked, and the punishment factory faded and sleep faded, but the question remained. Will it hurt? he thought as he lay in his newly lonely room.

But when he had gone once more below the water, his longing overcame him again, and he realized that he was less afraid of the pain than of hankering like this forever.

Angevine told Shekel-sternly-how to treat her when she was working.

“Can’t try and talk to me like that, boy,” she told him. “I been working with Tintinnabulum for years. Garwater pays me to look after him, ever since they brought him in. He’s trained me well, and I owe him loyalty. You don’t mess with me when I’m working. D’you understand?”

She spoke to him in Salt now, most of the time, forcing him to learn (she was hard on him, she wanted to bring him into her city without delay). As she turned to go, Shekel stopped her and told her, haltingly, that he did not think he could come to her cabin that night, that he felt he should spend a night with Tanner, who must be feeling a bit low, he said.

“Good of you to think of him,” she said. So many ways he was growing, so fast. Loyalty and lust and love weren’t enough for her. It was these frequent glimmerings of the man underneath the childhood he was shucking that swept Angevine with true passion for him, that stained her vague parental warmth with something more hard and base and breathless.

“Give him an evening,” she said. “Come by mine tomorrow, lover.”

She gave him that last word carefully. He was learning to take such presents with grace.

Shekel spent hours alone in the library, in the shelfscape of wood and vellum, gently rotting leather and paperdust. He kept to the Ragamoll section, surrounded by books that he pulled carefully down and opened around him, text and pictures like flowers on the floor. He slowly took in stories about ducks and poor boys who became kings, and battles against the trow, and the history of New Crobuzon.

He kept notes of every troublesome word whose sounds tried to evade him: Curious, saber, tough, Jhesshul, Kruach. He practiced them constantly.

As he wandered the shelves he kept his books with him, reshelving them at the end of the day not by the classmarks he did not understand, but by invented mnemonics that told him this one belonged between the big red and the small blue spines, and this one at the end, beside the volume with the picture of an airship.

There was one terrible panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.

But then he realized that he had taken a book from a shelf just to one side of the Ragamoll section; that it shared the alphabet that was now his, but pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share.

He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again. Tentatively he concluded that in this language, this particular clutch of letters meant boat , and this other set moon .

Shekel moved off slowly, making his way further from the Ragamoll section, picking up random works and gaping at their impenetrable stories, moving down the long corridors of children’s books until he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves.

He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another.

For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as these did now, only as mute objects with mass and dimension and color, but without content.

Though it was not quite the same. It was not the same to see these alien pages and know that they would have meaning to some foreign child, as The Courageous Egg and The History of New Crobuzon and The Wasp in a Wig now surrendered meaning to him.

He gazed at the books in Base and High Kettai and Sunglari and Lubbock and Khadohi with a kind of fascinated nostalgia for his own illiteracy, without for a fraction of a moment missing it.

Silas was waiting for Bellis as she emerged from the Pinchermarn , the sun low over the sea. She saw him leaning back against a railing and watching for her.

He smiled when he saw her.

They ate together, and talked, gently fencing around one another. Bellis could not tell if it was him she was glad to see, or whether she had simply had enough of loneliness, but either way she welcomed his company.

He had a suggestion. It was the fourth Bookdi of Hawkbill. That was a scabmettler blood-day, and in Thee-And-Thine riding there was a major fight festival. Several of the best fighters from Shaddler riding were coming, to show their skills. Had she ever seen mortu crutt , or stampfighting?

Bellis took convincing. In New Crobuzon she had never visited Cadnebar’s glad circus, or any of its lesser imitators. The idea of watching such combat repelled her somewhat, and bored her more. Silas was insistent. Studying him, she realized that his desire to see these fights was not motivated by sadism or voyeurism: she did not know what did drive it, but it was less base than that. Or differently base, perhaps.

She also knew that he was eager for her to come with him.

To get to Thee-And-Thine, they passed over Shaddler riding, the scabmettler home. Their aircab moved sedately past a spindly tower of girders at the rear of the great iron Therianthropus , and on, star’d.

This was to be Bellis’ first time in Thee-And-Thine. It’s about time, she told herself with shame. She was committed to understanding the city, but her resolution risked waning and becoming a nebulous depression again.

The fighting ground was a little way fore of Thee-And-Thine’s flagship, a big clipper with sails sliced into decorative patterns, in the thick of the merchant riding’s backstreets. The arena was a ring of small vessels with benches laid in gradients on their decks, facing into the circle of sea. Opulent gondolas hung from dirigibles around the edges of the arena. These were the private boxes of the rich.

Tethered in the middle was the stage itself; it was a wooden platform, its edges studded with brass gas lamps to light it and barrels to keep it afloat. That was the fighting ground: a circle of refitted ships and balloons around a piece of driftwood.

With a flourish of money and a brief word, Silas freed up two seats in the front row. He talked continuously in a low voice that outlined the politics and personalities around them.

“That’s the vizier of Thee-And-Thine,” he would explain, “come to make up the money he lost at the start of the quarto.” “The woman over there with the veil never shows her face. She’s said to be on the Curhouse council.” His eyes moved constantly over the crowd.