China Mieville - The Scar

Little waves lapped over the edges of the stage, and she wondered when this display would end.

Bellis heard a rhythmic, pounding sound in the crowd.

At first it was a murmur, a repeated murmur that beat below the susurrus of the spectators like a heartbeat. But it gathered strength, and became louder and more insistent, and people began to look around and to smile, and to join their voices to it with increasing excitement.

“Yes…” said Silas, stretching out the word with a hard delight. “Finally. This is what I wanted to see.”

At first Bellis heard the sound like it was drums, spoken drums. Then suddenly as an exclamation- Oh , Oh , Oh -repeated in perfect time, accompanied by banging arms and kicking feet.

It was only when the frenzy spread to her own boat that she realized it was a word.

“ Doul .” It came from all around her. “ Doul, Doul, Doul .”

A name.

“What are they saying?” she hissed to Silas.

“They’re calling for someone,” he said, his eyes scanning the surrounds. “They want a display. They’re demanding a fight from Uther Doul.”

He gave her a quick, cold smile.

“You’ll recognize him,” he said. “You’ll know him when you see him.”

And then the percussion of the name broke down into cheers and applause, an ecstatic wave of it that grew and grew as one of the little dirigibles tethered to the rigging cast off and drew slowly closer to the stage. Its crest was a steamer against a red moon, the sigil of Garwater. The gondola below it was polished wood.

“It’s the Lovers’ carriage,” Silas said. “They’re giving up their lieutenant for a moment, another ‘spontaneous’ display. I knew he couldn’t resist.”

Sixty feet above the arena, a rope spilled down from the airborne craft. The shrieks from the spectators were extraordinary. With great speed and skill, a man leaped from the vessel and slipped, hand over hand, to the blood-spattered fighting ground.

He stood, shoeless and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of leather britches. With his arms relaxed by his sides he rotated slowly to take in the crowd (frenzied now that he had touched down to fight). And as he turned his face swept slowly over Bellis’, and she gripped the rail in front of her, her breath catching momentarily, recognizing the crop-haired man, the man in grey, the murderer who had taken Terpsichoria .

By some goading, a clutch of men were blandished into fighting him.

Doul-the sad-faced butcher of Captain Myzovic-did not move, did not stretch or bounce or pull his muscles this way or that. He merely stood waiting.

Four opponents stood ill at ease on the edge of the arena. They were buoyed on the audience’s enthusiasm, shouts and raging washing over them as they shifted and murmured tactics to each other.

Doul’s face was set absolutely blank. When his rivals fanned out opposite him, he dropped slowly into stampfighting stance, his arms slightly raised, his knees bent, looking quite relaxed.

In the first brutal, astonishing seconds, Bellis did not even breathe. One hand to her mouth, her lips pursed shut. Then she emitted little gasps of astonishment with the rest of the crowd.

Uther Doul did not seem to live in the same time as anyone else. He seemed like some visitor to a world much more gross and sluggish than his own. Despite the bulk of his body, he moved with such speed that even gravity seemed to operate more quickly for him.

There was nothing spare to his movements. As he shifted from stamp to hammerpunch to block, his limbs slipped from one poise, one state, to the next by the most utterly seamless and pared-down routes, like machines.

Doul slapped open-handed, and one man went down; he stepped sideways and, poised on one leg, kicked twice to another’s solar plexus, then used the raised leg to block the attack of the third. He spun and shoved without flourish, with brutal precision, dispatching his rivals at his ease.

He took the last one with a throw, scooping his arm from the air and hugging it tight to him, pulling the man after his trapped limb. Doul seemed to roll through the air, preparing his body as he fell, landing astride the other’s back, pinioning his arm and immobilizing him.

There was a long silence, and then a rapture burst from the crowd like blood from a scabmettler, a tide of applause and cheers.

Bellis watched, and went cold, and held her breath again.

The fallen men raised themselves, or were dragged off, and Uther Doul stood, breathing heavily but rhythmically, his arms held very slightly out, the ridges of his muscles running with sweat and other men’s blood.

“The Lovers’ guard,” said Silas amid the audience’s frenzy. “Uther Doul. Scholar, refugee, soldier. Expert in probability theory, in Ghosthead history, and in fighting. The Lovers’ guard, their second, their assassin and strong-arm and champion. That’s what you had to see, Bellis. That is what’s trying to stop us leaving.”

They left and walked the winding nightlit pathways of Thee-And-Thine toward Shaddler, and Garwater and the Chromolith .

Neither spoke.

At the end of Doul’s fight, Bellis had seen something that had brought her up short and made her afraid. As he had turned, his hands clawed, his chest taut and heaving, she had seen his face.

It was stretched tight, every muscle straining, into a glare of feral savagery unlike anything she had ever seen on a human being.

Then a second later, with his bout won, he had turned to acknowledge the crowd and had looked once more like a contemplative priest.

Bellis could imagine some fatuous warrior code, some mysticism that abstracted the violence of combat and allowed one to fight like a holy man. And equally she could imagine tapping into savagery, letting atavistic viciousness take over in a berserker fugue. But Doul’s combination stunned her.

She thought of it later, as she lay in her bed, listening to light rain. He had readied and recovered himself like a monk, fought like a machine, and seemed to feel it like a predatory beast. That tension frightened her, much more than the combat skills he had shown. Those could be learned.

Bellis helped Shekel through books that grew more complex by the hour. When they separated she left him exploring the children’s section again, and went back to the rooms where Silas waited for her.

They drank tea and talked about New Crobuzon. He seemed sadder, quieter than usual. She asked him why, and he would only shake his head. There was something tentative about him. For the first time since meeting him, Bellis felt something like pity or concern for him. He wanted to tell or ask her something, and she waited.

She told him what Johannes had said to her. She showed him the naturalist’s books and explained how she was trying to piece together Armada’s secret from those volumes, without ever knowing which were important, or what within them might be clues.

At half-past eleven, after an extended silence, Silas turned to her. “Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, and all her usual evasions came to her throat, but she remained silent.

“You love New Crobuzon,” he continued. “Or… is that the best way to put it? You need New Crobuzon. You can’t let it go, so it doesn’t make sense. Why would you leave?”

Bellis sighed, but the question did not go away.

“When were you last in New Crobuzon?” she said.

“More than two years ago,” he calculated. “Why?”

“Did word reach you, when you were in The Gengris… Did you ever hear of the Midsummer Nightmare? The Dream Curse? Sleeping Sickness? Nocturne Syndrome?”

He was flicking his hand vaguely, trying to catch the memory. “I heard something from a merchant, a few months back…”