China Mieville - The Scar

Somewhere pipes are banging like great hammers.

Outside of Iron Bay, the sea was hard. Bellis woke to its slapping assault. She quit the cabin, picking her way past Sister Meriope, who was vomiting with what Bellis did not believe was just seasickness.

Bellis emerged into wind, and a great cracking as sails tugged like animals at their tethers. The enormous smokestack vented a little soot, and the ship hummed with the power of the steam engine deep below.

Bellis sat on a container. So we’re off, then, she thought nervously. We’re heading out. We’re away.

The Terpsichoria had seemed busy while they were moored: someone was always scrubbing something, or raising a piece of machinery, or running from one end of the ship to the other. But now that sense of activity was increased by a huge factor.

Bellis squinted out across the maindeck, not yet ready to look at the sea.

The rigging teemed. Most of the sailors were human, but here and there a spined hotchi raced along rope crawlways and onto crow’s nests. On the decks men lugged containers and wound huge winches, shouting instructions in incomprehensible shorthand, threading chains onto fat flywheels. There were towering cactacae, too heavy and ungainly to climb rope but making up for that with their efforts below, with their strength, fibrous vegetable biceps bunching massively as they tugged and tied.

Officers in blue uniforms strode among them.

The wind blew across the ship, and the deck’s periscopic cowls crooned like dolorous flutes.

Bellis finished her cigarillo. She stood slowly and walked to the side, her eyes lowered, till she reached the rail and she looked up and out to sea.

There was no land at all.

Oh gods, look at it all, she thought in shock.

For the first time in her life, Bellis looked out across nothing but water.

Alone beneath a colossal rearing sky, anxiety welled up in her like bile. She wanted very much to be back in the alleys of her city.

Slicks of spume spread fast around the ship, disappearing and reappearing incessantly. The water moiled in intricate marbled surges. It shifted for the ship, as it would for a whale or a canoe or a fallen leaf, a dumb accommodation that it might overturn with any sudden swell.

It was a massive moronic child. Powerful and stupid and capricious.

Bellis cast her gaze about nervously, looking for any island, any jag of coastline. At that moment, there was none.

A cloud of seabirds trailed them, plunging for carrion in the vessel’s wake, spattering the deck and the foam with guano.

They sailed without stopping for two days.

Bellis felt almost stupefied with resentment that her journey was under way. She paced the corridors and decks, shut herself in her cabin. She watched blankly as the Terpsichoria passed rocks and tiny islands in the distance, illuminated by grey daylight or the moon.

Sailors scanned the horizon, oiling the large-bore guns. With hundreds of ill-charted islets and trading towns, with an unending number of ships supplying the insatiable commercial hole of New Crobuzon at one end, Basilisk Channel was plied by pirates.

Bellis knew that a ship this size with an ironclad hull and New Crobuzon’s colors flying would almost certainly not be preyed upon. The crew’s vigilance was only slightly unnerving.

The Terpsichoria was a merchant vessel. It was not built for passengers. There was no library, no drawing room, no games room. The passengers’ mess was a halfhearted effort, its walls bare but for a few cheap lithographs.

Bellis took her meals there sitting alone, monosyllabic to any pleasantries, while the other passengers sat below the dirty windows and played cards. Bellis watched them surreptitiously and intensely.

Back in her cabin, Bellis took endless stock of what she possessed.

She had left the city in a sudden hurry. She had very few clothes, in the austere style she favored: severe and black and charcoal. She had seven books: two volumes of linguistic theory; a primer in Salkrikaltor Cray; an anthology of short fiction in various languages; a thick, empty notebook; and copies of her own two monographs, High Kettai Grammatology and Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub . She had a few pieces of jewelry in jet and garnet and platinum; a small bag of cosmetics; ink and pens.

She spent hours adding details to her letter. She described the ugliness of the open seas, the harsh rocks that poked up like traps. She wrote long, parodic descriptions of the officers and passengers, reveling in caricature. Sister Meriope; Bartol Gimgewry the merchant; the cadaverous surgeon Dr. Mollificatt; Widow and Miss Cardomium, a quiet mother and daughter transformed by Bellis’ pen into a scheming pair of husband hunters. Johannes Tearfly became the professorial buffoon pilloried in music halls. She invented motivations for them all, speculating on what might send them halfway across the world.

Standing at the back of the ship on the second day, by the morass of gulls and ospreys still bickering over the ship’s effluent, Bellis looked for islets but saw only waves.

She felt jilted. Then, as she searched the horizon, she heard a noise.

A little way from her the naturalist, Dr. Tearfly, stood watching the birds. Bellis’ face set hard. She prepared to leave as soon as he spoke to her.

When he looked down and saw her watching him coldly, he gave her an absent smile and pulled out a notebook. His attention was off her immediately. She watched as he began to sketch the gulls, paying her no mind at all.

He was in his late fifties, she guessed. His thinning hair was combed tightly back, and he wore little rectangular spectacles and a tweed waistcoat. But despite the academic uniform he did not look weak or absurdly bookish. He was tall, and he held himself well.

With quick, precise strokes, he marked out folded avian claws and the brute pugnacity of the seagulls’ eyes. Bellis warmed to him very slightly.

After a while she spoke.

It made journeying easier; she admitted that to herself. Johannes Tearfly was charming. Bellis suspected he would be equally friendly to everyone on board.

They took lunch together, and she found it easy to steer him away from the other passengers, who watched them intently. Tearfly was endearingly free of intrigue. If it occurred to him that keeping the company of the rude and distant Bellis Coldwine might lead to rumors, he did not care.

Tearfly was happy to discuss his work. He enthused about the unstudied fauna of Nova Esperium. He told Bellis about his plans for publishing a monograph, on his eventual return to New Crobuzon. He was collating drawings, he told her, and heliotypes and observations.

Bellis described to him a dark, mountainous island she had seen in the north, in the small hours of the previous night.

“That was North Morin,” he said. “Cancir’s probably off to the northwest right now. We’ll be docking at Dancing Bird Island after dark.”

The ship’s position and progress were matters of constant conversation among the other passengers, and Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.

Dancing Bird Island appeared just as the sun went down. Its volcanic rock was brick-red, and hunched into little peaks like shoulder bones. Qe Banssa clambered up the slopes of the bay. It was poor, an ugly little fishing port. The thought of setting foot in another resentful town imprisoned by maritime economics depressed Bellis.

The sailors without shore leave were sullen as their comrades and passengers disappeared down the gangplank. There were no other New Crobuzon ships at dock: nowhere for Bellis to deliver her letter. She wondered why they were stopping at this negligible port.