China Mieville - The Scar

That shook me; I admit it. That he knew this much about me, that he understood my reasons for that harmless little piece of obfuscation.

“On the boss’s island, the men go to sea and leave their wives and lovers on the land, and no amount of custom or tradition can chain legs closed. A man who loves a woman with a fierce enough passion-or says he does, or thinks he does-aches when he leaves her. He knows intimately how strong, how powerful her charms are. He himself succumbed to them, after all. So he must lessen them.

“On the boss’s island, a man who loves strongly enough will cut his woman’s face …” We watched each other, unmoving. “He’ll mark her, to make her his, inscribe his property, notch it like wood. Spoil her just enough that no other will want her.

“Those scars are freggios.

“Love, or lust, or something, some combination, overtook the boss. He courted the newcomer and quickly claimed her, with the masculine assertiveness he had been trained into. And by all accounts she welcomed his attentions and returned them, and she was his concubine. Until the day he decided she was his entirely, and with a kind of clumsy bravado, he drew his knife after coitus and cut her face.” Doul paused, then smiled with sudden and sincere pleasure.

“She was still; she let him do it… And then she took the knife and cut him back.”

“It was the making of them both,” he said softly.

“You can see the disingenuity. He was a remarkable boy to have risen so high so fast, but he was still a peasant playing peasant games. I don’t doubt he believed it when he told her that it was for love that he cut her, that he did not trust other men to resist her, but whether he did or not, it was a lie. He was marking territory, like a pissing dog. Telling others where his holdings began. And yet she cut him back.”

Doul was smiling at me again. “That was not expected. Property does not mark its owner. She did not fight him; while he marked her, she took him at his word. The blood, the split skin, the tissue and pain, the clot and the scar were for love , so they were hers to give as well as receive.

“Pretending that freggios were what he claimed they were, she changed them, and made them much more. Changing them, she changed him, too. Scarred his culture as well as his face. They found solace and strength in each other, then. They found an intensity and a connection in those wounds, wounds made suddenly pure.

“I do not know how he reacted, that first time. But that night she stopped being his courtesan and became his equal. They lost their names that night and became the Lovers. And we had two rulers on Garwater-two who ruled with more single-minded purpose than one ever had. And everything is open to them. She taught him that night how to remake rules, how always to go further. She made him like her. She was hungry for transformations.

“She remains so. I know that better than many: the eagerness with which she greeted me and my work, when I first came.” He spoke very softly, thoughtfully. “She takes the scraps of knowledge newcomers bring and makes them… remakes them with a drive and zeal that’s impossible to resist. However much you may want to.

“They reaffirm their purpose every day, those two. There are new freggios all the time. Their bodies and faces have become maps of their love. It’s a geography that changes, that becomes more manifest, as the years move. One for one, every time: marks of respect and equality.”

I said nothing-I had said nothing for many minutes-but Doul’s monologue had come to an end, and he waited for me to respond.

“Were you not there, then?” I asked finally.

“I came later,” he said.

“Press-ganged?” I said, astonished, but he shook his head again.

“I came of my own will,” he said. “I sought Armada out, a little more than ten years ago.”

“Why,” I said slowly, “are you telling me this?”

He shrugged a very little. “It’s important,” he said. “It’s important you understand. I saw you-you’re afraid of the scars. You should know what it is that you see. Who rules us, their motivation and passion. Drive. Intensity. It is the scars,” he said, “that give Garwater its strength.”

He nodded and left me then, abruptly. I waited for several minutes, but he did not reappear.

I am deeply perturbed. I do not understand what happened, why he spoke to me. Was he sent by the Lover? Did she instruct him to tell me her history, or was he operating on his own agenda?

Does he believe everything he told me?

The scars give Garwater its strength, he tells me, and I am left wondering if he is blind to another possibility. Has he not noticed, I wonder? Is it coincidence that the three most powerful people in Garwater, hence in Armada and hence on the seas, are outlanders? That they were not born within Armada’s confines? That they grew to cognition and agency unconstrained by the limits of what is, what remains, and cannot but be a mess of old boats, a little town-even if the most extraordinary one in the history of Bas-Lag-and that they can therefore see a world beyond its petty robberies and claustrophobic pride?

They are not beholden to Armada’s dynamics. What are their priorities?

I want to know the Lovers’ names.

Except when he fights (I remember that, and it terrifies me), Uther Doul’s face is almost motionless. It is compelling and a little tragic, and it is nigh impossible to tell what he thinks or believes. Whatever he says to me, I have seen the Lover’s scars, and they are ugly and unpleasant. And the fact that they bespeak some sordid ritual, some game for the emotionally arrested to play, does not change that.

They are ugly and unpleasant.

Thirty-six hours after the aerostat had risen over Armada and headed away to the southwest, land began to appear beneath them.

Bellis had slept little. She was not tired, however, and rose before five on the second morning to watch the dawn from the stateroom.

When she entered, there were others already awake and watching: several of the crewmen, Tintinnabulum and his companions, and Uther Doul. Her heart sank a little at the sight of him. She found his manner-even more reserved and measured than her own-troubling, and she did not understand his interest in her.

He noticed her and wordlessly indicated the windows.

In the sunless predawn light, rocks were breaking the water below. It was hard to judge the size or distance of the land formations. A scatter-pattern of stones like whales’ backs, none more than a mile across, few larger than Armada itself. Bellis could see no birds or animals-nothing but bleak brown rock and the green of scrubland.

“We’ll reach the island within the hour,” someone said.

The airship hummed with vague industry, with preparations that Bellis did not care to understand. She returned to her berth and packed quickly, then sat in the stateroom in her black clothes, her thick carpetbag at her feet. Deep within it, nestled in the folds of her spare skirts, was the little leather pouch and its contents that Silas Fennec had given her, along with the letter she was writing.

The crew were walking quickly back and forth, barking incomprehensible orders to each other. Those of them who were not working congregated by the windows.

The airship had descended considerably. They were only a thousand feet or so above the water, and the face of the sea had grown more intricate. Its wrinkles had resolved themselves into wave shapes and foam and currents, and the darknesses and colors of reefs and weed forests-and was that a wreck?-below.

The island was ahead of them. Bellis shivered to see it, laid out so stark in the hot sea. It stretched perhaps thirty miles long and twenty across. It was jagged with dust-colored peaks and little mountains.