China Mieville - The Scar

That morning, she was not allowed onto the main deck.

“Sorry ma’am,” said a sailor. He was young, and desperately uncomfortable at blocking her way. “Captain’s orders: passengers not allowed onto main deck till ten.”

“Why?”

He shied as if she had hit him. “Prisoners,” he said, “taking a constitutional.” Bellis’ eyes widened fractionally. “Captain’s giving them a shot of air, and then we’ve to clean the deck-they’re awful dirty. Why’n’t you have some breakfast, ma’am? This’ll be done in a trice.”

Out of the young man’s sight she stopped and considered. She did not like the coincidence of this, so soon after her discussion with Johannes.

Bellis wanted to see the men and women they carried below. She could not tell if she was driven by prurience, or a more noble instinct.

Instead of heading abaft for the mess, she wound down side passages through dim space, past poky doors. Bass sounds traveled through the walls: human voices sounded like dogs barking. Where the corridor ended she opened the last door, onto a walk-in cupboard lined with shelves. Bellis looked behind her, but she was alone. She finished her cigarillo and entered.

Pushing aside dried-up, empty bottles, Bellis saw that an ancient window had been blocked by shelves. She cleared them of detritus and wiped ineffectually at the glass.

She started as somebody walked past the pane, outside, barely three feet away. Stooping, she squinted through the dirt, out over the ship. The enormous mizzenmast was before her, and faintly, she saw the main- and foremasts beyond it. Below her was the main deck.

The sailors were moving, climbing and cleaning and winding in their rituals.

There was a mass of others, huddled in groups, moving slowly if at all. Bellis’ mouth twisted. They were mostly human and mostly men, but they defied generalization. She saw a man with a sinuous three-foot neck, a woman with a skein of spasming arms, a figure whose lower quarters were caterpillar treads, and another with metal wires jutting from his bones. The only thing they had in common were their greying clothes.

Bellis had never seen so many Remade in one place before, so many who had been altered in the punishment factories. Some were shaped for industry, while others seemed formed for no purpose other than grotesquerie, with misshapen mouths and eyes and gods-knew what.

There were a few cactacae prisoners, and other races too: a hotchi with broken spines; a tiny clutch of khepri, their scarab headbodies twitching and glinting in the washed-out sun. There were no vodyanoi, of course. On a journey like this, fresh water was too valuable to use keeping them alive.

She heard gaolers’ shouts. Men and cactacae strutted among the Remade, wielding whips. In groups of two and three and ten the prisoners began to shuffle in random circles around the deck.

Some lay still, and were punished.

Bellis pulled her face away.

These were her unseen companions.

They had not seemed much invigorated by the fresh air, she reflected coldly. They had not seemed to enjoy their exercise.

Tanner Sack moved just enough to keep from being beaten. He moved his eyes in a rhythm. Down for three long steps, to keep attention from himself, then up for one, to see the sky and the water.

The ship was juddering faintly from the steam engine below, and the sails were extended. The cliffs of Dancing Bird Island moved past them fast. Tanner moved toward the port side, slowly.

He was surrounded by the men who shared his hold. The women prisoners stood in a smaller group, a little way off. They all wore the same dirty faces and cold stares as him. He did not approach them.

Tanner heard a sudden whistle, a sharp two-tone different from the scream of the gulls. He looked up, and perched on some bulky metal extrusion, scrubbing it clean, Shekel looked down at him. The boy caught his eye and gave Tanner a wink and a fast smile. Tanner smiled back, but Shekel had already looked away.

An officer and a sailor with distinctive epaulets conferred at the ship’s bow, huddled over a brass engine. As Tanner strained to see what they were doing, a stick slapped across his back, not hard but with the threat of much worse. A cactacae guard was bellowing at him to keep moving, so he picked up his feet again. The alien tissue grafted to Tanner’s chest twitched. The tentacles itched and shed skin like severe sunburn. He spat on them and rubbed the saliva in, as if it were unguent.

At ten o’clock precisely, Bellis swallowed her tea and went outside. The deck had been swept and scrubbed clean. There was no sign that the prisoners had ever stood upon it.

“It’s odd to think,” said Bellis a little later, as she and Johannes stood watching the water, “that in Nova Esperium we might be in charge of men and women who traveled with us on this very boat, and we’d never know.”

“That’ll never happen to you,” he said. “Since when does a linguist need indentured assistants?”

“Neither does a naturalist.”

“Not true at all,” he said mildly. “There are crates to be taken into the bush, there are traps to be set, there are drugged and dead carcasses to lug, dangerous animals to subdue… It’s not all watercoloring, you know. I’ll show you my scars some time.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” He was thoughtful. “I’ve a foot-long gash where a sardula got nasty… a bite from a newborn chalkydri…”

“A sardula? Really? Can I see?”

Johannes shook his head. “It got me… close to a delicate place,” he said.

He did not look at her, but he did not seem prudish.

Johannes shared his cabin with Gimgewry, the failed merchant, a man crippled with the understanding of his own inadequacy, who eyed Bellis with miserable lust. Johannes was never lascivious. He seemed to think always of other things before he had a chance to notice Bellis’ attractions.

It was not that she was seeking to be approached-she would spurn him quickly if he did court her. But she was used to men trying to flirt with her-usually only for a short time, until they realized that her cool demeanor was not an act they could persuade her to drop. Tearfly’s company was frank and unsexual, and she found it disconcerting. She wondered briefly if he might be what her father had called an invert, but she saw no more sign that he was attracted to any of the men on board than he was to her. And then she felt vain for wondering.

There was a glimmer of something like fear in him, she thought, when an insinuation hung between them. Perhaps, she thought, he’s no interest in such matters. Or perhaps he’s a coward .

Shekel and Tanner traded stories.

Shekel already knew many of Crawfoot’s Chronicles, but Tanner knew them all. And even those that Shekel had heard before Tanner knew variations of, and he narrated them all well. In turn Shekel told him about the officers and passengers. He was full of scorn for Gimgewry, whose frantic masturbation he had heard through the privy door. He found the vacantly avuncular Tearfly enormously dull, and he was nervous of Captain Myzovic, but blustered and told lies about him wandering the decks drunk.

He lusted after Miss Cardomium. He liked Bellis Coldwine-“Cold ain’t the fucking word, though,” he said, “for Miss Black-and-blue.”

Tanner listened to the descriptions and insinuations, laughing and tutting where appropriate. Shekel told him the rumors and fables that the sailors told each other-about the piasa and the she-corsairs, Marichonians and the scab pirates, the things that lived below the water.

Behind Tanner stretched the long darkness of the hold.

There was a constant scavenging fight for food and fuel. It wasn’t just leftover meat and bread: many prisoners were Remade with metal parts and steam engines. If their boilers went out, they were immobilized, so anything that might burn was hoarded. In the far corner of the chamber stood an old man, the pewter tripod on which he walked locked solid for days. His furnace was dead cold. He ate only when someone bothered to feed him, and no one expected him to live.