China Mieville - The Scar

“Sunshit, I didn’t think I’d have to see this place again!” said Hedrigall in Sunglari-accented Salt. He pointed at the island’s farthest shore. “There’s more than a hundred and fifty miles between it and Gnurr Kett,” he continued. “They’re not strong in the air, the anophelii. Couldn’t last more than sixty miles. That’s why the Kettai let them live, and trade with them through the likes of me and my old comrades, knowing they’ll never make the mainland. That-” He jerked a thick green thumb. “-is a ghetto .”

The dirigibles were slanting, skirting the coastline. Bellis watched the island intently. There was nothing to see, no life apart from plants. With a sudden chill, Bellis realized that the skies were empty. There were no birds. Every other island they had passed had been a mass of shifting feathered bodies, the rocks that edged it smeared with guano. The gulls had surrounded every landmass in a little gusting corona, swooping to take fish from the warm seas, squabbling on thermals.

The air above the anophelii island’s volcanic cliffs was as dead as bone.

The aerostat passed over silent ocher hills. The inlands were hidden by a ridge of rock, a spine that ran parallel to the coast. There was a long silence broken only by the engines and the wind, and when someone finally did speak-shouting “Look!”-the sound seemed intrusive and defensive.

It was Tanner Sack, pointing at a little crabgrass meadow nestling in rocks, sheltered from the waves. The green was broken by a little clutch of moving white specks.

“Sheep,” said Hedrigall after a moment. “We’re nearing the bay. There must have been a delivery recently. There’ll be a few herds of them left for a while longer.”

The shape and nature of the coastline was changing. The stone spines and jags were giving way to lower, less antagonistic geography. There were short beaches of black shale; slopes of hard earth and ferns; low, bleached trees. Once or twice, Bellis saw farmyard animals, wandering feral: pigs, sheep, goats, cattle. Just a very few of them, here and there.

Inland a mile or two, there were ribbons of grey water, sluggish rivers oozing from the hills, intersecting and crisscrossing the island. The waters slowed over plateaus of flat land and burst their banks, diffusing and becoming pools and swampland, feeding white mango trees, vines, greenery as thick and cloying as vomit. In the distance, on the other edge of the island, Bellis saw stark shapes that she thought were ruins.

Below her there was motion.

She tried to track whatever it was, but it was too fast, too erratic. She was left with nothing more than an impression fleeting across her eye. Something had skated through the air, emerging from some dark hole in the rocks and entering another.

“What do they trade?” said Tanner Sack, without looking away from the landscape. “The sheep and pigs and whatnot get left here: your lot bring them and other stuff in from Dreer Samher, for the Kettai. What’s in it for them? What do the anophelii trade?”

Hedrigall stood back from the window and gave a curt laugh. “Books and intelligence, Tanner, man,” he said. “And flotsam and jetsam, driftwood, bits and pieces they find on the beach.”

There was more motion in the air below the dirigible, but Bellis simply could not focus on whatever it was that moved. She bit her lip, frustrated and nervous. She knew she was not imagining things. There was really only one thing the shapes could be. She was perturbed that no one else had mentioned them. Don’t they see? she thought. Why does no one say anything? Why don’t I?

The dirigible slowed, moving against a faint wind.

Surmounting a ridge of rockland, it was buffeted. There was an explosion of breath and whispers, incredulous excitement. Below them, in the shadows of hills patched barren and lush in random patterns, was a rocky bay. Anchored in the bay were three ships.

“We’re here,” Hedrigall whispered. “Those are Dreer Samher vessels. That’s Machinery Beach.”

The ships were galleons, ornately picked out in gold, surrounded, enclosed by cosseting rocks that jutted into the sea and curled around the natural harbor. Bellis realized she was holding her breath.

The sand and shale of the inlet’s beach was a dark red, dirty like old blood. It was broken by weirdly shaped boulders the size of torsos and houses. Bellis’ eyes skittered over the dark surface, and she saw trails, pathways scored in the matter of the shoreline. Beyond the boundary of stringy boscage that edged the beach, the trails became more defined. They entered rocky elevations that rose slowly from the earth to overlook the sea. The air was broken by heat waves where the sun baked the stone, and trees like olives and dwarf jungle species specked the slopes.

Bellis followed the trails winding up the scorched hillsides until (her breath stopping again) her eyes came to rest on a scattering of light-bleached houses, dwellings that extruded from the rocks like organic growth-the anophelii township.

There was no wind in the bay. There was a tiny grouping of clouds like paint dots around the sun, but heat blasted through them and reverberated around the enclosed rock walls.

There were no sounds of life. The tedious repetition of the sea seemed to underline the silence rather than break it. The dirigible hung quietly, its engines powered down. The Samheri boats creaked and shifted nearby. They were empty. No one had come to greet the airship.

Scabmettler guards in their bloodclot armor kept watch with cactacae as the passengers descended. Bellis touched land, crouching beside the rope ladder, and ran her fingers through the sand. Her breathing was quick and very loud in her head.

At first she was conscious of nothing but the novelty of being on ground that did not sway. She remembered her land-legs delightedly, only realizing at that moment that she had forgotten them. Then she became aware of her surroundings again, and felt the beach beneath her closely, and for the first time registered its strangeness.

She remembered the naive woodcuts in Aum’s book. The stylized monochrome of the man in profile on the beach, broken mechanisms around him.

Machinery Beach, she thought, and looked out across the dirty-red sand and scree.

Some way off were the shapes she had taken to be boulders- huge things the size of rooms, breaking up the shoreline. They were engines. Squat and enormous and coated with rust and verdigris, long-forgotten appliances for unknown purposes, their pistons seized by age and salt.

There were smaller rocks, too, and Bellis saw that these were shards of the larger machines, bolts and pipework junctions; or finer, more intricate, and complete pieces; gauges and glasswork and compact steam-power engines. The pebbles were gears, cogs, flywheels, bolts, and screws.

Bellis looked down at her cupped hands. They were full of thousands of minuscule ratchets and gear wheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. Each particle of wreckage a grain like sand, hard and sun-warmed, smaller than a crumb. Bellis let them sift from her hands, and her fingers were stained the dark blood color of the shoreline-painted with rust.

The beach was an imitation, a found sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine.

When does this age from? How old is this? What happened here? thought Bellis. She was too numb to feel any but the most tired awe. What disaster, what violence? She imagined the seafloor around the bay-a reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore.