China Mieville - The Scar

But even suspicious as she was, the details she had been told were so ghastly and fascinating that she wanted to share them; she wanted to make someone else know them.

“They don’t know much history, the anophelii, but they know that the cactacae-the sapwalkers-aren’t the only people across the sea. They know about us, the bloodwalkers, and they know why usually none of us visit. They’ve forgotten the details of the Malarial Queendom, but they have a sense that their womenfolk… did wrong… centuries ago.” She paused to let that understatement sink in. “They treat them without… affection or distaste.”

It was a melancholy pragmatism. They bore their women no ill will. They coupled with them eagerly enough once in the year, but they ignored them where possible and killed them if necessary.

“She wasn’t trying to feed, you know,” Bellis went on. She kept her voice neutral. “She was full. They’re… they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding, screaming ravenous for all those weeks: it’s all they can think about. But when they’ve fed, when they’re full-really sated-there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates. And that’s the time they try to talk.

“He described them coming up from the swamplands, landing in the square and shrieking at the men, trying to make words. But they could never learn language, you see. They were always too hungry. They know what they are.”

Bellis caught Uther Doul’s eye. She was aware, suddenly, that he respected her. “They know . Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.

“But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours.” She saw that he understood.

“Their voices sound like ours,” she went on softly. “They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him.”

“It’s a strange sword,” she said a little later.

He hesitated for a tiny moment (the first time, Bellis realized, she had ever seen him uncertain) then drew it with his right hand, held it out for her to see.

Three little buds of metal seemed embedded in the heel of his right hand, connected to the veinlike mass of wires under his sleeve, running down his side to a little pack on his belt. The handle of the sword was padded in leather or skin, but a patch was bare metal, which the nodes in his flesh touched when he held the sword.

The blade was not, as Bellis had supposed, stained metal.

“May I touch it?”

Doul nodded. She tapped the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It sounded dull and unresonant.

“It’s ceramic,” he said. “More like china than iron.”

The edges of the sword did not have the matte sheen of a sharpened blade. They were the same featureless white as the flat (a white stained fractionally yellow, like teeth or ivory).

“It’ll cut deeper than bone,” Doul said quietly in that melodious voice. “This is not a ceramic you’ve seen or used before. It won’t bend or give-it has no flex-but nor is it brittle. And it’s strong.”

“How strong?”

Uther looked at her, and she felt his respect again. Something inside her responded.

“Diamond,” he said. He sheathed his blade (with another exquisite, instantaneous motion).

“Where does it come from?” she said, but he did not answer her. “Is it from the same place as you?” She was surprised by her own persistence and… what? Bravery?

She did not feel as if she was being brave. Instead, she felt as if she and Uther Doul understood each other. He turned to her from the doorway and inclined his head in farewell.

“No,” he said. “It would be… hard to be less accurate.” For the first time, she saw a smile take him, very quickly.

“Good night,” he said.

Bellis took the solitary moments she had craved, steeped herself in her own company. She breathed deeply. And finally, she allowed herself to wonder about Uther Doul. She wondered why he was speaking to her, tolerating her company, respecting her, it seemed.

She could not read him, but she realized that she felt a faint connection to him, something woven out of shared cynicism, detachment, strength, understanding, and-yes-attraction. She did not know when or why she had stopped fearing him. She had no idea what he was doing.

Two days became three, and four, and then a week had passed, every day in the inexact light of that little room. Bellis felt as if her eyes were atrophying, only able to see the earth shades inside the mountain, surrounded by halfhearted, edgeless shadows.

In the night, she would make the same short run across the open air (looking up eagerly to see naked light and colors, even the scorched colors of that sky). The mosquito whine of the women came at her sometimes, to her abject terror, and sometimes it did not. But always she huddled in the shelter of the cactus warrior or scabmettler who protected her.

Sometimes she could hear the scuffling and muttering of the she-anophelii outside the long window shafts. The mosquito-women were appalling, and strong, and their hunger was a force of almost elemental power. They would kill any bloodwalkers who landed, might drain an entire ship in a day and then lie bloated on the beach. For all that, there was something indelibly pathetic about the women of this ghetto island.

Bellis did not know what chain of circumstances had allowed the Malarial Queendom to exist, but they were unthinkable to her. It was impossible to imagine these shrieking creatures on other shores, their petty terrorism despoiling half a continent.

The food was as monotonous as the setting. Bellis’ tongue was quite numb to the fish-and-grass taste, and she chewed stolidly on whatever rust-nourished sealife the cactacae caught in the bay, whatever edible weed they uprooted.

The Samheri officers tolerated them uneasily, but did not trust them. Captain Sengka continued to curse the cactus Armadans in rapid Sunglari as turncoats and renegades.

With each morning’s fevered calculations, the scientists became more and more excited. The stacks of their notes and calculations grew massive. The ember that distinguished Kruach Aum from his compatriots-which Bellis thought of as true curiosity-waxed.

Bellis struggled but did not fail. She was translating now without even trying to understand what she said, just passing on what was said as if she were an analytical engine breaking down and reconstituting formulae. She knew that to the men and women hunched over the table, debating with Aum, she was more or less invisible.

She focused on voices as if they were music: the measured sonority of Tintinnabulum, the staccato excitement of Faber, the seesawing oboe tones of the bio-philosopher whose name Bellis could never remember.

Aum was tireless. Bellis felt faintly dismayed by exhaustion when she sat with Tanner Sack and the other engineers in the afternoon, but Aum continued without apparent difficulty, shifting his attention from the conceptual problems and philosophy of the avancs to practical issues of bait, and control, and capture of something the size of an island. And when the failing light and general fatigue forced the day’s work to end, it was never Aum who suggested it.