China Mieville - The Scar

Shekel was fascinated by the brutality of that little realm. He watched the old man with avid eyes. He saw the prisoners’ bruises. He glimpsed peculiar double silhouettes of men coupling in consent or rape.

He had run a gang in Raven’s Gate, back in the city, and he was worried about what would happen to them now, without him. His first-ever theft, aged six, had netted him a shekel piece, and the nickname had stuck. He claimed that he could not remember any other name. He had taken this job on the ship when his gang’s activities, which included the occasional burglary, had attracted too much attention from the militia.

“Another month and I’d have been in there with you, Tanner,” he said. “Ain’t a lot in it.”

Tended by the ship’s thaumaturges and wyrdshipmen, the meteoromancing engine by Terpsichoria ’s bowsprit displaced air in front of the ship. The ship’s sails bowed out to fill the vacuum; pressure billowed in from behind. They made good speed.

The machine reminded Bellis of New Crobuzon’s cloudtowers. She thought of the huge engines jutting over the Tar Wedge roofscape, arcane and broken. She felt a hard longing for the streets and canals, for the size of the city.

And for engines. Machines. In New Crobuzon they had surrounded her. Now there was only the little meteoromancer and the mess-hall construct. The steam engine below made the whole of Terpsichoria a mechanism, but it was invisible. Bellis wandered the ship like a rogue cog. She missed the utilitarian chaos she had been forced to leave.

They were sailing a busy part of the sea. They passed other ships: in the two days after they left Qe Banssa, Bellis saw three. The first two were little elongated shapes at the horizon; the third was a squat caravel that came much closer. It was from Odraline, as the kites it flew from its sails announced. It pitched wildly in the choppy sea.

Bellis could see the sailors aboard it. She watched them swing in the complex rigging and scramble the triangular sails.

The Terpsichoria passed barren-looking islands: Cadann, Rin Lor, Eidolon Island. There were folktales concerning every one, and Johannes knew them all.

Bellis spent hours watching the sea. The water so far east was much clearer than that near Iron Bay: she could see the smudges that were huge schools of fish. The off-duty sailors sat with their legs over the side, angling with crude rods, scrimshawing bones and narwhal tusks with knives and lampblack.

Occasionally the curves of great predators like orca would breach in the distance. Once, as the sun went down, the Terpsichoria passed close to a little wooded knoll, a mile or two of forest that budded from the ocean. There was a clutch of smooth rocks off the shore, and Bellis’ heart skidded as one of the boulders reared and a massive swan’s neck uncoiled from the water. A blunt head twisted, and she watched the plesiauri paddle lazily out of the shallows and disappear.

She became briefly fascinated with submarine carnivores. Johannes took her to his cabin and rummaged among his books. She saw several titles with his name on the spine: Sardula Anatomy ; Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools ; Theories of Megafauna . When he found the monograph he was looking for, he showed her sensational depictions of ancient, blunt-headed fish thirty feet long; of goblin sharks with ragged teeth and jutting foreheads; and others.

On the evening of the second day out of Qe Banssa, Terpsichoria sighted the land that rimmed Salkrikaltor: a jagged grey coastline. It was past nine in the evening, but the sky, for once, was absolutely clear, and the moon and her daughters shone very bright.

Despite herself, Bellis was awed by this mountainous landscape, all channeled through by wind. Deep inland, at the limits of her vision, she could see the darkness of forest clinging to the sides of gulleys. On the coast the trees were dead, salt-blasted husks.

Johannes swore with excitement. “That’s Bartoll!” he said. “A hundred miles north there’s Cyrhussine Bridge, twenty-five damned miles long. I hoped we might see that, but I suppose it would have been asking for trouble.”

The ship was bearing away from the island. It was cold, and Bellis flapped her thin coat impatiently.

“I’m going inside,” she said, but Johannes ignored her.

He was staring back the way they had come, at Bartoll’s disappearing shore.

“What’s going on?” he murmured. Bellis turned back sharply. The frown was audible in his voice. “Where are we going?” Johannes gesticulated. “Look… we’re bearing away from Bartoll.” The island was now little more than an unclear fringe at the edge of the sea. “Salkrikaltor’s that way-east. We could be sailing over the cray within a couple of hours, but we’re heading south… We’re heading away from the commonwealth…”

“Maybe they don’t like ships passing overhead,” Bellis said, but Johannes shook his head.

“That’s the standard route,” he said. “East from Bartoll gets you to Salkrikaltor City. That’s how you get there. We’re heading somewhere else.” He drew a map in the air. “This is Bartoll and this is Gnomon Tor, and between them, in the sea… Salkrikaltor. Down here, where we’re heading now… there’s nothing. A line of spiky little islands. We’re taking a very long way around to Salkrikaltor City. I wonder why.”

By the next morning, several other passengers had noticed the unusual route. Within hours, word spread among the cloistered little corridors. Captain Myzovic addressed them in the mess. There were almost forty passengers, and all were present. Even pale, pathetic Sister Meriope and others similarly afflicted.

“There is nothing to be concerned about,” the captain assured them. He was clearly angry at being summoned. Bellis looked away from him, out of the windows. Why am I here? she thought. I don’t care. I don’t care where we’re going or how we damn well get there. But she did not convince herself, and she stayed where she was.

“But why have we deviated from the normal route, Captain?” someone asked.

The captain exhaled angrily. “Right,” he said. “Listen. I am taking a detour around the Fins, the islands at the southern edge of Salkrikaltor. I am not obliged to explain this action to you. However…” He paused, to impress upon the passengers how privileged they were. “Under the circumstances… I must ask you all to observe a degree of restraint, as regards this information.

“We will be circumnavigating the Fins before reaching Salkrikaltor City, so that we might pass some of New Crobuzon’s holdings. Certain maritime industries. Which are not public knowledge. Now, I could have you confined to cabins. But then you might see something from the portholes, and I’d rather not let loose the rumors that would result. So you are free to go above, to the poop-deck only. But . But I appeal to you as patriots and as good citizens to exercise discretion about what you see tonight. Am I clear?”

To Bellis’ disgust, there was a slightly awed silence. He’s stupefying them with pomposity, she thought, and turned away with her contempt.

The waves were broken by an occasional rock tusk, but nothing more dramatic. Most of the passengers had congregated at the back of the ship, and they gazed eagerly over the water.

Bellis kept her eyes to the horizon, irritated that she was not alone.

“Do you think we’ll know when we see whatever it is?” asked a clucking woman Bellis did not know, and whom she ignored.

It grew dark and much colder, and some of the passengers retired below. The mountainous Fins dipped in and out of visibility at the horizon. Bellis sipped mulled wine for warmth. She became bored, and watched the sailors instead of the sea.