The Scar (11 page)

“But a Dreer Samher war cog intercepted us. The Samheri were jealous of their trade with Kohnid. They had a monopoly—do they still?” she added suddenly, and Bellis could only shake her head uncertainly,
I don’t know
.

“Well, they strapped our captain to my place below the bowsprit and scuttled the ship. Most of the men and women they put on lifeboats with a few provisions, and pointed in the direction of the coast. It was a long way away, and I doubt they made it.

“Some of us they kept aboard. There was no ill treatment beyond cuffs and rudeness. I tortured myself stupid wondering what they’d do to me, but then came the second interception. Dry Fall riding needed ships, and sent poachers out. Armada was far south of here then, so Dreer Samher boats were perfect prey.”

“And . . . and how did you . . . ? Did you find it hard,” said Bellis, “when you came here?”

Carrianne looked at her for a while.

“Some of the cactacae,” she said, “never adjusted. They refused, or tried to escape, or attacked their guards. I suppose they were killed. Me and my companions . . . ?” She shrugged. “We’d been rescued, so it was very different.

“But, yes, it was hard, and I was miserable, and I missed my brother, and all of that. But, you see, I made a choice. I chose to live, to survive.

“After a time some of my shipmates moved out of Dry Fall. One lives in Shaddler, another in Thee-And-Thine. But mostly we stayed in the riding that took us in.” She ate for a little while, then looked up again. “It can be done, you know. You
will
make this place your home.”

She meant it reassuringly. She was being kind. But to Bellis it sounded like a threat.

Carrianne was talking to her about the ridings.

“Garwater you know,” Carrianne said, her voice deadpan. “The Lovers. The scarred Lovers. Fucked-up bastards. The Clockhouse Spur you know.”

The intellectuals’ quarter
, thought Bellis,
like Brock Marsh in New Crobuzon
.

“Shaddler’s the scabmettlers’. Bask. Thee-And-Thine.” Carrianne was counting off the ridings on her fingers. “Jhour. Curhouse, The Democratic Council. That brave redoubt. And Dry Fall,” she concluded. “Where I live.”

“Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” she said unexpectedly. “You don’t seem to me the colonist type.”

Bellis looked down. “I
had
to leave,” she said. “Trouble.”

“With the law?”

“Something happened . . .” She sighed. “I did nothing, nothing at all.” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “A few months ago there was a sickness in the city. And . . . there were rumors that someone I knew was involved. The militia were working their way through everyone he’d known, everyone he’d had involvement with. It was obvious they’d come for me, eventually. I never wanted to leave.” She spoke carefully. “It was no choice.”

The lunch, the company, even the small talk Bellis normally despised, had all calmed her. As they rose to leave, she asked Carrianne if she was feeling well.

“I noticed in the library . . .” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I was thinking you look rather pale.”

Carrianne smiled archly. “That’s the first time you’ve asked after me, Bellis,” she said. “You want to watch that. I might start thinking you give a brass eye about me.” The amiable taunt stung. “I’m fine. It’s just that I was taxed last night.”

Bellis waited, sifting through the information she had already assimilated, to see if Carrianne’s statement would make sudden sense. It did not.

“I don’t understand,” she said, exhausted by incomprehension.

“Bellis, I live in Dry Fall riding,” said Carrianne. “Sometimes we’re taxed, understand? Bellis, you know our ruler’s the Brucolac, don’t you? You’ve heard about him?”

“I’ve heard
of
him . . .”

“The Brucolac. He’s oupyr. Loango. Katalkana.” With each esoteric word, Carrianne held Bellis’ eyes and saw that she was not understood. “Haemophage, Bellis. Ab-dead.

“Vampir.”

* * *

Surrounded as she had been for weeks by a cloud of rumors and hints like insistent midges, Bellis had learned at least a little about most of the ridings. All the weird little femto-states clamped together in unhealthy congregation, resenting each other and maneuvering for position.

But somehow the most important, the most striking or unbelievable or appalling things, she had missed. At the end of the day, she thought of that moment when she had been made to see how ignorant she was: when Carrianne had explained her pallor and Bellis had realized how far from home she was.

She was pleased that she had done little more than blanch at Carrianne’s explanation. Something had hardened in her when she heard the word
vampir
—the same word in Ragamoll and Salt. Carrianne had, at that moment, taught her that there was nowhere further for her to go. She could be no further from her home.

In Armada they talked a language she could understand. She recognized the ships, even altered and rebuilt as they were. They had money and government. The differences of calendar and terminology she could learn. The found and scavenged architecture was bizarre but comprehensible. But this was a city where vampir did not need to hide and predate furtively, but could walk in the nights openly, and could rule.

Bellis realized then that all her cultural markers were obsolete. She was sick of her ignorance.

At the Sciences card catalog Bellis’ fingers fluttered through the entries, speeding through the alphabet until she found Johannes Tearfly’s name. There was more than one copy of several of his books.

If the Lovers who run my life wanted to get hold of you so badly, Johannes
, she thought to herself as she scribbled the classmarks of his works,
then I’m going to get inside their minds. Let’s see what they’re so excited about.

One of the books was on loan, but copies of the others were available. As an employee of the library, Bellis had borrowing rights.

It was very cold as she made her way home past the crowds, under jabbering Armada monkeys in the rigging, over the swaying walkways and decks and raised streets of the city, over the waves that slopped between vessels. The sky was raucous with catcalls. In her bag, Bellis carried
Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools
;
Sardula Anatomy
;
Essays on Beasts
;
Theories of Megafauna
; and
Transplane Life as a Problem for the Naturalist
—all by Johannes Tearfly.

She sat up late curled close to her stove, while freezing clouds diffused the moonlight outside. She read by lamplight, skipping from book to book.

At one in the morning she looked out over the dark shipscape.

The halo of boats that ringed the city still dragged it onward.

She thought of all the Armadan boats at sea, the agents of its piracy, taxing the ships and communities they passed. Ranging for months across thousands of miles, until, laden down with booty, and even as their city moved, they made their way back by arcane methods.

The city’s nauscopists watched the sky, and knew from its minute variations when vessels were approaching, so the tugs could haul Armada away and out of sight. Sometimes the evasion failed, and foreign ships were intercepted, welcomed in to trade, or hunted down. By secret science, the authorities always knew when incoming vessels were Armada’s own, and welcomed them home.

Even so late there were still sounds of industry from some quarters, cutting through the beat of waves and animals’ night calls. Between the layers of rope and wood that overlaid her view like scratches on a heliotype, Bellis could see to the little bay of boats at the aft end of Armada, where the rig
Sorghum
wallowed. For weeks, fire and thaumaturgic wash had billowed up from the tip of its stack. Every night the stars had been effaced around it in a drab, dun light.

No more. The clouds above the
Sorghum
were dark. The flame was out.

For the first time since she had arrived in Armada, Bellis dug through her belongings and brought out her neglected letter. She faltered as she sat there by the stove, the paper folded in front of her, a fountain pen poised. And then, irritated with her own hesitation, she began to write.

Even as Armada made its slow way south toward warmer waters, for a few days the weather turned hard cold. Winds blew frost in from the north. The trees and ivy, the slim gardens that adorned the decks of boats, became brittle and blackened.

Just before the chill hit, Bellis saw whales off the city’s port edge, playing with apparent pleasure. After a few minutes they came suddenly much closer to Armada, slammed the water with their huge tails, and were gone. The cold came quickly after that.

There was no winter in the city, no summer or spring, no seasons at all; there was only weather. For Armada it was a function not of time, but place. While New Crobuzon hunkered under snowstorms at the end of the year, Armadans might be basking in the Hearth Sea; or they might be bunked below while crews in thick coats tugged them slowly to anchor in the Muted Ocean, at temperatures that would have made New Crobuzon seem mild.

Armada tramped the oceans of Bas-Lag in patterns dictated by piracy, trade, agriculture, security, and other more opaque dynamics, and took what weather came.

The city’s irregular climate was hard on plant life. The flora of Armada survived by thaumaturgy, luck and chance, as well as stock. Centuries of husbandry had produced strains that grew fast and hardy, and could thrive in a wide range of temperatures. There were irregular crops throughout the year.

Farmlands were draped across decks and under artificial lights. There were mushroom plantations in dank old holds, and loud, stinking berths full of generations of wiry inbred animals. Fields of kelp and edible bladderwracks grew on rafts suspended below the city, alongside mesh-cages full of crustaceans and food-fish.

As days passed, Salt came to Tanner more easily, and he began to spend more time with his workmates. They would carouse in the pubs and gambling halls on the aft edge of Basilio Harbor. Shekel came too, sometimes, happy in the company of the men, but more often he took himself off, alone, to the
Castor
.

Tanner knew that he went to see the woman Angevine, whom Tanner had not met, a servant or bodyguard for Captain Tintinnabulum. Shekel had told him about her, in faltering adolescent terms, and Tanner had started off amused and indulgent. Nostalgic for himself at that age.

Shekel spent more and more time with the strange studious hunters who lived on the
Castor
. Once, Tanner came looking for him.

Belowdecks, Tanner had passed into a clean, dark corridor of cabins, each with a name stamped upon it: Modist, he had read, and Faber, and Argentarius. The berths of Tintinnabulum’s companions.

Shekel was in the mess, with Angevine.

Tanner had been shocked.

Angevine was in her thirties, he estimated, and she was Remade.

Shekel had not told him that.

Just below her thighs, Angevine’s legs ended. She jutted like some strange figurehead from the front of a little steam-driven cart, a heavy contraption with caterpillar treads, filled with coke and wood.

She could not be city-born, Tanner had realized. That kind of Remaking was too harsh, too capricious and inefficient and cruel to have been effected for anything other than punishment.

He thought well of her for putting up with the lad’s bothering. Then he saw how intensely she spoke to Shekel, how she leaned in to him (at a bizarre angle, anchored by the heavy vehicle below her), how she held his eyes. And Tanner had stopped, shocked again.

Tanner left Shekel to his Angevine. He did not ask what was happening. Shekel, forced into a sudden new conjuncture of feelings, behaved like a hybrid of child and man, now boastful and preening, now subdued and caught up with intense emotions. In what little information he gave out, Tanner learned that Angevine had been press-ganged ten years ago. Like the
Terpsichoria
, her ship had been stolen on its way to Nova Esperium. She, too, was from New Crobuzon.

When Shekel came home to the little rooms on the portmost edge of an old factory ship, Tanner was jealous, and then contrite. He determined to keep ahold of Shekel as best as he could, but to let him go as he needed.

Tanner tried to fill a vacuum by making friends. He spent more time with his workmates. There was a strong camaraderie among the dockworkers. He took part in their lewd jokes and games.

They opened to him, brought him in by telling tales.

As a newcomer he was an excuse for them to trot out stories and rumors they had all heard a mass of times before. One of them would mention dead seas, or boiltides, or the moray king, and would turn to Tanner.
You’ve probably not heard of the dead seas, Tanner,
he or she would say.
Let me tell you . . .

Tanner Sack heard the weirdest stories of the Bas-Lag seas, and the legends of the pirate city and Garwater itself. He heard of the monstrous storms that Armada had survived; the reason for the scars on the Lovers’ faces; how Uther Doul had cracked the possibility code and found his puissant sword.

He joined in celebrations for this or that happy occurrence—a marriage, a birth, luck at cards. And somber things too. When a dockside accident took off half a cactus-woman’s hand with a jag of glass, Tanner gave what eyes and flags he could spare to the whip-round. Another time, the riding was plunged into depression by the news that a Garwater ship, the
Magda’s Threat
, had gone down near the Firewater Straits. Tanner shared the loss, and his sadness was not feigned.

But although he liked his workmates, and the taverns and convivials were a pleasant way of spending evenings—and one that improved his Salt in great gouts—there was a constant odd ambience of half-acknowledged secrecy. He could not make sense of it.

There were certain mysteries that the work of the underwater engineers threw up. What manner of things were those shadows he sometimes glimpsed, behind the tightly tethered guard sharks, unclear through what must be adumbrating glamours? What were the purposes of the repairs that he and his colleagues daily carried out? What was it that the
Sorghum
, the stolen rig that they tended carefully, sucked up from the base of the sea, thousands of feet below? Tanner had followed its fat, segmented pipe down with his eyes many times, growing giddy as it dwindled.