China Mieville - The Scar

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The Scar

Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea

where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds. A blind sky bleached white the intellect of human

bone, skinning the emotions from the fracture to reveal the grief underneath. And the mirror reveals me,

a naked and vulnerable fact.

—Dambudzo Marechera,Black Sunlight

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The Scar

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.

It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete.

But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the spaces between stones and sand, curling around

coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land,

and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with

shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory

corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron.

The sea throngs.

There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them.

Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock

shelves and dropping into a zone below light.

There are ravines. Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles

of water. In the lightless cold a brutality of evolution obtains. Rude creatures emit slime and

phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from

nightmares.

There are bottomless shafts of water. There are places where the granite and muck base of the sea falls

away in vertical tunnels that plumb miles, spilling into other planes, under pressure so great that the

water flows sluggish and thick. It spurts through the pores of reality, seeping back in dangerous washes,

leaving fissures through which displaced forces can emerge.

In the chill middle deeps, hydrothermic vents break through the rocks and spew clouds of superheated

water. Intricate creatures bask in this ambient warmth their whole short lives, never straying beyond a

few feet of warm, mineral-rich water into a cold which would kill them.

The landscape below the surface is one of mountains and canyons and forests, shifting dunes, ice

caverns and graveyards. The water is dense with matter. Islands float impossibly in the deeps, caught on

charmed tides. Some are the size of coffins, little slivers of flint and granite that refuse to sink. Others

are gnarled rocks half a mile long, suspended thousands of feet down, moving on slow, arcane streams.

There are communities on these unsinking lands: there are hidden kingdoms.

There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and

catastrophes.

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The Scar

Intruding vessels pass between the sea and the air. Their shadows fleck the bottom where it is high

enough for light to reach. The trading ships and cogs, the whaling boats pass over the rot of other craft.

Sailors’ bodies fertilize the water. Scavenger fish feed on eyes and lips. There are jags in the coral

architecture where masts and anchors have been reclaimed. Lost ships are mourned or forgotten, and

the living floor of the sea takes them and hides them with barnacles, gives them as caves to morays and

ratfish and cray outcastes; and other more savage things.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly

through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized.

They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but

algae-covered bones.

At the edges of the shelves of rock where cold, light water gives way to a creeping darkness, a he-cray

scrambles. He sees prey, clicks and rattles deep in his throat while he slips the hood from his hunting

squid and releases it.

It bolts from him, diving for the shoal of fat mackerel that boil and re-form like a cloud twenty feet

above. Its foot-long tentacles open and whip closed again. The squid returns to its master, dragging a

dying fish, and the school reknits behind it.

The cray slices the head and tail from the mackerel and slips the carcass into a net bag at his belt. The

bloody head he gives his squid to gnaw.

The upper body of the cray, the soft, unarmored section, is sensitive to minute shifts of tide and

temperature. He feels a prickling against his sallow skin as complex washes of water meet and interact.

With an abrupt spasm the mackerel-cloud congeals and disappears over the crusted reef.

The cray raises his arm and calls his squid closer to him, soothes it gently. He fingers his harpoon.

He is standing on a granite ridge, where seaweed and ferns move against him, caressing his long

underbelly. To his right, swells of porous stone rise above him. To the left the slope falls away fast into

disphotic water. He can feel the chill emanating from below. He looks out into a steep gradation of blue.

Way overhead, on the surface, there are ripples of light. Below him the rays peter swiftly out. He stands

only a little way above the border of perpetual dark.

He treads carefully here, on the edge of the plateau. He often comes to hunt here, where prey are less

careful, away from the lighter, warmer shallows. Sometimes big game rises curiously from the pitch,

unused to his shrewd tactics and barbed spears. The cray shifts nervously in the current and stares out

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into the open sea. Sometimes it is not prey but predators that rise from the twilight zone.

Eddies of cold roll over him. Pebbles are dislodged around his feet and bounce slowly down the slope

and out of sight. The cray braces himself on the slippery boulders.

Somewhere below him there is a soft percussion of rocks. A chill not carried by any current creeps

across his skin. Stones are realigning, and a spill of thaumaturgic wash is spewing through new crevices.

Something baleful is emerging in the cold water, at the edge of the dark.

The cray hunter’s squid is beginning to panic, and when he releases it again, it jets instantly up the

slope, toward the light. He peers back into the murk, looking for the source of the sound.

There is an ominous vibration. As he tries to see through water stained by dust and plankton, something

moves. Way below, a plug of rock bigger than a man shudders. The cray bites his lip as the great

irregular stone falls suddenly free and begins a grinding descent.

The thundering of its passage reverberates long after it has become invisible.

There is a pit in the slope now, that stains the sea with darkness. It is quiet and motionless for a time,

and the cray fingers his spear with anxiety, clutching at it and hefting it and feeling himself tremble.

And then, softly, something colorless and cold slips from the hole.

It confuses the eye, flitting with a grotesque organic swiftness that seems to belie intention, like gore

falling from a wound. The he-cray is quite still. His fear is intense.

Another shape emerges. Again he cannot make it out: it evades him; it is like a memory or an

impression; it will not be specified. It is fast and corporeal and coldly terrifying.

There is another, and then more, until a constant quick stream dribbles from the darkness. The

presences shift, not quite invisible, communing and dissipating, their movements opaque.

The he-cray is still. He can hear strange, whispering discourses on the tides.

His eyes widen as he glimpses massive backbent teeth, bodies pebbled with rucks. Sinuous muscled

things fluttering in the freezing water.

The he-cray starts and steps backward, his feet skittering on sloping stone, trying to quiet himself but too

slow—small shattered sounds emerging from him.

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The Scar

With a single motion, a lazy, predatory twitch, the dark things that huddle in council below him move.

The he-cray sees the darks of a score of eyes, and he knows with a sick-making fear that they are

watching.

And then with a monstrous grace, they rise, and are upon him.

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The Scar

Part One

Channels

Chapter One

It is only ten miles beyond the city that the river loses its momentum, drooling into the brackish estuary

that feeds Iron Bay.

The boats that make the eastward journey out of New Crobuzon enter a lower landscape. To the south

there are huts and rotten little jetties, from where rural laborers fish to supplement monotonous diets.

Their children wave at travelers, warily. Occasionally there is a knoll of rock or a small copse of

darkwood trees, places that defy cultivation, but mostly the land is clear of stones.

From the decks, sailors can see over the fringe of hedgerow and trees and bramble to a tract of fields.

This is the stubby end of the Grain Spiral, the long curl of farmland that feeds the city. Men and women

can be seen among the crops, or plowing the black earth, or burning the stubble—depending on the

season. Barges putter weirdly between fields, on canals hidden by banks of earth and vegetation. They

go endlessly between the metropolis and the estates. They bring chymicals and fuel, stone and cement

and luxuries to the country. They return to the city past acres of cultivation studded with hamlets, great

houses, and mills, with sack upon sack of grain and meat.

The transport never stops. New Crobuzon is insatiable.

The north bank of the Gross Tar is wilder.

It is a long expanse of scrub and marsh. It stretches out for more than eighty miles, till the foothills and

low mountains that creep at it from the west cover it completely. Ringed by the river, the mountains, and

the sea, the rocky scrubland is an empty place. If there are inhabitants other than the birds, they stay out

of sight.

Bellis Coldwine took her passage on an east-bound boat in the last quarter of the year, at a time of

constant rain. The fields she saw were cold mud. The half-bare trees dripped. Their silhouettes looked

wetly inked onto the clouds.

Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories.

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She could recall the formation of a flock of geese that passed over the boat, barking; the stench of sap

and earth; the slate shade of the sky. She remembered searching the hedgerow with her eyes but seeing

no one. Only threads of woodsmoke in the soaking air, and squat houses shuttered against weather.

The subdued movement of greenery in the wind.

She had stood on the deck enveloped in her shawl and watched and listened for children’s games or

anglers, or for someone tending one of the battered kitchen gardens she saw. But she heard only feral

birds. The only human forms she saw were scarecrows, their rudimentary features impassive.

It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like infection. She had felt tethered by

time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the

farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.

And then they had snapped, and she had found herself catapulted here, now, alone and away from home.

Much later, when she was miles from everything she knew, Bellis would wake, astonished that it was

not the city itself, her home for more than forty years, that she dreamed of. It was that little stretch of

river, that weatherbeaten corridor of country that had surrounded her for less than half a day.

In a quiet stretch of water, a few hundred feet from the rocky shore of Iron Bay, three decrepit ships

were moored. Their anchors were rooted deep in silt. The chains that attached them were scabbed with

years of barnacles.

They were unseaworthy, smeared bitumen-black, with big wooden structures built precariously at the

stern and bow. Their masts were stumps. Their chimneys were cold and crusted with old guano.

The ships were close together. They were ringed with buoys strung together with barbed chain, above

and below the water. The three old vessels were enclosed in their own patch of sea, unmoved by any

currents.

They drew the eye. They were watched.

In another ship some distance away, Bellis raised herself to her porthole and looked out at them, as she

had done several times over the previous hours. She folded her arms tight below her breasts and bent

forward toward the glass.

Her berth seemed quite still. The movement of the sea beneath her was slow and slight enough to be

imperceptible.

The sky was flint-grey and sodden. The shoreline and the rock hills that ringed Iron Bay looked worn

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The Scar

and very cold, patched with crabgrass and pale saline ferns.

Those wooden hulks on the water were the darkest things visible.

Bellis sat slowly back on her bunk and picked up her letter. It was written like a diary; lines or

paragraphs separated by dates. As she read over what she had last written she opened a tin box of

prerolled cigarillos and matches. She lit up and inhaled deeply, pulling a fountain pen from her pocket

and adding several words in a terse hand before she breathed the smoke away.

Skullday 26th Rinden 1779. Aboard theTerpsichoria

It is nearly a week since we left the mooring in Tarmuth, and I am glad to have gone. It is an ugly,

violent town.

I spent my nights in my lodgings, as advised, but my days were my own. I saw what there was to the

place. It is ribbon-thin, a strip of industry that juts a mile or so north and south of the estuary, split by the

water. Every day, the few thousand residents are joined by huge numbers who come from the city at

dawn, making their way from New Crobuzon in boat- and cartloads to work. Every night the bars and

bordellos are full of foreign sailors on brief shore leave.

Most reputable ships, I am told, travel the extra miles to New Crobuzon itself, to unload in the Kelltree

docks. Tarmuth docks have not worked at more than half-capacity for two hundred years. It is only

tramp steamers and freebooters that unload there—their cargoes will end up in the city just the same, but

they have neither the time nor the money for the extra miles and the higher duty imposed by official

channels.

There are always ships. Iron Bay is full of ships—breaking off from long journeys, sheltering from the

sea. Merchant boats from Gnurr Kett and Khadoh and Shankell, on their way to or from New Crobuzon,

moored near enough Tarmuth for their crews to relax. Sometimes, far out in the middle of the bay, I saw

seawyrms released from the bridles of chariot-ships, playing and hunting.

The economy of Tarmuth is more than prostitution and piracy. The town is full of industrial yards and

sidings. It lives as it has for centuries, on the building of ships. The shoreline is punctuated with scores

of shipyards, building slipways like weird forests of vertical girders. In some loom ghostly half-

completed vessels. The work is ceaseless, loud, and filthy.

The streets are crisscrossed with little private railways that take timber or fuel or whatever from one side

of Tarmuth to the other. Each different company has built its own line to link its various concerns, and

each is jealously guarded. The town is an idiotic tangle of railways, all replicating each other’s journeys.

I don’t know if you know this. I don’t know if you have visited this town.

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The Scar

The people here have an ambivalent relationship with New Crobuzon. Tarmuth could not exist a solitary

day without the patronage of the capital. They know it and resent it. Their surly independence is an

affectation.

I had to stay there almost three weeks. The captain of theTerpsichoria was shocked when I told him I

would join him in Tarmuth itself, rather than sailing with him from New Crobuzon, but I insisted, as I

had to. My position on this ship was conditional on a knowledge of Salkrikaltor Cray, which I falsely

claimed. I had less than a month until we sailed, to make my lie a truth.

I made arrangements. I spent my days in Tarmuth in the company of one Marikkatch, an elderly he-cray

who had agreed to act as my tutor. Every day I would walk to the salt canals of the cray quarter. I would

sit on the low balcony that circled his room, and he would settle his armored underbody on some

submerged furnishing and scratch and twitch his scrawny human chest, haranguing me from the water.

It was hard. He does not read. He is not a trained teacher. He stays in the town only because some

accident or predator has maimed him, tearing off all but one leg from his left side, so that he can no

longer hunt even the sluggish fish of Iron Bay. It might make a better story to claim that I had affection

for him, that he is a lovable, cantankerous old gentleman, but he is a shit and a bore. I could make no

complaints, however. I had no choice but to concentrate, to effect a few focus hexes, will myself into the

language trance (and oh! how hard that was! I have left it so long my mind has grown fat and

disgusting!) and drink in every word he gave me.

It was hurried and unsystematic—it was a mess, a bloody mess—but by the time theTerpsichoria tied up

in the harbor I had a working understanding of his clicking tongue.

I left the embittered old bastard to his stagnant water, quit my lodgings there, and came to my cabin—

this cabin from where I write.

We sailed away from Tarmuth port on the morning of Dustday, heading slowly toward the deserted

southern shores of Iron Bay, twenty miles from town. In careful formation at strategic points around the

edge of the bay, in quiet spots by rugged land and pine forests, I spotted ships. No one will speak of

them. I know they are the ships of the New Crobuzon government. Privateers and others.

It is now Skullday.

On Chainday I was able to persuade the captain to let me disembark, and I spent the morning on the

shore. Iron Bay is drab, but anything is better than the damned ship. I am beginning to doubt that it is an

improvement on Tarmuth. I am driven to bedlam by the incessant, moronic slap of waves.

Two taciturn crewmen rowed me ashore, watching without pity as I stepped over the edge of the little

boat and walked the last few feet through freezing surf. My boots are still stiff and salt-stained.

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The Scar

I sat on the pebbles and threw stones into the water. I read some of the long, bad novel I found on board.

I watched the ship. It is moored close to the prisons, so that our captain can easily entertain and converse

with the lieutenant-gaolers. I watched the prison-ships themselves. There was no movement from their

decks, from behind their portholes. There is never any movement.

I swear, I do not know if I can do this. I miss you, and New Crobuzon.

I remember my journey.

It is hard to believe that it is only ten miles from the city to the godsforsaken sea.

There was a knocking at the door of the tiny cabin. Bellis’ lips pursed, and she waved her sheaf of paper

to dry it. Unhurriedly she folded it and replaced it in the chest containing her belongings. She drew her

knees up a little higher and played with her pen, watching as the door opened.

A nun stood in the threshold, her arms braced at either side of the doorway.

“Miss Coldwine,” she said uncertainly. “May I come in?”

“It’s your cabin too, Sister,” said Bellis quietly. Her pen spun over and around her thumb. It was a

neurotic little trick she had perfected at university.

Sister Meriope shuffled forward a little and sat on the solitary chair. She smoothed her dark russet habit

around her, fiddled with her wimple.

“It has been some days now since we became cabin-mates, Miss Coldwine,” Sister Meriope began, “and

I do not feel . . . as if I yet know you at all. And this is not a situation I would wish to continue. As we

are to be traveling and living together for many weeks . . . some companionship, some closeness, could

only make those days easier . . .” Her voice failed, and she knotted her hands.

Bellis watched her, unmoving. Despite herself, she felt a trickle of contemptuous pity. She could

imagine herself as Sister Meriope must see her: Angular, harsh, and bone-thin. Pale. Lips and hair

stained the cold purple of bruises. Tall and unforgiving.

You don’t feel as if you know me, Sister,she thought,because I haven’t spoken twenty words to you in a

week, and I don’t look at you unless you speak to me, and then I stare you down. She sighed. Meriope

was crippled by her calling. Bellis could imagine her writing in her journal “Miss Coldwine is quiet, yet

I know that I shall come to love her like a sister.”I am not,thought Bellis,getting involved with you. I will

notbecome your sounding board. I will not redeem you of whatever tawdry tragedy brings you here.

Bellis eyed Sister Meriope and did not speak.

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TheScarYetthememorywouldnotsetintothesettingsun,thatgreenandfrozenglancetothewideblueseawherebrokenheartsarewreckedoutoftheirwounds.Ablindskybleachedwhitetheintellectofhumanbone,skinningtheemotionsfromthefracturetorevealthegriefunderneath.Andthemirrorrevealsme,anakedandvulnerablefact.—DambudzoMar...

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China Mieville - The Scar

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