Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [21]
Yagharek spoke like a poet. His speech was halting, but his language was that of the epics and histories he had read, the curious stilted oration of someone who has learnt a language from old books.
“Flight is not a luxury. It is what makes me garuda. My skin crawls when I look up at roofs that trap me. I want to look down at this city before I leave it, Grimnebulin. I want to fly, not once, but whenever I will.
“I want you to give me back flight.”
Yagharek unclipped his cloak and threw it away across the floor. He stared at Isaac with shame and defiance. Isaac gasped.
Yagharek had no wings.
Strapped across his back was an intricate frame of wooden struts and leather straps that bobbed idiotically behind him as he turned. Two great carved planks sprouted from a kind of leather jerkin below his shoulders, jutting way above his head, where they hinged and dangled down to his knees. They mimicked wingbones. There was no skin or feathers or cloth or leather stretched between them, they were no kind of gliding apparatus. They were only a disguise, a trick, a prop on which to drape Yagharek’s incongruous cloak, to make it seem as if he had wings.
Isaac reached out for them. Yagharek stiffened, then steeled himself and let Isaac touch them.
Isaac shook his head in astonishment. He caught a glimpse of ragged scar tissue on Yagharek’s back, until the garuda turned abruptly to face him.
“Why?” breathed Isaac.
Yagharek’s face creased slowly as he screwed up his eyes. A thin, utterly human moan started from him, and it grew and grew until it became a bird of prey’s melancholy war-cry, loud and monotonous and miserable and lonely. Isaac gazed on in alarm as the cry became a barely comprehensible shout.
“Because this is my shame!” screamed Yagharek. He was silent for a moment, then he spoke quietly again.
“This is my shame.”
He unclipped the uncomfortable-looking bulk of wood from behind him, and it fell with a flat clatter to the floor.
He was nude to the waist. His body was thin and fine and tight, with a healthy emaciation. Without the looming bulk of his fake wings behind him, he looked small and vulnerable.
He turned slowly, and Isaac caught his breath as the scars he had glimpsed were brought into view.
Two long trenches of flesh on Yagharek’s shoulderblades were twisted and red with tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing. The strips of ruined flesh on either side of his back were a foot and a half long, and perhaps four inches at their widest point. Isaac’s face wrinkled in empathy: the torn holes were criss-crossed with rough, curving slice marks, and Isaac realized that the wings had been sawed from Yagharek’s back. No single, sudden cut but a long, drawn-out torturous disfigurement. Isaac winced.
Thinly hidden knobs of bone shifted and flexed; muscles stretched, grotesquely visible.
“Who did this?” breathed Isaac. The stories were right, he thought. The Cymek is a savage, savage land.
There was a long silence before Yagharek responded.
“I…I did this.”
At first Isaac thought he had misunderstood.
“What do you mean? How the fuck could you…?”
“I brought this onto me.” Yagharek was shouting. “This is justice. It is I who did this.”
“This is a fucking punishment? Godshit, fuck, what could…what did you do?”
“Do you judge garuda justice, Grimnebulin? I cannot hear that without thinking of the Remade…”
“Don’t try to turn it round! You’re absolutely right, I’ve no stomach for the law in this city…I’m just trying to understand what happened to you…”
Yagharek sighed, with a shockingly human slump of the shoulders. When he spoke, it was quiet and pained, a duty that he resented.