Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [318]
“Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims . . . And when Yagharek returns . . . I ask you to observe our justice—Yagharek’s justice—not to impute your own.
“He stole choice, in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is the end.”
Is it? thought Isaac. Is that enough? Is that the end?
Kar’uchai watched him struggle.
Lin called to Isaac, clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she said made sense, as if they were conversing.
She was calmed, and she hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her unbroken compound eye.
“Will you observe our judgement?” said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.
Kar’uchai was silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but confusion.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Please . . .”
He turned back to Lin, who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.
After minutes of silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his name.
He started as if he had forgotten she was there.
“I will leave. I ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our judgement be.” She moved the chair from the door and stalked out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.
And Isaac sat and stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace—marbled now with stress-fractures and lines of cruelty—thinking about Yagharek.
Do not translate, Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?
He thought of Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife? A weapon? A fucking whip?
Fuck them, he would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts. I don’t owe their laws respect . . . Free the prisoners. That was what Runagate Rampant always said.
But the Cymek garuda did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians. Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.
Or so he had been told. So he remembered. The band voted, Kar’uchai had said.
Was that true? Did that change things?
In New Crobuzon punishment was for someone. Some interest was served. Was that different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?
Was a garuda rapist worse than a human one?
Who am I to judge? Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked up his calculations, ready to continue, but then, Who am I to judge? he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.
He kept glancing at Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of them was as savage a stain as they had been.
They had mottled her in suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.
Lin shifted and woke and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of Kar’uchai.
This is all wrong, he thought. That’s just exactly what she told you not to do. This isn’t about rape, she said . . .
But it was too hard. Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of Kar’ uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.
This is all arse-side up, he thought.
If he took Kar’uchai at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all, he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew: his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the doubt?
He remembered Yagharek