Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [37]
Isaac and the others left Bellagin and Spint behind.
The remnants of the party turned a corner beside the Wheel of Destiny and a roughly fenced-off section of the park came into view. Inside a line of small tents curved away from view. Above the gateway was a crudely painted legend: The Circus of Weird.
“Now,” said Isaac ponderously. “Reckon I might have a little look at this . . .”
“Plumbing the depths of human squalor, ’Zaac?” asked a young artist’s model whose name Isaac could not remember. Besides Lin, Isaac and Derkhan, only a few others of the original group were left. They looked mildly surprised at Isaac’s choice.
“Research,” Isaac said grandly. “Research. Fancy joining me, Derkhan? Lin?”
The others took the hint with reactions ranging from careless waves to petulant flounces. Before they all disappeared, Lin signed rapidly to Isaac.
Not interested in this. Teratology more your thing. Meet you at the entrance in two hours?
Isaac nodded briefly and squeezed her hand. She signed goodbye to Derkhan and trotted off to catch up with a sound-artist whose name Isaac had never known.
Derkhan and Isaac stared at each other.
“. . . and then there were two,” sung Derkhan, a snatch of a children’s counting song about a basket of kittens that died, one by one, grotesquely.
There was an additional charge to enter the Circus of Weird, which Isaac paid. Though hardly empty, the freakshow was less crowded than the main body of the fair. The more monied the punters inside looked, the more furtive their air.
The freakshow brought out the voyeur in the populace and the hypocrisy in the gentry.
There seemed to be some kind of tour starting, which promised to view each exhibit in the Circus in turn. The bawls of the showman bade the assembled stick close together and prepare themselves for sights such as mortal eyes were not meant to see.
Isaac and Derkhan hung back a little and followed the troupe. Isaac saw that Derkhan had a notebook out and a pen poised.
The bowler-hatted Master of Ceremonies approached the first tent.
“Ladies and gents,” he whispered loudly and huskily, “in this tent lurks the most remarkable and terrifying creature ever seen by mortal man. Or vodyanoi, or cactus, or whatever,” he added in a normal voice, nodding graciously to the few xenians in the crowd. He returned to his bombastic tones. “Originally described fifteen centuries ago in the travelogues of Libintos the Sage, of what was then just plain ol’ Crobuzon. On his trips south to the burning wastes, Libintos saw many marvellous and monstrous things. But none more terrifying than the awesome . . . mafadet!”
Isaac had been sporting a sardonic smile. But even he joined the mass gasp.
Have they really got a mafadet? he thought as the MC drew back the curtain from the front of the little tent. He pushed forward to see.
There was another, louder gasp, and people at the front fought to move back. Others shoved to take their place.
Behind thick black bars, tethered by heavy chains, was an extraordinary beast. It lay on the ground, its huge dun body like a massive lion’s. Between its shoulders was a fringe of denser fur from which sprouted an enormous serpentine neck, thicker than a man’s thigh. Its scales glistened an oily, ruddy tan. An intricate pattern wound up the top of that curling neck, expanding to a diamond shape where it curved and became an enormous snake’s head.
The mafadet’s head lolled on the ground. Its huge forked tongue flicked in and out. Its eyes glistened like jet.
Isaac grabbed Derkhan.
“It’s a fucking mafadet,” he hissed in amazement. Derkhan nodded, wide-eyed.
The crowd had drawn back from the front of the cage. The showman grabbed a barbed stick and poked it through the bars,