The Scar - China Mieville [129]
“Those scars are freggios.
“Love, or lust, or something, some combination, overtook the boss. He courted the newcomer and quickly claimed her, with the masculine assertiveness he had been trained into. And by all accounts she welcomed his attentions and returned them, and she was his concubine. Until the day he decided she was his entirely, and with a kind of clumsy bravado, he drew his knife after coitus and cut her face.” Doul paused, then smiled with sudden and sincere pleasure.
“She was still; she let him do it . . . And then she took the knife and cut him back.”
“It was the making of them both,” he said softly.
“You can see the disingenuity. He was a remarkable boy to have risen so high so fast, but he was still a peasant playing peasant games. I don’t doubt he believed it when he told her that it was for love that he cut her, that he did not trust other men to resist her, but whether he did or not, it was a lie. He was marking territory, like a pissing dog. Telling others where his holdings began. And yet she cut him back.”
Doul was smiling at me again. “That was not expected. Property does not mark its owner. She did not fight him; while he marked her, she took him at his word. The blood, the split skin, the tissue and pain, the clot and the scar were for love, so they were hers to give as well as receive.
“Pretending that freggios were what he claimed they were, she changed them, and made them much more. Changing
them, she changed him, too. Scarred his culture as well as his face. They found solace and strength in each other, then. They found an intensity and a connection in those wounds, wounds made suddenly pure.
“I do not know how he reacted, that first time. But that night she stopped being his courtesan and became his equal. They lost their names that night and became the Lovers. And we had two rulers on Garwater—two who ruled with more single-minded purpose than one ever had. And everything is open to them. She taught him that night how to remake rules, how always to go further. She made him like her. She was hungry for transformations.
“She remains so. I know that better than many: the eagerness with which she greeted me and my work, when I first came.” He spoke very softly, thoughtfully. “She takes the scraps of knowledge newcomers bring and makes them . . . remakes them with a drive and zeal that’s impossible to resist. However much you may want to.
“They reaffirm their purpose every day, those two. There are new freggios all the time. Their bodies and faces have become maps of their love. It’s a geography that changes, that becomes more manifest, as the years move. One for one, every time: marks of respect and equality.”
I said nothing—I had said nothing for many minutes—but Doul’s monologue had come to an end, and he waited for me to respond.
“Were you not there, then?” I asked finally.
“I came later,” he said.
“Press-ganged?” I said, astonished, but he shook his head again.
“I came of my own will,” he said. “I sought Armada out, a little more than ten years ago.”
“Why,” I said slowly, “are you telling me this?”
He shrugged a very little. “It’s important,” he said. “It’s important you understand. I saw you—you’re afraid of the scars. You should know what it is that you see. Who rules us, their motivation and passion. Drive. Intensity. It is the scars,” he said, “that give Garwater its strength.”
He nodded and left me then, abruptly. I waited for several minutes, but he did not reappear.
I am deeply perturbed. I do not understand what happened, why he spoke to me. Was he sent by the Lover? Did she instruct him to tell me her history, or was he operating on his own agenda?
Does he believe everything he told me?
The scars give Garwater its strength, he tells me, and I am left wondering if he is blind to another possibility. Has he not noticed, I wonder? Is it coincidence that the three most powerful people in Garwater, hence in Armada and hence on the seas, are outlanders? That they were not born within Armada’s confines?