The Scar - China Mieville [142]
Doul had been training. He stood in the room’s center, relaxed, holding his sword. It was a straight blade, thin and edged on both sides, something over two feet long. It was not big or ornate or impressive, or carved with puissant signs.
The blade was white. It moved suddenly, flickered like water, soundless and impossible to follow, in a sudden murderous formation. And then it was sheathed, too fast for her to see.
“I’m done here, Miss Coldwine,” he said. “The room is yours.” But he did not leave.
Bellis nodded thank-you and sat, waiting.
“Let’s hope that unfortunate killing won’t sour our relations with the mosquito-men,” he said.
“It won’t,” said Bellis. “They hold no grudges when their womenfolk die. They remember enough to know it’s necessary.” He knows this, she thought suddenly, incredulous. He’s making conversation with me again.
But even suspicious as she was, the details she had been told were so ghastly and fascinating that she wanted to share them; she wanted to make someone else know them.
“They don’t know much history, the anophelii, but they know that the cactacae—the sapwalkers—aren’t the only people across the sea. They know about us, the bloodwalkers, and they know why usually none of us visit. They’ve forgotten the details of the Malarial Queendom, but they have a sense that their womenfolk . . . did wrong . . . centuries ago.” She paused to let that understatement sink in. “They treat them without . . . affection or distaste.”
It was a melancholy pragmatism. They bore their women no ill will. They coupled with them eagerly enough once in the year, but they ignored them where possible and killed them if necessary.
“She wasn’t trying to feed, you know,” Bellis went on. She kept her voice neutral. “She was full. They’re . . . they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding, screaming ravenous for all those weeks: it’s all they can think about. But when they’ve fed, when they’re full—really sated—there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates.
And that’s the time they try to talk.
“He described them coming up from the swamplands, landing in the square and shrieking at the men, trying to make words. But they could never learn language, you see. They were always too hungry. They know what they are.”
Bellis caught Uther Doul’s eye. She was aware, suddenly, that he respected her. “They know. Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.
“But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours.” She saw that he understood.
“Their voices sound like ours,” she went on softly. “They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him.”
“It’s a strange sword,” she said a little later.
He hesitated for a tiny moment (the first time, Bellis realized, she had ever seen him uncertain) then drew it with his right hand, held it out for her to see.
Three little buds of metal seemed embedded in the heel of his right hand, connected to the veinlike mass of wires under his sleeve, running down his side to a little pack on his belt. The handle of the sword was padded in leather or skin, but a patch was bare metal, which the nodes in his