The Scar - China Mieville [154]
The quiet went on while he turned the package over and over in his hands, ran his fingers over the nub of sealing wax, and the ring, and the long letter with its dreadful warning.
There was his Remaking to remember, but that was not all. There were places and people. There was more than one side to New Crobuzon.
Tanner Sack was loyal to Garwater, and he felt the passion of that loyalty inside him, beside a sad affection for New Crobuzon—a kind of melancholic regretful fondness. For the shoe market, and for other things. The two emotions flickered inside him and circled each other like fish.
He thought of his old city all blasted, destroyed.
“It’s true,” he whispered slowly. “It’s a mile or more to Machinery Beach, down the hill past the swamps and all that, where the women live.”
He jerked his head, suddenly indicating the other end of the township, the cleft in the rocks with the waves like oil below.
“But it’s only a few yards from here to the sea.”
Interlude V
Tanner Sack
It don’t take much.
Keep my eyes on the window (Bellis Coldwine herself crouched and waiting hiding behind me. Nervous I reckon that I’m playing her but still she’s alight with hope). Waiting till the guard wanders off around a corner, away from the plaza and out of sight.
—Don’t you move, I tell her, and she shakes her head most fervent. —Don’t you move an inch from here (I’m putting it off now, scared as I am). Don’t you shift a muscle till you hear me knocking.
She’s to open the bolt. She’s to watch make sure no anophelii push their way in while that door’s unlocked. She’s to wait as long as it takes till I come back.
And then I’m nodding, that leather bag of hers fastened and folded tight and rubbed with wax to keep the water out, held by my gut as if I clutch a wound, and she’s pulled that door to and I’m out, in the starlight, in the air, in the hot night, with the mosquito-women all around me.
Tanner Sack does not hesitate. He bolts toward the chasm that splits the rear of the village like its anus, from where the rubbish is thrown into the sea.
He runs with his head down, blind and quite terrified, hurtling toward the crack in the rock. His nerves scream and his body arcs as each part of him fights to be nearest to the water.
He is sure he can hear the sound of the mosquito wings.
It is only five seconds that he is out under the sky listening to the wind and the night insects until his feet touch the flat rock that perches like a balcony over the sea. The air is still, and the darkness cossets him more tightly as he plunges into the shadow-stained gap in the mountain. For a moment his feet skitter as he hesitates and considers a more laborious and careful descent by the thin path that winds in tight, back and forth, down the stone, but it is too late: his legs have taken him on and out, as if he hears the whine of a she-anophelius, and he has left the rock and is falling.
There is nothing but air beneath him, more than fifty feet of air, and then the slickly moving water that glints like iron. He has seen the movement of the sea in the chasm below. And he is a sea creature now, and he can read the shapes of the currents. He knows the water beneath is deep, and so it proves to be.
He pulls himself up tight, and the surf opens to him with a plunging sound and smashes the air from his lungs, and he opens his mouth with the shock of it and breathes the water across his poor, desiccated gills as the sea seals itself above him again, taking him into its body. It makes him welcome, little microbe that he is.
There is a blissful time, when he drifts unmoving in the dark water. The space around him is giddying, the safety of it. No mosquito-women come here (he thinks then of other predators, and is for a moment a little less secure).
Tanner feels the weight of the package in its greased pouch. He holds it against his belly and kicks out with his webbed toes. It has been so long since he has swum.