The Scar - China Mieville [175]
Uther Doul was pointing up at the ceiling, only an inch or so above her head. He cocked an ear expressively. It took some seconds before Bellis heard anything, and when she did, she was not at first sure what it was.
Voices. Muffled by layers of air and metal. Half-familiar. Bellis turned her head up. She could almost make out words now. This was an accidental little listening post. By quirk of architecture and materials, the sounds from the room above issued (by pipes, hollow walls?) through the ceiling.
Voices from the room above.
The Lovers’ room.
She started in astonishment. It was the Lovers that she could hear.
Cautious and slow, as if they might somehow see her, Bellis craned her neck and listened.
Words fluttering across registers, uttered with quick breaths. Mewing, pleading, delighting. Gasps of sexual closeness and pain and other intense emotions. And words coming through the metal.
. . . love . . . soon . . . fuck . . . yes and . . . cut . . . now . . . love . . . cut . . . yes, yes . . .
Yes.
The words were thick. Bellis recoiled from them—physically, literally, stepping away from the weak spot in the metal. The words, the sounds, were crooned quickly, so steeped in passion and need that they had to be bitten out or they would become a wordless shriek.
cut yes love cut
Two streams of words, male and female, overlapping and interweaving and inextricable—their rhythms inextricable.
Dear Jabber! thought Bellis. Uther Doul watched her, expressionless.
Cut and cut and love and cut! she thought, and went for the door, appalled. She thought of what they were doing, in their room, a few feet away.
Doul led her away from that terrible little cubbyhole. They ascended through layers of metal toward the night air. Doul still did not speak.
What are you doing? she thought, staring at his back. Why show me that?
There had been nothing prurient in his demeanor. She did not understand. Stiff, eloquent, and formal in his own room, uncovering extraordinary stories and theories to keep himself talking, he had become, in these corridors, a truculent child with a secret hideaway. And with something like the wordless, inarticulate pride she would expect from such a child, he had led her to his private den and shown her its secret. And she could not fathom why.
She shuddered at the memory of those breathy exclamations, the Lovers’ twisted declarations of passion. Of love, she supposed. She thought of their scars, the cutting. The blood and split skin, the fervor. She felt as if she would sick up. But it was not the violence, not the knives they used or what they did, that horrified her. It was not that at all. Peccadillos did not disturb her at all—those, she could understand.
This had become something else. It was the emotion itself, the intense, giddying, slick, and sick-making ardor she had heard in their voices that appalled her. They were trying to cut through the membrane between them and bleed one into the other. Rupturing their integrity for something way beyond sex.
That violent, moaning thing that they thought was love, she thought was something akin to masturbation, and it disgusted her.
Bellis was left aghast by it. Nauseated and threatened and aghast.
Chapter Thirty-one
During the days, Shekel was free.
Like most of the young bravos who hung out around the Basilio docks, he made his living as he had in New Crobuzon—running errands, delivering messages and goods, keeping his eyes and ears open, for whatever handful of change his momentary employer chose to give him. His Salt was game and comprehensible, if not fluent.
A little more than half of his evenings he spent with Angevine. She berthed in Tintinnabulum’s Castor, below its belfry. She often returned very late at night, since Tintinnabulum spent long hours in the meetings with his colleagues, and with Krüach Aum and Bellis and the Lovers, and Angevine fetched books or materials for him, from the library or from his hidden laboratory at the back of his ship. She would return tired, and