The Scar - China Mieville [2]
The thundering of its passage reverberates long after it has become invisible.
There is a pit in the slope now, that stains the sea with darkness. It is quiet and motionless for a time, and the cray fingers his spear with anxiety, clutching at it and hefting it and feeling himself tremble.
And then, softly, something colorless and cold slips from the hole.
It confuses the eye, flitting with a grotesque organic swiftness that seems to belie intention, like gore falling from a wound. The he-cray is quite still. His fear is intense.
Another shape emerges. Again he cannot make it out: it evades him; it is like a memory or an impression; it will not be specified. It is fast and corporeal and coldly terrifying.
There is another, and then more, until a constant quick stream dribbles from the darkness. The presences shift, not quite invisible, communing and dissipating, their movements opaque.
The he-cray is still. He can hear strange, whispering discourses on the tides.
His eyes widen as he glimpses massive backbent teeth, bodies pebbled with rucks. Sinuous muscled things fluttering in the freezing water.
The he-cray starts and steps backward, his feet skittering on sloping stone, trying to quiet himself but too slow—small shattered sounds emerging from him.
With a single motion, a lazy, predatory twitch, the dark things that huddle in council below him move. The he-cray sees the darks of a score of eyes, and he knows with a sick-making fear that they are watching.
And then with a monstrous grace, they rise, and are upon him.
Part One
Channels
Chapter One
It is only ten miles beyond the city that the river loses its momentum, drooling into the brackish estuary that feeds Iron Bay.
The boats that make the eastward journey out of New Crobuzon enter a lower landscape. To the south there are huts and rotten little jetties, from where rural laborers fish to supplement monotonous diets. Their children wave at travelers, warily. Occasionally there is a knoll of rock or a small copse of darkwood trees, places that defy cultivation, but mostly the land is clear of stones.
From the decks, sailors can see over the fringe of hedgerow and trees and bramble to a tract of fields. This is the stubby end of the Grain Spiral, the long curl of farmland that feeds the city. Men and women can be seen among the crops, or plowing the black earth, or burning the stubble—depending on the season. Barges putter weirdly between fields, on canals hidden by banks of earth and vegetation. They go endlessly between the metropolis and the estates. They bring chymicals and fuel, stone and cement and luxuries to the country. They return to the city past acres of cultivation studded with hamlets, great houses, and mills, with sack upon sack of grain and meat.
The transport never stops. New Crobuzon is insatiable.
The north bank of the Gross Tar is wilder.
It is a long expanse of scrub and marsh. It stretches out for more than eighty miles, till the foothills and low mountains that creep at it from the west cover it completely. Ringed by the river, the mountains, and the sea, the rocky scrubland is an empty place. If there are inhabitants other than the birds, they stay out of sight.
Bellis Coldwine took her passage on an east-bound boat in the last quarter of the year, at a time of constant rain. The fields she saw were cold mud. The half-bare trees dripped. Their silhouettes looked wetly inked onto the clouds.
Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories. She could recall the formation of a flock of geese that passed over the boat, barking; the stench of sap and earth; the slate shade of the sky. She remembered searching the hedgerow with her eyes but seeing no one. Only threads of woodsmoke in the soaking air, and squat houses shuttered against weather.
The subdued movement of greenery in the wind.
She had stood on the deck enveloped in her shawl and watched and listened for children’s games or anglers, or for someone tending