The Scar - China Mieville [32]
My eyes are like a cave-thing’s. I have learnt to see in the drab brown light of my cabin and this morning startles me. My eyes are teary and I blink and blink and the sea clouds run from me above. Everywhere I can hear the soft applause of waves. I can taste salt in my air.
Around me are the others, Mollificatt and Cardomiums one and two. Murrigan and Ettenry and Cohl Gimgewry Yoreling Tearfly my Johannes glimpsing at me swiftly and with a sudden smile before swept away in a crowd, and Fennec somewhere his head down still, and all of us look made of roughcut paper in this light. We are made of baser stuff than the rest of the day. It ignores us with the arrogance of a fucking child.
I want to shout to Johannes but he’s been taken away by the current of us and with my newly clear eyes I look and look.
I struggle with my sea chest, stumbling, hobbling the deck’s length. I feel battered by the light and air and I look up again and see birds arcing. I struggle forward and keep them in my sights and they wheel over us, passing to starboard, and they head erratically for the horizon and I see masts in their flight path. I have been avoiding this. I have not yet looked to the side of the ship, I have not seen where we are. My destination has been skulking beyond the corner of my eye but now as I watch the gulls it leaps into view.
It is everywhere. How could I not see?
Someone is shouting names as we shuffle past, splitting us into groups and handing out instructions, complex orders but I am not listening because I am looking out over
Dear Jabber
My name is called and I am here next to Johannes again but I am not looking at him because
I am watching
mast upon mast and sail and tower and
on and more
We are here
beside this forest
Godspit Jabber and fuck
a trick a trick of perspective
a city that moves and ripples and slops endlessly side to side
—Miss Coldwine someone says coldly but I cannot, not now I am looking, and I have put down my chest and I am looking
and someone is shaking Johannes’ hand and he stares at them bemused as they speak to him.—Dr. Tearfly, you are most welcome this is indeed an honor, but I am not listening because we are here we have arrived and look at it all look at it
Oh I’ll I’ll I could laugh or spew as my stomach yaws look we are here we are here
We are here.
Part Two
Salt
Chapter Six
There were lamps under the water. Green, grey, cold white, and amber globes of cray design, tracing the undersides of the city.
Light prickled on suspended particles. It came not only from the thousand knots of illumination but from corridors of early sunlight that angled down, picking out passages from the waves to the deep water. Fish and kree circled them and passed through them dumbly.
From below, the city was an archipelago of shadows.
It was irregular and sprawling and hugely complex. It displaced currents. Jags of keel contradicted each other in all directions. Anchor chains trailed like hair, snapped and forgotten. From its orifices billowed refuse; fecal matter and particulate, and oil eddying uneasily and rising in small slicks. A constant drool of trash fouled the water and was swallowed by it.
Below the city there were a few hundred yards of rapidly thinning light, then miles of dark water.
The underside of Armada was crisscrossed with life.
Fish eddied through its architecture. Fleeting newtlike figures moved with intellect and purpose between boltholes. There were wire mesh cages tucked into hollows and dangling from chains, crowded with fat cod and tunny. Cray dwellings like coral tumors.
Beyond the edges of the city, and below it at the far reaches of light, huge half-tame seawyrms corkscrewed and fed. Submersibles droned—rigid shadows. A dolphin made constant vigilant rounds. A moving ecology and politics were tethered to the city’s calcified base.
The sea around it resonated with noise made physical: staccato clicks and the vibrations of pounding metal, the swallowed sound of watery friction as currents rubbed against each other. Barks that dissipated when