The Scar - China Mieville [36]
The organization, the mumming of legality, confused her.
These were pirates. This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating freetown for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right. The evidence of this was everywhere: in the severity of the citizens, the weapons they wore openly, in the stocks and whipping posts she saw on the Garhouse vessels. Armada, she thought, must be ordered by maritime discipline, the lash.
But the ship-city was not the base brutocracy that Bellis had expected. There were other logics at work. There were typed contracts, offices administrating the new arrivals. And officials of some kind: an executive, administrative caste, just as in New Crobuzon.
Alongside Armada’s club law, or supporting it, or an integument around it, was bureaucratic rule. This was not a ship, but a city. She had entered another country as complex and organized as her own.
The officials had taken her to the Chromolith, a long-decaying paddleship, and berthed her in two little round rooms joined by a spiral staircase, built in what had been the vessel’s big chimney. Somewhere far below her, in the ship’s guts, was an engine that had once vented its soot through what was now her home. It had gone cold long before she was born.
The room was hers, they told her, but she must pay for it, weekly, at the Garwater Settlement Office. They had given her an advance on her wages, a handful of notes and change—“ten eyes to a flag, ten flags to a finial.” The currency was rough-cut and crudely printed. The colors of the ink varied from note to note.
And then they had told her, in rudimentary Ragamoll, that she would never leave Armada, and they had left her there alone.
She had waited, but that was all. She was alone in the city, and it was a prison.
Eventually hunger had driven her down to buy greasy street-food from a vendor who jabbered at her in Salt too quick for her easily to understand. She had walked the streets, astonished that she was not accosted. She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine, surrounded by the women and men in lush, ragged dress, the street children, the cactacae and khepri, hotchi, llorgiss, massive gessin and vu-murt, and others. Cray lived below the city and walked topside in the day, sluggish on their armored legs.
The streets were narrow little ridges between the houses crammed on decks. Bellis grew used to the city’s yawing, the skyline that shifted and jostled. She was surrounded by catcalls and conversations in Salt.
It was easy for her to learn: its vocabulary was obvious, stolen as it was from other languages, and its syntax was easy. She had to use it—she could not avoid buying food, asking for directions or clarification, speaking to other Armadans—and when she did her accent marked her out as a newcomer, not city-born.
For the most part those she spoke to were patient with her, even crudely good-humored, forgiving her surliness. Perhaps they expected her to relax as she made Armada her home.
She did not.
That morning, as Bellis stepped out of the Chromolith smokestack, the question How did I get here? broke through into her mind again.
She was out in the street in the city of ships, in the sun, enclosed in a press of her kidnappers. Men and women, tough-faced humans and other races, even a few constructs were all around her, bartering, working, jabbering in Salt. Bellis walked on through Armada, a prisoner.
She was heading for The Clockhouse Spur. This riding abutted Garwater, and was more commonly known as Booktown, or the khepri quarter.
It was a little more than a thousand feet from Chromolith Towers to the Grand Gears Library. The walk