The Scar - China Mieville [41]
“I can make them out,” said Shekel vaguely.
“Well, there you go then. You go and have a word with Miss Coldy, and get her to recommend some reading for you.”
They ate silently for a while, watching a group of the Armada cray come up from their hivewreck below.
“What’s it like under there?” Shekel said at last.
“Cold,” said Tanner. “And dark. Dark but . . . luminous. Massive. You’re just surrounded by massiveness. There are shapes you can only just see, huge dark shapes. Subs and whatnot—and sometimes you think you see others. Can’t make them out properly, and they’re guarded, so’s you can’t get too close.
“I’ve watched cray under their wrecks. Seawyrms that saddle up sometimes to the chariot ships. The menfish, like newts, from Bask riding. Can’t hardly see them, the way they move. Bastard John, the dolphin. He’s the Lovers’ security chief below, and a colder, more vicious sod you could not imagine.
“And then there’s a few . . . Remade.” His voice eddied into silence.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Shekel, watching Tanner closely. “I can’t get used to . . .” He said nothing more.
Neither could get used to it. A place where the Remade were equal. Where a Remade might be a foreman or a manager instead of the lowest laborer.
Shekel saw Tanner rub his tentacles. “How are they?” he asked, and Tanner grinned and concentrated, and one of the rubbery things contracted a little and began to drag itself like a moribund snake toward Shekel’s bread. The boy clapped appreciatively.
At the edge of the jetty where the cray were surfacing, a tall cactus-man stood, his bare chest pocked with fibrous vegetable scars. A massive rivebow was strapped across his back.
“D’you know him?” said Tanner. “His name’s Hedrigall.”
“That don’t sound like a cactacae name,” said Shekel, and Tanner shook his head.
“He’s no New Crobuzon cactus,” he explained, “nor even a Shankell one. He’s a press-ganged, like us. Came to the city more than twenty years ago. He’s from Dreer Samher. Near enough two thousand miles from New Crobuzon.
“I tell you what, Shekel, he’s got some stories. You don’t need books to get tales off him.
“He was a trader-pirate before he got captured and joined the city here, and he’s seen just about all the things that live in the sea. He can cut your hair with that rivebow; he’s that good a shot. He’s seen keragorae and mosquito-men and unplaced, and whatever else you like. And gods, he knows how to tell you about ’em. In Dreer Samher, they’ve fablers who tell stories for a calling. Hed was one. He can make his voice hypnagogic if he wants, keep you totally drunk on it. All while he tells you stories.”
The cactus-man was standing very still, letting the rain pelt his skin.
“And now he’s an aeronaut,” Tanner said. “He’s been piloting Grand Easterly’s airships—scouts and warflots—for years. He’s one of the Lovers’ most important men, and a fine bloke he is. He spends most of his time now up in the Arrogance.”
Tanner and Shekel looked behind them, and up. More than a thousand feet above the deck of the Grand Easterly the Arrogance was tethered. It was a big, crippled aerostat, with twisted tail fins and an engine that had not moved in years. Attached by hundreds of yards of tar-stiffened rope, winched to the great ship below it, it served as the city’s crow’s nest.
“He likes it up there, Hedrigall,” said Tanner. “Told me he just wants things quiet, these days.”
“Tanner,” said Shekel slowly, “what do you reckon to the Lovers? I mean, you work for them: you’ve heard them talk; you know what they’re like. What d’you think of them? Why d’you do what they say?”
Tanner knew, as he spoke, that Shekel would not fully understand him. But it was such an important question that he turned and looked very carefully at the boy he shared his rooms with (on the port end of an old iron hulk). The boy who had been his jailer and his audience and his friend and was becoming something different, something like family.
“I was going to be a slave in the colonies, Shekel,” he said quietly. “The Lovers of Grand Easterly