The Scar - China Mieville [53]
Tanner knew that he went to see the woman Angevine, whom Tanner had not met, a servant or bodyguard for Captain Tintinnabulum. Shekel had told him about her, in faltering adolescent terms, and Tanner had started off amused and indulgent. Nostalgic for himself at that age.
Shekel spent more and more time with the strange studious hunters who lived on the Castor. Once, Tanner came looking for him.
Belowdecks, Tanner had passed into a clean, dark corridor of cabins, each with a name stamped upon it: Modist, he had read, and Faber, and Argentarius. The berths of Tintinnabulum’s companions.
Shekel was in the mess, with Angevine.
Tanner had been shocked.
Angevine was in her thirties, he estimated, and she was Remade.
Shekel had not told him that.
Just below her thighs, Angevine’s legs ended. She jutted like some strange figurehead from the front of a little steam-driven cart, a heavy contraption with caterpillar treads, filled with coke and wood.
She could not be city-born, Tanner had realized. That kind of Remaking was too harsh, too capricious and inefficient and cruel to have been effected for anything other than punishment.
He thought well of her for putting up with the lad’s bothering. Then he saw how intensely she spoke to Shekel, how she leaned in to him (at a bizarre angle, anchored by the heavy vehicle below her), how she held his eyes. And Tanner had stopped, shocked again.
Tanner left Shekel to his Angevine. He did not ask what was happening. Shekel, forced into a sudden new conjuncture of feelings, behaved like a hybrid of child and man, now boastful and preening, now subdued and caught up with intense emotions. In what little information he gave out, Tanner learned that Angevine had been press-ganged ten years ago. Like the Terpsichoria, her ship had been stolen on its way to Nova Esperium. She, too, was from New Crobuzon.
When Shekel came home to the little rooms on the portmost edge of an old factory ship, Tanner was jealous, and then contrite. He determined to keep ahold of Shekel as best as he could, but to let him go as he needed.
Tanner tried to fill a vacuum by making friends. He spent more time with his workmates. There was a strong camaraderie among the dockworkers. He took part in their lewd jokes and games.
They opened to him, brought him in by telling tales.
As a newcomer he was an excuse for them to trot out stories and rumors they had all heard a mass of times before. One of them would mention dead seas, or boiltides, or the moray king, and would turn to Tanner. You’ve probably not heard of the dead seas, Tanner, he or she would say. Let me tell you . . .
Tanner Sack heard the weirdest stories of the Bas-Lag seas, and the legends of the pirate city and Garwater itself. He heard of the monstrous storms that Armada had survived; the reason for the scars on the Lovers’ faces; how Uther Doul had cracked the possibility code and found his puissant sword.
He joined in celebrations for this or that happy occurrence—a marriage, a birth, luck at cards. And somber things too. When a dockside accident took off half a cactus-woman’s hand with a jag of glass, Tanner gave what eyes and flags he could spare to the whip-round. Another time, the riding was plunged into depression by the news that a Garwater ship, the Magda’s Threat, had gone down near the Firewater Straits. Tanner shared the loss, and his sadness was not feigned.
But although he liked his workmates, and the taverns and convivials were a pleasant way of spending evenings—and one that improved his Salt in great gouts—there was a constant odd ambience of half-acknowledged secrecy. He could not make sense of it.
There were certain mysteries that the work of the underwater engineers threw up. What manner of things were those shadows he sometimes glimpsed, behind the tightly tethered guard sharks, unclear through what must be adumbrating glamours? What were the purposes of the repairs that he and his colleagues daily carried out? What was it that the Sorghum, the stolen rig that they tended carefully, sucked up from