The Scar - China Mieville [56]
Buh eh luh luh ih suh.
(Confused by the double lingua-alveolar, as she had expected.)
He tried once more, and halfway through he stopped and began to smile at the word. He gave her a look so full of delight that it brought her up short. He said her name.
After she had showed him the rudiments of punctuation she had an idea. She walked with him through ships’ bowels, past sections on science and humanities where scholars read hunkered beside oil lamps and little windows, then out between buildings in the drooling rain, over the bridge to the Corrosive Memory. It was a galleon at the outer edge of Grand Gears Library. It contained children’s books.
There were very few readers on the children’s deck. The shelves that surrounded them bristled with garish colors. Bellis ran her fingers along their spines as she walked, and Shekel gazed at them with a deep curiosity. They stopped at the very back of the ship, studded with portholes and listing quite sharply away from them, covered by an incline of books.
“Look,” Bellis said. “Can you see?” She indicated the brass label. “Rag. A. Moll. Ragamoll. These are books in our language. Most of them’ll come from New Crobuzon.”
She plucked a couple and opened them. She froze for a fraction of a second, too quickly for Shekel to notice. Handwritten names peered up at her from the inside front pages, but these were scrawled in crayon, in infants’ hands.
Bellis turned the pages quickly. The first book was for the very young, large and carefully hand-colored, full of pictures in the simplistic Ars Facilis style that had been in vogue sixty years previously. It was the story of an egg that went to battle against a man made of spoons, and won, to become mayor of the world.
The second was for older children. It was a history of New Crobuzon. Bellis stopped short, seeing the etched pictures of the Ribs and the Spike and Perdido Street Station. She skim-read quickly, curling her face in amused contempt at the grotesquely misleading history. The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust and, most shamefully, the Pirate Wars all suggested, in childish and disingenuous language, that New Crobuzon was a stronghold of liberty that thrived despite almost insuperable and unfair odds.
Shekel was watching her, fascinated.
“Try this one,” she said, and held out to him The Courageous Egg. He took it reverentially. “It’s for young children,” she said. “Don’t get worried about the story; it’s much too silly for you. It means nothing. But I want to know if you can work out what’s happening, if you can understand what goes on, by working through the words like I showed you. Follow the letters’ orders, say the words. There are bound to be some in there that you can’t understand. When you come to them, write them down, and bring the list to me.”
Shekel looked up at her sharply. “Write them down?” he said.
She saw inside him. He still related to the words as if they were outside entities: subtle teases that he was finally beginning to understand, just a little. But he had not yet conceived of being able to encode them into his own secrets. He had not realized that by learning to read he had learned to write.
Bellis found a pencil and a half-used piece of paper in her pocket and handed them to him.
“Just copy the words that you don’t understand, the letters in order exactly like they are in the book. Bring them to me,” she said.
He eyed her, and another of those beatific smiles shot across him.
“Tomorrow,” she went on, “I want you to come to me at five o’clock, and I’m going to ask you questions about the story in the book. I’m going to have you read pieces to me.” Shekel stared at her as he took the book, nodded briskly, as if they’d reached some business arrangement in Dog Fenn.
Shekel’s demeanor changed when they left the galleon. He held himself cocky again, and swaggered a little as he walked, and even began to talk to Bellis