The Scar - China Mieville [67]
He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again. Tentatively he concluded that in this language, this particular clutch of letters meant boat, and this other set moon.
Shekel moved off slowly, making his way further from the Ragamoll section, picking up random works and gaping at their impenetrable stories, moving down the long corridors of children’s books until he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves.
He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another.
For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as these did now, only as mute objects with mass and dimension and color, but without content.
Though it was not quite the same. It was not the same to see these alien pages and know that they would have meaning to some foreign child, as The Courageous Egg and The History of New Crobuzon and The Wasp in a Wig now surrendered meaning to him.
He gazed at the books in Base and High Kettai and Sunglari and Lubbock and Khadohi with a kind of fascinated nostalgia for his own illiteracy, without for a fraction of a moment missing it.
Chapter Eleven
Silas was waiting for Bellis as she emerged from the Pinchermarn, the sun low over the sea. She saw him leaning back against a railing and watching for her.
He smiled when he saw her.
They ate together, and talked, gently fencing around one another. Bellis could not tell if it was him she was glad to see, or whether she had simply had enough of loneliness, but either way she welcomed his company.
He had a suggestion. It was the fourth Bookdi of Hawkbill. That was a scabmettler blood-day, and in Thee-And-Thine riding there was a major fight festival. Several of the best fighters from Shaddler riding were coming, to show their skills. Had she ever seen mortu crutt, or stampfighting?
Bellis took convincing. In New Crobuzon she had never visited Cadnebar’s glad circus, or any of its lesser imitators. The idea of watching such combat repelled her somewhat, and bored her more. Silas was insistent. Studying him, she realized that his desire to see these fights was not motivated by sadism or voyeurism: she did not know what did drive it, but it was less base than that. Or differently base, perhaps.
She also knew that he was eager for her to come with him.
To get to Thee-And-Thine, they passed over Shaddler riding, the scabmettler home. Their aircab moved sedately past a spindly tower of girders at the rear of the great iron Therianthropus, and on, star’d.
This was to be Bellis’ first time in Thee-And-Thine. It’s about time, she told herself with shame. She was committed to understanding the city, but her resolution risked waning and becoming a nebulous depression again.
The fighting ground was a little way fore of Thee-And-Thine’s flagship, a big clipper with sails sliced into decorative patterns, in the thick of the merchant riding’s backstreets. The arena was a ring of small vessels with benches laid in gradients on their decks, facing into the circle of sea. Opulent gondolas hung from dirigibles around the edges of the arena. These were the private boxes of the rich.
Tethered in the middle was the stage itself; it was a wooden platform, its edges studded with brass gas lamps to light it and barrels to keep it afloat. That was the fighting ground: a circle of refitted ships and balloons around a piece of driftwood.
With a flourish of money and a brief word, Silas freed up two seats in the front row.