The Scar - China Mieville [69]
“The liquid’s an infusion that slows coagulation. It allows them to shape the armor,” Silas whispered to Bellis. “Each warrior perfects his own pattern of cuts. That’s part of their skill. Quick-moving men cut themselves and direct the blood so as to leave their joints free, and they pare off excess armor. Slow, powerful ones coat themselves in scab until they’re as clumsy and heavily armored as constructs.”
Bellis did not want to speak.
The men’s grisly, careful preparations took time. Each of them sliced in turn at his face and chest and belly and thighs, and grew a unique integument of dried blood: hardened cuirasses and greaves and vambraces and helmets with irregular edges and coloration; random extrusions like lava flows, organic and mineral at once.
The laborious act of cutting turned Bellis’ stomach. The sight of that armor so carefully cultivated in pain astounded her.
After that cruel and beautiful preparation, the fight itself was as dull and unpleasant as Bellis had thought it would be.
The three scabmettlers circled each other, each wielding two fat scimitars. Encumbered by their bizarre armor, they looked like animals in outlandish plumage. But the armor was harder than wax-boiled leather, deflecting strokes from the weighted swords. After a long, sweaty battering, a clot of the stuff fell free from the forearm of one fighter, and the quickest man slashed out at him.
But scabmettler blood provided another defense. As the man’s flesh parted, his blood gushed out and over his enemy’s blade. Unthinned by anticoagulant, it set almost instantly as it met the air, in an ugly, unsculpted knot that grasped the scimitar’s metal like solder. The wounded man bellowed and spun, ripping the sword out of his opponent’s hand. It juddered absurdly in his wound.
The third man stepped in and cut his throat.
He moved with speed, at such an angle that although his blade was spattered with quick-setting gore, it was not trapped by the glacier of blood that bloomed and froze in the ragged hole.
Bellis was holding her breath with shock, but the defeated man did not die. He fell to his knees in obvious pain, but the rime of scab had immediately sealed his wound, saving him.
“You see how hard it is for them to die on that arena?” murmured Silas. “If you want to kill a scabmettler, use a club or a bludgeon, not a blade.” He looked briefly around him and then spoke intensely and quietly, his voice muffled by the spectators. “You’ve got to try to learn things, Bellis. You want to defeat Armada, don’t you? You want out? So you have to know where you are. Are you accumulating knowledge? Godspit, trust me, Bellis; this is what I do. Now you know how not to try to kill a scabmettler, right?”
She stared at him, eyes widening in astonishment, but his brutal logic made sense. He committed to nothing and collated everything. She imagined him doing the same thing in High Cromlech and The Gengris and Yoraketche, hoarding money and information and ideas and contacts, all of it raw material, all of it potentially a weapon or a commodity.
He was, she realized uneasily, more serious, far more serious, than she. He was preparing and planning all the time.
“You have to know,” he said. “And there’s more to come. There are some people you need to know.”
There were other scabmettler fights, all with their oddly stunted savagery: varieties of scab armor, different styles of combat all executed with the stylized movements and ostentation of mortu crutt.
And there were other contests, between humans and cactacae and all the nonaquatic races of the city—displays of stampfighting.
Combatants used the bottom of their clenched fists, as if they were banging a tabletop—a blow called a hammerpunch. They did not kick with the front of the foot but stamped with the base. They swept and pulled and tripped and slammed, moving with quick and jerky sinuosity.
Bellis watched minutes and minutes of broken noses, bruises, blackouts. The bouts blurred into one. She tried to see possibilities