The Scar - China Mieville [7]
She watched the night until the last lines of division between shore, sea, and sky were obscured. Then, cosseted by darkness, she walked slowly aft, toward the constricted doorways and stooped passages leading to her cabin, a scrap of space like a flaw in the ship’s design.
(Later the ship moved uneasily, in the coldest hour, and she stirred in her bunk and she pulled the blanket up to her neck, and she realized somewhere below her dreams that the living cargo was coming aboard.)
I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus.
My skin’s taut with it, stretched till it puckers nor can I touch it without it rages. I’m infected. I hurt where I touch and I touch everywhere to make sure that I hurt that I’m not yet numb.
But still thank whatever makes these veins mine I’m full of blood. I worry my scabs and they brim I brim with it. And that’s a small comfort nor mind the pain.
They come for us when the air’s so still and black without not a seabird cries. They open our doors and shine lights, uncovering us. I am almost ashamed to see how we have surrendered, we’ve surrendered up to filth.
I can see nothing beyond their lights.
Where we lie together they beat us apart, and I wrap my arms around the spastic matter that twitches in my midriff as they begin to herd us.
We wind through tarry passages and engine chambers and I’m all cold to know what this is for. And I’m more eager, I’m quicker than some of the old ones bent double coughing and spewing and afraid to move.
And then there’s a swallowing up, I’m eaten up by the cold gulped down by darkness and gods fuck me blind we are outside.
Outside.
I’m dumb with it. I’m dumb with wonder.
It has been a long time.
We huddle together, each against the next man like troglodytes like myopic trow. They’re cowed by it the old ones, by the lack of walls and edges and the movement of the cold, by water and air.
I might cry gods help me. I might.
All black on black but still I can see hills and water and I can see clouds. I can see the prisons on all sides bobbing a little like fishermen’s floats. Jabber take us all I can see clouds.
Bugger me I’m crooning like I soothe a baby. That’s for me that coddling noise.
And then they push us on like livestock shuffling rattling chains, dripping farting muttering astonished, across the deck crippled under the weight of bodies and fetters, to a swaying rope bridge. And they hurry us along and over it, all our number, and each man pauses a moment in the middle of the low-slung passage between vessels, their thoughts visible and bright like a chymical burst.
They consider leaping.
Into the water of the bay.
But the rope walls around the bridge are high and there’s barbed wire hemming us in and our poor bodies are sore and weak and each man falters, and continues, and crosses the water to a new ship.
I pause like the others in my turn. Like them I’m too afraid.
And then there’s a new deck underfoot, scrubbed iron smooth and clean, vibrating from engines, and more corridors and clattering keys and after all another long unlit room where we collapse exhausted and changed over and raise ourselves slowly to see who our new neighbors are. Around me begin the hissed arguments and bickerings and fights and seductions and rapes that make up our politics. New alliances are formed. New hierarchies.
I sit apart for a while, in the shadows.
I’m still caught in that moment when I entered the night. It’s like amber. I’m a grub in amber. It snares me and damn but it does it makes me beautiful.
I’ve a new home now. I’ll live in that moment as long as I can, till the memories decay and then I’ll come out, I’ll come to this new place we sit in.
Somewhere pipes are banging like great hammers.
Chapter Two
Outside of Iron Bay, the sea was hard. Bellis woke to its slapping assault. She quit the cabin, picking her way past Sister Meriope, who was vomiting with what Bellis did not believe was just seasickness.
Bellis emerged into wind, and a great