The Scar - China Mieville [8]
Bellis sat on a container. So we’re off, then, she thought nervously. We’re heading out. We’re away.
The Terpsichoria had seemed busy while they were moored: someone was always scrubbing something, or raising a piece of machinery, or running from one end of the ship to the other. But now that sense of activity was increased by a huge factor.
Bellis squinted out across the maindeck, not yet ready to look at the sea.
The rigging teemed. Most of the sailors were human, but here and there a spined hotchi raced along rope crawlways and onto crow’s nests. On the decks men lugged containers and wound huge winches, shouting instructions in incomprehensible shorthand, threading chains onto fat flywheels. There were towering cactacae, too heavy and ungainly to climb rope but making up for that with their efforts below, with their strength, fibrous vegetable biceps bunching massively as they tugged and tied.
Officers in blue uniforms strode among them.
The wind blew across the ship, and the deck’s periscopic cowls crooned like dolorous flutes.
Bellis finished her cigarillo. She stood slowly and walked to the side, her eyes lowered, till she reached the rail and she looked up and out to sea.
There was no land at all.
Oh gods, look at it all, she thought in shock.
For the first time in her life, Bellis looked out across nothing but water.
Alone beneath a colossal rearing sky, anxiety welled up in her like bile. She wanted very much to be back in the alleys of her city.
Slicks of spume spread fast around the ship, disappearing and reappearing incessantly. The water moiled in intricate marbled surges. It shifted for the ship, as it would for a whale or a canoe or a fallen leaf, a dumb accommodation that it might overturn with any sudden swell.
It was a massive moronic child. Powerful and stupid and capricious.
Bellis cast her gaze about nervously, looking for any island, any jag of coastline. At that moment, there was none.
A cloud of seabirds trailed them, plunging for carrion in the vessel’s wake, spattering the deck and the foam with guano.
They sailed without stopping for two days.
Bellis felt almost stupefied with resentment that her journey was under way. She paced the corridors and decks, shut herself in her cabin. She watched blankly as the Terpsichoria passed rocks and tiny islands in the distance, illuminated by grey daylight or the moon.
Sailors scanned the horizon, oiling the large-bore guns. With hundreds of ill-charted islets and trading towns, with an unending number of ships supplying the insatiable commercial hole of New Crobuzon at one end, Basilisk Channel was plied by pirates.
Bellis knew that a ship this size with an ironclad hull and New Crobuzon’s colors flying would almost certainly not be preyed upon. The crew’s vigilance was only slightly unnerving.
The Terpsichoria was a merchant vessel. It was not built for passengers. There was no library, no drawing room, no games room. The passengers’ mess was a halfhearted effort, its walls bare but for a few cheap lithographs.
Bellis took her meals there sitting alone, monosyllabic to any pleasantries, while the other passengers sat below the dirty windows and played cards. Bellis watched them surreptitiously and intensely.
Back in her cabin, Bellis took endless stock of what she possessed.
She had left the city in a sudden hurry. She had very few clothes, in the austere style she favored: severe and black and charcoal. She had seven books: two volumes of linguistic theory; a primer in Salkrikaltor Cray; an anthology of short fiction in various languages; a thick, empty notebook; and copies of her own two monographs, High Kettai Grammatology and Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She had a few pieces of jewelry in jet and garnet and platinum; a small bag of cosmetics; ink and pens.
She spent hours adding details to her letter. She described the ugliness of the open seas, the harsh rocks