Shekel spent hours alone in the library, in the shelfscape of wood and vellum, gently rotting leather and paperdust. He kept to the Ragamoll section, surrounded by books that he pulled carefully down and opened around him, text and pictures like flowers on the floor. He slowly took in stories about ducks and poor boys who became kings, and battles against the trow, and the history of New Crobuzon.
He kept notes of every troublesome word whose sounds tried to evade him: Curious, saber, tough, Jhesshul, Krüach. He practiced them constantly.
As he wandered the shelves he kept his books with him, reshelving them at the end of the day not by the classmarks he did not understand, but by invented mnemonics that told him this one belonged between the big red and the small blue spines, and this one at the end, beside the volume with the picture of an airship.
There was one terrible panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.
But then he realized that he had taken a book from a shelf just to one side of the Ragamoll section; that it shared the alphabet that was now his, but pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share.
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. He talked continuously in a low voice that outlined the politics and personalities around them.
“That’s the vizier of Thee-And-Thine,” he would explain, “come to make up the money he lost at the start of the quarto.” “The woman over there with the veil never shows her face. She’s said to be on the Curhouse council.” His eyes moved constantly over the crowd.
Vendors sold food and spiced wine, and bookmakers shouted odds. The festival was unpretentious and profane, like most of what went on in Thee-And-Thine.
The crowd was not all human.
“Where are the scabmettlers?” Bellis said, and Silas began to point, seemingly randomly, around the arena. Bellis struggled to see what he saw: he was indicating humans, she thought, but their skin was blanched grey, and they looked squat and strong. Scarification marked their faces.
Bloodhorns sounded, and by chymical trickery the lights of the stage burst suddenly red. The crowd brayed enthusiastically. Two seats along from her, Bellis saw a woman whose physiognomy marked her as scabmettler. She did not cheer or shout, but sat still through the vulgar enthusiasm. Bellis could see other scabmettlers reacting similarly, waiting stolidly for the holy-day battles.
At least the general bloodlust was honest, she thought, contemptuous. There were enough scabmettler bookies to show that this was an industry, whatever the Shaddler elders might pretend.
Bellis realized wryly that she was tense to see what would happen. Excited.
When the first three fighters were ferried over to the arena, the crowd fell silent. The scabmettler men stepped onto the platform, naked except for loincloths, and stood in a triangle back-to-back in the center.
They were poised, all of them well muscled, their grey skin pallid in the gas jets.
One of the men seemed to be facing her directly. He must have been blinded by the lights, but still she entertained the fancy that it was a private performance for her.
The fighters kneeled and washed themselves, each from a bowl of steaming infusion the color of green tea. Bellis saw leaves and buds in it.
Then she started. From their bowls each man had pulled out a knife. They held them still and dripping. They were recurved, the cutting edge curling like a hook or a talon. Skinning knives. Something with which to score, to pare off flesh.
“Is that what they fight with?” she turned to Silas to ask, but the sudden mass gasp from the crowd pulled her attention back to the stage. Her own cry came an instant later.
The scabmettlers were carving furrows in their own flesh.
The fighter right before Bellis was tracing the outlines of his muscles in wicked strokes. He hooked the knife under the skin of his shoulder, the
n curled around with surgical precision, drawing a red line that linked deltoid and biceps.
The blood seemed to hesitate for a second, then to blossom, an eructation of it, bursting out from the fissure like boiling water, pouring out of him in great gouts, as if the pressure in his veins was immeasurably greater than in Bellis’. It raced across the man’s skin in a macabre slick, and he turned his arm expertly this way and that, channeling his own blood according to some design Bellis could not see. She watched, waiting for a cascade of gore to foul the stage, which did not happen, and her breath stopped in her throat as she saw that the blood was setting.
It poured in great oozing washes from the man’s wounds, the substance of the blood crawling over itself to reach higher, and she saw that the edges of the wound were crusted with embankments of clotting blood, vast accretions of the stuff, the red turning swiftly brown and blue and black, and freezing in crystalline jags that jutted inches from his skin.
The blood that ran down his arm was setting also, expanding at an impossible rate and changing color like vivid mold. Shards of scab matter frosted into place like salt or ice.
He dipped his knife again in the green liquid and continued to cut, as did his fellows behind him. He grimaced against the pain. Where he sliced the blood exploded, and coursed along the runnels in his anatomy, and set hard in an abstract armor.
“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 in everything, tried to hoard what she saw, as she sensed Silas was doing.
Little waves lapped over the edges of the stage, and she wondered when this display would end.
Bellis heard a rhythmic, pounding sound in the crowd.
At first it was a murmur, a repeated murmur that beat below the susurrus of the spectators like a heartbeat. But it gathered strength, and became louder and more insistent, and people began to look around and to smile, and to join their voices to it with increasing excitement.
“Yes . . .” said Silas, stretching out the word with a hard delight. “Finally. This is what I wanted to see.”
At first Bellis heard the sound like it was drums, spoken drums. Then suddenly as an exclamation—Oh, Oh, Oh—repeated in perfect time, accompanied by banging arms and kicking feet.
It was only when the frenzy spread to her own boat that she realized it was a word.
“Doul.” It came from all around her. “Doul, Doul, Doul.”
A name.
“What are they saying?” she hissed to Silas.
“They’re calling for someone,” he said, his eyes scanning the surrounds. “They want a display. They’re demanding a fight from Uther Doul.”
He gave her a quick, cold smile.
“You’ll recognize him,” he said. “You’ll know him when you see him.”
And then the percussion of the name broke down into cheers and applause, an ecstatic wave of it that grew and grew as one of the little dirigibles tethered to the rigging cast off and drew slowly closer to the stage. Its crest was a steamer against a red moon, the sigil of Garwater. The gondola below it was polished wood.
“It’s the Lovers’ carriage,” Silas said. “They’re giving up their lieutenant for a moment, another ‘spontaneous’ display. I knew he couldn’t resist.”
Sixty feet above the arena, a rope spilled down from the airborne craft. The shrieks from the spectators were extraordinary. With great speed and skill, a man leaped from the vessel and slipped, hand over hand, to the blood-spattered fighting ground.
He stood, shoeless and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of leather britches. With his arms relaxed by his sides he rotated slowly to take in the crowd (frenzied now that he had touched down to fight). And as he turned his face swept slowly over Bellis’, and she gripped the rail in front of her, her breath catching momentarily, recognizing the crop-haired man, the man in grey, the murderer who had taken Terpsichoria.
By some goading, a clutch of men were blandished into fighting him.
Doul—the sad-faced butcher of Captain Myzovic—did not move, did not stretch or bounce or pull his muscles this way or that. He merely stood waiting.
Four opponents stood ill at ease on
the edge of the arena. They were buoyed on the audience’s enthusiasm, shouts and raging washing over them as they shifted and murmured tactics to each other.
Doul’s face was set absolutely blank. When his rivals fanned out opposite him, he dropped slowly into stampfighting stance, his arms slightly raised, his knees bent, looking quite relaxed.
In the first brutal, astonishing seconds, Bellis did not even breathe. One hand to her mouth, her lips pursed shut. Then she emitted little gasps of astonishment with the rest of the crowd.
Uther Doul did not seem to live in the same time as anyone else. He seemed like some visitor to a world much more gross and sluggish than his own. Despite the bulk of his body, he moved with such speed that even gravity seemed to operate more quickly for him.
There was nothing spare to his movements. As he shifted from stamp to hammerpunch to block, his limbs slipped from one poise, one state, to the next by the most utterly seamless and pared-down routes, like machines.
Doul slapped open-handed, and one man went down; he stepped sideways and, poised on one leg, kicked twice to another’s solar plexus, then used the raised leg to block the attack of the third. He spun and shoved without flourish, with brutal precision, dispatching his rivals at his ease.
He took the last one with a throw, scooping his arm from the air and hugging it tight to him, pulling the man after his trapped limb. Doul seemed to roll through the air, preparing his body as he fell, landing astride the other’s back, pinioning his arm and immobilizing him.
There was a long silence, and then a rapture burst from the crowd like blood from a scabmettler, a tide of applause and cheers.
Bellis watched, and went cold, and held her breath again.
The fallen men raised themselves, or were dragged off, and Uther Doul stood, breathing heavily but rhythmically, his arms held very slightly out, the ridges of his muscles running with sweat and other men’s blood.