The Scar

Chapter Twenty-three

They waited, silent: the Lover, Doul, Tintinnabulum, Hedrigall, and Bellis. And standing before their visitors, their faces cocked in what looked like polite confusion, were two anophelii.

Bellis was astonished by the two mosquito-men. She had expected something dramatic, skin discolored by chitin, stiff little wings like their women’s.

They looked like nothing more or less than small men, bent a little by age. Their ocher robes were discolored with dust and the stains of plants. The older man was balding, and the arms protruding from his sleeves were extraordinarily thin. They had no lips, no jawbones, no teeth. Their mouths were sphincters, tight little rings of muscle that looked exactly like anuses. The skin on all sides simply slid in toward that hole.

“Bellis,” said the Lover, her voice hard, “try again.”

They had entered the town to the stares and astonishment of the mosquito-men.

Disheveled and sweating and dust-blind, the Armadan landing party had stumbled the last yards up the hill into the sudden shade of houses cut and built into the sides of the gorge that split the rock. There was little apparent plan to the township: little square dwellings sprawled up on the main slopes, in the sun, and swept as if spilt down the steep edges of the fissure itself, linked by chiseled steps and pathways. The chimneys of submerged chambers poked like mushrooms from the earth around them.

The town was punctuated with engines reclaimed from Machinery Beach, each piece scrubbed clean of rust, in hundreds of obscure shapes. Some moved; some were still. Those in the sunlight glinted. None was powered by the noisy steam pistons of New Crobuzon and Armada; there was no oily smoke in the air. These were heliotropic engines, Bellis supposed, their paddles and blades whirring in the hard sunlight, their cracked glass housings sucking it up, sending arcane energies down the wires that linked random houses. The longer wires were knotted together, from whatever short lengths had been salvaged.

On their flat roofs, on the sides of the hills, in the shade of the narrow cleft itself, and from the canopies of the gnarled trees around the township, from doorways and windows, the mosquito-men turned to stare. There was no sound at all, no whoops or shouts or gasps. Nothing but the astonished gaze of all those eyes.

Once, Bellis (with a horrible spasm of fear) thought she saw the drifting, meandering flight of a she-anophelius over some of the higher-up buildings. But the males nearby turned and began to throw stones at the figure, driving it away before it had spotted the Armadans or entered any of the houses.

They reached a kind of square, ringed by the same dirt-colored houses and the skeletal sun-engines, where the crevice widened and admitted light from the baked blue sky. At the far end, Bellis saw a split in the rocks and a jutting cliff, a precipitous path down to the sea. And here, finally, someone came to meet them: a little delegation of nervous anophelii males, bowing and ushering them forward, into a great hall in the stone of the hills.

In an inner room, lit by immensely long bored shafts full of light, by mirrors that refracted the day and recycled it in the mountain, two anophelii had come to stand before them, bowing politely, and Bellis (remembering that day in Salkrikaltor City, different language but the same job), had come forward and greeted them in her clearest High Kettai.

The anophelii had stood still, their expressions quizzical, not understanding a word.

Bellis tried again to make sense in the stilted eloquence of High Kettai. The anophelii looked at each other and emitted hissing noises like farts.

Seeing their mouth-sphincters twitch and dilate, Bellis realized the truth, and she wrote, rather than spoke, the High Kettai words.

I am named Bellis, she wrote. We have come very, very far to speak to your people. Do you understand me?

When she handed the paper to the anophelii, their eyes opened wide and they looked at each other and crooned enthusiastically. The older man took Bellis’ pen.

I am Mauril Crahn, he wrote. It is scores of years since we have had visitors such as you. He looked up at her, his eyes crinkling. Welcome to our home.

The anophelii hooting tongue had no written form. For them High Kettai was written language, but they had never heard it spoken. They could express themselves perfectly in elegant script, but they had no idea how it would sound. The very concept of High Kettai “sounding” was alien to them.

Over scores or hundreds of years, a symbiosis had built up between the Samheri sailors and the Gnurr Kett authorities in Kohnid. The Samheri cactacae came to the island with livestock and a few trade goods, and took their cut as middlemen. Kohnid bought from them whatever the anophelii gave.

Between them, they controlled the flow of information to the mosquito-people. They had carefully ensured that no language other than High Kettai reached the island’s shores, and that none of the anophelii ever left it.

The terrible memories of the Malarial Queendom abided. Kohnid was playing a game, keeping the brilliant anophelii as pet thinkers; giving them nothing that might make them powerful, or let them escape-Kohnid would not risk unleashing the she-anophelii on the world again-but just enough to think with. The Kettai would not allow anophelii access to any information outside of its control: the centuries-long maintenance of High Kettai as the island’s written language ensured that. And that way, anophelii science and philosophy were in the hands of the Kohnid elite, who were almost alone in being able to read it.

The jigsaw pieces of ancient technology that the anophelii possessed, the works of their philosophers must be quite astonishing, thought Bellis, to allow this convoluted system to continue. Each Samheri journey from Kohnid to the island would bring with it a few carefully chosen books, and sometimes commissions. Given these conditions, some Kohnid theorist might demand, and remembering the paradox laid out in your previous essay, what is the answer to the following problem? And handwritten anophelii works, under chosen Kettai names, made the return journey, in response to such questions, or to problems posed by the anophelii themselves, to be printed by Kohnid publishers-without payment. Sometimes they were doubtless claimed by some Kettai scholar as his or her own work, all adding to the prestige of the High Kettai canon.

The mosquito-people had been reduced to captive scholars.

The island’s ruins housed old texts, in the High Kettai language the anophelii could read, or in long-dead codes they carefully broke. And with the slow accretion of the books from Kohnid, and the written records of their ancestors, the anophelii also pursued their own investigations. Sometimes such a resulting work was sent overseas to the island’s masters in Kohnid. It might even be published.

That was what had happened to Kruach Aum’s book.

Two thousand years ago, the mosquito-people had ruled the southern lands in a short-lived nightmare of blood and plague and monstrous thirst. Bellis did not know how much the anophelii men knew of their own history, but they had no illusions about the nature of their own womenfolk.

How many did you kill? wrote Crahn. How many of the women?

And when, after a hesitation, Bellis wrote One, he nodded and responded, That is not so many.

The township was without rank. Crahn was not a ruler. But he was eager to help, and to tell the guests everything they might want to know. The anophelii responded to the Armadans with a courteous, measured fascination, a contemplative, almost abstract reaction. In their phlegmatic response, Bellis detected an alien psychology.

Bellis wrote the Lover’s and Tintinnabulum’s questions as quickly as she could. They had not yet broached the most important subject, the very reason they were on this island, when they heard a ruckus from the other room where their companions waited. Loud voices in Sunglari, and responses in shouted Salt.

The Dreer Samher trader-pirates stationed on the island had returned to their ships and had discovered the newcomers. A gaudily adorned cactus-man strode into the little room followed by two of his erstwhile compatriots, now Armadan cactacae, angrily remonstrating with him in Sunglari.

“Sunshit!” he yelled in accented Salt. “Who the fuck are you?” He held a massive cutlass in one hand, hefting it angrily. “This island is Kohnid territory, and it’s forbidden to come here. We’re their agents here, and we’re authorized to protect their fucking holdings. Tell me why I shouldn’t have you fucking killed here and now.”

“Ma’am,” said one of the Armadan cactacae, waving his hand wearily in introduction. “This is Nurjhitt Sengka, captain of the Tetneghi Dustheart.”

“Captain,” said the Lover, stepping forward, Uther Doul moving behind her like her shadow. “It’s good to meet you. We must talk.”

Sengka was not a freebooter, but an official Dreer Samher pirate. The Samheri’s regular stationing on the island was monotonous and easy and dull: nothing happened, nobody came, nobody went. Every month, or two, or six, a new Samheri mission would arrive from Kohnid or Dreer Samher with a cargo full of livestock for the she-anophelii, and perhaps some random collection of commodities for the men. The newcomers would relieve their bored compatriots, letting them go off with whatever brilliant essays and reclaimed scientific refuse they had gathered to trade.

Whoever was stationed on the island spent their time bickering and fighting and betting amongst themselves, ignoring the mosquito-women, visiting the men only to take what they needed by way of food or machinery. And officially, they were there to police the flow of information into the island, the linguistic purity that gave Kohnid its stranglehold-and to stand in the way of any anophelii escape.

The idea was ridiculous; no one ever came to the island. Very few sailors knew of it. There were occasional very rare cases of lost vessels arriving on the shore, but their ignorant crews generally suffered rapid death at the hands of the island’s women.

And no anophelii ever left.

Formally, therefore, the Armadan newcomers’ presence on the island was not forbidden under the agreement between Dreer Samher and Kohnid. Only High Kettai was being used, after all, and nothing had been brought in to trade. But the presence of strangers who could converse with the natives was unprecedented.

Sengka looked wildly around. When he realized that these bizarre intruders came from the mysterious boat city of Armada, his eyes widened. But they were courteous and seemed keen to explain themselves. And although he cast angry glances at the cactus-people who had once been his countrymen, and hissed insults at them, called them traitors and pretended disdain for the Lover, he did listen, and he let himself be led back to the large room where the Armadan party waited.

And while the Lover and the cactus guards and Uther Doul moved away, Tintinnabulum came to Bellis’ side. He gathered his long, white hair in a ponytail, blocking her from the view of the others with his powerful shoulders and arms.

“Don’t stop now,” he murmured. “Get to the point.”

Crahn, she wrote.

For a brief moment, she felt slightly hysterical with the absurdity of this. If she set foot outside, she knew, she risked instant and unpleasant death. Those ravenous mosquito-women would find her before very long, a sack of blood like her; they’d smell her out and siphon every drop out of her, drain her as easily as turning a spigot.

Yet within these sheltering walls, only an hour since she had seen the carnage on the path, a dead anophelius burst on the heat-split skin and bones of the drained animals, she was asking polite questions of an attentive host in a long-dead language. She shook her head.

We are looking for one of your people, she wrote. We need to speak to him. This is greatly important. Do you know one named Kruach Aum?

Aum, he responded, no slower or quicker than before, without a shred more or less interest, who fishes for old books in ruins. All of us know Aum.

I can bring him to you.