"China Mieville - The Scar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

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.

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 The Scar



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 vesselтАЩs 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 theTerpsichoria 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 CrobuzonтАЩs colors flying would almost
certainly not be preyed upon. The crewтАЩs vigilance was only slightly unnerving.

TheTerpsichoria was a merchant vessel. It was not built for passengers. There was no library, no
drawing room, no games room. The passengersтАЩ 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.