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

The north bank of the Gross Tar is wilder.

It is a long expanse of scrub and marsh. It stretches out for more than eighty miles, till the foothills and
low mountains that creep at it from the west cover it completely. Ringed by the river, the mountains, and
the sea, the rocky scrubland is an empty place. If there are inhabitants other than the birds, they stay out
of sight.

Bellis Coldwine took her passage on an east-bound boat in the last quarter of the year, at a time of
constant rain. The fields she saw were cold mud. The half-bare trees dripped. Their silhouettes looked
wetly inked onto the clouds.

Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories.

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The Scar


She could recall the formation of a flock of geese that passed over the boat, barking; the stench of sap
and earth; the slate shade of the sky. She remembered searching the hedgerow with her eyes but seeing
no one. Only threads of woodsmoke in the soaking air, and squat houses shuttered against weather.

The subdued movement of greenery in the wind.

She had stood on the deck enveloped in her shawl and watched and listened for childrenтАЩs games or
anglers, or for someone tending one of the battered kitchen gardens she saw. But she heard only feral
birds. The only human forms she saw were scarecrows, their rudimentary features impassive.

It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like infection. She had felt tethered by
time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the
farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.

And then they had snapped, and she had found herself catapulted here, now, alone and away from home.

Much later, when she was miles from everything she knew, Bellis would wake, astonished that it was
not the city itself, her home for more than forty years, that she dreamed of. It was that little stretch of
river, that weatherbeaten corridor of country that had surrounded her for less than half a day.


In a quiet stretch of water, a few hundred feet from the rocky shore of Iron Bay, three decrepit ships
were moored. Their anchors were rooted deep in silt. The chains that attached them were scabbed with
years of barnacles.

They were unseaworthy, smeared bitumen-black, with big wooden structures built precariously at the
stern and bow. Their masts were stumps. Their chimneys were cold and crusted with old guano.

The ships were close together. They were ringed with buoys strung together with barbed chain, above
and below the water. The three old vessels were enclosed in their own patch of sea, unmoved by any
currents.

They drew the eye. They were watched.