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

In another ship some distance away, Bellis raised herself to her porthole and looked out at them, as she
had done several times over the previous hours. She folded her arms tight below her breasts and bent
forward toward the glass.

Her berth seemed quite still. The movement of the sea beneath her was slow and slight enough to be
imperceptible.

The sky was flint-grey and sodden. The shoreline and the rock hills that ringed Iron Bay looked worn

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 The Scar

and very cold, patched with crabgrass and pale saline ferns.

Those wooden hulks on the water were the darkest things visible.

Bellis sat slowly back on her bunk and picked up her letter. It was written like a diary; lines or
paragraphs separated by dates. As she read over what she had last written she opened a tin box of
prerolled cigarillos and matches. She lit up and inhaled deeply, pulling a fountain pen from her pocket
and adding several words in a terse hand before she breathed the smoke away.

Skullday 26th Rinden 1779. Aboard theTerpsichoria

It is nearly a week since we left the mooring in Tarmuth, and I am glad to have gone. It is an ugly,
violent town.

I spent my nights in my lodgings, as advised, but my days were my own. I saw what there was to the
place. It is ribbon-thin, a strip of industry that juts a mile or so north and south of the estuary, split by the
water. Every day, the few thousand residents are joined by huge numbers who come from the city at
dawn, making their way from New Crobuzon in boat- and cartloads to work. Every night the bars and
bordellos are full of foreign sailors on brief shore leave.

Most reputable ships, I am told, travel the extra miles to New Crobuzon itself, to unload in the Kelltree
docks. Tarmuth docks have not worked at more than half-capacity for two hundred years. It is only
tramp steamers and freebooters that unload thereтАФtheir cargoes will end up in the city just the same, but
they have neither the time nor the money for the extra miles and the higher duty imposed by official
channels.

There are always ships. Iron Bay is full of shipsтАФbreaking off from long journeys, sheltering from the
sea. Merchant boats from Gnurr Kett and Khadoh and Shankell, on their way to or from New Crobuzon,
moored near enough Tarmuth for their crews to relax. Sometimes, far out in the middle of the bay, I saw
seawyrms released from the bridles of chariot-ships, playing and hunting.

The economy of Tarmuth is more than prostitution and piracy. The town is full of industrial yards and
sidings. It lives as it has for centuries, on the building of ships. The shoreline is punctuated with scores
of shipyards, building slipways like weird forests of vertical girders. In some loom ghostly half-
completed vessels. The work is ceaseless, loud, and filthy.

The streets are crisscrossed with little private railways that take timber or fuel or whatever from one side