Perdido Street Station (12 page)

The fair was where
normal rules were briefly forgotten, where bankers and thieves
mingled to
ooh,
scandalized and titillated. Even Lin’s
less outrageous sisters would come to the fair.

One of her early
memories was of creeping past ranks of gaudy tents to stand next to
some terrifying, dangerous, multicoloured ride, some giant wheel at
the Gallmarch Fair twenty years ago. Someone—she never knew
who, some khepri passer-by, some indulgent stallholder—had
handed her a toffee-apple, which she had eaten reverentially. One of
her few pleasant memories of childhood, that sugared fruit.

Lin sat back and waited
for her friends to finish their preparations. She sucked sweet tea
from her sponge and thought of that candied apple. She waited
patiently to go to the fair.

"Come try, come
try, come try your luck!"

"Ladies, ladies,
tell yer fellers to win you a bouquet!"

"Spin in the
Whirligig! It’ll spin your mind!"

"Your likeness
affected in only four minutes! No faster portraiture in the world!"

"Experience the
hypnagogic mesmerism of Sillion the Extraordinary!"

"Three rounds,
three guineas! Stand for three rounds against ‘Iron Man’
Magus and take home three Gs! No cactus-people."

The night air was thick
with noise. The challenges, the shouts, the invitations and
temptations and dares sounded around the laughing party like bursting
balloons. Gasjets, mixed with select chymicals, burnt red, green,
blue and canary yellow. The grass and paths of Sobek Croix were
sticky with spilt sugar and sauce. Vermin scampered from the skirts
of stalls into the dark bushes of the park clutching choice morsels.
Gonophs and cutpurses slipped predatory through the crowds like fish
through weeds. Indignant roars and violent cries sounded in their
wake.

The crowd was a moving
stew of human and vodyanoi, cactus, khepri, and other, rarer breeds:
hotchi and strider and stiltspear and races the names of which Isaac
did not know.

A few yards out from
the fair, the darkness of the grass and trees was absolute. The
bushes and boughs were fringed with bunting of ragged paper,
discarded and ensnared and slowly shredded by the wind. Paths
criss-crossed the park, leading to lakes and flower beds and acres of
untended growth, and the old monastic ruins at the centre of the huge
common.

Lin and Cornfed, Isaac
and Derkhan and all the others strolled past enormous contraptions of
bolted steel, garishly painted iron and hissing lights. Delighted
squeals sounded from little cars swinging on flimsy-looking chains
above them. A hundred different manically cheerful tunes sounded from
a hundred engines and organs, an unsettling cacophony that ebbed and
flowed around them.

Alex munched honeyed
nuts; Bellagin salted meat; Thighs Growing a watery mulch delicious
to cactus-people. They threw food at each other, caught it in their
mouths.

The park was thronging
with punters, throwing hoops over poles, firing children’s bows
at targets, guessing under which cup the coin was hidden. Children
screamed with pleasure and misery. Prostitutes of all races, sexes
and descriptions sashayed exaggeratedly between the stalls or stood
by the beerhalls, winking at passers-by.

**

The party disintegrated
slowly as they passed into the heart of the fair. They hovered a
minute while Cornfed showed off his archery. He ostentatiously
offered his prizes, two dolls, to Alex and a young, beautiful whore
who cheered his triumph. The three disappeared arm in arm through the
crowd. Tarrick proved adept at a fishing game, pulling three live
crabs from a big swirling tub. Bellagin and Spint had their futures
read in the cards, squealing in terror when the bored witch turned
over The Snake and The Old Crone in succession. They demanded a
second opinion from a wide-eyed scarabomancer. She gazed theatrically
at the images skittering across the carapaces of her pattern beetles
as they bumbled through their sawdust.

Isaac and the others
left Bellagin and Spint behind. The remnants of the party turned a
corner beside the Wheel of Destiny and a roughly fenced-off section
of the park came into view. Inside a line of small tents curved away
from view. Above the gateway was a crudely painted legend:
the
circus of weird.

"Now," said
Isaac ponderously. "Reckon I might have a little look at
this..."

"Plumbing the
depths of human squalor, ‘Zaac?" asked a young artist’s
model whose name Isaac could not remember. Besides Lin, Isaac and
Derkhan, only a few others of the original group were left. They
looked mildly surprised at Isaac’s choice.

"Research,"
Isaac said grandly. "Research. Fancy joining me, Derkhan? Lin?"

The others took the
hint with reactions ranging from careless waves to petulant flounces.
Before they all disappeared, Lin signed rapidly to Isaac.

Not interested in
this. Teratology more your thing. Meet you at the entrance in two
hours?

Isaac nodded briefly
and squeezed her hand. She signed goodbye to Derkhan and trotted off
to catch up with a sound-artist whose name Isaac had never known.

Derkhan and Isaac
stared at each other.

"...and then there
were two," sung Derkhan, a snatch of a children’s counting
song about a basket of kittens that died, one by one, grotesquely.

There was an additional
charge to enter the Circus of Weird, which Isaac paid. Though hardly
empty, the freakshow was less crowded than the main body of the fair.
The more monied the punters inside looked, the more furtive their
air.

The freakshow brought
out the voyeur in the populace and the hypocrisy in the gentry.

There seemed to be some
kind of tour starting, which promised to view each exhibit in the
Circus in turn. The bawls of the showman bade the assembled stick
close together and prepare themselves for sights such as mortal eyes
were not meant to see.

Isaac and Derkhan hung
back a little and followed the troupe. Isaac saw that Derkhan had a
notebook out and a pen poised.

The bowler-hatted
Master of Ceremonies approached the first tent.

"Ladies and
gents," he whispered loudly and huskily, "in this tent
lurks the most remarkable and terrifying creature ever seen by mortal
man. Or vodyanoi, or cactus, or whatever," he added in a normal
voice, nodding graciously to the few xenians in the crowd. He
returned to his bombastic tones. "Originally described fifteen
centuries ago in the travelogues of Libintos the Sage, of what was
then just plain ol’ Crobuzon. On his trips south to the burning
wastes, Libintos saw many marvellous and monstrous things. But none
more terrifying than the awesome...mafadet!"

Isaac had been sporting
a sardonic smile. But even he joined the mass gasp.

Have they really got
a mafadet?
he thought as the MC drew back the curtain from the
front of the little tent. He pushed forward to see.

There was another,
louder gasp, and people at the front fought to move back. Others
shoved to take their place.

Behind thick black
bars, tethered by heavy chains, was an extraordinary beast. It lay on
the ground, its huge dun body like a massive lion’s. Between
its shoulders was a fringe of denser fur from which sprouted an
enormous serpentine neck, thicker than a man’s thigh. Its
scales glistened an oily, ruddy tan. An intricate pattern wound up
the top of that curling neck, expanding to a diamond shape where it
curved and became an enormous snake’s head.

The mafadet’s
head lolled on the ground. Its huge forked tongue nicked in and out.
Its eyes glistened like jet.

Isaac grabbed Derkhan.

"It’s a
fucking
mafadet,
" he hissed in amazement. Derkhan nodded,
wide-eyed.

The crowd had drawn
back from the front of the cage. The showman grabbed a barbed stick
and poked it through the bars, goading the enormous desert creature.
It gave forth a deep, rumbling hiss and batted pathetically at its
tormentor with a massive forepaw. Its neck coiled and twisted in
desultory misery.

There were small
screams from the crowd. People surged at the little barrier before
the cage.

"Back, ladies and
gents, back, I beg of you!" The showman’s voice was
pompous and histrionic. "You are all in mortal danger! Don’t
anger the beast!"

The mafadet hissed
again under his continued torments. It wriggled backwards along the
floor, crawling out of range of the vicious spike.

Isaac’s awe was
waning fast.

The exhausted animal
squirmed in undignified agony as it sought the rear of the cage. Its
threadbare tail lashed the stinking goat carcass presumably provided
for its nourishment. Dung and dust stained the mafadet’s pelt,
along with blood that oozed thickly from numerous sores and nicks.
Its sprawled body twitched a little as that cold, blunt head rose on
the powerful muscles of the snake-neck.

The mafadet hissed and,
as the crowd hissed in turn, its wicked jaws unhinged. It tried to
bare its teeth.

Isaac’s face
curled.

Broken stubs jutted
from the creature’s gums where cruel fangs a foot long should
have glinted. They had been smashed out of its mouth, Isaac realized,
for fear of its murderous, poisonous bite.

He gazed at the broken
monster whipping the air with its black tongue. It laid its head back
down.

"Jabber’s
arse," Isaac whispered to Derkhan with pity and disgust. "Never
thought I’d feel sorry for something like that."

"Makes you wonder
what state the garuda’s going to be in," Derkhan replied.

The barker was
hurriedly drawing the curtain on the miserable creature. As he did so
he told the crowd the story of Libintos’s trial by poison at
the hands of the Mafadet King.

Nursery tales, cant,
lies and showmanship,
thought Isaac contemptuously. He realized
that the crowd had only been given a snatch of a view, a minute or
less.
Less chance anyone will notice how moribund the poor thing
is,
he mused.

He could not help but
imagine the mafadet in full health. The immense weight of that tawny
body padding through the hot dry scrub, the lightning strike of the
venomous bite.

Garuda circling above,
blades flashing.

The crowd were being
shepherded towards the next enclosure. Isaac was not listening to the
roar of the guide. He was watching Derkhan jot quick notes.

"This for
RR
?"
whispered Isaac.

Derkhan looked around
them quickly.

"Maybe. Depends
what else we see."

"What we’ll
see," hissed Isaac furiously, dragging Derkhan with him as he
caught sight of the next exhibit, "is pure human viciousness! I
fucking despair, Derkhan!"

He had stopped a little
way behind a group of dawdlers who were gazing at a child born
without eyes, a fragile, bony human girl who cried out wordlessly and
waved her head at the sound of the crowd.
she sees with inner
sight!
proclaimed the sign over her head. Some before the cage
were cackling and yelling at her.

"Godspit,
Derkhan..." Isaac shook his head. "Look at them tormenting
that poor creature..."

As he spoke, a couple
turned from the exhibited child with disgust in their faces. They
turned as they left and spat behind them at the woman who had laughed
the loudest.

"It
turns,
Isaac," said Derkhan quietly. "It turns quickly."

**

The tour guide strode
the path between the rows of little tents, stopping here and there at
choice horrors. The crowd was breaking apart. Little clots of people
milled away under their own volition. At some tents they were stopped
by attendants, who waited until a sufficient number had congregated
before unveiling their hidden pieces. At others the punters walked
right in, and shouts of delight and shock and disgust would emanate
from within the grubby canvas.

Derkhan and Isaac
wandered into a long enclosure. Above the entrance was a sign
rendered in ostentatious calligraphy.
A panoply of wonders!
Do You
dare enter the museum of hidden things?

"Do we dare,
Derkhan?" muttered Isaac as they passed into the warm dusty
darkness within.

The light ebbed slowly
into their eyes from the corner of the makeshift room. The cotton
chamber was full of cabinets in iron and glass, stretching out before
them. Candles and gasjets burned in niches, filtered through lenses
that concentrated them into dramatic spots, illuminating the bizarre
displays. Punters meandered from one to another, murmuring, laughing
nervously.

Isaac and Derkhan
wandered slowly past jars of yellowing alcohol in which broken body
parts floated. Two-headed foetuses and sections of a kraken’s
arm. A deep red shining jag that could have been a Weaver’s
claw, or could have been a burnished carving; eyes that spasmed and
lived in jars of charged liquid; intricate, infinitesimal paintings
on ladybirds’ backs, visible only through magnifying lenses; a
human skull scuttling in its cage on six insectile brass legs. A nest
of rats with intertwined tails that took it in turns to scrawl
obscenities on a little blackboard. A book made of pressed feathers.
Druds’ teeth and a narwhal’s horn.

Derkhan scribbled
notes. Isaac gazed avariciously about him at the charlatanism and
cryptoscience.

They left the museum.
To their right was Anglerina, Queen of the Deepest Sea; to their left
Bas-Lag’s Oldest Cactus-Man.

"I’m getting
depressed," said Derkhan.

Isaac agreed.

"Let’s find
the Bird-Man Chief of the Wild Desert quickly, and fuck off. I’ll
buy you some candyfloss."

They wound through the
ranks of the deformed and obese, the bizarrely hirsute and the small.
Isaac suddenly pointed above them, at the sign that had come into
view.