The Scar (48 page)

Ironclads and scouts mill solicitous and useless around it, drones around a dying queen. Under renewed onslaught from the remnants of the Armadan fleet, but most of all under the unexpected and suicidal attacks of all those refitted steamers, the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts are, one by one, being destroyed.

From the raised deck above the
Grand Easterly
, the man screams in unheard horror.

The man tenses and kisses his statue with a fervent frenzy, then prepares to leap out and down, folding space a little, and land on that frigate below, which is rumbling and gearing up to leave. But he stops as a terrible realization shakes him.

He watches the last two dreadnoughts quiver under the attacks and fire their vicious guns at their tormentors. And even though those retaliations cost several Armadan vessels, the ugly explosions that rock the dreadnoughts’ flanks continue until the Crobuzoner vessels go down.

The invaders’ coal has been sunk. The man watches, quite numb. There is no point now in him jumping ship or swimming out for his home vessels. Even if the Armadans do not destroy every single ship, even if one or two fast-running ironclads escape, this is the middle of the Swollen Ocean, uncharted waters, almost two thousand miles from the nearest land and twice that far to home. Within a few hundred miles their boilers will grow cold, and the Crobuzoner vessels will be calmed.

They have no sails. They will rot and die.

There is no hope for them.

This rescue has failed. The man is still trapped.

He looks down and realizes with a dull shock that he has slipped back into phase with Bellis’ space. If she turned now, she would see him. He mouths the statue again, numbly, and disappears.

Dusk fell, and finally the Dry Fall dirigibles lifted off, each containing its murderous crew. They sailed low and fast over the last dregs of battle, their vampir passengers ready. Long tongues flickered in the night air as the ab-dead prepared to hurl themselves into any fray.

They were too late. The fight was over.

The airships meandered pointlessly over water fouled with coaldust and twisted metal and acid and oil, and here and there the shimmering residue of rockmilk, and sap, and many gallons of blood.

Chapter Thirty-seven

At first the city welled up with exhausted delight, a kind of ragged, wounded euphoria.

It did not last long. In the days that followed, Bellis was acutely conscious of silence; Armada was endlessly quiet. It started after the battle, when the roars of triumph died out and the scale of devastation became clear.

Bellis had not slept in the night after the carnage. She stumbled out with the dawn, with thousands of other citizens, and walked, dumb, across the city. The skyline she knew was broken in strange new ways. Ships in which she had bought paper, or drunk tea, or walked across, unthinking, a hundred times, were gone.

Croom Park was quite untouched. The
Chromolith
, the
Tolpandy
, the
Grand Easterly
itself were quite whole.

Many times in the days that followed, Bellis would turn a corner in some backstreet maze—or cross a wooden bridge, or come into a well-lit plaza—and see people crying, mourning the dead. Some were staring at one piece or another of the damage to their city—a blank, wave-flecked hole where their home ship had been, a shattered mess of a marketplace, a church crushed by fallen masts.

It was quite unfair, Bellis thought nervously, that so few of her own haunts had been harmed. By what right was that? She, after all, did not even care.

A huge number of Armadans had died. Several members of the Curhouse Council and Queen Braginod of Jhour were among them. The Council voted in replacements, and the stewardship of Jhour passed quietly to Braginod’s brother, Dynich. No one cared, particularly. Armada had left thousands of bodies in the sea.

People stared at the
Sorghum
, muttering that it was not worth it.

Bellis wandered through the brutalized cityscape as if she were dreaming. Even where no shells had fallen, the stresses caused by the bucking sea had ruined architecture. Arches were shattered, their keystones now resting on the ocean floor. There had been fires; narrow streets had crumbled, the rows of houses that seemed to lean into each other shifting, touching, their roofs cracking and collapsing. The city seemed to tremble with kinds of damage that would have been impossible on land.

As she wandered, Bellis heard hundreds of stories: exaggerated tales of heroism and ghoulish descriptions of injuries. She began to dig for specific information, tentatively. Moved by curiosity she did not understand (feeling in those hours like an automaton, moving without her own consent), Bellis asked what had happened to the other passengers from the
Terpsichoria
.

There were conflicting stories about the Cardomiums. Bellis heard about those crewmen still imprisoned, their commitment to Armada not yet trusted, having failed to make peace with their press-ganging. She heard that there had been an almighty ruckus from the prison ships in the fore of Garwater when the shelling began, and that the imprisoned men had screamed and screamed for their compatriots to come for them.

The boarders, of course, had never come close, and the shouts had gone unanswered.

Sister Meriope was dead. Bellis was shocked by that—in a horrible, abstract way—as if at seeing an unexpected color. In the chaos, she heard, several prisoners had escaped from the asylum, Meriope among them. The massively pregnant nun had made her way to the city’s aft edge, where she had run toward the New Crobuzon boarding party, shouting ecstatic greetings, and been shot down. It was impossible to tell whose guns had killed her.

That was the kind of story that Bellis heard again and again—the press-ganged who, faced with what seemed a sudden chance to go home, had tried desperately to switch sides in the battle, and had died. Several of those from the
Terpsichoria
had been killed in such a way, it seemed. And even if their numbers were exaggerated, even if the details were embellished as a moral caution about disloyalty, Bellis was sure that many must have died as described.

It was obvious to Bellis—no great revelation—that her safety would have been very, very far from secure had she sought refuge with the New Crobuzon troops. She had decided long ago that her return to her city would have to be her own doing. Bellis knew how little her government would care about her survival. She had fled them, after all, and for good reasons.

During the fighting, Bellis had felt paralyzed, had been numb to any kind of desire for one side or the other to win. She had watched like a chance spectator at a bloody prizefight. Now that Armada had triumphed, she felt no relief or happiness, nor any despair.

After the destruction of the dreadnoughts, the other Crobuzoner ships had sailed away to the northwest. They fled in a panic, too terrified to surrender, to beg quarter from the Armadans. They escaped, pretending that there was some hope for them, that they might make it to a port. Everyone knew that their crews would die.

Three Crobuzoner ironclads and a frigate were captured. Instantly, they became the most advanced ships in Armada, but still they were hardly recompense for the scores of vessels that Armada had lost. A good portion of its fleet, two submersibles, and half the hastily rebuilt steamers had been sacrificed to destroy the dreadnoughts. The
Trident
and tens of smaller airships were gone. The massive aeroflot had been weighed down by golems like attacking rats, brought into the rage of fire that had taken its hide and burst its skeleton.

Armadans had taken many hours to return to their city, paddling in their life rafts, swimming, clinging to debris. The thaumaturges and engineers in the base of the
Grand Easterly
kept the avanc slow for more than a day. It had made its dumb way on, untroubled by the murderous chaos above it.

Inevitably, some of those who reached the city were New Crobuzon troops. Perhaps an enterprising few stole the clothes off Armadan corpses and simply hauled themselves aboard into a new life—as sailors, all spoke at least passable Salt. But most were too traumatized to calculate like that, and in the hours after the battle, Crobuzoner sailors began to appear on the decks of Armada in sodden, ruined uniforms, miserable with fear. Their dread of drowning was stronger than that of Armadan revenge.

In those ruined days immediately after the war, under red- and black-smoked skies, those terrified Crobuzoner sailors caused a political crisis. Of course, in their rage of loss, the Armadans punished their bedraggled captives. The newcomers were beaten and whipped—some to death—while their tormentors howled the names of dead friends. But eventually weariness, disgust, and numbness set in, and the Crobuzoners were taken away and held on the
Grand Easterly
. After all, Armada’s history was built on the assimilation of strangers and enemies—after any battle, any time a ship was taken.

This had been a more violent, a more terrible set of circumstances than any in the city’s past, but still, there was no question as to what must be done with captured enemies. As with the
Terpsichoria
, those who could be won over were to be made Armadans.

Only this time, the Lovers said otherwise.

The Lovers had come back from the fighting enraged and elyctric, exhilarated, scarred all anew with random markings that did not match each other’s (something they would fix over the nights to come). The whole riding, the whole city, was shocked when the news leaked that the Lovers intended to have the Crobuzoners cast out.

At a hastily convened mass meeting on the
Grand Easterly
, the Lover put her case. She declaimed violently against the Crobuzoners, reminding her citizens that their missing families had been slaughtered by such as these, their city blasted, half their Armadan ships destroyed. There were now many times more press-ganged aboard than Garwater or any other riding had had to take in at one time before. With their resources stretched, with Armada vulnerable, with New Crobuzon having declared war, how could they possibly absorb so many enemies?

But many of those who were Armadans now had once been enemies. For as long as the city had existed, Armadans had held that once the fighting stopped, there was no quarrel with its enemies’ foot soldiers. They were to be welcomed, and hopefully transformed, and made citizens. That, after all, was what Armada was—a colony of the lost, the renegade, the absent-without-leave, the defeated.

The New Crobuzon sailors shivered in their prisons, unaware of the controversy that surrounded them.

It would not be murder, the Lover claimed. The prisoners could be put aboard a ship, with provisions, and pointed in the direction of Bered Kai Nev. It was not impossible that they would make it.

That was a poor argument.

She changed her tack, arguing angrily that with the avanc, the city must go on, that it had the power to go to places Armadans had never dreamed of, to do unimagined things, and that to waste their resources wiping the noses of a thousand blubbering newcomers—murderers—was idiocy.

Even with their wounds still bleeding and fresh, even with the memory of war still painful, the mood of the crowd was turning against the Lover. She was not convincing them. The other rulers held their peace, watching.

Bellis understood. It was not that those gathered had any love, any particular pity or compassion, for their captives. It was not about those bloody, wounded troops holed up in agony and squalor below. The Armadans were not concerned for those captives, but for their own city.
This is Armada
, they were saying.
This is how it is what it is. Change that, and how do we know what we are? How do we know how to be?

With one speech, the Lover could not defeat so many centuries of tradition—tradition thrown up for the city’s survival. She was alone on the stage, and she was losing her argument. With a sudden, rocking uncertainty, Bellis wondered where the Lover was, whether he agreed.

Sensing the discontent, those among the crowd who agreed with the Lover’s line began to shout, spontaneously offering support, crying revenge against the captured. But more voices rose in opposition, and quieted them.

Something shifted, decisively. It was obvious, suddenly, that this gathering would not allow the Crobuzoners to be murdered, even through the drawn-out pretense at mercy the Lover had suggested. It was obvious that the long, sometimes easy, sometimes cruel process of press-ganging would have to begin, and that many months of effort would be expended on the men and few women imprisoned below, and that eventually many of them would reconcile themselves to their new life, and some would not. The latter would remain imprisoned; and only eventually, after long efforts at persuasion, might they, perhaps, be executed.

“What’s the fucking hurry?” someone shouted. “Where you fucking taking us, anyway?”

The Lover gave in then, swiftly, with charisma; shrugging in exaggerated humility, she acquiesced, announced her order rescinded. She won a ragged cheer from an audience still eager to forgive a bad suggestion made in anger. She did not answer the heckler’s question.

Bellis remembered that moment later, and saw in it a fulcrum.
That was the moment
, she would tell herself in the weeks to come,
that everything changed.

Vessels now too broken to sail hitched themselves to the city and were pulled on by the untiring avanc. It swam at a steady pace, without sudden darts or caprice, a little more than five miles an hour.

North.

The days were full of services for the dead: homages and homilies and prayers. Rebuilding began. Cranes twitched; the city bustled with subdued crews refitting the broken buildings, restoring what they could and changing what they could not. In the evenings, the pubs and drinking dens were full but quiet. Armada was not convivial, in those awful days. It was still bleeding, had not yet scarred.

People began to ask questions. Delicately, very carefully, they probed those wounds in their minds, tender places that the war had left. And when they did, terrible uncertainties arose.

Why did they come?
people began to say to themselves and to each other (with shaking heads and lowered eyes).
And how, across half a world, did they ever find us?

Can they do it again?

This slow, burgeoning spirit of anger and query raised wider issues than the war itself. Each question bore others.

What did we do to attract their notice?

What are we doing?

Where are we going?

With the days and insomniac nights, Bellis’ numbness began to ebb. She had spoken properly to no one—she had spent time with no one—since the battle. Uther Doul had done without her; she had not found Carrianne or Johannes. Except to rake through the rumors that proliferated like weeds, Bellis had hardly spoken for days.

On the second day after the fighting, she began to think. Something in her woke, and she viewed the damaged city with the first emotion she had felt for some time—a cold horror. Bellis realized curiously that she was aghast.

As she lifted her eyes to the sun, she felt the stirrings of emotions and uncertainties and terrible certainties she had been storing.

“Oh gods,” she said quietly. “Oh gods.”

She knew so many things, she realized. So much was clear to her now—and so much that was terrible, that she balked at confronting, that she could not think about just yet. She had understanding and knowledge inside her, but she shied away from it as if from a bully.

That day, Bellis ate and drank and walked as if nothing had changed, her motions as jerky and fumbling as those of all the other traumatized around her. But at odd moments she would wince—she would blink and hiss and grit her teeth—as the knowledge inside her moved. She was pregnant with it—a fat, malign child that she was desperately ignoring.

Some part of her knew that she could not batten it down, but she played herself for time, never vocalizing, never thinking in words, always closing off the understanding she carried with an angry, frightened sense of
Not now, not now
. . .

She watched the sun set from her rough-cut windows and read and reread her letter, trying to steel herself to write something about the battle, not knowing what to do. At ten o’clock she heard a peremptory knocking, and opened the door onto Tanner Sack.