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.
He stood on the little platform that jutted from the smokestack beyond her door, at the top of the stairs. He had been wounded in the fighting; his face was cut and septic, his left eye puffed closed. His chest was bandaged, the
ugly tentacles springing from it wrapped close to him. Tanner was holding a pistol aimed at Bellis’ face. His hand was unwavering.
Bellis stared into it, into the pit at its end. The fat, hateful understanding that she had nurtured came out of her, unstoppable. She knew the truth, and she knew why Tanner Sack was ready to kill her. And with an exhaustion she knew that if he pulled the trigger, if she heard the blast, that in the sliver of a second before the bullet burst her brain, she would not blame him.
Chapter Thirty-eight
“You murderous fucking bitch.”
Bellis gripped the back of her chair, gasping with pain, blinking to clear her eyes. Tanner Sack had hit her once, a hard backhanded slap that had sent her into the wall. The blow seemed to have taken the physical anger out of him and left him with only the strength to speak to her, hatefully. He kept his gun aimed at her head.
“I didn’t know,” said Bellis, “I swear to Jabber I didn’t know.” She felt little fear. Mostly, she felt a thick shame and a confusion that slurred her words.
“You fucking evil shit,” said Tanner, not loud. “You fucking bloodsucker, you bitch, you bitch, fuck you . . .”
“I didn’t know,” she said again. The gun did not waver.
He swore at her again, a drawn-out drawl of invective, and she did not interrupt. She let him speak until he was tired. He cursed her for a long time, and then suddenly changed his tack, speaking to her in what was almost a normal tone.
“All them dead. All that blood. I was under the waves, you know that? I was swimming in it.” He whispered the words at her. “I was swimming in the fucking blood. Killing men like me. Stupid New Crobuzon boys that might’ve been my mates. And if I’d been took back, if they’d got their way, if they’d done what they wanted, if they’d taken this fucking city, then the killing wouldn’t have stopped. I’d be on my way to the colonies now. A Remade slave.
“My boy,” he said, suddenly hushed. “Shekel. You know Shekel, don’t you?” He stared at her. “He helped you a few times. Him and his lady, Angevine, got caught up in the fighting. Ange can take care of herself, but Shekel? He got himself a rifle, stupid lad. A bullet hit the rail under him, and the splinters tore open his face. It’s a mess. He’ll always be marked—always. And there am I, thinking that if that Crobuzoner had moved his gun an inch—a fucking inch—then Shekel’d be gone. He’d be gone.”
Bellis could not insulate herself from his desolate tone.
“Like all the others who’ve gone.” Tanner’s voice was drab. “And who killed them, all the dead crews? Who killed ’em? Had to call for help, didn’t you? Did you even think about what might happen? Did you? Did you care? Do you care now?” His words hammered her, and even as she shook her head—that’s not how it was—she felt deep shame. “You killed them, you traitor fuck.
“You . . . and me.”
He kept the gun steady, but his face distorted.
“Me,” he said. “Why’d you bring me in?” His eyes were bloodshot. “You nearly killed my boy.”
Bellis blinked away her own tears.
“Tanner,” she said, and her voice was throaty. “Tanner,” she said slowly, raising her hands in a helpless gesture. “I swear to you, I swear to you, I swear . . . I didn’t know.”
She supposed that he had always had some vestige of doubt, some uncertainty, or he would have simply blown her away. She spoke to him for a long time, stumbling over her words, trying to find ways to express what sounded impossible, utterly untrue, even to her.
All the time she spoke, his gun never left her face. As she told Tanner what she had realized, Bellis stopped speaking, from time to time, as the truth of it sank into her.
The window was visible over Tanner Sack’s shoulder, and she stared through it as she spoke. That was much easier than meeting his eyes. Whenever she glimpsed his face, she burned. The outrage of betrayal, and most of all the shame, scoured her.
“I believed what I told you,” she told him, and remembering the carnage, she winced so hard it hurt. “He lied to me, too.”
“I don’t fucking know how they found Armada,” she said, a little time later, still in the face of Tanner’s scorn and livid disbelief. “I don’t know how it works; I don’t know what they did; I don’t know what information or machinery he stole to let it happen. There was something . . . He must have hidden something; he must have given them something they needed, something to track us, in that message . . .”
“The one you gave me,” Tanner said, and Bellis hesitated, then nodded.
“The one he gave me, and I gave you,” she said.
“I was convinced,” she said. “Jabber, Tanner, why do you think I was on the Terpsichoria? I was a fucking exile, Tanner.” He kept quiet at that.
“I was running,” Bellis went on. “I was running. And damn, I don’t like it here, this isn’t my place . . . But I was running. I wouldn’t call those bastards; I wouldn’t trust them. I was on the run because I was scared for my fucking neck.” He looked at her curiously. “And anyway . . .” She hesitated to say more, fearing that she would sound ingratiating, though she wanted to tell him the truth.
“Anyway . . .” she continued, keeping her voice calm. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have done that. I’d not do that to . . . to you, to any of you. I’m not a fucking magister, Tanner. I’d not wish their justice on any of you.”
He gazed back at her, his face like stone.
What decided him, she realized later, what led him to believe her, was not her sadness or her shame. He did not trust those, and she did not blame him. What convinced him that she was telling the truth, that she had been as duped as him, was her rage.
For a long, wordless, miserable time, Bellis felt herself trembling, and her fists clenched bone-hard and white.
“You fucker,” she heard herself say, and shook her head.
Tanner could tell she was not speaking to him. She was thinking of Silas Fennec.
“He told me lies,” she spat suddenly to Tanner, surprising herself, “after lie after lie . . . so that he could use me.”
He used me, she thought, like he used everyone else. I watched him at work; I knew what he did, how he used people, but . . .
But I didn’t think he was doing it with me.
“He humiliated you,” Tanner said. “Thought you were special, did you?” he sneered. “Thought you could see through him? Thought you was in it together?”
She stared at him, white-hot with rage and self-disgust at being gulled by Silas like some stupid naÏve, like his puppets, like everyone else. Me more than all the poor fools reading Simon Fench’s pamphlets; me more than every poor stupid fuck acting as his contact. She was sick at the contempt, the ease, with which he had lied to her.
“You piece of shit,” she muttered. “I’ll fucking destroy you.”
Tanner sneered at her again, and she knew how pathetic she sounded.
“Do you think any of what he said was true?” Tanner Sack asked her.
They sat together, stiff and uncertain. Tanner still held the gun, but loosely. They had not become coconspirators. He looked at her with dislike and anger. Even if he believed that she had not set out to harm Armada, she was not his comrade. She was still the one who had persuaded him to be message-boy. It was she who had implicated him in the butchery.
Bellis shook her head in slow dudgeon.
“Do I think New Crobuzon is under attack?” she said disgustedly. “Do I think the most powerful city-state in the world is being threatened by malevolent fish? That two thousand years of history is about to end, and that only I can save my home? No, Tanner Sack, I don’t. I think he wanted to get a message home, and that was all. I think that manipulative fuck played me like a fiddle. Like he plays everyone.” He’s an assassin, a spy; he’s an agent, she thought. He’s exactly what I was running from. And still, lonely and credulous like some fucking lost fool, I believed him.
Why would they come for him? she thought suddenly. Why would they cross four thousa
nd miles just to rescue one man? It wasn’t for him, and I don’t think it was for the Sorghum.
“There’s more to this . . .” she said slowly, and tried to form thoughts. “There’s more to this than we can see.”
They wouldn’t come this far, risk this much, just for him, no matter how good an agent he is. He has something, she realized. He has something they want.
“So what are we going to do?”
It was growing light. The city’s birds were sounding. Bellis’ head ached; she was terribly tired.
She ignored Tanner’s question for a moment. As she looked out of the window, she could see the sky paling and the silhouettes of rigging and architecture etched in black. It was very still. She could see the waves against the city’s sides, could make out Armada’s faint northern passage. The air was cool.
Bellis wanted one more moment in this time, one more suspended second, when she could breathe, before she spoke, and answered Tanner, and set in motion a clumsy, claustrophobic endgame.
She knew the answer to his question, but she did not want to give it. She did not look at him. She knew he would ask again. Silas Fennec was still free in the city, having seen his attempted rescue fail, and there was only one thing that could be done. She knew that Tanner knew it, that he was testing her, that there was only one possible answer to his question and that if she failed to give it, he might still shoot her dead.
“What are we going to do?” he said again. She looked up at him, weary. “You know that.” She laughed unpleasantly. “We have to tell the truth.
“We have to tell Uther Doul.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Here we drift, near the northern rim of the Swollen Ocean, and only—what?—a thousand, two thousand miles to the west, the northwest, is the Cunning Sea. And nestled in the crooks of its coast, on the shoreline of an unmapped continent, is the colony of Nova Esperium.