Embassytown - China Mieville [121]
He jerked his head at the door through which Ez had left. “That bastard, eh? It can be ugly how things go. I was going to say … I don’t know what I was going to say. I’m doing what I have to.”
“What is it you’re doing, Cal? Why d’you have to?” I said that though I’d not intended to respond, or involve myself in whatever this was. “We tried this once before, Cal; you made armies and it was a disaster …”
“Avice, please.” He shook his head, and hesitated, as if he was trying very hard to think how to communicate something. “It was joint patrols that didn’t work. You’ll see what we do now. This is different. Anyway, what would you rather? We can’t just leave them to come in … And haven’t you seen?” He gesticulated again after Ez. “I can make them do anything I want.”
“Well …”
“Well, anyway that’s not really the point. I do, we do want protections around the city, we need it, but that’s not the real point. The real point is the squads that go out. I’ve been thinking a lot.” He waved a hand at his throat, his voice. “About this. I’ve been thinking how to use it. I know why the first patrols went wrong: we just ordered them to patrol. That was much too vague. Tasks, though, that’s different. Specifics. With beginnings and endings.”
“What tasks are you going to set them, EzCal?” I said. The slip, calling Cal that, wasn’t deliberate.
“You’ll see. And you’ll be impressed, I think. I’m not operating like you think I am. I know what you think I am, Avice.”
I walked away. It was just unbearable.
I didn’t watch Cal, with Ez, inspect his Ariekene troops—what a pantomime. I heard he made MagDa his assistant, had them talk for him. EzCal couldn’t do it: it would have created a comedy of overwhelmed squaddies mindlessly attempting to obey every word, whether it was an order or not.
There were, in fact, —some thousands. An unprecedented gathering. Through MagDa, Cal organised them into ranks, and squadrons into units, each with its own commander. There wasn’t as much of the chaos as I’d expected, when our new defenders went to their outposts.
They weren’t enough. The Absurd army outnumbered them by several times. I didn’t yet understand—had ignored him telling me—that this warcraft and panicked pomp was a minor part of Cal’s intentions. I didn’t even notice that MagDa were gone for two days, alongside others, part of a squad I imagine EzCal gave some carefully chosen name. While they were, without knowing they were, I went again with YlSib to Spanish Dancer, as the army of Absurd approached. I’d had enough of inevitability. In the city, outside Embassytown, it felt, even illusorily, as if more than one outcome was possible.
EzCal summoned us to a lecture hall. I went to that meeting, as I did to all of them, feeling like a spy. Not wholly misleading. The committee was depleted. In steeply banking rows of chairs we looked down at EzCal in the centre. I sat by Southel and Simmon. MagDa was with EzCal, their faces scuffed with injuries. By them was , and there were other Hosts in corners.
“We’d like to start with a silence,” Cal said, “for officers Bayley and Kotus, who gave their lives on this mission, for the sake of Embassytown.” We waited. “Let’s make sure it wasn’t in vain. Bring them in.”
There was a commotion. We gasped and swore and drew back. What the guards entered and brought before us were enemies. Two deafened Absurd. They were held in cuffs. They eyed us, their eyes in polyp motion. Their legs and giftwings shook in constraints. They tested their tethers with cunning.
We watched them. Cal circled the captives, pointing out the injuries of the wilderness, the flanges of the ripped-out fanwing. He pointed at each thing he described with a long thin stick. He was like a picture of an ancient lecturer, in some pre-diaspora centre of learning. The attackers made noises as he rounded them. Calls that sounded like halloos, like calls to gods. and the other Ariekei in the room watched them and kept up their own constant movement, twitches in a disgust-echo of the prisoners’ strainings.
Our people had tracked a group of