Embassytown - China Mieville [137]
It wasn’t long before we saw a line of figures. Bren stiffened. I knew how weak our plan was, but we had no choice. “It’s alright,” I said. “They’re Terre.”
A big, dirty derelict band, dressed like penitents, a trudging little town. There were children among them. They looked at us through their masks. They were as intense as monks, too. Some backed away, muttered among themselves. A few temporary leaders came closer, and a few soldiers, refugee from that ruination, in scorched uniforms.
The Ariekei stayed back. They kept the self-deafened close, disguised its injury. The humans told us they’d run from the depredations of the Absurd, from pioneer homesteads and biorigging farms. This was everyone running: they’d found each other. Been joined by the AWOL and soldiers from defeated units. They were behind their attackers now, were following them to the city, like those prey-fish that seek safety in their predator’s wake. They had no plans, only the vague sense that this might keep them alive a few days longer. Their passage in the tracks of the enemy was a despairing homage to their own defeat.
A militia-man told us, “We were with Ariekei. Leaders. The most eloquent, I suppose. There to communicate. We were there to protect them, the negotiators, give them space, time, when they were trying to get through to …” The soldiers had been instructed to do whatever was necessary while the Ariekene speakers struggled to make the Absurd understand them. “They were trying to talk to them.”
“How?” I said.
“No how.” I thought he’d said know-how and didn’t understand.
“There was no how,” he said. “We wondered. We could see the Absurd coming; they had fliers and weapons and vehicles, and there were thousands of them. We wondered what it was the Ariekei were planning. What they’d cooked up. It was only, Jesus … They got ready by listening to EzCal on datchip. A couple of us in the unit understand Language …” He paused at that inadvertent present tense. “… They told me what EzCal was saying, in the recordings. ‘You must make them understand.’ Again and again. In all different ways. ‘You must speak to them so they understand you.’ ” The man shook his head. “That’s what they got high on. When the Absurd came, they shouted at them through loudspeakers.”
“But they’re deaf,” I said. He shrugged. The wind sent his greasy hair rippling from under his battered helmet.
“We sent some of them out to meet … the enemy … close. Their plan must have been … Well, the Absurd just came through them. To us.” There’d been no plan at all. I looked at Bren. There’d been no secret strategy: only the knowledge of what had to happen, with no idea how.
“They tried to do it by fiat,” Bren said. The god-drug had hoped their ineluctable instructions would carry this. What despairing deity.
“Jesus,” I said. “Do you think they thought it would work?” There were a lot of dead back there. “Where are the rest of your army?” I said. “EzCal’s army?”
The man shook his head. “Most of them … us … never wanted to fight,” he said. “They wanted to beg. But they can’t even. Beg. Can’t make them hear. They’re retreating back to the city. Getting behind the blockades.” He shook his head slowly. “Those won’t stop them,” he said. There was nothing between the Absurd army and the city, and Embassytown.
The refugees watched us go. Told us it was in the wrong direction and shrugged when we ignored them. They gestured goodbye and good luck with a kind of dead politeness, a strange courtesy. At the edges of the mass, those most monkish ones watched us with hostility I’m certain most of them couldn’t have explained.
We travelled in their hoof-churnings, and stalked the Absurd from just beyond their sight. From thickets, from behind rises. It rained. We sprayed muck. It didn’t seem to get very dark that night; it was as if the stars and Wreck were shining unnaturally, so I could lean against Spanish Dancer and watch it sketch hand signs with the Ariekes that was no