The Scar - China Mieville [108]
“This is a New Crobuzon ship, you know.”
Even as she turned, Bellis recognized the voice. It was the scarred man, the Lover, standing in the doorway, alone.
Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by him. I translated the book, she thought. I get special treatment.
The Lover closed the door behind him.
“It was built more than two and a half centuries ago, at the end of the Full Years,” he continued. He spoke to her in Ragamoll, with only a slight accent. He sat, indicated to her to do the same. “In fact, it’s been claimed that the Grand Easterly’s building itself brought the Full Years to an end. Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “that is ridiculous. But it’s a useful symbolic coincidence. Decline was setting in at the end of the 1400s, and what more potent symbol of the failure of science than this ship? In a scramble to prove that New Crobuzon was still in its golden age, they come up with this thing.
“It’s a very poor design, you know. Trying to combine the paddle power of those stupid huge wheels, on her flanks, with a screw propeller.” He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Bellis. “You can’t power something of this size with paddles. So they just loomed there like tumors, ruining the ship’s line, acting as brakes. Which meant the screw didn’t work very well, either, and you couldn’t sail it. Isn’t it ironic?
“But there’s one thing that they did right. They set out to build the biggest vessel ever seen. They had to launch the thing sideways, in the estuary by Iron Bay. And for a few years it limped around. Awesome but . . . ungainly. They tried to use it during the Second Pirate Wars, but it lumbered like a massively armed rhinoceros while the Suroch and Jheshull ships danced around it.
“Then, they’ll tell you, it sank. Of course, it didn’t. We took it.
“They were wonderful years for Armada, the Pirate Wars. All that carnage; ships disappearing every day; missing cargos; sailors and soldiers fed up with fighting and dying, eager to escape. We stole ships and technology and people. We grew and grew.
“We took the Grand Easterly because we could. That was when Garwater took control, which it has never lost. This ship is our heart. Our factory, our palace. It was a dreadful steamer, but it is a superlative fortress. That was the last . . . great age for Armada.”
There was silence for a long time.
“Until now,” he said, and smiled at her. And the interrogation began.
When it was all finished, and she emerged mole-eyed into the afternoon, she found it hard to recall his questions exactly.
He had asked her a great deal about the translation. Had she found it hard? Was there anything that had not made sense? Could she also speak High Kettai, or merely read it? And on and on.
There had been questions designed to gauge her state of mind, her relationship to the city. She had spoken carefully: it was a tentative line between the truth and lies. She did not try to hide all of her distrust, her distaste at what had been done to her, her resentment. But she battened it down, somewhat: contained it, made it safe.
She tried not to seem to try.
There was no one to meet her outside, of course, and that gladdened her, obscurely. She crossed the steep bridges that descended from the Grand Easterly to the lower ships beside it.
She made her way home through some of the most intricate byways and alleys. Passing under brick arches that dripped with Armada’s constant salt damp; by groups of children playing variants of the shove-stiver and catch-as-can she remembered from the streets at home, as if there were a deep grammar of street games shared across the world; beside small cafés in the shadow of raised forecastles, where their parents played their own games, backgammon and chatarang.
Gulls arced and shat. The backstreets pitched and shifted with the