The Scar - China Mieville [153]
There were several small cafés on that little street, and he had known the proprietors and the regulars well. When he had no work and a little money, he might spend hours in the ivy-covered Boland’s Coffees, arguing and idling with Boland and Yvan Curlough and Sluchnedsher the vodyanoi, taking pity on mad Spiral Jacobs and buying him a drink.
Tanner had spent many days there, in a haze of smoke and tea and coffee, watching the shoes and the hours ebb away through Boland’s imperfect windows. He could live without those days, for Jabber’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were a drug. It wasn’t as if he lay awake missing them at night.
But they were what he thought of, instantly, when Bellis asked him if he cared whether the city fell.
Of course the thought of New Crobuzon and all those people he knew (whom he had not thought of for some time), and all the places he had been, all broken and destroyed and drowned by the grindylow (figures who existed only in a nightmare, shadow form in his head), of course that appalled him. Of course he would not wish for that.
But the immediacy of his own reaction astonished him. There was nothing intellectual, nothing thought out about it. He looked through the window into that sweltering hot island night and remembered looking through those other windows, of thick and mottled glass, onto the shoe market.
“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers? Whyn’t you think they’d help try to get a message to the city?”
Bellis shucked her shoulders in a false, silent laugh.
“Do you really think,” she said slowly, “that they would care? Do you think they’d put themselves out? Send a boat, maybe? Pay for a message? You think they’d risk uncovering themselves? You think they’d go to all that effort, just to save a city that would destroy them if it had the slightest chance?”
“You’re wrong,” he said, uncertain. “There’s enough Crobuzoners among the press-ganged who’d care.”
“Nobody knows,” she hissed. “Only Fennec and I know, and if we spread the word, they’ll discredit us, write us off as troublemakers, dump us at sea, burn the message. Godsdammit, what if you’re wrong?” She stared at him until he shifted in her gaze. “You think they’ll care? You think they won’t let New Crobuzon drown? If we told them and you were wrong, it would be over—our only chance gone. Do you see what’s at stake? You want to risk it? Really?”
With a hollowness in his throat, Tanner realized that what she said made sense.
“And that is why I’m sitting here crying like a cretin,” she spat. “Because getting this message, and this proof, and this bribe to the Samheri is the only chance we have to save New Crobuzon. Do you see? To save it. And I’ve been standing here, frozen, because I can’t think of a way to get to the beach. Because I’m terrified of those woman-things out there. I do not want to die, and dawn is coming, and I can’t go out there, and I have to. And it’s more than a mile to the beach.” She looked at him carefully, and then away. “I don’t know what to do.”
They could hear the cactacae guard walking through the moonlit township, from house to house. Tanner and Bellis sat facing each other, leaning against the walls, their eyes fixed.
Tanner looked again at the letter he held. There was the seal. He held out his hands, and Bellis gave him the rest of her little bundle. She kept her face composed. He read the letter to the Samheri pirates. The reward was generous, he thought, but hardly excessive if it meant saving New Crobuzon.
Saving it, keeping it safe from harm.
He went through each letter again, line by line. Armada was not mentioned.
He looked at the necklace with its little tag, its name and symbol. There was nothing to link this to Armada. Nothing to tell the Crobuzoner government where to find him. Bellis watched him from her silence. She knew what he was. He could sense the hope in her. He picked up the big ring, examined its intricate