The Scar - China Mieville [165]
Aum approached the task with the rigor and logic of a mathematician. Bellis discovered, uneasily, that he had already worked out a surprising amount of vocabulary from the Armadans’ short visit (and she wondered whether they had infected the island with language).
For New Crobuzoners, or Jhesshul or Mandrake Islanders or Shankellites or Perrickish, Salt was an easy language to learn. Krüach Aum, though, knew none of its components. There were no cognates at all—vocabulary or grammar—with High Kettai. Nonetheless, he broke Salt down, made careful lists of declensions and conjugations and grammar. His method was very different from Bellis’, without intuition, without the training of the language trance to make his mind receptive; but still, he made quick progress.
Bellis looked forward eagerly to the time that she would be redundant; when she would not have to sit endlessly scribbling notes in a scientific register she did not understand. She had been released from her job in the library. Now her mornings were taken up with teaching Aum, and her afternoons with translating between Aum and the scientific committee of Garwater. She enjoyed none of it.
During the day she ate with Aum, and during the evenings she sometimes accompanied him throughout the city, with a guard of Garwater yeomanry. What else, she thought, can I do? She escorted him to Croom Park, to the colorful thoroughfares and shopping streets of Garwater and Jhour and Curhouse. She took him to Grand Gears Library.
While she stood and spoke in a low voice to Carrianne, who seemed sincerely delighted to see her again, Krüach Aum wandered from shelf to shelf. When she came to tell him that they must go, he turned to her and she was truly alarmed at his expression—a reverence and joy and agony like religious ecstasy. She pointed out the High Kettai books to him, and he reeled, as if drunk at the sight of all that knowledge in his grasp.
She felt a constant low-level unease at spending her days in the presence of the Garwater authorities: the Lovers, Tintinnabulum and his crew, Uther Doul.
How did it come to this? she wondered.
Bellis had been cut off from the city since the first moment, and she had assiduously kept that wound raw and bloodied. She defined herself by it.
This is not my home, she had said to herself again and again, endless repetitions. And when the chance had come to make some connection with her true home, she had taken it with all its risk. She had not renounced her claim to New Crobuzon. She had discovered a terrible threat to her city, and had (at great risk, with careful planning) worked out a way to save it.
And somehow in that very action, in the very act of reaching out to New Crobuzon across the sea, she had tied herself closely in to Armada, and to its rulers.
How did it come to this?
It made her laugh humorlessly. She had done what was best for her true home, and as a result she spent her days working for the governors of her prison, helping them gain the power to take her anywhere they wanted.
How did it come to this?
And where is Silas?
Every day, Tanner thought about what he had done on the anophelii island.
It was not something he felt comfortable considering. He was not sure what his emotions were. He probed the memory of what he had done, as if it were a wound, and discovered a reserve of pride inside him. I saved New Crobuzon, he thought, not quite believing it.
Tanner thought carefully about the few people he had left behind there. The drinking partners, the friends and girlfriends: Zara and Pietr and Fezhenechs and Dolly-Ann . . . He thought of them with a sort of abstracted fondness, as if they were characters in a book of whom he had grown affectionate.
Do they think of me? he thought. Do they miss me?
He had left them behind. He had been so long in that stinking prison in Iron Bay, and in that drab place in the Terpsichoria, and then his life had been so suddenly and extraordinarily renewed, that New Crobuzon had attenuated as a memory in him.
But still there was a wellspring of feeling for it, a recognition