The Scar - China Mieville [177]
“All the same,” Shekel said quietly. “All the same.”
When he spoke to Angevine about his experience the next day, she echoed Tanner Sack almost exactly.
“Might be there’s something in it,” she said slowly. “It’s a strange time, you know. People are excited, and some are scared. I doubt that unseen intruders’ll be the strangest thing we have to face over the next weeks, lover. With the factories working overtime for the bridle, people are grumbling. There’s no time or engineers to fix up machines elsewhere, no engine parts or metalwork being built. ‘With all the power from that rig,’ people are saying, ‘when’ll we see it put to our use? How much does the damn avanc need, anyway?’
“Well, it needs a lot, Shekel. A damn lot, now and always.” She met his eye and took his hand. “And the rumblings that you can hear now—in Bask and Curhouse and Dry Fall, most especially, but all over—are bound to grow. When people get to understand that there’s other things more important to put the oil and rockmilk to than all their schemes.”
She spoke absently, recalling conversations that she had overheard between Tintinnabulum and others, and Shekel could do little more than nod.
“They’re appearing already, the troublemakers,” she mused. “Vordakine in Curhouse, Sallow in Bask. The mysterious Simon Fench. Pamphlets, graffiti, whispers. And good people have their doubts, too. I heard that Hedrigall, who’s loyal to his wooden bones, even knows this Fench, drinks with him sometimes. People’ll get fired up if the avanc is called—something so wonderful as that, it’ll excite them. But that won’t be the end, Shekel, believe me.”
In the blazing heat of Armada’s accidental, equatorial summer, Croom Park blossomed.
When last Bellis had visited it, it had been all-over green: wet, and lush, and sap-stinking. Now the green was overlaid with spring and summer colors: a mulch of hurried blossom underfoot, and here and there still frosting the tips of trees. The first bright summer flowers vied with vivid weeds, dogwood, and daffodils. The woods rustled with small life.
Bellis came to the park not with Silas, but with Johannes Tearfly, and she was wryly amused that she felt as if she were being somehow unfaithful.
She walked her favorite route, along what had once been a corridor between ship’s cabins and was now an ivy-smothered canyon. The walls were studded with passion flowers, broken windows just visible beneath a mesh of roots. Where the old cabin-hills sank into the grassy surface and the pathway opened out into the sun, there was a fringe of pungent honeysuckle purring with bees.
This is a good moment, thought Bellis carefully as she walked, Johannes shy and wondering behind her. But you’ll have to spoil it in a moment, Johannes—you’ll have to speak.
And after some more minutes of flowers and grass, when the only sound was the vibrato of warm insects, he did.
They talked for a long time about the work below the city.
“I’ve been down in a submersible a couple of times,” Johannes told her. “It’s extraordinary, Bellis. The speed with which they’re constructing it—it’s truly amazing.”
“Well, I’ve seen the rate they’ve decommissioned the Terpsichoria, among others,” she said. “I can just imagine.”
Johannes was wary of her, still, but he was eager to feel the connection they had once had. She could feel him reaching to her, explaining away to himself any curtness she might display.
“You’ve not told me much about the island,” he said.
Bellis sighed. “It was hard,” she said. “I don’t relish discussing it.” But she gave him a little more than that: told him of the excruciating heat, the constant fear, the gurning curiosity of the he-anophelii and the murderous hunger of their mates.
He tried to gauge her. She wondered whether he thought he was shrewd and subtle.
“They took Aum away, yesterday,” she continued, and he turned to her, startled. “I’ve been teaching him Salt for a couple of weeks, that’s all. He learns at a rate that frightens me. He takes notes on everything I say—he’s already amassed enough for a textbook. But, still,