The Scar - China Mieville [213]
Bellis had not slept in the night after the carnage. She stumbled out with the dawn, with thousands of other citizens, and walked, dumb, across the city. The skyline she knew was broken in strange new ways. Ships in which she had bought paper, or drunk tea, or walked across, unthinking, a hundred times, were gone.
Croom Park was quite untouched. The Chromolith, the Tolpandy, the Grand Easterly itself were quite whole.
Many times in the days that followed, Bellis would turn a corner in some backstreet maze—or cross a wooden bridge, or come into a well-lit plaza—and see people crying, mourning the dead. Some were staring at one piece or another of the damage to their city—a blank, wave-flecked hole where their home ship had been, a shattered mess of a marketplace, a church crushed by fallen masts.
It was quite unfair, Bellis thought nervously, that so few of her own haunts had been harmed. By what right was that? She, after all, did not even care.
A huge number of Armadans had died. Several members of the Curhouse Council and Queen Braginod of Jhour were among them. The Council voted in replacements, and the stewardship of Jhour passed quietly to Braginod’s brother, Dynich. No one cared, particularly. Armada had left thousands of bodies in the sea.
People stared at the Sorghum, muttering that it was not worth it.
Bellis wandered through the brutalized cityscape as if she were dreaming. Even where no shells had fallen, the stresses caused by the bucking sea had ruined architecture. Arches were shattered, their keystones now resting on the ocean floor. There had been fires; narrow streets had crumbled, the rows of houses that seemed to lean into each other shifting, touching, their roofs cracking and collapsing. The city seemed to tremble with kinds of damage that would have been impossible on land.
As she wandered, Bellis heard hundreds of stories: exaggerated tales of heroism and ghoulish descriptions of injuries. She began to dig for specific information, tentatively. Moved by curiosity she did not understand (feeling in those hours like an automaton, moving without her own consent), Bellis asked what had happened to the other passengers from the Terpsichoria.
There were conflicting stories about the Cardomiums. Bellis heard about those crewmen still imprisoned, their commitment to Armada not yet trusted, having failed to make peace with their press-ganging. She heard that there had been an almighty ruckus from the prison ships in the fore of Garwater when the shelling began, and that the imprisoned men had screamed and screamed for their compatriots to come for them.
The boarders, of course, had never come close, and the shouts had gone unanswered.
Sister Meriope was dead. Bellis was shocked by that—in a horrible, abstract way—as if at seeing an unexpected color. In the chaos, she heard, several prisoners had escaped from the asylum, Meriope among them. The massively pregnant nun had made her way to the city’s aft edge, where she had run toward the New Crobuzon boarding party, shouting ecstatic greetings, and been shot down. It was impossible to tell whose guns had killed her.
That was the kind of story that Bellis heard again and again—the press-ganged who, faced with what seemed a sudden chance to go home, had tried desperately to switch sides in the battle, and had died. Several of those from the Terpsichoria had been killed in such a way, it seemed. And even if their numbers were exaggerated, even if the details were embellished as a moral caution about disloyalty, Bellis was sure that many must have died as described.
It was obvious to Bellis—no great revelation—that her safety would have been very, very far from secure had she sought refuge with the New Crobuzon troops. She had decided long ago that her return to her city would have to be her own doing. Bellis knew how little her government would care about her survival.