The Scar - China Mieville [215]
The New Crobuzon sailors shivered in their prisons, unaware of the controversy that surrounded them.
It would not be murder, the Lover claimed. The prisoners could be put aboard a ship, with provisions, and pointed in the direction of Bered Kai Nev. It was not impossible that they would make it.
That was a poor argument.
She changed her tack, arguing angrily that with the avanc, the city must go on, that it had the power to go to places Armadans had never dreamed of, to do unimagined things, and that to waste their resources wiping the noses of a thousand blubbering newcomers—murderers—was idiocy.
Even with their wounds still bleeding and fresh, even with the memory of war still painful, the mood of the crowd was turning against the Lover. She was not convincing them. The other rulers held their peace, watching.
Bellis understood. It was not that those gathered had any love, any particular pity or compassion, for their captives. It was not about those bloody, wounded troops holed up in agony and squalor below. The Armadans were not concerned for those captives, but for their own city. This is Armada, they were saying. This is how it is what it is. Change that, and how do we know what we are? How do we know how to be?
With one speech, the Lover could not defeat so many centuries of tradition—tradition thrown up for the city’s survival. She was alone on the stage, and she was losing her argument. With a sudden, rocking uncertainty, Bellis wondered where the Lover was, whether he agreed.
Sensing the discontent, those among the crowd who agreed with the Lover’s line began to shout, spontaneously offering support, crying revenge against the captured. But more voices rose in opposition, and quieted them.
Something shifted, decisively. It was obvious, suddenly, that this gathering would not allow the Crobuzoners to be murdered, even through the drawn-out pretense at mercy the Lover had suggested. It was obvious that the long, sometimes easy, sometimes cruel process of press-ganging would have to begin, and that many months of effort would be expended on the men and few women imprisoned below, and that eventually many of them would reconcile themselves to their new life, and some would not. The latter would remain imprisoned; and only eventually, after long efforts at persuasion, might they, perhaps, be executed.
“What’s the fucking hurry?” someone shouted. “Where you fucking taking us, anyway?”
The Lover gave in then, swiftly, with charisma; shrugging in exaggerated humility, she acquiesced, announced her order rescinded. She won a ragged cheer from an audience still eager to forgive a bad suggestion made in anger. She did not answer the heckler’s question.
Bellis remembered that moment later, and saw in it a fulcrum. That was the moment, she would tell herself in the weeks to come, that everything changed.
Vessels now too broken to sail hitched themselves to the city and were pulled on by the untiring avanc. It swam at a steady pace, without sudden darts or caprice, a little more than five miles an hour.
North.
The days were full of services for the dead: homages and homilies and prayers. Rebuilding began. Cranes twitched; the city bustled with subdued crews refitting the broken buildings, restoring what they could and changing what they could not. In the evenings, the pubs and drinking dens were full but quiet. Armada was not convivial, in those awful days. It was still bleeding, had not yet scarred.
People began to ask questions. Delicately, very carefully, they probed those wounds in their minds, tender places that the war had left. And when they did, terrible uncertainties arose.
Why did they come? people began to say to themselves and to each other (with shaking heads and lowered eyes). And how, across half a world, did they ever find us?
Can they do it again?
This slow, burgeoning spirit of anger and query raised wider issues than the war itself. Each question bore others.
What did we do to attract their notice?
What are we doing?
Where are we going?
With the days and insomniac nights,