The Scar - China Mieville [237]
The second day after Bellis’ shocking, revelatory discussion with Carrianne, the remaining ships and submersibles in Armada’s orbit had turned back. They could no longer fight the Hidden Ocean. They gathered into a nervous convoy, tacking with the fractious winds, then steamed back to the south. They stayed together for protection, and to drag each other on, back to the Swollen Ocean, with its safer, comprehensible waters, where they would wait.
The city would return for them, within a month, or two at most.
And after that? If Armada had not returned? Well, they were to consider themselves free. That dispensation was given like an afterthought, and its implications were not discussed.
From her window, Bellis had watched the retreat of Armada’s vessels. Others were left behind, now chained like limpets to the city’s flank, or in the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. They eddied apprehensively, surrounded by the vessels making up wharfs and quays, but they were trapped. They had waited too long to sail away, and they could only bob pointlessly, tied up as if loading or unloading, and wait.
Armadans had never seen their city without its nimbus of ships. They had crowded to the city’s margins to gaze out at the sea. The emptiness had subdued them. But even those acres of vacant water were not so disturbing as the missing airship.
No one had seen anything; no one had heard a sound. The Arrogance had crept away in secret. To Garwater it was a stunning loss.
How was it possible? people asked. The dirigible itself was crippled, and Hedrigall was known to be absolutely loyal.
“He had doubts,” Tanner told Shekel and Angevine. “He told me. He was loyal, ain’t no doubt, but he never thought this avanc business was best for the city. I suppose the Scar thing was even worse, but he weren’t winning any arguments.”
Tanner was horrified by Hedrigall’s flight. It wounded him. But he talked his thoughts out loud, trying hard to see things as his enigmatic friend had seen them. Must’ve felt trapped, Tanner thought. All the years he lived here, to suddenly see the place doing things in a new way. He don’t belong in Dreer Samher no more, and if he thought that he didn’t belong here neither . . . what must that’ve done?
He imagined Hedrigall fixing the Arrogance’s broken motors in some of the spare hours he spent aboard it on his own. Everyone knew that Hedrigall was a loner who spent a deal more time in the Arrogance than he needed to. Had he untwisted the girders in the Arrogance’s fins? Tested the pistons that had not moved for decades?
How long you been planning this, Hedrigall? thought Tanner Sack.
Couldn’t he have had an argument? Did he feel so strongly? Did he feel that there was no point even fighting for his home? Did he doubt that that’s what it was any longer?
Where you now, man?
Tanner imagined that big ungainly aerostat heading south, Hedrigall alone at its wheel.
I bet he’s crying.
It was suicide of sorts. Hedrigall couldn’t have amassed enough fuel to reach land, not anywhere. If he reached Armada’s waiting fleet, they’d want to know what had happened and why he’d left the city, so he’d avoid them.
The winds would take him over the empty sea. The gasbags were very strong; they might keep him buoyant for years. How much food did you store, man? Tanner wondered.
An image came to his mind, of the Arrogance adrift for years, four or five hundred feet above the water, with Hedrigall’s corpse rotting slowly in the captain’s cabin. A windblown sepulchre.
Or maybe he could stay alive. Maybe he would unroll a great, absurdly long fishing line from the Arrogance’s bay doors. Tanner imagined it cascading through the air like a spring unwinding, till its baited hook reached the water. By choice the cactacae were vegetarians, but they could survive on fish or flesh if they had to.
There Hedrigall could sit, on the edge of the hatch, his legs swinging like a child’s, reeling