The Scar - China Mieville [278]
The Lovers were arguing.
Quiet came down over the crowd as they realized what was happening. Bellis held her breath. It shocked her deeply. That they could whisper to each other, their faces growing red, their scars white-scored with anger, their voices hissed, muttered curt, growing slowly louder until they shouted, ignoring those around them, who stared at them in stupid amazement.
“. . . he’s right,” Bellis heard the Lover shout. “He’s right. We don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” the Lover shouted back. Her face was outraged and terrible. “Don’t know what?”
Overhead, a little flock of cowed city birds cut across the sky, touching quickly down, somewhere out of sight. Armada creaked. The silence went on and on. Tanner Sack and his mutineers were frozen. They watched the argument between the Lovers unfold with an awe more fitting to a geological event.
As Bellis watched the last of the birds, her eyes came to the Brucolac’s blasted figure and stayed there, though the vampir disgusted her. His convulsions were dying down, his body calming. He opened eyes seared milk-white and blind by the daylight, and turned his head slowly.
He was listening. Bellis was sure of it.
The Lovers ignored everything outside them. Uther Doul moved silently aside, as if to give those assembled a better view.
There was no other sound at all.
“We don’t know,” said the Lover again. Bellis felt as if an arc of heat or electricity spat between the Lovers’ eyes. “We don’t know what’s ahead. He might be right. Can we be sure? Can we risk it?”
“Oh . . .” the Lover responded, her voice coming out of her in a querulous sigh. She stared at her lover with a terrible disappointment and loss. “Oh, godsdammit,” she breathed quietly. “Gods rot and fuck you dead.”
Again there was quiet, and palpable shock. The Lovers stared at each other.
“We cannot force them,” the Lover said finally. His voice shook violently. “We can’t rule without concord. This isn’t a war. You can’t send Doul to fight them.”
“Don’t turn away from this now,” the Lover said, her voice unstable. “You’re turning from me. After what we’ve done. After I made you. After we made ourselves together. Don’t deny me . . .”
The Lover glanced up around him, at the encircling faces. A visible panic came over him. He held out his hands. “Let’s go inside.”
The Lover was rigid, her scars glowing. She was tense with self-control. She shook her head at him, tightly raging. “Who the fuck are we to care who hears? What is this? What’s happened to you? Are you as stupid as these fools? You think the lying cant that returned bastard told us rings true? Do you? You believe him?”
“Am I still you,” the Lover screamed back at her, “and are you me? Or not? That’s the only question here!”
He was losing something. Something was slipping from him. Bellis watched a connection as vital as an umbilicum attenuate and wither in him, and dry up and snap. Flailing, raging, terrorized very suddenly, alone for the first time in many years, he tried to say more.
“We can’t do this; we can’t. You’ll lose us everything . . .”
The Lover watched him, and her face set dead cold.
“I thought more of you,” she said slowly. “I thought I’d made my soul whole.”
“And you have, you have, you did,” said the Lover frantically, so pathetic that Bellis turned her face away in shame.
They brought Hedrigall up from belowdecks, draped over the shoulders of the cactacae who had gone after him, and he was greeted with a wave of welcoming joy.
Everyone shouted questions at him that he shied away from and could not answer. People danced and shouted and called his name while he stared at them, drunk with what seemed disoriented terror. Cactacae, untroubled by his thorns, grabbed him and rode him on their shoulders, where he bobbed unsteadily and stared bewildered about.
“Turn!” shouted Tanner Sack. “We turn the