The Scar - China Mieville [280]
This is what she has wanted. Every mile that took her away from New Crobuzon was a defeat. She had tried everything to get the fucking city to turn, to take her back toward her home; and now, suddenly and utterly unexpectedly, she has succeeded.
How did this happen? she thinks, feeling as if she should be triumphant or proud, not like a bewildered, happy bystander.
She knows why she is troubled. She has questions and resentments. She remembers what she saw in Doul’s eyes. Used again, she thinks, aghast and wondering. Used again.
It is a complex chain of manipulation, what has been done to her. She cannot untangle it now. Now is not the time.
Flares, the pilots’ signals to the winch-boats, were set off in a big vulgar display. It was a celebration and a defiance—we do not need these anymore, the mutineers were saying.
There were men and women still out, in frenetic celebration, when the sky first lightened in the east.
Bellis stood on the Grand Easterly, near the entrance to the corridors where the Lovers’ quarters were. She had been waiting for some time. She remembered what the Lover had said: I will not ask you to come. Something was ending, and Bellis wanted to witness it.
There were others on the deck, mostly tired and drunk, singing and watching the sea, but they quieted when the Lover appeared on deck with Uther Doul beside her. There was a moment, an ugly moment, when the bystanders remembered their anger and something might have happened, but it went quickly.
The Lover carried packs that bulged oddly. She did not look at anyone but Doul. Bellis saw that one of the packs contained the perhapsadian, Doul’s weird instrument.
“This is all of it?” the Lover said, and Doul nodded.
“Everything I collected,” he said, “except my sword.” The Lover’s face was set. Calm and hard.
“Is the boat all ready?” she said, and Doul nodded.
They walked together, unmolested, watched by all the pirates, toward the Grand Easterly’s port side, and the streets that wound over a tight crush of vessels, and Basilio Harbor beyond.
Bellis kept looking back to the doorway. She expected the Lover to appear, to call his lover back or to run to her and tell her he would go, too, that nothing would part them, but he did not.
They had never been each other. They had never been doing the same thing. Perhaps it was only chance that they had traveled together so far.
At the edge of the Grand Easterly, the Lover stopped Uther Doul and turned for a last look at the ship. The sun was not yet up, but the sky was light, and Bellis could see the Lover’s face clear.
Cutting across it, scored over her right cheek from the hairline to her jaw, was a new wound. It glistened with a faint coating of salve like varnish. It was deep, and dark red, and it sliced straight through several of her other, older scars, as if it were brushing them aside.
Bellis never heard any stories about that last journey, which astonished her. In all the days and weeks that followed, when everyone was talking about the night of the mutiny, she never once heard about the Lover and Uther Doul moving sedately through a city tired and drunk on its rebellion.
She could imagine it, though. She saw them progressing sedately, the Lover sad and pensive, looking around her, memorizing the details of the city she had helped rule for so long. Hefting her pack, feeling the weight of all the books of arcane science, the tracts on possibility mining, the ancient machines that Doul had given her.
Doul beside her, his hand ready by his sword, to protect her in her last minutes in Armada. Was it necessary? Did he need to step in? Bellis heard no stories of him cutting Armadans down.
And was the Lover really alone?
It seemed hard to believe that after the years of her presence she would have no one ready to follow her. Her narrative logic was not the brutal mercantilism that drove