The Scar - China Mieville [283]
Back toward New Crobuzon.
It has been a month since the woman left, whose name I did not know. Things have changed.
It did not take long for the mutineers to relinquish control. They had no program, no party. They were only ever a disparate group who found out they had been lied to, who did not want to die. They snatched power in an anarchic and momentary coup, and gave it up easily.
Within days, the Lover reemerged. He came out of the Grand Easterly and issued orders. People were glad to carry them out. No one has a quarrel with him.
He is lost, though. Everyone knows it. His eyes do not focus, and his orders are vague. Uther Doul whispers to him carefully, and the Lover will nod and issue some meaningful command, Doul’s words through the Lover’s mouth.
Doul will not allow that to continue. He is a mercenary: he works for money; he sells his loyalty. If he must have control, I do not believe he wants it to be so unsubtle. If he rules, he hides it, for the freedom of paid subordinance. I have learnt that, if nothing else.
I do not know what happened to him, to make him flinch from naked power so much.
I have never met a more complicated man, or, I suspect, a more tragic one. His own history planted the ideas that brought us all here, so far from what he himself sought in Armada. It is hard to tell what in him has been intent, and what reaction. I cannot believe that this is satisfactory for him: that he looks at his position, and that of the Lover, and he nods, and says, “This is what I wanted.”
Either he spends his life in control of everything, or in panicked fear. Either he has planned everything to a dizzying degree, or he moves us all desperately from crisis to crisis, not knowing what he wants, showing nothing on his face.
The Lover keeps his dead gaze on the horizon. Although at the end, the woman was despised and feared as a liar, she was never pathetic, and her erstwhile lover has become so. I suspect that he will not survive this. Perhaps one day he will discover that Doul is no longer at his side. Especially now that the Brucolac controls Dry Fall again.
Few actually saw the grindylow, and fewer talk about it. It is only I who cannot forget them.
I have seen the Brucolac at night. He walks free.
He is sun-scarred, and will always be. He is subdued. Carrianne talks of him with an austere kind of affection. His citizens have rallied to him, and most others were fast to forgive him—even those who lost lovers on the night he rebelled. After all, he led his cadre against Garwater because he said we must turn the city around. And he was right, and that has now been done.
There is no war between Dry Fall and Garwater. Doul visits the Brucolac, at night, on the Uroc, Carrianne tells me.
I spend many of my days with Carrianne. She is quiet about her one-time support for the Lovers’ project. For almost a fortnight she did not speak much at all. Perhaps she was ashamed, to have found herself on the side of that woman who was so ready to lie, to lead us to our deaths.
That is the accepted story, apparently. We believe what the returned Hedrigall said. That is what people believe; that is why the city was turned.
Tanner Sack and I—we see each other, from time to time. He has begun to work again, under the city. He never mentions the time I took him to the little room and spurred a rebellion.
Did I do that?
Was this mutiny my doing? This city heading southward again, toward the waters we have passed through before, to the places that mean something to me—was this my doing?
And does that mean that I have won?
Perhaps she made it safely, the woman, and moored herself at the water’s rim, and lowered her equipment into the chasm and extracted all the energies she needed, and is now as powerful as a god.
Perhaps she fell in.
Perhaps there was nothing to fall into.
Hedrigall is ill, delirious from his ordeal, we are told,