The Scar - China Mieville [285]
All the time we were together, he was playing me, making me his agent to turn the city around, so that it was not him that did it. A loyal mercenary, making the city merely pirate again.
Now that I have done what I was required to do, I am less than nothing to him.
It is strange to find yourself a game piece. I am humbled by him, but I am too old to be wounded by betrayal.
Still, twice now I have tried to see him, to understand what it was he did. Twice I have knocked and had him open the door to me, and stare at me unspeaking as if I am a stranger. And both times my words have gone sour in my mouth.
There is no “it,” I remember Silas Fennec scolding me.
It is probably the best advice.
Right now, there are a small handful of possibilities that can explain what happened. Any of them might be true. And if Doul were to claim innocence of all of them, I would have less to make sense with, less than I have now. I would have to contemplate the possibility that there was no plan—that there is nothing to be explained.
Why would I risk that? Why in the world would I relinquish what understandings I have?
Tanner Sack came to my rooms. Angevine waited for him below on the Chromolith’s deck. Her treads could not take my stairs.
I am sure that they are a comfort to each other. But what I heard between them was uncertain and careful, and I think they will move apart. Sharing loss, I suspect, will not be enough.
Tanner brought me a heliotype he had found: of Shekel, holding two books, grinning outside the library. Tanner has decided that everything to do with Shekel and books is mine. I am embarrassed. I don’t know how to tell him to stop.
After he left, I looked at the sepia scrap he had left me. It was not a good print. Vague suggestions of architecture and biology burnt onto the paper, scarring it. Wounding it and healing it in a new configuration. Scars are memory.
I carry my memories of Armada on my back.
I took the dressings off some weeks ago, and with angled mirrors I have seen what Garwater has written on me. It is a breathtakingly ugly message, in a brutal script.
Contours ridge my back, lines stretched horizontal across it, roughly parallel, where the whip landed. They seem to emerge from one side of my back, break my skin, and descend on the other.
Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
I look at them with wonder. It is as if they are nothing to do with me. Armada is sewn fast onto my back, and I know that I will carry it with me everywhere.
So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.
Carrying it on my back, I will take Armada home with me.
Home.
The second time Doul found me at his door, he must have seen something in my face. He nodded once and then spoke.
He said: “Enough is enough. We will take you back.”
Back again.
I was stunned. I bowed my head, nodded, and thanked him.
He gave me that. And not for any residue of what he once pretended was between us.
He is rewarding me. He is paying me.
For the jobs I have done. Since he has used me.
Doul passed messages to Fennec through me, for Fennec to give the city. But Fennec did the wrong thing, and the Lovers outmaneuvered us all by telling the truth. So Doul found other uses for me.
And now he will take me home. Not for warmth or out of justice. He is offering me a wage.
I will accept.
He is not stupid. He knows that nothing I could do in New Crobuzon could undermine or threaten Armada in any way. I would not be listened to if I tried to tell Parliament, and why would I do that, renegade that I am?
Eventually there will be a ship charged to rob the Basilisk Channel. And I will be on it. I will be taken on some tiny boat, perhaps, dropped in that ugly port Qé Banssa that I saw from the Terpsichoria’s deck. And I will wait there until a New Crobuzon ship appears, heading home for Iron Bay