The Scar - China Mieville [42]
Shekel stared at him. Tanner was a slow-talking, quiet man, and Shekel had never seen that intensity from him before.
He was very impressed.
It continued raining. All across Armada, the passengers from the Terpsichoria who had been let out tried to live.
On gaudy yawls and barquentines, they were arguing, buying and selling and stealing, learning Salt, some weeping, poring over maps of the city, calculating the distance from New Crobuzon or Nova Esperium. They mourned their old lives, staring at heliotypes of friends and lovers at home.
In a reeducation jail between Garwater and Shaddler were scores of sailors from the Terpsichoria. Some were shouting at their guard-counselors, who were trying to soothe them, all the time gauging whether this man or that could overcome his ties, whether his link to New Crobuzon would attenuate, whether he could be won over to Armada.
And if not, deciding what was to be done with them.
Bellis arrived at the Unrealized Time with her makeup and hair rain-battered. She stood bedraggled in the doorway while a waiter greeted her, and she stared at him, astonished at this treatment. As if he were a real waiter, she found herself thinking, in a real restaurant in a real city.
The Raddletongue was a big and ancient vessel. It was so crusted with buildings, so recrafted and interfered with, that it was impossible to tell what kind of ship it had once been. It had been part of the Armada for centuries. The ship’s forecastle was covered with ruins: old temples in white stone, much of their substance scattered and pounded to dust. The remnants were smothered in ivy, and nettles that did not keep the city’s children away.
There were strange shapes in the Raddletongue’s streets, lumps of obscure sea-salvaged stuff left in corners as if forgotten.
The restaurant was small and warm and half-full, paneled in darkwood. Its windows looked out over a fringe of ketches and canoes to Urchinspine Docks, Armada’s second harbor.
Bellis saw with a stab of emotion that from the restaurant’s ceiling hung little strings of paper lanterns. The last place she had seen that had been in the Clock and Cockerel, in Salacus Fields in New Crobuzon.
She had to shake her head to clear it of a biting melancholy. At a table in the corner, Johannes was getting to his feet, waving to her.
They sat quietly for a while. Johannes seemed shy, and Bellis found herself resentful that it had been so long since she had heard from him, and suspecting that she was not being fair she retreated into silence.
Bellis saw with amazement that the red wine on the table was a vintage Galaggi, a House Predicus 1768. She looked up at Johannes with eyes wide. With her mouth set shut she looked disapproving.
“I thought we might celebrate,” he said. “I mean, at seeing each other again.”
The wine was excellent.
“Why’ve they just left me . . . us . . . to get on with it? Or to rot?” Bellis demanded. She picked at her concoction of fish and bitter ship-grown leaves. “I’d have thought . . . I’d have thought it illadvised to pluck a few hundred people from their lives, then let them loose in . . . this . . .”
“They’ve not done that,” Johannes said. “How many of the other Terpsichoria passengers have you seen? How many of the crew? Don’t you remember the interviews, the questions, when we first arrived? They were tests,” he said gently. “They were estimating who was safe, and who not. If they think you’re too troublesome, or too . . . tied to New Crobuzon . . .” His voice petered away.
“Then what?” demanded Bellis. “Like the captain . . . ?”
“No no no,” said Johannes quickly. “I think that they . . . work on you. Try to persuade you. I mean, you know about press-ganging. There are plenty of sailors