The Scar - China Mieville [47]
She could not shake his words from her ears. She hoped fervently that her own still troubled him.
Chapter Eight
When Bellis looked out of her window the next morning, she saw, over the roofs and chimneys, that the city was moving.
At some time in the night, the hundreds of tugboats that milled constantly around Armada like bees around a hive had harnessed the city. With thick chains they had attached themselves in great numbers to the city’s rim. They spread outward from the city, with their chains taut.
Bellis had become used to the city’s inconsistencies. The sun would rise to the left of her smokestack house one day, to the right the next, as Armada had spun slowly during the night. The sun’s antics were disorienting. Without land visible, there was nothing except the stars by which to gauge position, and Bellis had always found stargazing tedious: she was not someone who could instantly recognize the Tricorn or the Baby or the other constellations. The night sky meant nothing to her.
Today the sun rose almost directly in front of her window. The ships that strained at their chains and tugged at Armada’s mass cut across her field of vision, and she calculated after a moment that they were heading south.
She was awed by that prodigious effort. The city easily dwarfed the proliferation of ships that were pulling at it. It was hard to estimate Armada’s motion, but looking at the water coursing between ships, and the slap of breakers against the edges of the city, Bellis suspected that their passage was cripplingly slow.
Where are we going? she wondered, helplessly.
Bellis felt curiously shamed. It was weeks since she had arrived on Armada, and she realized that she had not wondered about the city’s motion, about its passage across the sea or its itinerary, or how its fleet, out engaged in their piracy, found their way back to a home that moved. She remembered with a sudden shudder Johannes’ attack on her the previous night.
Some of what he had said was true.
So was much of what she herself had said, of course, and she was still angry with him. She did not want to live on Armada, and the thought of seeing out her days on this mesh of moldering tubs made her mouth curl with anger so strong it was like panic. But still.
But still, it was true that she had locked herself off in her unhappiness. She was ignorant of her situation, ignorant of Armada’s history and politics, and she realized that this was dangerous. She did not understand the city’s economies; she did not know where the ships came from that sailed into the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. She did not know where the city had been or where it was going.
She began to open her mind as she stood in her nightgown, watching the sun pour across the bows of the slowly moving city. She felt her curiosity unfurl.
The Lovers, she thought with distaste. Let’s start there. Godspit, the Lovers. What in the name of Jabber are they?
Shekel took coffee with her on an upper deck of the library.
He was an excited boy. He told her that he was doing something with one person, and something else with another, and that he had had a fight with a third, and that a fourth lived in Dry Fall riding, and she withered beside his casual knowledge of the city. She felt disgraced again, for her ignorance, and she listened carefully to his ramblings.
Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactacae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate-merchant for Dreer Samher, and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous island south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men.
In turn, Bellis asked him about the ridings, the haunted quarter, the city’s route, the Sorghum rig, Tintinnabulum. She turned up her questions like cards.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I know Tinnabol. Him and his mates. Strange coves. Makler, Metzger, Promus, Tinnabol. There’s one called