The Scar - China Mieville [73]
“Two years? Three?” She shrugged. “I didn’t know how long it would be till I’d be safe. Ships come from home at least annually to Nova Esperium. My contract was five years, but I’ve broken contracts before. I thought I’d stay until they forgot, till some other public enemy or crisis or whatever took over their attention. Until I got word that it was safe to go back—there are people who know where . . . where I was going.” She had been about to say where I am. “And so . . .” she concluded.
They looked at each other for a long time.
“So that’s why I ran away.”
Bellis thought of the people she had left, the few people she had trusted, and was suddenly and briefly overwhelmed by how much she missed them.
These were strange circumstances. She was a fugitive, eager, desperate to return to the place she had fled. Well, she thought, in all plans, circumstances intervene. She smiled with cold humor. I tried to leave the city for a year or two, and circumstances intervened—some things happened—and instead I find myself trapped for the rest of my life as a librarian in an itinerant pirate city.
Silas was subdued. He seemed moved by what she had told him, and she studied him and knew that he was thinking over his own story. Neither of them were self-pitying. But they had come to be here through no fault or design of their own, and they did not wish to stay.
There were minutes more silence within the room. Outside, of course, the subdued puttering from the hundreds of engines that dragged them south continued. And the glottals of waves continued; and the other sounds—city noise, night noise.
When Silas rose to leave, Bellis came with him to the door, sticking quite close by him, though she did not touch or look at him. He paused at her entrance and met her eyes, melancholy. There was a long second, and then they bent in to each other, his arms on the door, hers unmoving by her sides, committing to nothing.
They kissed, and only their lips and tongues moved. They were carefully poised, so as not to breathe, or to encroach too far on the other with touches or sound, but finding a connection nonetheless, warily and with relief.
When their long and deep kiss broke, Silas risked moving his lips gently as they parted, finding her again with a little succession of mouth-to-mouth touches; and she allowed him that, even though that first moment was passed and these tiny codas took place in real time.
Bellis breathed slowly and looked at him steadily, and he at her, for just as long as they would have done anyway, and he opened the door and walked out into the cool, speaking his goodnight quietly, not hearing her echo.
Chapter Twelve
The next day was New Year’s Eve.
Not, of course, to the Armadans, for whom it was a day marked only by a sudden increase in warmth, making it merely autumnal. They could not ignore the fact that it was the solstice, the shortest day of the year: but they did not treat that as of much importance. Beyond a few cheerful remarks about the nights drawing in, the day went unremarked.
But Bellis was sure that, among the New Crobuzon press-ganged, she was not alone in keeping track of the days back home. She speculated that there would be subdued parties speckled across the ridings that night. Quiet, so as not to stand out, or to alert the yeomanry or the proctors, or whatever authority there was in a particular riding, that some among the cramped terraces and galleys of Armada were loyal to alternative calendars.
It was a kind of hypocrisy, she vaguely acknowledged: New Year’s Eve had never meant anything to her before.
For the Armadans, it was Horndi, the beginning of another nine-day week, and a day that Bellis had free. She met Silas on the bare deck of the Grand Easterly.
He took her to the star’d-aft edge of Garwater, to Croom Park. He had been surprised that she had not visited it before, and as they entered it and passed deep into its byways, she could understand why.
The bulk of the park was a long strip, more than a hundred feet wide and almost six