The Scar

Chapter Forty-seven

Tanner Sack was known. He was the one who had fought a bonefish to save a dying man. He had Remade himself into a kind of manfish, the better for life in Armada. He had lost his boy.

Tanner was known, and he was respected.

You listened to Tanner, and you believed him.

Bellis could tell no one anything. Her mouth was hard and cold as a stone.

She had to turn to others to spread words.

Everyone knew Tanner Sack.

If Bellis had tried to tell what she had heard in that unpleasant little cubbyhole, if she tried to tell the secrets she had listened to, she would not be believed. She would not be heard. But she had introduced someone else to her room, so that he could speak for her and tell the story.

She could not help nodding. Smiling without warmth. Gods, it’s well done, she thought, bowing her head, acknowledging consummate work. She felt skeins of cause, effect, effort, and interaction tying around her. She felt things all coming together, pushing her into this place, at this time, having done this thing.

Oh, it’s well done.

It started almost as soon as she and Tanner came up out of the lower decks.

She blinked, and looked around her at the flags and the washing and the bridges and the towers, still all strong and knotted together with mortar. She was haunted by the images from Hedrigall’s story. She saw the city shattering and falling so clearly that it was a true relief to emerge and see it all solid.

Tanner began. The Lovers were still below, still organizing, trying to hide Hedrigall. While they secreted themselves below the air and schemed, Tanner began.

He looked first for the people he knew well. He spoke quickly and fiercely. One of the first he found was Angevine, and he involved her carefully with the group of dockers to whom he was speaking, who did not know her.

His passion was genuine, utterly guileless. He did not orate.

Bellis watched him move through the crowd still milling on the Grand Easterly’s decks, arguing in angry tones about what it was they had heard, about what Hedrigall had seen-how and why he had come back. There were still a good number of pirates on the huge old ship, and Tanner spoke to them all.

He trembled with rage. Bellis followed him by an irregular and discrete course. She watched him, and was impressed by his fervor. She watched the stunned reactions move like a disease through the masses. She watched the disbelief quickly become belief and frightened anger, and then resolve.

Tanner insisted-she heard him-that they had the right to know the truth, and something uncertain moved inside Bellis.

She did not know what the truth was; she was not sure what she believed. She was not sure what lay behind Hedrigall’s extraordinary story. There were several possibilities. But it did not matter. She refused to think about that now. She had been brought to this place, and she would do what was required, and bring this to an end.

Bellis watched as those whom Tanner had told then told others, and they told more, until it was quickly impossible to track the story. It moved under its own momentum. Very soon, most of those who told a garbled story of Hedrigall’s escape from the Scar could not have said how they knew it.

The Lovers had told a great deal of the truth about the Scar, as they understood it, in a popular form. There were few people in Armada who did not know that possibilities spilled from it, that that was the source of its power. Several had seen Uther Doul’s sword switched on: they knew what probability mining did. And here, so deep in the Hidden Ocean, so close to the Scar itself, with its seepage, with probabilities welling up from it like plasma, it was not hard to believe that Hedrigall-this Hedrigall, raving in the lower decks of the steamer-was telling the truth.

And while their own Hedrigall might be thousands of miles away, fled weeks ago, adrift above the ocean or crashed or surviving as a hermit on some foreign land or drowned in the sea, the Armadans accepted that the one they had picked up was a nigh-man. A refugee from a terrible Bas-Lag in which Armada had been lost.

“Two days ago,” Bellis heard one woman say with a dreadful awe. “All of us, we’ve been dead for two days.”

It was a warning. No one could possibly miss that.

While the sun crossed toward the lowest quarter of the sky, the story spread its fingers, passing into all the ridings. Its presence clogged up the atmosphere.

Hedrigall was hidden, and the Lovers made a stupid mistake by staying below, trying to work out plans. Over their heads, Tanner vented and ran from ship to ship, spreading word.

On the Grand Easterly, Bellis waited, remembering Hedrigall’s story-remembering it so that it filled her head, and she saw all the dreadful collapse again. She did not try to evaluate what he had said. It was a story, an awesome story, awesomely told. That was all that was important.

She watched the Armadans come and go around her, debating and conferring darkly. There were plans, she could see that; there was movement. Something was coming to a close.

Time moved quickly. The sun was low. All over Garwater, workshops were closing, their workers amassing, converging on the Grand Easterly.

At six o’clock the Lovers emerged. Some sense of what was happening had filtered down to them, some inchoate awareness that their riding and their city were in crisis.

They came out into the light, followed by Uther Doul, wearing hard and nervous expressions. Bellis saw them blink with shock at the ranks of their citizens who faced them. Scores lined up like a ragged army: hotchi and cactacae among the humans, even the Garwater llorgiss.

Above them, twitching as his nerves died in the light, was the Brucolac. And at their head, standing a little forward, his chin pushed out, facing the Lovers, was Tanner Sack.

The Lovers looked out at their men and women, and Bellis was certain that she saw them flinch. She glanced at them and then ignored them, staring past them at their mercenary. Uther Doul did not meet her eyes.

“We have spoken to Hedrigall,” the Lover began, her voice not showing any anxiety.

Shockingly, Tanner Sack interrupted her.

“Spare us,” he said. All around him, people glanced at each other, held by the force of his voice.

The Lovers stared at him, their eyes widening very slightly, their faces inscrutable.

“Enough lies,” Tanner said. “We know the truth. We know where Hedrigall-this maybe-Hedrigall, the one you’ve locked away, hiding him from us-we know where he’s been. Where he’s from.”

He moved forward, and the mass moved up behind him, shuffling, determined.

“Jaddock,” Tanner shouted, “Corscall, Guddrunn, you lot, go find Hedrigall. He’s down there somewhere. Bring him out here.” A group of cactacae stepped forward nervously toward the Lovers and Uther Doul, and the door behind them.

“Stop!” shouted the Lover. The cactacae halted and looked to Tanner. He moved forward, and the crowd came with him. Emboldened, the cactus-people moved on.

“Doul…” said the Lover, her voice dangerous. Everyone stopped, instantly.

Uther Doul stepped forward, between the Lovers and the advancing Armadans.

And after a second, Tanner came to meet him.

“All of us, Uther Doul?” he said, loud enough for everyone around him to hear. “You want to take every one? You think you can do that? Because we are fetching Hedrigall up here, and if you threaten them-” He indicated the cactacae. “-then the rest of us are coming with them, and you threaten all of us. Think you can take us all? Shit, maybe you can, maybe you can. But if you fucking do… what then? Who are your bosses going to rule?”

There were hundreds of Armadans behind him, and they nodded as he spoke, and some of them shouted their agreement.

Uther Doul looked from Tanner to the masses behind him, back to Tanner again. And then he showed weakness, his command broke, he hesitated and turned his head. Uncertain, he turned, to look to his bosses, to seek clarification. His shoulders moved in a minuscule shrug; he tilted his head in a question: He’s right, what do you want me to do, do you want me to kill them all …?

When he turned like that, when he showed doubt, Tanner won. He moved his hand again, and the cactacae moved past Doul and the Lovers and into the corridor, setting out to find Hedrigall, uneasy but not afraid, knowing that they would be safe.

The Lovers did not even look at them. They stared instead at Tanner Sack.

“What more could you ask?” said Tanner, his voice hard. “You’ve been shown what’ll happen to us. But you’re so fucking insane with this, so fucking caught up in it, that you’d ignore this? You still want to go on.

“And you’d keep this quiet from us. You’d lie to us, let us drive ourselves, mute and stupid as the fucking avanc, over the edge. That’s enough. This stops here. You take us no further. We are turning back.”

“Dammit!” The Lover jabbed her hand at Tanner, meeting his eye. She spat on the deck before him. “You fucking coward! You fool! Do you really think that story he told is the truth? Think about it, godsdammit. You think that’s how the Scar really is? And you think that out of all the ocean, out of the entire fucking Hidden Ocean, we found him by sheer chance? You think it’s a fucking coincidence that our own Hedrigall runs and then we meet another, from some other place, with stories to scare us stupid?

“It’s the same man! This was always his plan. Can’t you fucking see? We thought he’d left us, but he didn’t. Where would he go? He cut loose the Arrogance, and he hid somewhere. And now, when we get so close, so fucking close to the most amazing place in our world, he comes out to frighten us away. Why? Because he’s a coward, like you, like all of you.

“That was his plan. He didn’t even have the courage to run away in shame. He waited to take all of you with him.”

There were those who wavered at that. Even in her blistering rage, her points scored home.

But Tanner gave her nothing.

“You were going to keep it from us,” he said. “You were going to lie. We’ve come so far with you, and you were going to lie to us about this. Because you’re so blinded by some greed you couldn’t risk us facing you down. You know nothing about the Scar,” he shouted. “Nothing. Don’t tell me coincidence; don’t tell me unbelievable-maybe this is how it works. You don’t even know.

“All we know is that one of the best fucking Garwater men I ever knew is down there in your jail, warning us that if we go to the Scar we’ll die. And I believe him. This ends here. We say what happens now. We’re taking control. We’re turning around; we’re heading home. Your orders to proceed… are in-fucking-validated. You can’t jail or kill us all.”

There was a roar at that, a mass exhalation of excitement, and people began sporadically to chant Sack Sack Sack.

Bellis paid no attention. Something extraordinary was happening, something almost inaudible under the noisy approval around her.

Behind Uther Doul, the Lover had been watching and listening with a terrible uncertainty in his eyes. He had reached forward, touched the Lover, and turned her around, then had said something low and urgent to her, something inaudible that had made her react with incredulity and rage.

The Lovers were arguing.

Quiet came down over the crowd as they realized what was happening. Bellis held her breath. It shocked her deeply. That they could whisper to each other, their faces growing red, their scars white-scored with anger, their voices hissed, muttered curt, growing slowly louder until they shouted, ignoring those around them, who stared at them in stupid amazement.

“… he’s right,” Bellis heard the Lover shout. “He’s right. We don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” the Lover shouted back. Her face was outraged and terrible. “Don’t know what?”

Overhead, a little flock of cowed city birds cut across the sky, touching quickly down, somewhere out of sight. Armada creaked. The silence went on and on. Tanner Sack and his mutineers were frozen. They watched the argument between the Lovers unfold with an awe more fitting to a geological event.

As Bellis watched the last of the birds, her eyes came to the Brucolac’s blasted figure and stayed there, though the vampir disgusted her. His convulsions were dying down, his body calming. He opened eyes seared milk-white and blind by the daylight, and turned his head slowly.

He was listening. Bellis was sure of it.

The Lovers ignored everything outside them. Uther Doul moved silently aside, as if to give those assembled a better view.

There was no other sound at all.

“We don’t know,” said the Lover again. Bellis felt as if an arc of heat or electricity spat between the Lovers’ eyes. “We don’t know what’s ahead. He might be right. Can we be sure? Can we risk it?”

“Oh…” the Lover responded, her voice coming out of her in a querulous sigh. She stared at her lover with a terrible disappointment and loss. “Oh, godsdammit,” she breathed quietly. “Gods rot and fuck you dead.”

Again there was quiet, and palpable shock. The Lovers stared at each other.

“We cannot force them,” the Lover said finally. His voice shook violently. “We can’t rule without concord. This isn’t a war. You can’t send Doul to fight them.”

“Don’t turn away from this now,” the Lover said, her voice unstable. “You’re turning from me. After what we’ve done. After I made you. After we made ourselves together. Don’t deny me…”

The Lover glanced up around him, at the encircling faces. A visible panic came over him. He held out his hands. “Let’s go inside.”

The Lover was rigid, her scars glowing. She was tense with self-control. She shook her head at him, tightly raging. “Who the fuck are we to care who hears? What is this? What’s happened to you? Are you as stupid as these fools? You think the lying cant that returned bastard told us rings true? Do you? You believe him?”

“Am I still you,” the Lover screamed back at her, “and are you me? Or not? That’s the only question here!”

He was losing something. Something was slipping from him. Bellis watched a connection as vital as an umbilicum attenuate and wither in him, and dry up and snap. Flailing, raging, terrorized very suddenly, alone for the first time in many years, he tried to say more.

“We can’t do this; we can’t. You’ll lose us everything…”

The Lover watched him, and her face set dead cold.

“I thought more of you,” she said slowly. “I thought I’d made my soul whole.”

“And you have, you have, you did,” said the Lover frantically, so pathetic that Bellis turned her face away in shame.

They brought Hedrigall up from belowdecks, draped over the shoulders of the cactacae who had gone after him, and he was greeted with a wave of welcoming joy.

Everyone shouted questions at him that he shied away from and could not answer. People danced and shouted and called his name while he stared at them, drunk with what seemed disoriented terror. Cactacae, untroubled by his thorns, grabbed him and rode him on their shoulders, where he bobbed unsteadily and stared bewildered about.

“Turn!” shouted Tanner Sack. “We turn the city! Get the Lover! Get someone who knows how. Get crews to the rein-winches. We’re sending a signal to the fucking avanc; we’re turning.” Buoyed up, the throng looked around for the Lovers, demanding that they tell how it was done, but the Lovers were gone.

In the crush surrounding Hedrigall, in that carnival, the Lover had turned fiercely and run back toward her room, the Lover behind her.

And watching them carefully, following a little behind them, getting ready to take a different route, for one final time to try to understand what she had done and what had been done to her, was Bellis Coldwine.

As she stepped into the passageway, she heard another exchange.

“I rule here,” she heard the Lover say, his voice thick and careful. “I rule this place; we rule it. That’s what we do; that’s what we fucking are… Don’t do this. You’ll lose it all for us.”

The Lover turned to him, and Bellis was suddenly in plain view. But the Lover took her in for only a second, then turned her scarred face away, uncaring. Not giving a damn who heard.

“You…” she said, touching the Lover’s face. She shook her head, and when she spoke again it was with great sadness and resolve. “You’re right. We don’t rule here anymore. That was never why I was here.

“I won’t ask you to come with me.” For a second, her voice almost broke. “You’ve stolen yourself from me.”

She turned, and with the Lover pleading with her, begging her to listen to him, to hear reason, to understand, she walked away.

Bellis had heard enough. She stood alone for a long time in between old heliotypes stripped of meaning before turning back to the celebrations outside, where Tanner was trying to give orders, trying to have the city turned.

Raucous gangs, reeling at what they did, turned the winches that tugged at the avanc’s reins. And slowly, over miles, the avanc turned its nose in dumb obedience, and the city’s massive wake began to arc, and Armada turned.

It was a long, very shallow curve that took the rest of the day’s light to complete. And while the city turned tail on the featureless sea, the pirate-bureaucrats of Garwater ran frantic through their riding, trying to discover who was now in control.

The truth terrified them: in those anarchic hours there was no one giving orders. There was no chain of command, no order, no hierarchy, nothing but a rugged, contingent democracy thrown together by the Armadans as they needed it. The bureaucrats could not accept this, and they saw leaders in Tanner Sack and Hedrigall. But those two were participants, nothing more: one enthusiastic, the other looking bewildered, dragged about on shoulders like a mascot.

Is this how it ends?

Bellis is lost with excitement. She is weak with it. It is night now, and she is running with a crowd of smiling citizens along the edge of Jhour, to watch the crews come in from the winch-boats. She realizes that she is smiling, too. She does not know when that began.

Is it finished?

Is this how it ends?

The authority that kept Garwater in control, and which spread beyond that to assert its will on all Armada, is gone. It was so strong, so powerful, for so long, and now it has melted with a speed and a quiet that leave Bellis stunned. Where have they all gone? she wonders. The rulers have disappeared, and their integument of law and control, their yeomanry and their authority, have gone with them.

The rulers of the other ridings have wisely remained silent and hidden. It would not work for them to try to take control of this, this popular rage and exhilaration. They are not so stupid as to try. They are waiting.

All the fears and resentments and uncertainties, everything that has welled up in the citizens for weeks and months, the residue from every time they had doubts and said nothing: that is what powers this movement. This mutiny. Hedrigall’s extraordinary, improbable story has set them free, given them the certainty they needed.

They pull the city around.

There is no looting that Bellis can see, no violence, no fires or gunshots. This is about a single issue. This is about not dying, about escaping this dreadful sea alive. The avanc is still injured, but it is progressing, and Bellis can see the stars, and she knows that the beast is heading back toward the Swollen Ocean.

This is what she has wanted. Every mile that took her away from New Crobuzon was a defeat. She had tried everything to get the fucking city to turn, to take her back toward her home; and now, suddenly and utterly unexpectedly, she has succeeded.

How did this happen? she thinks, feeling as if she should be triumphant or proud, not like a bewildered, happy bystander.

She knows why she is troubled. She has questions and resentments. She remembers what she saw in Doul’s eyes. Used again, she thinks, aghast and wondering. Used again.

It is a complex chain of manipulation, what has been done to her. She cannot untangle it now. Now is not the time.

Flares, the pilots’ signals to the winch-boats, were set off in a big vulgar display. It was a celebration and a defiance-we do not need these anymore, the mutineers were saying.

There were men and women still out, in frenetic celebration, when the sky first lightened in the east.

Bellis stood on the Grand Easterly, near the entrance to the corridors where the Lovers’ quarters were. She had been waiting for some time. She remembered what the Lover had said: I will not ask you to come. Something was ending, and Bellis wanted to witness it.

There were others on the deck, mostly tired and drunk, singing and watching the sea, but they quieted when the Lover appeared on deck with Uther Doul beside her. There was a moment, an ugly moment, when the bystanders remembered their anger and something might have happened, but it went quickly.

The Lover carried packs that bulged oddly. She did not look at anyone but Doul. Bellis saw that one of the packs contained the perhapsadian, Doul’s weird instrument.

“This is all of it?” the Lover said, and Doul nodded.

“Everything I collected,” he said, “except my sword.” The Lover’s face was set. Calm and hard.

“Is the boat all ready?” she said, and Doul nodded.

They walked together, unmolested, watched by all the pirates, toward the Grand Easterly’s port side, and the streets that wound over a tight crush of vessels, and Basilio Harbor beyond.

Bellis kept looking back to the doorway. She expected the Lover to appear, to call his lover back or to run to her and tell her he would go, too, that nothing would part them, but he did not.

They had never been each other. They had never been doing the same thing. Perhaps it was only chance that they had traveled together so far.

At the edge of the Grand Easterly, the Lover stopped Uther Doul and turned for a last look at the ship. The sun was not yet up, but the sky was light, and Bellis could see the Lover’s face clear.

Cutting across it, scored over her right cheek from the hairline to her jaw, was a new wound. It glistened with a faint coating of salve like varnish. It was deep, and dark red, and it sliced straight through several of her other, older scars, as if it were brushing them aside.

Bellis never heard any stories about that last journey, which astonished her. In all the days and weeks that followed, when everyone was talking about the night of the mutiny, she never once heard about the Lover and Uther Doul moving sedately through a city tired and drunk on its rebellion.

She could imagine it, though. She saw them progressing sedately, the Lover sad and pensive, looking around her, memorizing the details of the city she had helped rule for so long. Hefting her pack, feeling the weight of all the books of arcane science, the tracts on possibility mining, the ancient machines that Doul had given her.

Doul beside her, his hand ready by his sword, to protect her in her last minutes in Armada. Was it necessary? Did he need to step in? Bellis heard no stories of him cutting Armadans down.

And was the Lover really alone?

It seemed hard to believe that after the years of her presence she would have no one ready to follow her. Her narrative logic was not the brutal mercantilism that drove Armada, but could it be alien to all its citizens? She could not have controlled a ship, even a small one, on her own. Bellis found it easier to imagine that as she walked through the city, she drew certain men and women out of their hiding places, that they sensed her passing and came to her. Alienated from their neighbors, impelled by other motivations, a gathering come out to drift in behind the Lover and Uther Doul, walking at her pace, themselves packed and ready to leave their city.

Romantics, storytellers, misfits, the suicidal and the mad. Bellis imagined them behind the Lover.

She could not help thinking that there was a small crew of them by the time the Lover emerged from below the eaves and crossed the deserted warehouses of the docks. She imagined that they must have joined the Lover on the deck of the prepared ship, helping her to stoke the engines, casting off, saying good-bye.

But Bellis did not know. The Lover might have gone alone.

All Bellis knew was that after almost an hour, with the sun very low and its light thick, a sail passed unmolested through the narrow entrance to Basilio Harbor and out into the sea. It was not large. Its deck was equipped with little cranes and winches and all manner of engines and boilers, the purposes of which Bellis had no idea of. It seemed well equipped and clean.

Bellis could not see it clearly. She was watching over the irregular contours of Armada’s roofs, all those flats and slopes in grey and red, slate, concrete, iron. She could just make out the vessel’s progress through oily morning sunlight, past the other vessels tied up carefully in the harbor, out through the gap in the city’s ship matter. She could see the woodsmoke it vented as the strong, strange currents of the Hidden Ocean took it away.

A little way from Bellis, the Lover was watching.

His eyes were so raw with tears it looked as though they had been rubbed with dust. And of course, his cheek had only its old scars.

The boat powered on. It moved with an undeviating speed that Bellis had never witnessed on the Hidden Ocean. Without fuss, without a fusillade of shots or fireworks, it headed north, directly away from the city, slipping into Armada’s wake and heading for the horizon, toward the Scar.

A long time after that, after it had disappeared from sight, Uther Doul came back to the Grand Easterly, alone.

Doul stood below the mast on which the Brucolac was crucified, the vampir’s early-morning shrieks beginning weakly with the sun.

“Cut him down,” said Uther Doul with authority to a nearby group of men and women. They looked up, startled, but did not question him. “Cut him down and take him home.”

And on that extraordinary morning, while the city felt its way toward new rules and nobody knew what was permissible or normal or acceptable or right, Uther Doul’s merciful order was obeyed.

Not the Lover anymore, thought Bellis suddenly. She stared out toward the horizon’s rim, where the little vessel had disappeared. She thought of the Lovers’ argument, and of the new wound-a newborn scar that tore across the Lover’s face, re-creating and separating her. You’re not the Lover anymore.

Bellis tried to reconceive of the Lover, out there at the helm of her ship, heading toward the most extraordinary place in the world. Bellis tried to rethink her, to be clear, to give credit or blame where it was due and think about the woman piloting that lost vessel toward the edge of the world according to no one’s plans or desires but her own.

But Bellis kept thinking of her as Lover Lover Lover, even as she tried not to.

She did not know the woman’s name.