The Scar by China Miéville Page A

continued.
    She told them about the city.
    Sometimes she was silent, and without a pause the man would speak. They were almost like twins, finishing each other’s sentences.
    It had been hard to listen to what they were telling her. Bellis was agog at the feelings she saw pass between the scarred man and woman every time they glanced at each other. Above all a hunger. Bellis had felt unstuck in time: as if she were dreaming this arrival.
    Later, she would realize that she had absorbed much of what had been said, that it had passed into her and been processed at some level below consciousness. It came out as she began to live in Armada, against her will.
    At the time, all she had been aware of was the couple’s shared intensity, and the stunned excitement that greeted the woman’s final sentence.

    The words had reached Bellis full seconds after they were spoken, as if her skull were some thick medium through which sound traveled sluggishly.
    There was a massed gasp and a whoop and then a swell of incredulous cheering, a huge breaking wave of joy from the hundreds of exhausted Remade prisoners who stood shivering and stinking. It rose and rose, at first tentative and then rapidly delirious with triumph.
    “Human, cactacae, hotchi, cray . . .
Remade
,” the woman had said. “In Armada you are all sailors and citizens. In Armada you are not distinguished. Here you are free. And equal.”
    There, finally, was a welcome. And the Remade accepted it with loud and tearful thanks.

    Bellis had been herded away with her random companions, out into the city where the men and women of the city’s trades were waiting with contracts and hard, eager looks. And as she shuffled out of the room, she looked back at the group of leaders and saw with astonishment that someone had joined them.
    Johannes Tearfly was looking down, totally bewildered, at the hand that the scarred man proffered—not snubbing it, but as if he could not think what he was supposed to do with it. The elderly man who had stood with the murderer and the scarred couple stepped forward, stroking his bright white beard, and greeted Johannes loudly by name.
    That was all Bellis had seen or heard before she was taken away. Off the ship, out into Armada, into her new city.
    A flotilla of dwellings. A city built on old boat bones.

    Everywhere battered clothes shook and dried in the constant wind. They ruffled in Armada’s alleyways, by tall brickwork, steeples, masts, and chimneys and ancient rigging. Bellis looked from her window across the vista of reconfigured masts and bowsprits, a cityscape of beakheads and forecastles. Across many hundreds of ships lashed together, spread over almost a square mile of sea, and the city built on them.
    Countless naval architectures: Stripped longships; scorpion galleys; luggers and brigantines; massive steamers hundreds of feet long down to canoes no larger than a man. There were alien vessels: ur-ketches, a barge carved from the ossified body of a whale. Tangled in ropes and moving wooden walkways, hundreds of vessels facing all directions rode the swells.
    The city was loud. Tethered dogs, the shouts of costermongers, the drone of engines, hammers and lathes, and stones being broken. Klaxons from workshops. Laughter and shouting, all in the variant of Salt, the mongrel sailors’ tongue, that was the language of Armada. And below those city sounds the throaty noise of boats. Complaining wood and the snaps of leather and rope, the percussion of ship on ship.
    Armada moved constantly, its bridges swinging side to side, its towers heeling. The city shifted on the water.
    The vessels had been reclaimed, from the inside out. What had once been berths and bulkheads had become houses; there were workshops in old gundecks. But the city had not been bounded by the ships’ existing skins. It reshaped them. They were built up, topped with structure; styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and esthetics into a compound