Embassytown (50 page)

We were too large for them to come for us, but they still watched. Flying things skittered at our torches: burrowing eaters of phosphorescent rot, used to honing in on glowing ground, emerged and gnawed confused at the pooled light.

We didn’t take the leash off our prisoner—we didn’t trust it or know how to decide if it became trustable. But we’d been treating it with less fear for days, and did so with even less now. The new ex-Host liars regarded it, and whispered to each other in words they’d used countless times, that now did very different things. By early morning something was changing. The Ariekei were circling the captive. It wasn’t gasping or lunging at them, or at me, or Bren or YlSib: it was watching us, and watching the other Ariekei.

28

S
PANISH
D
ANCER
and our captive circled. The others ringed them. Every few seconds one of the two would shove out its giftwing like a knife-fighter looking for an opening. It would sketch out some outline in the air: there would be a pause and the other would follow suit. Spanish’s fanwing frilled open and shut. The Languageless’s stub trembled.

The gesticulations were information, motion telegrams. Talking. They didn’t understand each other but they knew there was something to understand. And that was liberation. When they did make communication—something ridiculous, Spanish throwing a pulpy bud then pointing into the muttering wildlife where it lay, and the Absurd picking it up—their euphoria, even alien, was palpable.

Signifying Spanish could speak through gesture now. For our captive that no longer had a name, perhaps the strangeness was greater. It had thought that without words, it had no language. Its comrades communicated with each other, never knowing they did, not across the chasm with untorn Ariekei; and mostly what they expressed to each other was the very hopelessness that made them believe they were incommunicado.

But in the panic of the attack and our escape, it had understood shove-and-point instructions to flee. It had watched Bren, YlSib and me speak and listen to each other with gestures for stress and clarity. The rest of the Absurd army never had to reflect on these behaviours. Spanish had learnt it could speak without speaking: the Absurd had learnt that it could speak, and listen, at all.

“They were yanking it around,” Bren said. “It was impossible for it not to know what they meant: they were shoving it and pointing the same way. They
made
it obey them. Maybe you need violence for language to take.”

“Bren,” I said. “That’s crap. We were all running the same way. We were
all
trying to get out. We had the same intentions. That’s how it knew what we were doing.”

He shook his head. Formally, he said, “Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.”

“Bullshit. It’s cooperation.” Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren’t as contradictory as they sounded.

“Look,” I said. Pointed above the horizon. There was smoke, stains in the sky.

“I
T
CAN’T
BE
,” Bren said, as if to himself, as we moved as fast as we could. “They were going to wait.” He said it more than once. When specks appeared far off on the lichened downs, we pretended that there were many things they might be, until we came too close to deny that they were bodies.

We looked down an incline to the aftermath of war. Thousands of metres of remains. I was breathing very hard, through my aeoli, in horror. At this distance the specificities of carnage were hard to gauge. I was trying to estimate Terre versus Absurd, but the death was too tangled. In any case, many of the Ariekene corpses I saw must be EzCal’s forces, like the humans with which they lay.

We led our not-quite-captive. It was in its collar but we hadn’t shocked it for kilometres. Spanish Dancer drummed its hoofs. It looked at me and opened its mouths. It pointed at the ruination. It opened and closed its mouths and said to me: “
”

“Yes.”

“
.”

“Yes. Too late.” We had not taught it that.

“
.”

S
TRUNG OUT
, artificially, druggedly alert, there was an unpleasant drag to my senses, as if things I saw or heard left residue when I turned from them. My aeoli mask in a rare reminder of its biorigged life shifted, uncomfortable at the smell of the dead. Everywhere were men and women burst open. There were Ariekei dead with fanwings and without, strewn together. Innards evolved on opposite ends of space alloyed in compound decay. There were corpse-fires and rubbish.

Wrecks. The aftermath was scored by lines of char culminated in craters, where fliers had come down. Bren sifted through junk, hands wrapped in rags. I copied him. It wasn’t quite so hard as I’d expected.

This had all happened perhaps two days before. These scenes made me careful and cold. I didn’t look too close at the faces of the scores of Embassytowner dead. I was too certain I’d see one I knew. Picking through remnants between those smoke pillars I tried to learn the history of the fight. There were many more Embassytown-and-city dead than Absurd. Fighters lay mid-action, in mouldering stasis, hands and giftwings and weapons still on each other. We read these corpse dioramas for the stories of their creation.

“They have corvids,” I said. Strategising without speech, the Absurd were driving biorigged weapons. “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus it’s an
army
, I mean it’s an
army
.”

Shockingly few combatants were left alive. A few mortally wounded Ariekei cycled their legs in the air, craning eyes. One cried out in Language, telling us that it was wounded. Spanish Dancer touched its giftwing. The Absurd moribund were dying with too much focus to notice us. On some I saw the bleed from fanwings newly excised—there were new recruits to that force even among the dying.

Pinioned under Ariekene dead was a woman still just alive, her broken aeoli wheezing oxygen into her. She looked at Bren and me as we tried to calm her and ask her, “What happened here?” But she only stared, terrified or air-starved out of speech. At last we laid her back down and gave her water. We couldn’t move her; her aeoli was dying. We found two others alive: one man couldn’t be woken; the other was conscious only of his impending death. All we got from him was that the Absurd had come.

Bren indicated ripped uniforms. “These are specialists.” He pointed at runnels out of the battlefield. “This wasn’t . . . These were outriders, this was a guard group, around something, that came in first.”

“The negotiators,” I said. He nodded slowly at me.

“Of course, yes. The negotiators. This was supposed to be a bloody parley. They gave it a try. My God.” He looked at the remnants around us. “The Languageless didn’t even slow.”

“And now they’re heading for the rest.” For the main mass of the Terre-Ariekei army.

W
E HAD TO
double back. We took an abandoned vehicle, cleaned the mess of war out of it. We sped along the cut through the marks of thousands of hooves. I was pressed against the Ariekei. Spanish and Baptist were crowding around the Absurd. They were sketching marks in the air, and the captive, if I could still describe it so, was doing the same.

It wasn’t long before we saw a line of figures. Bren stiffened. I knew how weak our plan was, but we had no choice. “It’s alright,” I said. “They’re Terre.”

A big, dirty derelict band, dressed like penitents, a trudging little town. There were children among them. They looked at us through their masks. They were as intense as monks, too. Some backed away, muttered among themselves. A few temporary leaders came closer, and a few soldiers, refugee from that ruination, in scorched uniforms.

The Ariekei stayed back. They kept the self-deafened close, disguised its injury. The humans told us they’d run from the depredations of the Absurd, from pioneer homesteads and bio-rigging farms. This was everyone running: they’d found each other. Been joined by the AWOL and soldiers from defeated units. They were behind their attackers now, were following them to the city, like those prey-fish that seek safety in their predator’s wake. They had no plans, only the vague sense that this might keep them alive a few days longer. Their passage in the tracks of the enemy was a despairing homage to their own defeat.

A militia-man told us, “We were with Ariekei. Leaders. The most eloquent, I suppose. There to communicate. We were there to protect them, the negotiators, give them space, time, when they were trying to get through to . . .” The soldiers had been instructed to do whatever was necessary while the Ariekene speakers struggled to make the Absurd understand them. “They were trying to
talk
to them.”

“How?” I said.

“No how.” I thought he’d said
know-how
and didn’t understand.

“There was no how,” he said. “We wondered. We could see the Absurd coming; they had fliers and weapons and vehicles, and there were thousands of them. We wondered what it was the Ariekei were planning. What they’d cooked up. It was only, Jesus . . . They got ready by listening to EzCal on datchip. A couple of us in the unit understand Language . . .” He paused at that inadvertent present tense. “. . . They told me what EzCal was saying, in the recordings. ‘You must make them understand.’ Again and again. In all different ways. ‘You must speak to them so they understand you.’” The man shook his head. “That’s what they got high on. When the Absurd came, they shouted at them through loudspeakers.”

“But they’re deaf,” I said. He shrugged. The wind sent his greasy hair rippling from under his battered helmet.

“We sent some of them out to meet . . . the enemy . . . close. Their plan must have been . . . Well, the Absurd just came through them. To us.” There’d been no plan at all. I looked at Bren. There’d been no secret strategy: only the knowledge of what had to happen, with no idea how.

“They tried to do it by fiat,” Bren said. The god-drug had hoped their ineluctable instructions would carry this. What despairing deity.

“Jesus,” I said. “Do you think they thought it would work?” There were a lot of dead back there. “Where are the rest of your army?” I said. “EzCal’s army?”

The man shook his head. “Most of them . . . us . . . never wanted to fight,” he said. “They wanted to beg. But they can’t even. Beg. Can’t make them hear. They’re retreating back to the city. Getting behind the blockades.” He shook his head slowly. “Those won’t stop them,” he said. There was nothing between the Absurd army and the city, and Embassytown.

The refugees watched us go. Told us it was in the wrong direction and shrugged when we ignored them. They gestured goodbye and good luck with a kind of dead politeness, a strange courtesy. At the edges of the mass, those most monkish ones watched us with hostility I’m certain most of them couldn’t have explained.