1876 A.D. Ferupe: Greenslope Domain
The circus convoy rumbled along at thirty miles an hour: the daemons were really kicking in tonight. Inside Daisy 3, one of the big trucks whose body had been honeycombed with partitions to make living quarters, Anuei sat ungracefully on her sembhui mat. It was the only genuine relic of Lamaroon she had managed to preserve for this long. Her birdcages swung from the ceiling, linnets and nightingales silent under their cloths. She was knitting a sweater for Crispin and keeping an eye on him at the same time. He scrambled on a pile of the boxed props she didn’t allow him ever to look at, trying to press his eye to the crack through which he’d be able to see the back of Roddy Colbey’s head and the road between the dark, rolling fields ahead. During the day, Roddy was Fred the Fearless, a tiger trainer; at night, he was a reasonably expert truck driver. Crispin banged his head on the board ceiling as the truck jounced, let out one cry, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
He wore nothing except a shirt filthy with snot and what else Anuei didn’t like to think. It didn’t matter that his little penis bobbled in full view; he was only three, and the night air was warm. But before the end of the year, Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show would enter the northern domains, where winter was one long swirl of whiteness and spring was a hillside or two covered with eyebright. By then Anuei wanted her son to have a wardrobe that wouldn’t shame a squire’s child. The circus’s itinerary was so long, six full years between shows at the capital, that all Crispin had known in his short life were the plains of the east and these fertile, balmy hills of the heartlands. Saul Smithrebel said that this time, he’d timed the itinerary so that they’d make their swing through the northern domains during what passed for summer there. But it was already spring and they were not yet north of the capital. Anuei had twenty-five years of experience with Saul’s timing. Miserable man! she thought. He frets to get to our next stop, and then all he wants is to get the show over with and move out! I’d wager my last penny that every day when he sees the sun rise, the first thing he thinks is, “My hat and coattails, we’re late, save the Queen!”
Earlier in the day they had shown a farming town called Amisbottom. (What a name for a town, no lilt, not like Eirhazii or Faiina or Redeuiina. Oh, Redeuiina, where it’s always summer, and I was young and thin and wore hibiscus in my hair! A pang of loss, the taste of sea-salt, memories of an ocean so blue that even the drops she splashed at her friends were turquoise... .)
As the circus rolled in along the main street of Amisbottom, sweeping carts and wagons aside, patchwork-coated clowns tumbling ahead of the parade, the band screaming its siren song, the lions in their open-sided truck and the elephants plodding behind, Anuei had known it was going to be a good show. Of course the respectable citizens were muttering behind their lace curtains. But out of sight was out of mind. And the lower classes, by contrast, were unashamedly visible. Scruffy street urchins trotting along behind the trucks. Farmers in town for the day showing their rotted teeth in laughter as the clowns plucked live birds out of the children’s ears.
A good show.
In the east and west, circuses were seen so rarely that they carried no stigma. Here in the more populous domains of the heartlands, where the map was freckled with towns, everyone knew a circus was scarcely better than a music hall. The audiences were composed solely of the lower classes. But the lower classes of Amisbottom seemed far happier than they had any right to be. And happy people generally had coin in their pockets. Clink! Clink!
Anuei found the idea of saving her earnings—as her friend Gift “Mills the Magificent” did—ridiculous. She spent them on things that made Crispin laugh. Cypean lanterns, lollipops, paper dolls. She would have been happy to stay for two days, maybe more, in Amisbottom. Even Saul had known it would be a good show: he’d grinned as he sat in his paper-flower-covered throne on top of the first truck in the parade. Anuei believed that these were the best moments of his life, the rare triumphs of a ragtag general.
But the grin hadn’t lasted long. Almost before Anuei finished with her last patron, the show was over and the roustabouts were dismantling her black top over her head.
Twenty-five years of this. Never slowing down.
She was forty-one, and she would spend the rest of her life with Smithrebel’s. Sometimes she wondered how long that life would be; sometimes she didn’t care.
If it weren’t for Crispin... ! She didn’t know why she’d waited so long to have a baby. What had she been afraid of? Should’ve gotten pregnant twenty years ago. Spawned a whole gang of little half-breeds. Blown up to the size of a baby elephant.
She cocked her ear at a knock on the planking partition. Not Millsy, he’d come right in; and only one other visitor ever came to her quarters—unless one of her Amisbottom patrons had somehow managed to conceal himself in the convoy, and was now emerging to confess his undying love! She expelled a long sigh as she got to her feet. “Must shed just a little, just a little of this weight,” she whispered as she unhooked the door curtain. Saul came in, sliding his feet and jerking his head about—like a crow, she always thought. A scavenger. He did not even look at her, but took up his stance in the middle of the tiny room, eyeing Crispin as if he thought the child might be good to eat. Beads tinkled as the curtain slid closed.
Anuei yanked up her skirts—she wore ordinary Ferupian clothing when she wasn’t “on”—and slapped the mountainous, dimpled expanse of flesh as black as five-thousand-year-old oak. “Hey up, Saul, I’m going to lose some weight!” she said, silently cursing the soft-accented timidity of her voice.
“What, the Balloon Lady relinquish her rotundity? I forbid it!” Saul said pompously. “Skinny women are not female. They are Kirekunis.” He chuckled at his own joke and squinted at Crispin, who balanced precariously on the rail from which swung the vast “Lamaroon” gowns Anuei wore for her patrons, picking wood lice out of the juddering partition. “Always climbing!” Saul said. “I tell you he is going to be an aerialist!”
“And I tell you,” Anuei said, “the men of our race grow to be giants! He’ll be six-foot-five by the time he’s fifteen! More’n three heads taller than the tallest aerialist I ever saw. Millsy says he’s not meant for the circus at all.” Millsy was a truck driver, and also a daemon trickster who filled in between the elephants and the aerial ballet. In the scheme of Smithrebel’s, he was so far down the pecking order that he was practically ignored, but he was one of the few people in the circus who took a real, human interest in Anuei and her son.
“Gift Mills spouts more hot steam than a kettle!” Saul said. “Don’t believe a word he tells you, my angel.”
Anuei looked at her son. His pudgy little hands were intent on their task. Anuei felt a pang of desperate sorrow: he didn’t yet know he was a half-breed.
Annoyed at her inattentiveness, Saul tapped one foot in its meticulously shined shoe. “I expected to find you abed,” he remarked.
“You don’t remember Lamaroon, do you,” she said sadly.
She had been fifteen when she met Saul. He had been eighteen. He was making a sight-seeing tour of the islands of the Pacific Ocean—his father, the then-owner of Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show, heir to five centuries of circus life, had sent him to learn something of the rest of the world. For the young Saul, Ferupe, with its vast territories spreading from the frozen north to the equatorial savannah which bordered Izte Kchebuk’ara, had been enough world and more; he had refused to sail to the Americas, and he had stubbornly refused to have his mind changed by anything he saw in the islands. His itching, jumping eagerness to get back to the circus infected Anuei. She could not believe it when he offered to take her with him.
At fifteen everyone is prone to thinking they have fallen in love. But Anuei wondered, later, why she had never seen what her friends and family told her: that the short, maggot-pale tourist in his absurd black top hat could not hold a candle to the men of Redeuiina who flirted with her every day. Island men wore nothing but char-dyed pantaloons, so it looked as if they were balancing naked on the decks of the fishing boats. Dusty black gods with grins like double rows of cowries. But back then, Anuei knew only that she had heard stories of husbands drinking too much and bashing their wives’ faces in. She had not yet learned the lesson of the circus: appearances are everything. So young, she placed no value on sheer physical beauty, on the positive impact of having that beauty come home to you every day. But of course, back then she had been beautiful herself.
She had been a valued addition to Smithrebel’s Fabulous Show. But Crispin was even more valuable. A circus baby, he could be taught skills that no hiree could ever learn to the satisfaction of the born-and-bred performers. And a freak to boot! Saul prided himself on having one of everything. Among the roustabouts numbered a Green Eye from the Mim, a Red Nomad from Izte Kchebuk’ara, and a tiny, sallow, truck driver named Kiquat who supposedly came from deep within the snowlands. There was a man who called himself The Cultie, who did an epileptic trance dance to fill in between the lions and the high-wire acts, though Anuei very much doubted any apocalyptic cult would recognize him as a member. Saul even employed a couple of Kirekunis, though Queen only knew what they had done at home to have to live as exiles in a nation that was locked in war with theirs. They were tall men with glossy hair tied back from their faces, dead white skin, and long tails. They wore the brightest-colored clothes they could find and spoke Ferupian liquidly, adding vowels to the ends of words.
Then there was her. And Crispin.
She drew the line at including him in her act, as Saul wanted. But she couldn’t stop people from staring as he toddled around the circus lot. When he learned to talk properly, she would teach him a comeback to spout when people asked him what he was: a precocious, improbable little speech (“I’m the child that the wind and the earth had when they danced with each other”) that would make them laugh and forget. And she’d have to devise a last name for him. She hadn’t given that thought yet. All she knew was, he wasn’t going to go through life with a Lamaroon surname, let alone one as unpronounceable as Eixeiizeli.
“My beauty. Even when you are silent, I revel in your proximity.” With the half-apologetic grin that meant he was now going to flirt, Saul bent, clamped his hands on her thighs, and hefted her into the air. He bounced her slowly up and down, smiling with pleasure, letting her long hair waft across his face. His arms shook visibly, but that was only because he wasn’t very strong. Like all Lamaroons, Anuei weighed no more than a Ferupian child. Her patrons never seemed to get over the fact that although she was too voluptuous for them to put their arms around, and her face bore evidence of her age, her stomach didn’t droop, and her bosom was as pert as a young Ferupian girl’s. Crispin was lighter than a Ferupian child his age—but nothing like her,
At least my baby will have half his heritage. Heir to five centuries of the circus—even if he is illegitimate. But if you, Saul, tell him before I’m ready for him to know—she stared impassively down at her lover—I will break your scrawny pigeon legs, little man. Smithrebel or no Smithrebel. Crunch.
Although
There’s not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman. bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy, filthy thing.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Dolls”