1879 A.D. Ferupe: Kingsburg
Gift “Mills the Magnificent” bent to peer into the tiny mirror hooked on the wall of the men’s quarters in the truck named Hollyhock 7. His fingers trembled as he wrapped a lace cravat around his neck. It had been years since he had done this. Ten years, to be precise. He was uncomfortably aware that ten years on the road with Smithrebel’s had aged him immensely: at least in terms of appearance, he had reached the age at which style becomes a mere tautology. He looked as ridiculous as Sam Kithriss had; but at least Sam had had power to make up for it. Ten years ago, Millsy had cast aside his chance to inherit Sam’s rings.
For ten years he had not written to any of them—until a week ago, to say he was coming. They must have thought him dead. He had been unforgivably rude.
And yet he couldn’t not go back. Just to see. In the few hours since they had entered the suburbs of Kingsburg, the familiar restiveness had crept over him. Last time he’d been able to resist; but not now. Indeed, he was getting old.
“Goin’ out?” a blurry voice said. Bru Wilcox lay in one of the lowest bunks of the men’s quarters, caterpillar-wrapped in a blanket despite the heat of the Kingsburg summer. “Swear, Millsy, you’re the most obscure fellow around. Show’s in two hours.”
“I have already told Mr. Saul I will not be taking part tonight,” Millsy said, tugging at his lace. “Or tomorrow night, or next week.”
Bru let out a low whistle. “What’d he say? This’s Kingsburg, man.”
“Precisely.” Millsy had a horror of letting slip any crumb of information about his past, but punctiliousness compelled him to face Bru and explain, gesturing as extravagantly as if he were in ring center. “When I signed my contract, Smithrebel and I reached an understanding regarding Kingsburg. For six years of touring I would be his; when we reached the capital I could, if I wanted, take two weeks off. Of course it would be no good if everybody did it, but Mr. Smithrebel is an understanding and generous employer, and he realizes that I have certain needs.” Bru’s lip curled. Millsy hastily changed the subject. “Is your leg still bothering you?”
“Should be out with the rest of them. Whoopin’ it up. Bloody pain in the ass.” Bru slapped his blanket-shrouded limb, then winced. A war cripple, invalided home from the Teilsche Parallel, his only visible handicap was a rolling walk. According to him, he had blown his pension the first week after he got home, so that he now had to work to keep mind and body together.
Millsy, who had seen the Teilsche Parallel firsthand, wondered whether Bru had ever gotten his discharge—or whether he had taken his survival into his own hands. Many, if not most, so-called “invalids” were in fact deserters. Real invalids sat in their parents’ houses, drooling. Men like Bru were regularly found guilty and incarcerated for unpatriotic behavior; but Millsy did not think that fair of the policemen, many of whom, after all, had joined the white-coats to avoid being recruited by the army. No one should be compelled to endure the ground front for a term of ten years. He had known men, and women, who had fallen in love with the war, and opted to stay on, and on, and on, until they were sent home in pieces. Perhaps they were even the majority. But whether you hated it or loved it, the conflict was still an atrocity.
In fact, it was a worse atrocity than most people knew, Millsy thought. After a hundred years, the population accepted war as a permanent evil, and resented the inconveniences of levies and forced recruitment no more than they resented the vagaries of wind and storm. But Millsy knew that in the last ten or so years the situation had become critical. Somehow—either through a religio-mystical connection such as culties rambled about, or through the understandable stress of impending defeat—the war was killing the Queen.
And Lithrea the Second was the last, the very last daughter of a dynasty which had held Ferupe stable for almost nineteen hundred years.
Like all who had spent time in the court, Millsy knew that although Ferupe was the most powerful empire east of Sinoa, it rested upside down, on its peak, and the Queen was that peak. And she was crumbling. Some of those who saw the awful truth of her decline with their own eyes lost their faith in life. Some redoubled their patriotic zeal. And a few, starting quite early in the war, had transposed the threat of the end of the dynasty into a strange doctrine of apocalypse and nothingness. All his life Millsy had watched—bemused and increasingly worried—as these slandermongers gained followers and imitators all across Ferupe. Cults were even in Cype and Kirekune. He’d seen them for himself. And since he knew their rants were based on some truth—the impending end of the Dynasty—he could not despise them, as most did.
It would have been suicidal for the court to confirm the royal illness in public. Officially, the cults had to be beneath the Queen’s notice. So the disgust of the righteous citizen for the culties’ excesses was encouraged, subtly, wherever possible. If Millsy had still been at court, he would have been intriguing against them himself. But he was a coward.
You are unworthy even to speak her name, he thought disgustedly, looking into the mirror. Lithrea Mathrelia Lithrelia, Queen of men!
As a young man he had worshiped her more devoutly than any other courtier. Each day, awaking, he had spoken her name aloud.
But he had not been a courtier for a decade, and what good could he do her now? Wasn’t he returning only to solace his own heart with—pray—a sight of her? He was just a truck driver now. A midway magician. His sleight of hand wouldn’t cure her illness. A daemon handler, member of the most royal of professions, and yes, a trickster (and that was his vocation if you liked, as diplomacy had never been). He had no daemon big enough to make an honorable gift.
“You old fool,” he muttered to the mirror.
“What’s that?” Bru Wilcox said loudly.
Millsy flung out his hands, nearly knocking over a precarious pile of razors. “What do you think?” He was attired in knee boots, baggy silk trousers, and a long tunic which was the smartest he had, though it had gone out of style ten years ago. All of his fingers sparkled with rings that signified the status he had once had at court. He had had difficulties remembering which ring went on which finger. He hoped he had them right.
“Not bad,” Bru said. “Wouldn’t fancy loaning me them boots tomorrow, would you?”
“Mmm.” Millsy stretched out his hands toward the windows in the side of the truck, watching them shake. He was only thirty-six, yet the face in the mirror, with its hollow cheeks and ragged gray hair, could pass for sixty. He had once been tall and lean; now he was stooped and skeletal. That was what tricking daemons did to you. The combination of wrinkled skin and expensive regalia made him look like one of the scholars of Kingsburg University, at whom he and his friends had used to snigger when they tottered past with their spectacles falling off. Youth, the most cherished possession of a courtier, had been the price he paid for his freedom from the court. And he knew he had been lucky to get free at all. If not for Boone—there was a man he must see, if he got a chance—
“A fresh face is the stamp of a life unlived,” he said aloud, and swirled his old cloak onto his shoulders.
“What?” Bru said again.
Irritation welled up in Millsy. Despite the heat he fastened his cloak all the way down. “Anon, my friend!” Before the young man could ask where he was going, he pushed through the curtains that partitioned off the quarters, strode between head-height piles of canvas, and leapt over the lowered tailgate into sewage-colored mud. Head down to avoid meeting anyone’s eye, he crossed the vacant lot around which Smithrebel’s trucks were parked. The carousel stood on a flatbed trailer near the gap in the fence which passed for a gate. The gaily painted side panels of the trucks glowed as brightly as the Ferupian flag that would fly from the peak of the big top when it was erected. Saul Smithrebel always had the trucks repainted in the last town before Kingsburg: the circus had to work to hold its own in a city where more than five traveling shows would be playing at any given time.
Millsy strode between the low mud-brick houses of the suburb. Guarze, it was called. Smithrebel’s set up here every time it came to Kingsburg. Laundry filled the tiny front yards, flapping like flocks of birds descending onto scattered crumbs—but if there had been any crumbs, the scavenging cats, dogs, dragonets, and flightless crows would have gotten them already. Guarze. Spoken in the guttural drawl of Kingsburg, the word alone conjured long, dreary days at factory benches, bracketed by scant hours of sleep in rooms which no one had the time or inclination to beautify.
Much of the industrial north was like this, and none of the working people—whose fathers, or grandfathers had sweated their lives away, too, only in cornfields instead of factories—ever questioned their lot. Yet it was unthinkable that they should be content with such penury. One could almost despise them for it. And their country cousins, too, who knew no world beyond the perimeter of the squire’s estate, whose ears were deaf to the call of filthy lucre even though they didn’t know, as the slum-dwellers did, that the city’s promises were all false. But these same men, women, and children were the ones who filled any circus’s audience. One could not despise one’s patrons. And in the years since Millsy had come to work for Saul Smithrebel, he had gradually realized that every single hayseed and slumrat desired liberation somewhere in his or her tarnished little soul. He knew he was crazy, knew that the pounding of life had driven him honest to heavens crazy, when he found his eyes filling with tears at the thought that they would never be truly liberated, because that was not the way the world was made. The circus was the closest approximation of joy they would ever see.
True freedom couldn’t be bought. You had to reach out and grab it with both hands. That was what Millsy had done. He had been brought up on a tenant farm in the heartlands, barefoot and starving, but he had put that behind him. None of his cronies in the court had known he was born a peasant, just as none of his friends in Smithrebel’s knew he had been the Queen’s ambassador to Kirekune.
He’d only kept one of the vows he made as a child, and that was the vow never to have children himself. He never wanted to subject another human being to the misery in which he’d been born. The peace he had finally achieved as a ringside magician and truck driver in a small-time traveling circus was simply not worth it.
But now there was Crispin.
He sighed loudly, wrenching at his cravat as he walked.
Crispin, born in the back of a truck four years after Millsy arrived at the performers’ entrance of the big top with his daemons, materialized, following him like dogs, to stage an impromptu tricking daemonstration for Saul Smithrebel that led to his being offered a position at a skinflint’s salary of six shillings a week. (It had since risen to ten.) Millsy hated children. Hated them! But Crispin had wormed his way under his skin. He was six years old now, and looked ten or eleven. Being half Lamaroon, he was as easy to pick up as a baby: a specimen the physicians of Kingsburg would surely have loved to get their hands on. What mysteries Nature conceals, the experts knoweth not, Millsy thought. All the aerial acts would have had Crispin for a novelty turn, except that his mother, Anuei, wouldn’t allow it. Elise and Heine Valenta, two-fourths of the Flying Valentas, even wanted him for apprentice when he came of age. Anuei violently opposed the Valentas. But Saul Smithrebel supported their claim. He might even have put the idea in their heads for all Millsy knew. And Millsy knew Anuei would never stand up to Saul. The conflict was still years off—a child could not start proper training until he was at least nine or ten—but Millsy could see it coming, like a black splotch on Saul’s big map of Ferupe.
That meant it was up to Millsy.
The Valentas did not understand that once Crispin got a little older he would not take orders from anyone. But Millsy understood that perfectly. He would not make a single demand on Crispin. And because of that, Crispin would come to him willingly.
Millsy had already seen the small child watching the truck drivers coax their daemons into consciousness on cold winter nights. He’d seen him, entranced, sniffing the exhaust which filled the air as the engines warmed up. And after long nights on the road, he’d seen him sidle up to the handlers again, when they talked the daemons into quiescence, their heads and shoulders deep inside the engine cavities of the giant tractors. Crispin would listen, mouthing the words. You ugly bastard... smelly snakely grass-eater... Handlers used a limited repertory of persuasion on their daemons. The controlled violence of the relationship between men and daemons was what drew many to handling who would otherwise have been soldiers or policemen or criminals. Some said daemons understood every word out of your mouth; some said they were no more intelligent than fish. Millsy was a trickster, like the women who lived in the forests and captured wild daemons, and so he knew that the former was closer to the truth, but he would have had to be crazier than he was to give away trade secrets.
You’re not going nowhere! So calm the hell down ‘fore I flay the skin off your ugly skelliton!
There was less than no chance that Crispin, too, would be a trickster. But Millsy would not have wished it on him in any case. All he wanted was to be able to share the joy of handling with the child.
That animated little face, the color of clove honey...
Admit it, old man, he thought with a flash of disgust, you’re half in love with the child!
He shook his head violently and tramped on, muttering.
In Guarze only the very small children stayed home from the factories. They looked up from their games, open-mouthed, dirty-eyed, as Millsy passed. The hem of his cloak swept the garbage-strewn dirt road. The weight of their neediness struck at him. How lucky the circus children were! Fate had not dealt Crispin and the others a particularly enviable hand—but all the same, they didn’t know what it was like not to have enough to eat. He sank his chin into his collar, not acknowledging the children’s whining pleas, and passed on beneath the ancient (and strikingly beautiful) stone arch marking the entrance to Guarze, into another mordant suburb named Hastych, and thence across the Eine into another world: one of the prosperous towns that snuggled against the walls of Kingsburg, Rotterys. Here all the houses had slate roofs like black paper hats, and their secret price tags were commensurate with the snotty manner of the maids hurrying through the streets. Everyone in Rotterys wished to be able to say that he lived in the Burg, and paid through the nose for the privilege of only having to stretch the truth a little.
The black worm of the Eine, oozing between the cobbled “river walk” on the Rotterys side and the sink-mud on the Hastych bank, fostered a sense of separation from the slums. But rich and poor alike breathed the same air. Thick with summer heat, evil-smelling, and vibrating with the far-off roar of the demogorgons in the factories. The noise was a contamination. It was everywhere. Even in the depths of the palace, if by a miracle everybody stopped speaking for a second, one heard it: thud. Thud, Rrrrrrrr-thud. Thud.
By the time he’d found his way through the twisting streets to the gates of the city proper, his body was dripping with sweat under the layers of regalia. He bought a fruit drink from a farmer-stallkeeper. As he counted out the coppers, he longed to be young again. Oh, instead of a mumbling, crazy old man in fancy dress, to be the boy with iron in his eyes and steel at his hip and gold in his pockets whom nobody in the court dared to cross. He had been a favorite. Once she had even spoken to him! He had crossed the northern pass into Kirekune and knelt as her ambassador before the Lizard Significant, full of high hopes, and failed to gain even the slightest concession from that august creature. And on his return she had said—
The failure of Millsy’s mission had began the pattern of defeats which was to drain Ferupe and her Queen. Soon Gift Mills was no longer the darling of the court, but a tool that had turned in its mistress’s hand. He had left the capital because he could not bear the thought of living out the rest of his life in the shadow of his one-time celebrity. He knew also that if he stayed, that life was likely to be short.
The cold fruit juice cleared his head. His face heated with shame as he realized that for several minutes he had been lost in nostalgia. Nostalgia!
Standing out of the way of the bustle, he gulped the juice down. Why should a ten-year-old failure matter in the least? Traveling with Smithrebel’s, he was happy. Happy!
He lifted his eyes to the Salubrious Gates. Ajar, they looked as if they were about to fall and crush the market. Hundred-foot-tall marvels of black-painted wrought iron, they were the only entrance for miles into the stone wall that beetled like gray doom above Rotterys. He would not want to live even for a day with that hanging over him. Maybe that was why everyone here stared at the ground as they walked.
Moles! Blind, petty moles!
The haze of longing for the past which had clouded his mind since the circus came within a hundred miles of Kingsburg cleared. His thoughts were as lucid as crystal. Never like this anymore. Except with his daemons...
He threw his pottery juice bulb down to hear it shatter, and shouldered between shrill-voiced, foul-mouthed marketgoers toward the gates. Soon he would see his old friends. Then he would remember exactly why he had left the court.
The palace was unspectacular compared to the rest of the Heart of Kingsburg. It was the oldest building in the capital, built as a fortress before there ever was a capital by King Thraziaow, who had come out of the west to lead Ferupe under the flag of the Twenty-One United Domains. It was blocky and ill-proportioned. The buildings that crowded close around it, leaving mere cracks for streets, soared gracefully over the palace: the Hall of Justice; KPD HQ; Astrologers’ Hall; the Crown Prince’s Mansion (inhabited now only by servants); the Stock Exchange; the ancient church of God, now the Royal Opera House; and dozens of others. In the Heart of Kingsburg, there were no residential buildings, though in reality, the top floors of many of the public halls were in use as apartments.
The newer palaces dripped with balconies. They were airy with arches, and their spires strained toward the sky. If you stood in the maze of fountains on the plaza in front of the old palace, the spires hemmed in the sky like broken ice. It had been said that standing among the fountains was like drowning, looking up through the icy water to the surface.
The old fortress lay low like an old dog among children. Each block of pink granite was polished to brightness. The arrow-slit windows sparkled, and the heavy porticoes were freshly ornamented each day with flowers. Millsy entered in a river of people that got thinner at each police checkpoint. Every time, he flashed his rings and was shown through.
He had, in fact got the sequence of rings wrong. But none of the guards knew the difference until he penetrated the labyrinth to a depth where daemon-scented air whooshed out of grilles in corners, and the walls were no longer stone but carpet. Barkings, whoopings, and chee-cheeing sounds exploded close at hand. Millsy knew they could be traced to expensive pets (mostly animals that were never meant to be pets; he still had the scar where a bird of paradise had pecked him ten years ago). Niches displayed artwork from far countries and from every domain in Ferupe, with no glass to protect any of it. Visitors who got this far were expected to be above pocketing the knickknacks.
“You a prince?” the policeman said with disbelief, dropping Millsy’s hands. “Whatcha wearing anyway?” He eyed Millsy’s scruffy cloak. Millsy felt shame climbing up his neck. “No, I—”
“You’re a foreign prince. With connections to Kirekune. That’s what this says.”
The policeman sat on a camp stool in the middle of a small lobby. He had an antique gray-marble side table for a desk. The checkpoint was more for show than security.
“A foreign prince. Show you, mate.” He began to flip through a ringbook printed specially for the illiterate, full of drawings of bejeweled hands. “Ain’t no foreigners authorized—”
“I apologize. It has been years since I wore my rings,” Millsy whispered.
The policeman looked up, eyes narrowing, sharp words springing to his lips. One hand went to his truncheon.
Millsy undid his cloak and swept it back from his shoulders.
An entering pair of courtiers who could have been twins, so ruggedly handsome were they, so springy their dark curls, laughed at the scene.
By the time Millsy found his way to the suite of Lady Gregisson, one of his oldest friends and a lady-in-waiting to Royal Cousin Dorthrea, he had lost all his desire for social interaction. Only loyalty drove him on. Through Christina Gregisson, and if not through her then through Sam Kithriss (if the old fellow was still alive!) or Boy Charthreron, he would wangle a glimpse of the Queen.
People were looking at him strangely. He realized he had been muttering to himself again.
Under the gaze of the lackeys at the door of Lady Gregisson’s suite, he gathered himself and presented his rearranged rings.
The lackeys conferred. Then one of them vanished inside. The others resumed staring at him. They were all tall, red, and muscular. The skimpy tunics worn by Izte Kchebuk’aran men showcased their powerful arms and chests to perfection. Millsy wondered whether they resented having to dress like barbarians, now that they were employed in the most civilized place in the world. Such a question would never have occurred to him in the old days, but now it seemed of paramount importance. What were the Kchebuk’arans thinking? He was on the verge of asking them when the fourth one came back.
“Lady Gregisson is not in her suite,” he said flatly. “However, her steward says that she is hosting Royal Cousin Dorthrea, Royal Second Cousin Sathranna, Royal Second Cousin Athrina, and Royal Aunt Melithra, as well as others, at tea on Sammesday. You are on the standing list of individuals who are welcome to join the Lady’s parties at any time. Thank you.”
“But she must be at home,” Millsy said. “I sent her a note from Severidge saying I would be coming.” He forced a laugh. “That was ten days ago.”
“Thank you,” another Kchebuk’aran said.
“Sammesday is the last day of my stay in Kingsburg. I am not sure whether I can—”
“Thank you.”
And over the course of the next few hours he came to appreciate Christina’s generosity, yes, the generosity she had displayed on leaving him on her standing list when everyone else had either crossed him off or presumed him dead. He wandered from door to door to door, jumping at servants, shaking his rings at them like a dancer jangling castanets for their entertainment, and with each rebuff he descended lower in the underground palace until he was in such rarefied territory that he had absolutely no hope at all of getting past any of the footmen who lined the walls like mannequins modeling different versions of the royal livery. None of his erstwhile friends had been Royals. Royals did not have friends. (Though he had spoken to her once, yes, spoken to her, and she had said... )
He should have expected this. But somehow he had assumed—the former ambassador to Kirekune, they couldn’t pretend he didn’t exist—
Then again, maybe he did not, or only in ghostly form. The footmen watched him without turning their heads, dozens of pairs of eyes swiveling as one. He flapped his hands at them as if he were shooing pigeons. His voice cracked. “Minions! Minions, do you hear me? The world is above your heads, and it is a bright sky which you will never see, cocooned down here!”
The underground palace was shaped like an inverted pyramid buried in the ground, with each level designed on the same basic floor plan, but as you descended, the plan got simpler and simpler, the area enclosed by the halls which you could reach without an entrée smaller and smaller. The lowest floor of all was a simple square of hallway with only three doors beside the one to the stairwell. Two doors had one dejected-looking royal footman each. The other had none. There was a smell of must. The carpet on the floors and walls looked water-stained.
Millsy walked around the square twice. The second time, both footmen thought about challenging him, and decided to do so if he walked around again (he saw every step of the thought process in each pair of eyes).
From their posts they could not see each other. Somewhat wildly, he wondered if they ambled to the corner to chat when no one was around. Would that be considered scandalous, a breach of loyalty to the Queen and to themselves? He did not know. He had lost his feel for the court code.
Lost his feel—
It had been slightly less than a decade. A blink, in the scope of the Dynasty. But things moved fast at court, even while they did not move at all. Not Sam, he wouldn’t have started it. Probably Boy Charthreron: he’d been a back-stabber even at twenty. Millsy could just see him spring-cleaning his list of friends, standing perhaps in the middle of a whirl of servants who were industriously feather-dustering his rooms (Boy’s life was one long, painstaking practical joke) declaring with a flip of the fingers that old Gift was probably dead, and if he wasn’t, he’d always been a bore, anyhow. “If he resurrects himself from the provinces again, Moose, you know the line. Who’s next?”
Thus is the past erased. Despair welled up in Millsy’s heart like black syrup.
He turned the knob of the third door. It opened and let him into a pitch-black passage.
Warm, sewage-scented wind gusted into his face. He could hear water rushing fast and far down.
After a stunned instant, he chuckled. The sound echoed, bouncing off walls into infinity.
How could he have forgotten?
Tapping gingerly outward with his right boot, he encountered the crumbling stone edge of the walkway. Gravel bounced down and down and down.
His left hand encountered a clutch of wet pipes running horizontal to the ledge. The pipes were at the right height for handholds, but they were thick with slime; not many more people used this little shortcut, then, than they had ten years ago.
He hadn’t felt ready for Boone earlier this afternoon. But now he did. How could he have forgotten Boone? Boone would not have forgotten him—in fact, within the bounds of propriety, he could not, since it was he who had incited Millsy to leave the court!
Millsy chuckled again and began to edge along the walkway.
Millsy was in the Kingsburg Waterworks. The light of the daemon glares nailed to the rock behind his and Boone’s chairs cast a streaky brightness on the water of the reservoir, which stretched out from the cliff much farther than the light carried. Boone never permitted anyone except his subordinates to accompany him on his “routine” boat trips into the blackness, but Millsy had heard that it took several hours to reach the other side. It was difficult to imagine the years and manpower which had been necessary to hollow out such a vast space under the city.
Pipes at least three feet in diameter plunged down from the roof of the reservoir, into the water, like the proboscises of monstrous flies. Toward the edge of the light, the copper trunks grew as thick as a forest. Among them, stone support columns, inside which six of the pipes could have fitted comfortably, reached up to the invisible roof. The rumble of the pump daemons at work in nearby caves could be felt as a vibration. Boone’s predilection for entertaining visitors on this sparsely furnished ledge mere inches above the reservoir, rather than in his sumptuous office, was, Millsy had deduced as much as fifteen years earlier, symptomatic of certain impulses, dangerously akin to sadism, which had grown from his boredom with his post.
Boone Skinner, Comptroller of the Kingsburg Waterworks, was king of his underground realm. He did as he liked. Valued by the Queen for his handling and administrative skills, and celebrated for his eccentricity, he was a treasure of the Burg, a rotund blond man who ought to have been jolly. In reality he had a gloomy manner far more pronounced now than the last time Millsy had seen him. His detractors said that he was not as pessimistic as he pretended: that, in fact, he thought better of himself than of any other man in Kingsburg. He lived in one of Kingsburg’s rougher neighborhoods with his wife, Betsy, who was so common that she dropped the ends of her words. After absconding from the court, Millsy had stayed in their home while Boone taught him all he knew of the handler’s art.
The comptroller’s pale blue eyes stared meditatively at Millsy. His thumbs coaxed a thin ringing from the rim of his wineglass.
“It is that I regret my youth sometimes, nothing more,” Millsy said, sipping the deliciously chilled ale Boone had served him. “And the indignity of the snub, perhaps. But that will pass. The last strings have been cut.” He paused. “Now I know I could not live in court again.”
“You are made of stronger stuff than the rest of them,” Boone said. “I thought so from the beginning. Now I see I was right.”
Millsy remembered the Teilsche Parallel. It was never far from his mind; but in light of what Boone had just said, the memory was especially painful. If Boone had seen him then, would he say that Millsy was made of strong stuff? Millsy had only been seventeen when he was in the army, but surely the stuff that a man is made of does not change. Once a coward, always a coward. All the machinations he’d put into getting his ambassadorship had been part of an elaborate, ongoing attempt to convince himself otherwise. Only when he discovered that he had the blood of a trickster had he finally accepted the truth.
“Perhaps the only difference between me and the rest of them is that I have weathered so many failures,” he said. “Are you aware that when I was seventeen, I deserted? I was recruited into the Teilsche 198th Infantry. I only lasted three months.”
“I was not aware of that,” Boone said.
“I shan’t bind you to secrecy. It’s not as though it makes any difference now. The circus is effectively outside the law. At least half the roustabouts are deserters.”
“Are you finding it satisfying?” Boone asked. “Commoners’ entertainment. It’s not much of a job for a handler. Especially one with trickster blood. You could be so much greater.”
“But have no desire to be. Do I seem discontented?”
“I haven’t heard from you in ten years, Gift. How should I know whether you are content? I did not even know whether you were alive.”
The rebuke hung in the air. Millsy forced himself to look Boone in the eye. “I am not discontented any longer. I had to come here to know that, but now I am certain of it.”
“Good,” Boone said. “And good that you left when you did. They came to my house. I was in hot water for a while. It was lucky that Royal Sister Jacilithra spoke up for me.” Pride rang in his voice as he mentioned the Royal.
Millsy sighed. “Boone, you are a better friend than I deserve. Tell me—they don’t still hold that grudge, do they?”
“Gift, they were going to kill you.”
“I had hoped it would be old news after so long. After all, I’m not coming back to reclaim my rings.”
“Although you are wearing them.”
“Only for a visit.”
Boone nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t expect there is any danger. But frankly, I was surprised to see you here. I thought that even if you were alive, you would not dare to come back. You have changed. In those days I thought you rather an amusing fellow, when you were allowed to be, but not very well attuned to reality.”
“I don’t believe it’s possible to be in or out of tune with reality. After all, we live in it,” Millsy said. But Boone did not respond, nor did his gaze leave Millsy’s face. It was discomfiting. Millsy shifted in his chair in a vain attempt to get out from under the stare. An amusing fellow... not very well attuned to...
Was that really what he had been back then? Had he been vastly unsuited for the Kirekuni mission? Had his failure been—oh, blasphemous thought—not due to his own mistakes, but the Royals’?
There was no way of knowing. But it did not matter now.
He met Boone’s gaze and laughed aloud. “Do you know what, Comptroller? I think you simply say whatever comes into your head.” He took a drink of sweet ale.
Boone laughed: a prolonged rumble that carried out over the water. “I am still your friend, Gift. That is why I am telling you that you should not go to tea with Christina Gregisson.”
“Who have you been entertaining while I lost my way in your damned tunnels?”
“Christina,” Boone rumbled, glinting with joy.
“Is she planning to feed me poisoned pastries?” Millsy laughed.
Boone did not answer. He got up from his chair and stretched his massive shoulders. With the unhurried, rolling grace of the obese, he walked to the corner of the ledge, unhooked the front of his britches, and urinated into the reservoir. Millsy experienced a vague disgust as he watched the ripples spread into the drinking water of the masses of Kingsburg. “Even the Queen’s morning tea is made with water from my reservoir,” Boone observed as he returned to the assorted tables and chairs, on one of which Millsy sat. “A good joke, isn’t it?”
“The Queen!”
Sparkles of hilarity danced in the blue eyes. “Oh, come on, Gift! I thought you were past that.”
“No one calls me Gift any more,” Millsy said stiffly.
“Shall I tell you what’s happened to you?” Boone steepled his fingers. “I’ve figured it out. You’ve lost your cynicism. And if you’ll pardon my saying so, that was the most amusing thing about you.”
A torrent of words sprang into Millsy’s throat. Do you know how hard I struggled to lose my cynicism? It took me ten years and Queen knows how many setbacks to regain a measure of the innocence which I lost, not when I failed in Kirekune, but when I understood that because of that failure I must resign everything else in my life. Because it was all connected.
“Perhaps you’re right.” He bowed his head to hide his face. He had to chew his lower lip until the blood came, just to hold back his laughter. Or was it tears? He cried very easily these days. It came from being a trickster. The men of Smithrebel’s saw it as evidence of his craziness, but the women understood him a little better. “It’s true that I’ve lost my feel for Kingsburg. The code of the court might as well be Kirekuni to me. I knew that tongue once, too. Have pity on me.”
“Never fear,” Boone said, and hoisted himself to his feet. Millsy followed suit. “No, no, bring your glass. You are not drunk yet. I owe you that, at least, for old times’ sake! I think we’ve talked enough about the prize parrots in the palace. Come and see my daemons. I have two which I think you haven’t met. One was seventeen thousand, the other was twenty; you will enjoy trying your hand on them.” He shook his head. “Ahhh, where I’d be if I had trickster blood!”
Millsy paced himself to match Boone’s slow strides as they entered a glare-lit archway in the cliff. “But I have no chance to practice with demogorgons. The beasts I use in my act are only small heartland ninnies. I have one southern daemon true-named Gallanis that is twelve feet tall—I got him cheaply in Naftha. But all I can do with them is make them jump through hoops and tie themselves in knots.”
Boone shrugged. “You work in a circus, not a house of trickery.” Millsy knew the slur was unintentional. Everyone he had ever met—even those with democratic pretensions, like Boone—held the circus in low esteem. That was partly why Millsy himself had first been attracted to it.
“True, true.” He laughed. “Do you know what? My act is like that stunt with macaws Sim used to do. Except that he had them on strings, poor creatures. Remember?”
“Just wait until you see, Gift,” said Boone. “I have had a cave fitted especially for them.”
They entered a big, brightly lit cavern where pale-faced young men were seated at desks. There was a smell of old books. All of the clerks scrambled to their feet and mumbled “Comptroller” as Boone and Millsy passed through. Millsy’s palms were wet with anticipation. He glanced sideways: a half smile slackened Boone’s normally expressive mouth. After all, they still shared one passion. It was a glimpse of this zest which had first interested Millsy in the comptroller. During his period of social decline, Millsy had tried his hand at every conceivable occupation. It had been through Boone, finally, that he discovered the quirk in his blood and his aptitude for trickery, a trade normally exclusive to women. And with Boone’s help, he began to see a way out of his dilemmas at court. Very quickly they had come to share that all-devouring, enthusiasm for the “business”; for a brief while, in Boone’s house in Xeremaches, they had been as close as lovers, and Millsy had mistakenly believed they shared other things as well.
Now they had even less in common than they had ten years ago. But there were still daemons.
There always had been daemons.
The vibration became a real noise. Thump. Thump. And simultaneously: Clatter-rattle-ratter-clattle...
There would always be daemons.
They rounded a bend, hurrying now, and came out onto the floor of a wide shaft whose roof was visible high up in the light of brilliant glares that did not leave a pocket of shadow anywhere.
“Sumenitas,” the comptroller of the waterworks said in an odd voice. “Dorennin.”
Against opposed walls of the shaft, thirty-foot silver treadmills housed in wooden scaffolding were turning so fast that they blurred. A huge axle hung horizontally fifteen feet off the floor, connecting the treadmills at the hubs. An assortment of wooden gears—a transformation engine many times magnified—rose from the axle’s center into the roof, clanking and gnashing. And underneath that noise Millsy heard the booming of the pumps the engine drove, which sucked the water up from the reservoir into the pipes that ran beneath the streets of Kingsburg.
“Hallo!” Boone shouted at the top of his lungs, advancing into the cavern.
The handlers who stood guard, two to a treadmill, whipped around. For a minute Millsy thought they were going to crumple—as if the shattering of the tableau had shattered them, also. Then they dived for their levers, and the scent of burning rubber filled the air as massive brake pads contacted the sides of the treadmills. As the rpms decreased, the second handler of each pair ran up to his treadmill, carrying what looked like a seven-foot lance tipped with a silver spike. These they jammed into the mesh, into the flesh of the daemons inside. Millsy winced.
The daemons were silent. Collared daemons could roar and groan, but not speak. Another attraction of Millsy’s little act (“The Only Exhibition of Wild Daemons to Tour the Domains in a Hundred Years!”) was the eerie jabbering of the daemons as they obeyed his commands. Sumenitas and Dorennin obeyed the cue of the lance and crouched on the bottoms of their treadmills without making a sound. Tears poured down their faces. Millsy noted the way they constantly picked up their hands and feet to avoid contact with the silver slats.
One—Sumenitas, he guessed from the look of her—would have been about fifty feet tall standing upright. Her bones were coated with sweat-sheened mauve. Her breasts hung down like flaps. Even in the slave crop, her hair was bushy and black. Dorennin was shorter and stockier. His skin was pale, though his hands, feet, and joints, like Sumenitas’s, were wealed and infected. Silver slave collars two inches thick encircled necks covered with sores. They would never see a bath: their natural smell was so overpowering that most handlers preferred it masked by the smell of dirt and feces. They turned their heads languidly to see who had come in, eyes the size of brimming teacups.
Oh, they were tricksy beasts! Demogorgons this big could only come from the Waste.
“How do you know their true names?” he asked Boone softly.
“I went myself into the northern Wraithwaste to buy them.” Boone, too, spoke in a near whisper. Now that the last of the gears had stopped moving, his voice echoed up into the heights of the shaft. “The trickster woman told me their names, for a fee.”
Most trickster women would sooner die than reveal a single bit of their lore to one of alien biology. That was why Millsy himself had never ventured into the forests of the Wraithwaste, never tried to seek out a house of trickery and get the training that would enable him to exploit the abilities his blood conferred on him. He had known it would be a wasted effort. Boone’s bribe must have been handsome indeed.
“Sumenitas.”
“And Dorennin.”
There were many twenty- and thirty-foot daemons currently in use in the waterworks. But these were prize specimens. If Millsy had been trained as a trickster, he would have been able to step in perfect safety up to the sides of the treadmills and caress them through the bars. (The handlers hung back a good ten paces, aware just how far the daemons’ auras of power extended, aware of the danger they were in. Boone would be rotating his men, putting different handlers on these daemons every day so that no man was numbed by the constant exertion of willpower that was necessary to keep the daemons calm enough that they didn’t lash out. About seventy years ago a daemon had broken loose from its cage. That had not been in the waterworks, but in the gasworks, which lay about ten miles outside the city. The deaths had numbered in the hundreds.)
“Daemons are much like people,” Boone said. He was fingering a small silver-threaded whip that he had taken from a pocket of his half-cape. “One learns a good deal from handling them. What one learns is that they are stupid.”
“They’re not.” Millsy shook his head absently. He did not have to argue; he knew. “They are as intelligent as we are. That should be obvious even to you. I don’t understand why handlers persist in believing them mindless.”
“They are nothing like us.”
“They do not think as we do. But they understand everything.”
For the first time since they entered the cavern Boone looked at him. “Does it matter?” He laughed his deep, unhurried laugh. “They are ours. In my book, my friend, that which a man can best is not his equal.” He strode to Dorennin’s treadmill and flicked the whip through the metal. Millsy heard the faint hiss of silver contacting daemon flesh. A split second later he felt the power with which Dorennin lashed back at Boone. The comptroller leapt backwards, surprisingly fast for a man of his bulk, laughing as he deflected the invisible blow. Dorennin’s handlers rushed up to the treadmill as the furious giant threw himself at the mesh. The whole scaffolding shook. The axle turned a half-rotation. On the other side of the cave, Sumenitas pitched forward in her wheel. Gears clanked like falling rocks in the roof.
The handlers pressed themselves against the mesh. Not for a second did they stop crooning to the daemon. Ugly motherfucking beast... dickless ogre that you, that you are... One of them, either bold or stupid, ripped one silver-woven glove off and stretched his hand into the cage. After an endless moment, the quivering giant let his head drop so that the handler could touch his neck, stroking around the cruel collar.
Boone walked back toward Millsy, grinning broadly, wiping sweat from his face. “All right! Start ‘em up again!”
Dorennin’s handlers withdrew. The daemons responded to the prodding lances. As the noise built, Boone shouted, “See what I mean? Eh?”
Millsy nodded. “Just so long,” he shouted, grinning, “as you don’t let them get free!”
“It’s not even possible!” Boone tipped his head back to survey the workings of the machinery. “The mills are welded shut. We feed them through traps in the mesh.”
Millsy felt exhilarated, as if he had shared in Boone’s triumph. And as a handler, he had shared in it. It was the triumph of mankind over beast: pure, intellectual, and visceral at the same time. Inevitably his thoughts went to Crispin. This was the joy to which he wanted so badly to introduce the boy when he got old enough. He felt that Crispin had an aptitude for it. Just as, long ago, Boone must have felt that Millsy had an aptitude.
Boone was explaining some difficulty they had had in the construction of the shaft. Millsy could not make himself pay attention. Exhibitions like this were not routine to him, as they were to the comptroller. The episode with the whip had left his heart beating fast. A voice whispered in him: This is all that there is in life. The rest is words on the wind; what does it matter if they are sweet or bitter? This is the essence.
(Crispin, my child... )
And love, after all, the fast-fading cynic within him whispered superciliously, is just another form of control.
It was insupportably cold in Christina Gregisson’s parlor. The Royals themselves seemed to emanate the chill—as if they were frozen stiff in their layers of draperies. They did not react to the conversation around them, except to flicker an eyelid when the company laughed. They were not dressed in the fashions of the court; instead, they had swathed themselves in what looked to Millsy’s unaccustomed eye like landscape paintings torn out of their frames. The courtiers who fluttered around them, proffering cakes, finger-goblets of wine, conversational sallies, seemed small and thin as sprites—men and women both, for the fashions for women this year were body-hugging sheaths that would have caused a scandal in the streets of any city in Ferupe.
Only the boldest courtiers actually dared to address themselves to Melithra, Athrina, Sathranna, or Dorthrea. The rest stood in the corners gossiping, slewing their eyes every five seconds toward the center of the room where the painted hillocks brooded.
Millsy’s dulled aesthetic sense could not help equating the exquisite fragility of the parlor with beauty. He had been speechless ever since he came in. Common sense told him that none of them even knew who he was. Yet fear pounded maddeningly inside his skull, and every time someone offered him a cake he hesitated. He hated himself for it, but he hesitated.
He had been a fool to come!
But he had been so hungry for a glimpse of the Royals. And here they were. The women cousins. He had forgotten how unsatisfying they were, these women cousins. He remembered the Queen as far grander than any of them. Her skin was almost as dark as Crispin’s. Strange, Millsy had often thought, how although the non-Royal ladies powdered their skin to make it whiter, among Royals darker skin meant purer blood. The court ladies’ rejection of their rulers’ standards of beauty had something not quite dignified about it. He could not help thinking of the women of Smithrebel’s. Not Anuei Kateralbin, but the animal trainers like Mrs. Lee Philpotts, who feared and loved her smelly tigers so much.
There was a reek of daemons in the room. They roiled unseen about the Royals, worming their way in and out of the stiff folds of their drapes. Millsy knew that nobody besides himself and the Royal women could sense them. The tiny porcelain cup between his fingers glowed with warmth, but cold hung like a miasma over the room, whitening the air. Of course they were hundreds of feet underground; but that alone did not account for the chill.
Daemon braziers burned at the feet of each Royal. Green tea steamed as it issued from the spout of the samovar over which Christina presided, her wit brittle, her voice strained. Yet when Millsy glanced at the little gatherings of courtiers, the women were surreptitiously rubbing their bare arms, the men cracking their knuckles. It was almost impossible to remember that outside, overhead, up in the world of dirt and vulgarity and death, summer was in full force. Could the chill, Millsy wondered, be psychosomatic? It certainly wasn’t produced by the daemons. He knew of no medical condition which would cause such symptoms. Therefore, it must be all in his head: a function of the extreme, unreasonable case of nerves which had overcome him the minute he entered the palace this second time.
And yet it wasn’t just him.
He must try to join in the conversation. It would take his mind off the cold, and his fear. Yet he knew that if he tried to make repartee, he would betray his own redundancy. Anyhow, he was terrified of the courtiers. The kisses Christina had given him on his arrival, and the questions she had asked, had been so sincere that despite himself he got quite flustered. In the world of Smithrebel’s, because of the close quarters in which everyone lived, reticence was valued almost as highly as patriotism, and Millsy did not have to throw up any false fronts. No self-explanations were required, and so he gave none—whereas in the half hour he had been at the tea party, he had already had to offer prettified accounts of himself to the Royals and to half a dozen other people whose eyes flickered away from him while he spoke.
“More tea, Martha? More tea, Frederic? No? Gift, surely you—”
“No, no.” Millsy’s voice came out husky. He cleared his throat. “Christina, did I forget to compliment you on that rosette? It is quite exquisite.”
Her hand flew to her throat. She giggled. “You have an eye for fine craftsmanship?” Like most court ladies, she never tired of compliments, bland or clever, sincere or otherwise. The thing at her throat looked like a full-blown, perfect yellow rose, one petal edged with brown, but from the way it weighed down her neck ribbon, Millsy knew it was metal.
“I was given it by Melithra on my twenty-fifth birthday—last year!” The courtiers on either side of her chuckled indulgently. It was hard to remember that Christina was in fact forty unless you looked at the tiny lines in the masklike white around her mouth and eyes. “Of course I always wear it. Melithra!” She raised her voice. “Gift admires the rosette you gave me... ” She whipped back to Millsy, a forced smile on her mouth. “If you won’t have any more tea, then surely a pastry!” She picked several from the platters on the low table before her, arranged them on a saucer, and thrust them at Millsy.
“Really, no,” he began, but, she had already turned away from him. “Frederic!” she commanded. “Come over here and tell us again about your expedition to the south! Do they all look like my Kchebuk’arans, or are some of them moderately civilized? I am speaking of the people of the countryside, of course... Naftha is a perfect paradise, but then it is in Ferupe. Has anyone else been to Giorgio’s in Naftha... ?”
Millsy’s gorge rose as he stared at the assortment of microscopic pastries on his napkin. In order to keep their figures and simultaneously stick to a schedule which included four to seven meals a day, lady courtiers ate nothing that was not miniaturized. Baby chickens and quail eggs, fillets of minnow; wild strawberries, infant vegetables; doll-size scoops of sherbet, chocolates like bits of gravel. It was not a fad but a serious etiquette. If the food at a “mixed” party did not come in two sizes, the host was severely censured. What could be concealed in these dabs of flour and sugar? Should he choose cowardice or possible death?
He shook his head angrily and looked up.
The subject of the south had been a failure. Christina was frantically trying to entertain the Royals.
“And has your little Poche recovered from his canker, Dorthrea? We were all so concerned for the poor creature!”
Dorthrea turned her head, slowly. Millsy was surprised that the raised collars of her drapes did not crackle.
Silence fell over the guests: the Royal was actually going to speak! “The dog is quite well.”
Her voice was the grind of rocks falling. Her skin was sallow and lusterless, like that of her sister and her cousins. Her hair was a garden of china flowers. Beneath that hallucinatory mass, her eyes looked like rain puddles.
The Royals were not beautiful.
Once the Queen had spoken to him. And she had said—
“My bowels are about to move,” Royal Aunt Melithra said suddenly. “Perhaps I will go home.”
Far off, through the ground, Millsy heard the subsonic roar of the factories. The birds in the cages hanging from the ceiling were silent, their feathers puffed up in the presence of the daemons. Christina’s voice rose high and gay over the silence.
“Well, of course, Melithra, if you are not feeling well, the last thing I should—”
The only light in the room came from the gas fixtures around the walls. It was yellowish, unhealthy. The tea in Millsy’s cup had gone cold. He had not drunk a drop. He, too, would have to leave soon, or he would be sick; however, he probably wouldn’t have to excuse himself. The Royal’s announcement of her discontent meant the party would be over as soon as decency permitted. Knotting his fingers in his beard, Millsy stared at the curlicues of pastry on his knee, his heart pounding.
That night the trucks of Smithrebel’s rolled out of the Guarze vacant lot. Millsy sat in a costume closet in the back of Daisy 3. He had left his pet daemons in the props truck so as not to frighten Crispin. If he had been a trickster woman, or a Royal, he could have forced them to stay invisible. But he was imperfectly trained.
He sat hunched in the dark as the trucks chugged through the streets of Guarze and Jaxeze. Little by little, they pulled free of the capital. Millsy could picture the half-mile-long convoy passing the gasworks, the Kingsburg Granaries, and nameless twenty-four-hour factories from which poured the noise of daemons in torment. At last the flattening of all outside sound told him they were on the northbound road. During the hours of daylight, ox-carts, dog-carts, private daemon limousines, police cars, foot travelers, men on horseback, and army trucks all vied for space, sometimes spilling across the hedges into the fields that bordered the road, reducing crops to mud. Now the road belonged to big game. Dump trucks, short-haul lorries, eighteen-wheelers bound cross-country for Naftha, Grizelle, Gilye, or Kotansburg, semiarticulated tankers full of natural gas; Smithrebel’s trucks were merely the jesters of this powerful crew. The noise of the daemon-powered engines blended in Millsy’s ears into a spine-tingling hum, as if a choir five hundred strong were voicing one endless note.
The winter clothes hanging in the closet swayed against his face. He inhaled a moth, and coughed. The vibration of the transformation engine went through his bones.
Long before he had ever thought of becoming a truck driver, as a twenty-year-old courtier, he had stood at the edge of the northern road and watched the stream of behemoths pour by. His fine silk hose had been sopped with dew. His suede boots had been ruined. (In those days he had tried so hard to be fashionable, despite his long stork’s body that could not wear tight clothes without looking skeletal.) He had lost his hat. He had—if he remembered correctly—been wild with grief over some boy.
And yet—and yet—
The daemon of Daisy 3 was lulling him into a trance, all the way from the other end of the truck. He was in danger of falling asleep if he didn’t rouse himself. Feeling like an old man, he extracted himself from the costume closet and passed along a dark gangway until he reached the nook behind the tractor where Anuei and Crispin made their home. Seven square feet to contain the debris of two lives. A chilling thought.
“Hallo!” he called, falsetto, and in a blurry voice, as if she had been sleeping, Anuei said:
“Come in.”
But she was not sleeping, but mending clothes, while Crispin, as was his wont, clambered quietly around the room. Anuei’s kind heart and clever fingers meant she got saddled with a lot of other people’s sewing. In his present state of mind, Millsy did not dare to speak to Crispin. He pretended that he had come to visit Anuei. If she was not fooled, so much the worse for her, but this afternoon had left him with a desperate zeal to maintain the proprieties.
Despite his good intentions, it did not take him long to work around to the subject which, he now realized ruefully, was his only subject. Daemons.
“Should you like to be able to command daemons some day?” he called to Crispin.
The little boy was hanging upside down from the clothes rail, half-naked, his thumb in his mouth, like some overgrown wingless fruit bat. His toes were on a level with the cages of Anuei’s exotic birds, now covered with cloth, which swayed from hooks in the underside of the horizontal partition in the truck.
“Make them come to you, I mean? Should you like that? You could play with them, have them fetch things for you... ”
“You are terrible with children,” Anuei said. “Never offer them anything they don’t need.”
“I’d like that,” Crispin said. His eyes shone like wet black stones. “D’you have some daemons with you right now, Millsy?”
“Don’t build cloud castles for him!” Anuei said.
Millsy knew what she meant. I’m warning you, Millsy! But because she did not say it explicitly, he could ignore it—just as everybody else ignored what she meant. That difference between Ferupians and Lamaroons was the cause of Anuei’s failure to influence Smithrebel’s as the ringmaster’s mistress should have.
Millsy took a deep breath and concentrated on ignoring the tragedy in her eyes. “Crispin, come down from there, and we’ll have a game of cards—you, your mother and I. I’ll show you a new shuffle.”
“Don’t wanna.” Crispin flipped around on the pole so that he was hanging with his face to the wall. His cutoff shirt slipped down around his shoulders.
Millsy hitched himself closer to Anuei and murmured, “He has an aptitude. Look at the way he listens to the engine.”
“He’s always done that.” Anuei bit off thread.
“Exactly! Don’t you see—don’t you see? If I started training him now, he would become so outstanding a handler that not even his father would think of making him into an aerialist!”
“Not so loud!” Anuei almost shrieked.
Millsy held up both hands to calm her. “He doesn’t understand.”
“The neighbors!”
“They can’t hear, Anuei.” Only a few people in Smithrebel’s—Green Sam the chief cook, the elephant-training Philpotts brothers, and Millsy himself—knew the truth of Crispin’s parentage. A secret shared, even among half a dozen, is barely a secret at all—but with Millsy, at least, it was safe.
“No child’s got an aptitude for slave-driving,” Anuei said in a flat voice, so that for a moment Millsy did not quite understand what she was saying. “Not no Lamaroon child.”
Millsy rocked on his heels. “What most people mistakenly call aptitude is usually only a matter of early encouragement! And I feel it would be best to encourage Crispin to pursue the grandest of all professions, rather than making him into a mere entertainer!”
“I’m a ‘mere entertainer’! And I know what you want from my baby,” Anuei said, and for a paralyzed moment Millsy thought she was going to say something which should not be said by anyone. Then he remembered she was not like that. She sat hugely on the pillow of her thighs, on her cushions. “And I can’t protect him all the time—not from you, because you are supposed to be our friend. Or are you? This damn incestuous cesspit!” she spat suddenly. “Traveling monkey show! All I can ask you is not to put him in danger. And because you are my friend”—she stressed the word sarcastically—“I hope that you will respect my wishes.”
The room smelled of cheap tallow, and those Lamaroon fumes Anuei carried about with her, whose virtues Millsy had heard graphically extolled in the men’s quarters.
“I cannot,” he said softly. Her eyes were on her mending, through which she jerked the needle viciously. “Anuei” —he knew she could not hear him—“this afternoon I tasted the poison. Henceforth I must push the cup away whenever it is offered to me—even when it is offered by a friend. I cannot.”
It had taken him the greater part of his life to get the proportions right, but now he had it. From now on he was one hundred percent daemon handler. No more courtier. No more ambassador. No more failure.
No more misplaced scruples.
He had tasted poison, and he would have no more of it. The exhilaration of unrequited love, that obsession which frees the soul from gravity, buoyed him up. He felt as Anuei, the Balloon Lady, must feel when one of the roughnecks tossed her laughing into the air. His soul swelled with his desire for, and his complete belief in his own, altruism.
Twin tears sat on the shelves of fat below Anuei’s eyes.
“Millsy! I’m begging you!”
He smiled in his beard and held a skinny, shaking finger to his lips.
The truck rumbled on through the night. Cows slept in the fields and tenant farmers slept in their one-room huts, dreaming of circuses.
The mask fell off the city, and she saw it for what it really is—a caricature of infinity. The familiar barriers, the streets along which she moved, the houses between which she had made her little journeys for so many years, became negligible suddenly.
—E. M. Forster, Howards End