Jevanary 1893A.D. Ferupe: Lovoshire Domain
Midwinter, just after the turn of the year. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show was in Lovoshire Domain, at the westernmost point of the grand itinerary that Saul Smithrebel had sketched anew on his map last year, rumbling slowly southward through the Apple Hills. Lovoshire was a domain renowned for nothing except its massive, millennia-long flirtation with the Wraithwaste, the daemon-infested forest that stretched for thousands of miles along Ferupe’s western border, over which the war with Kirekune was being fought right now. The Wraithwaste had never really been part of Ferupe. It was alien, unknown, colonized only by trickster women. In the rest of the country, the name of Lovoshire evoked a dark glamour. Beyond Lovoshire lay only the trackless Waste, and the exotic glory of the war front, into whose brilliance all young soldiers vanished. And beyond that... Kirekune!
Here in the Apple Hills one often saw airplanes gliding high and silent overhead, on their way to the front from the air bases in Salzeim. But there were no bases in Lovoshire itself, nor (for some reason known only to the Queen) in any of the other heavily forested western domains. Here, the war might as well have been a thousand miles away. People’s everyday business was quite different, and of a great deal of interest to Crispin: it was daemons. It had been years since the circus passed through daemon country. He had only been fifteen the last time around. So this time, Lovoshire held a special attraction for him, too.
It was an attraction, however, which vanished quickly when he remembered that in the Apple Hills, in Jevanary, it rained every day without fail. He and the other drivers muttered disloyally that it had been a mistake on Mr. Saul’s part to come here in winter. What a fool the Old Gentleman was! The takings were unbelievably meager.
Last time, it had been Aout. High summer. The hills had been far greener than they were now. And the dark-haired people hadn’t hidden in their wooden villages, putting their heads out when the musicians struck up, drawing them quickly back in when they glimpsed Missy, Charmer, and Two-Tails, the elephants. They had been so generous with themselves, so joyous, that the circus had not been able to do anything more than plug into their summer-long celebration, crystallizing the giddiness, synchronizing the overflowing energy into one glorious three-hour performance after another.
Even the Old Gentleman’s chronic sense of lateness had abated. He had consented to do one show after another in the same location for as long as the appleseeds kept coming. Each clink of coin, to him, rang another note in the tune of a Ferris wheel. That had been his fixation ever since the daemon in the carousel died and they had had to sell it for scrap. A Ferris wheel! Prohibitively expensive, considering a twenty-foot daemon would be needed to power it—but maybe not! A tipsy-giggly-making chiming Ferris wheel from whose top you could see miles over the forest!
Crispin’s mother had been dead three years when he was fifteen, but he’d only just succeeded in forgetting all the things she had used to tell him. He passed the summer in a daze of elderflower wine. The hills were the sort of place where young men ought to have been thin on the ground, most of them having been snapped up by the army; but in the west, for some reason, the recruiters were not so gung-ho, and the population of the appleseed towns was gloriously skewed in favor of the young. In every village, Crispin met up with the local boys and drank cider under haystacks. He sobered up only when he was due to perform. (Always on the verge of getting himself chucked out of the troupe, never quite crossing that line. Elise Valenta had threatened to eject him more than once—but he knew they couldn’t do without him. How he’d capitalized on that knowledge!) And he’d had a fling with a different girl every night. As a rule western girls were more prudish than heartland, prairie, southern, or northerners, but they were also more beautiful. (So it had seemed to him.) When they got drunk, the usual taboos fell away like layers of confining garments, and the dubious looks that Crispin provoked in all strangers, female or male (to which he had, at fifteen, achieved a hard-won immunity) gave way to the smoldering immobility of attraction. Attraction they could not repress, and did not want to. At fifteen, he hadn’t been immune to that.
“Best damn summer I remember,” he said sourly, as he, Millsy, and Kiquat the snowman climbed down from their truck cabs. They surveyed the site.
“Bloody shithole.” Kiquat flexed stiff fingers. “Here?”
The roughnecks were making so much noise unloading the trucks that the dense silence lingered only in negative. The Old Gentleman had given the signal to stop in a field at the top of a hill, where the road paused for a breather before plunging down again into another dizzying series of hairpin bends. It was apparently used as a travelers’ rest, though what travelers passed through here with any regularity, Crispin couldn’t imagine. Probably gypsies—though he hadn’t seen any of that lot on the roads for ages, not since they got out of the southlands. On the trunks of the trees that leaned over the field, various symbols had been hacked. He’d peered at them as he parked Poppy 2. Most of the carvings looked as old as the hills themselves, and as meaningless. They were unlikely to be real writing: in Lovoshire, a schoolteacher would look as out of place as the elephants did. But Crispin wouldn’t have known if they were. Like most circus people, he was illiterate, and he had no problem with that. Millsy said that knowing how to read and write caged you in. Millsy claimed to have had a Kingsburg education, and subsequently forgotten every letter, every equation, and the name of every constellation and flower he had ever learned. “Quite a feat,” Crispin would say sarcastically whenever he mentioned it. They had been friends so long that Crispin wasn’t fooled. Forgetting was not that easy. But everyone had to have his little secrets, and Crispin was not one to pry into things.
Kiquat wandered off to sleep somewhere. Droplets of dew gathered on the straggling ends of Millsy’s beard as he listened to Crispin’s recollections of that good summer. His bloodless lips were pursed, his head tipped on one side. Joining his thin hands together inside the sleeves of his overcoat, he nodded appreciatively whenever Crispin came to a salacious bit.
“Yes. Yes, I do remember. But I’m afraid you have it wrong, my young friend. That wasn’t the Apple Hills, it was the Yellow Sweeps, as they call the lower hills of the Happy Mountains in Galashire. A westerly range—but more pleasantly situated than this Queen-forsaken place... This is the first time since you were born that we’ve taken the southward leg this close to the Wraithwaste.” He shrugged sadly, his thin body swaying from top to toe. “And I hope it will be the last. Mr. Saul is not pleased with the takings. Not at all. He thinks it is due to the activity of cults around here. Those of the locals whom they have not drawn in, they have got under their sway... ”
“Load of tripe,” Crispin said. “If you ask me, the problem is there’s so many daemons in the woods. They mess people up.” He tapped his temple. “No one’s going to go to the circus if they’re sleepwalking half the time.”
“I could be coaxed into agreement with you. But tell that to Smithrebel.”
Crispin breathed slowly, watching his exhalations puff white in the air. Last time the Old Gentleman was pleased with the takings, he thought, King Ethrew was on the throne in Kingsburg! He doesn’t understand that altering the itinerary does nobody any good. What he needs to do is build us a better reputation. Visit the same places over and over. Over and over. Smithrebel ‘s ought to be a name like Furey’s, like Gazelle’s, Murk & Nail’s...
Too tired...
The two months they had expected to spend in these muddy, slimy hills were nearly over. All anybody wanted to see now was the last, long downhill run which would carry them out of the fog and rain into the flat farmlands of Thrazen Domain. Sweeter than a girl’s kiss to Crispin would have been the sight of the sun. And last night, while he was at the wheel of Sunflower I, staring entranced at the headlights bouncing along the road, the Old Gentleman had crawled forward through the hatch from his quarters, and sitting forward with his hands on his kneecaps, regaled Crispin with long-winded anecdotes of his own boyhood in the circus.
Why? Crispin wondered. The Old Gentleman took an interest in him that was more than unusual, it was creepy. Crispin believed the Old Gentleman had a grudge against him—probably for some fucked-up reason to do with his mother—and was trying to kill him, but was too much of a coward, and too greasy a professional, to stain the circus annals with any “accidents.” So he had to employ dirtier, subtler schemes.
It had been worse when Anuei was alive. Crispin had felt he had to protect her from the Old Gentleman. Saul was just not good enough for her! One time when he was ten he’d walked in on them. Grunting and bouncing in the dark of Daisy 3, The Old Gentleman wriggling like a white worm on top of Anuei’s black bulk. Crispin had gasped and stiffened, and the red-eyed, growling beast inside him rose up and took a flying leap at the Old Gentleman and tried to rip him bodily off his mother.
That was the night he first knew, honest to the Queen knew, that he was strong. The Old Gentleman tried to hush the incident up, but of course people found out. You can’t very well pretend a battered face, a swollen groin, and a broken arm are all the result of falling off a chair.
And not long after that had come the night when Mike Valenta’s trapeze ripped loose from the rigging, dashing him to the mats thirty feet below. His back was broken in seven places. The Flying Valentas found themselves without a catcher, and Smithrebel’s bereft of its star turn. It was then that the Old Gentleman interfered with Crispin more intrusively than any owner had a right to interfere with his performers’ children. Despite Anuei’s violent, silent disapproval, Crispin was made an aerialist.
Queen, how he had hated the Old Gentleman for forcing that wedge between him and his mother. Working with the Valentas was the first thing he had not been able to talk to Anuei about.
But since then...
Perhaps the Old Gentleman had not even thought about Crispin’s probable unhappiness; perhaps that had merely been the egocentrism of a child, who traces everyone’s motives back to himself. Perhaps it had just been the circus instincts bubbling to the top in Saul Smithrebel’s dried-up, one-track brain. For Crispin turned out to be a good catcher. He would never have made a flier. He was just too tall and bulky. But his weight—he weighed less than Prettie herself—his big ugly hands, and his ability to swing head down for hours without getting dizzy, made him, Herve freely admitted, a better catcher than Mike had been. Rock-steady. It used to worry Crispin that Herve didn’t know that was all just an act of will. Rock-steady! In truth, in those early days, Crispin had been racked by a paralyzing fear of heights.
But gradually he came to enjoy flying, even to believe he loved it. Days, days, and more days. Rehearsals and performances. Tape-wrapped wrists and ankles slapping into chalk-dusted palms. The tricks you learn to ensure that someone’s life is safe in your hands, even when it looks to the audience as if a thousandth of a second’s miscalculation means the flyer’s death. It’s all a matter of being on.
The Old Gentleman’s interference, however, had more repercussions. While Crispin tried to juggle his responsibilities to his mother and to the Valentas, he ended up neglecting Millsy. Millsy was the only adult who had taken a real interest in him as a child. They were friends and playmates; and Millsy taught Crispin geography, history, and everything it was possible for a child to learn about daemons—all the knowledge he might have needed, in fact, except reading and writing, against which Millsy was violently prejudiced. To Millsy, and only to Millsy, Crispin had confessed that he still hated his mother’s lover—that giving Smithrebel a broken arm hadn’t made any difference—that every time the Old Gentleman tried to talk to him, he wanted to attack him again. If the Old Gentleman wouldn’t leave Anuei, couldn’t he at least leave Crispin alone?
There had once been an understanding that Crispin would become Millsy’s apprentice, that their friendship would, so to speak, be legitimized. But neither of them ever mentioned it after Crispin started training with the Valentas. Their night meetings came to an end. And Crispin hated the Old Gentleman for that, too.
But even when he was rushing to practice tumbling with Herve at five in the morning, there had been the hot, seductive stink of daemon breath wafting out from under the hoods of the trucks; exhaust staining the night as the engines turned over; and prickly hints of not-scent around the cotton-candy machine, the carousel, the appliances in the cook tent. His defection to Millsy had been gradual but inevitable.
“Like it or stick it up your ass,” he had said finally to Herve.
Herve and Elise had chosen to like it. But hot-tempered sour-tongued southerners that they were, they’d never managed to forgive him for choosing to be better with daemons than he was on the flying trapezes. He could insist until he turned blue in the face that when he’d joined the troupe, he’d been young enough to have become reasonably good at anything; that Smithrebel’s couldn’t afford for any adult to have less than two skills. But those were excuses, not explanations. Solely on the strength of his half-Lamaroon resistance to gravity, an advantage which far outweighed the drawback of his height, he could have become one of the best catchers in Ferupe. He could have been a mainstay of the Valenta troupe, instead of just a permanent adjunct. Perhaps, with his skill and Prettie’s, the act could even have lifted out of Smithrebel’s into the orbit of one of the really big circuses. A whole life spent sweating in the limelights.
But by the time he was sixteen, he was driving trucks, and it was too late. Every time he was late for a rehearsal, or showed signs of sleepiness—the curse of the daemon handler—Herve lashed out more bitterly than before. Gradually, the empathy necessary for a risk-free performance trickled away.
Thank the Queen—he thought now—Elise and Herve had found another boy to train. Fergus Philpotts, son of George, the elephant handler, and his wife. Fergus might not be a Lamaroon, but he was a circus baby. Pretty soon, Crispin knew, he himself would be relegated to back-up catcher and then phased out.
It sounded wonderful on the face of it; but it could easily turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to him. While it had seemed that Crispin would fit neatly in with the Valentas, the Old Gentleman had left him pretty much alone. But now... He must know what was in the air; what did he have in mind for Crispin this time around? There wasn’t a chance in hell he would let him just drive trucks. Smithrebel’s invasion of the truck cab last night had been like the recurrence of a childhood disease of which you can’t remember the symptoms, only the pain. Crispin had wanted to slouch in his seat and smoke and tip the ashes on the floor of the cab, spit out the window, sing dirty songs, shout that he wasn’t having any of it, not this time. But he had only nodded and clenched his fists tighter around the wheel. Yes sir. No sir.
And he was worried about what Prettie might do when she was faced with the cessation of their working partnership. That had been over years ago. But the way she looked at him had never changed.
She and the Old Gentleman seemed to be boxing Crispin in, one on either side, pressing close, closer. He could refuse Prettie all right—that was horribly easy—but for obvious reasons, he could not refuse to take a new job, even though the Old Gentleman was likely to assign him heavy labor and long hours.
On the other hand, if he was honest with himself, he really did not know how much longer he could keep on like this. For four years he had been driving all night, every night, rehearsing every morning, and performing once, sometimes twice an evening. He was twenty years old. He needed some free time. He needed time to think. That was all there was to it.
Tired ... The deep blue vistas of dreams were shedding their nighttime disguises of transparency, creeping up around him.
He hoped he wasn’t swaying on his feet. When you are six feet eight and look as if you can move a mountain, you’d better not let anyone see otherwise.
Millsy grabbed his arm. “Ware, my friend.”
The shambling figure of Donald Lloyd was coming across the field, dodging the roustabouts hauling rolls of canvas with a nimbleness that belied his long-limbed awkwardness.
Donald was the only clown in Smithrebel’s whose bumbling ring-center persona did not change when he came back out through the red curtains. He had been badly affected by his years in the army. He never talked about them, or about his desertion, though unlike many, he freely admitted he had deserted. Had he been clownish all his life, and stumbled into his second profession by a happy accident? Or had he been a different person, a tolerable person, and changed after he took up clowning? One had to be careful of that.
“I thought I was dead,” he shrilled as he drew up to Millsy and Crispin, staring at them in terror from under his hair. Crispin gazed stonily down at him. “She was groaning and wobbling every time I fucking downshifted! You gotta have a look at her, Cris.”
“I got stuff to do.” Crispin glanced across the lot. Lee and George Philpotts, the elephant-training brothers, were coaxing their animals out of Speedwell 11 to help raise the poles of the big top. Crispin had no responsibility for the elephants, but he was supposed to assist with the labor.
“I’m not getting behind the wheel tonight if you don’t. Come on. One of you.”
Millsy shrugged. He was like an empty overcoat hanging on a hanger, shivering as the truck swung around the bends. Movement without motivation. A human mannequin. Mills the Magnificent, who claimed to be the only male in six domains who could handle uncaged daemons. He was too young to have gray hair, and he talked like a quack doctor. He was unmarried. Once or twice Crispin had wondered, with a prickle of discomfort, if Millsy liked it that way—but he always dismissed the possibility. There were no men like that in Smithrebel’s, except for Shuffling Will the high-wire performer, and everybody knew about him.
“S’pose I’d better check it out,” he said. “Go on, then, Donald.”
The big top, half up now, quaking as the elephants pulled at the ropes, covered most of the field, a vaguely octagonal expanse of grubby white canvas. The smaller black tops of the sideshows were scattered on the far side of the field in a haphazard midway. Anuei had performed her act, which Crispin had never, ever seen—he’d obeyed her request not to sneak in, because she’d never begged him for anything else—in one of those little stuffy tents.
The trucks resembled a circular stockade of children’s blocks. The big top would abut onto the gap between Tulip 5 and Hollyhock 7, so that the performers could pass from the enclosure to the red curtains without being seen. All the tailgates were down. The panels of the menagerie trucks, Speedwell 11 and Pink 12, had been removed to let the cats, apes, and elephants smell fresh air. They were setting up a racket: couldn’t wait for their cages to be set up on the grass. The sight of the flaking swirls of blue and yellow that covered the trucks, and their red silhouettes of dancing people, most of them cut comically in half where the shutters of the living quarters’ windows were raised, always put the metallic taste of homesickness into Crispin’s mouth.
Which was stupid, because he was home.
He set his toolbelt down on the squelching dead leaves and propped the gigantic, warped wooden hood of Lily 6 on its rods. Donald, for once, was right. The whole vehicle shuddered gently.
“Hold up,” he shouted to the roustabouts who were unloading ring lino from the back of the truck. “Stand clear.”
He gulped damp air into his lungs and ducked into the hot, reeking interior. As a handler, he could feel the stink of the daemon, a powerful, localized source of tension. It stung his nostrils and eyes. He wiped water away. “You stupid hog, Donald! Cotton candy for a brain. Poor old lady.” He straightened up, took another breath of fresh air, and bent to gather hammer and pliers out of his toolbox. A daemon handler had two skills: the purely mechanical, which was just knowing the ins and outs of the transformation engines that power trucks, generators, and all the other machines that human ingenuity had devised to exploit daemons; and the daemonological. The interesting bit. Not dangerous, per se, for a celled daemon was a defanged daemon. And yet...
Taking a firm grip on the vibrating edge of the hood, Crispin slid back the hatch in the top of the cell anchored in the middle of the engine. The entire body of the truck jounced upward, and then sank on its wheels. Crispin held on. His bones shook.
Two thousand pounds’ worth of fury glared up at him. The face pressed against the silver mesh under the hatch was just like a human child’s, except that it was bright green. A silver collar gleamed, pinched cruelly tight around the daemon’s neck, trapping most of her mane of black hair. She sat in the three-by-three-foot oak housing with her knees drawn up to her nose, her arms by her sides. The cage was too small to allow her to change position. Her lips moved as if she wanted to speak.
“Now, now,” Crispin muttered. “Ugly little bitch, aren’t you? Come on, calm down, soulless whore you are.”
She seemed properly angry. Nothing wrong there. Starved to the point of madness, not misery. A fine balance. Supposedly, you could eke a powerful daemon out for fifty years with the right care and feeding, but Crispin had never heard of one that had lasted that long. Millsy asserted that captivity killed daemons. Crispin agreed. If you were cooped up in a cell too small to stand up or lie down in, and the touch of the walls irritated you beyond pain, driving you mad with the urge to escape, so that you pushed and pushed and pushed—just as you had been trained to do... .
Lily 6 shook as though she were going to fall apart any minute.
Whispering obscenities, Crispin tapped the sides of the cell with the hammer. Probably a loose join. Daemons could not stand oak, so that was what must be used for the cells, and every crack must be sealed with an alloy containing at least 70 percent silver. The catch, of course, was that silver is infuriatingly weak. He had just located the loose place, and was fishing in a pocket for silver nails, when someone wrapped a hand around his arm.
Concentration shattered. Black bubbles danced in front of his eyes. Swearing, he dived into the engine cavity to retrieve his hammer, and the daemon shot a tentacle of power out through the loose join and sent fierce shivers up and down his spine as his fingers closed around the handle. The lip of the engine cavity caught him in the stomach. He heard a faint shout and knew that Lily 6 was standing on her port wheels, her center of gravity tipping dangerously high.
Every last kink in his hair straightened on end as he banged the vital nail in.
A squelching thud shook the earth as the big truck dropped back onto all eighteen wheels. The daemon shuddered with misery.
Crispin slammed the hatch closed, hooked it shut, and spun around to see if the person who had wrecked a nice straightforward fixit was still in the vicinity. That lash had hurt. He would lambast—
Prettie Valenta stood in the muck, her head bowed, wringing her hands. Her little body was sheathed in one of the long pink dresses he’d once liked so much on her. “I’m sorry!” she said before he could speak. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you were... ”
Why else would I have my head in the guts of a tractor, girl? What do you want?
But it was his own fault, and he knew it. Can’t you get it through your thick skull, Crispin, that just because it’s there for the taking doesn’t mean it comes free? He had only made that mistake a few times, but the last had been very recent. He shook his head in anger.
She was smiling hopefully.
“You know never to interrupt me when I’m working with a daemon.”
“But. I—I have to tell you.” She wasn’t smiling anymore. “Last night—Father finally decided to tell us what he’s been thinking. He says—oh, Crispin, he says Fergus is ready to perform. He’s gotten good enough to catch me. Father wants to put him in the ring on alternate nights, and then permanently.”
“Good,” Crispin said. “Maybe I’ll finally have time to give all of these old ladies a once-over.” He flung his arm out to embrace the semicircle of trucks. “Queen knows they’ve been waiting for, it long enough!”
Prettie’s eyes glimmered like raindrops. She was so predictable! Crispin felt as if he would fly apart. He looked away from her, up into the sky. The dawn had given way to another misty, motionless winter morning, weeping clouds. He rubbed his back. It ached.
Hadn’t he all the appearance of a man living in the open air of the world, indifferent to small considerations, caring only for truth and knowledge and... to... find at least some happiness in the search?
—Henry James