Crispin stood on the catcher’s platform, halfway between the ring floor and the craze of rigging under the roof of the big top. Howard-the-lights, suspended in his high cradle, had all his glares turned on Prettie as she climbed artistically up the ladder to the flyer’s platform thirty feet away, where Elise stood waiting to handle the bars for her. Crispin himself was in shadow; it was unlikely that anyone was looking at him. He wiped sweat off his face with a blue-sequined forearm. Herve stood behind him, fidgeting like one of Millsy’s daemons when it was out of sorts. Crispin guessed that after they went off, Herve was planning to tell him about his demotion—he must not know that Prettie had let the cat out of the bag. Ugly little despot though he was, the Valenta patriarch couldn’t be looking forward to that interview.
There had been a period of about two years when Herve had been the closest thing to a father Crispin had. A few vestiges of that relationship lingered. Crispin wasn’t looking forward to the interview either.
Unsmiling white faces clustered below in the darkness. Elise had finished her turn, to the scattered clapping of sixty or seventy people, perhaps half a hundred of them smelly, blond-headed Apple Hills natives, the rest “seeds.” Seeding was a technique that worked better in large towns, where everyone did not know each other by sight, Here, the audience wasn’t taking well to being jollied along by strangers whose effort to dress like locals had resulted in some really bizarre outfits. Crispin suspected the crofters didn’t really understand the circus: they were still trying to figure out what they had forked over their coin (or chicken, or fruit, or cheese) for. Unlike more sophisticated folk, they saw entertainment for nothing other than what it was, an elaborate method of scamming you out of your money.
But Prettie never noticed whether she had an audience or not. She was that rare creature, a circus artist who performed for the sheer love of it. She hoisted herself onto the top of her tower and flung her arms wide, her expression radiant.
But she was studiously not looking across the gap at Crispin.
As she swung out into the air to do her solo routine, her limbs coiling bonelessly around the ropes of her trapeze, his suspicions were confirmed. She wasn’t really on. No prizes for guessing why. As a performer, she had a tendency to go wild, depending on luck and instinct rather than on concentration—tonight, she appeared to be flirting with the very concept of balance itself, constantly on the verge of making a fatal mistake. The audience couldn’t look away, of course, though from the little screams and gasps coming from below, most of them were not so much fascinated as they were genuinely petrified.
Queen damn it! Crispin thought, clenching his teeth. He was the one who had to compensate for her lack of finesse. He was the one who had to ensure her safety. And she wasn’t making it any easier.
She caught a rope, twined a foot in it, let the trapeze dart away to Elise’s waiting hands and cast herself into a spin, head down, one hand on her heart, the other stretched out.
Eye contact.
Crispin stiffened.
Eye contact.
Her spin slowed.
Eye contact.
He felt unprofessional heat rising in his face as he swooped out to join her. Don’t think about it. Jackknife. Flipping around the bar of the catcher’s trapeze, he locked his knees on the padded supports, arching his back to get up speed.
She was building back-and-forth momentum. Wait. Wait. Now! At the highest point of her swing, she let go of the rope and soared toward him, her body arched like a fish’s. Somebody in the audience screamed. Behind her the rope vanished into the roof. In her blue-feathered leotard, she looked lighter than a bird. Inch for inch, Crispin weighed even less; but no one would have guessed it. Effortlessly, he caught her wrists and lifted her, twisting her bodily around so that they were suspended face-to-face. Momentum carried them across to the flyer’s platform, down, then up to the catcher’s platform, so high that Crispin could have grabbed the railing. Candy-dank air swished past their ears; lime glares sizzled in silence. The audience ought to be clapping at this point—Smithrebel’s seeds were making a valiant effort to start a hand of applause—but the poor locals were likely too frightened to make a sound.
One of her feet lost its hold. She promptly let go with the other, so that she curved away from him, like a branch splitting off from a tree trunk. Crispin tightened his grip. “In the name of the Queen, concentrate!” he muttered.
She radiated at him. Close up, it was a horrifying sight. Her heavy paint made her look thirty, and half-witted.
Until the finale of the act, nothing went too badly wrong. Herve had once been a catcher, and although now he couldn’t swing head down for long without getting dizzy, for the last few routines he liked to join Crispin and Prettie in the air. It was an opportunity for Prettie to show off her flying skills, more than anything else; as she somersaulted between her father and her ex-lover, the limelights followed her like avid admirers. These routines were far less difficult for Crispin. Standard catching, nothing fancy.
Maybe he relaxed too soon. Maybe that was what happened.
But later that night, when he tried, sweating and shaking, to remember what he had done wrong, he could come up with nothing but the facts.
It happened when the act was nearly over, just as he reached the far point of his swing and swooped down again toward the center of the ring, his hands stretched out to Prettie, who was somersaulting toward him, dangerously off course. The big top exploded in flames. Sweat broke out all over his body. The scent of unfamiliar things burning filled his nose. It was a wonder he didn’t lose his knee-lock on the trapeze. The animals—the audience—the trappings! Everything in a circus is flammable, even rain-soaked. Danger! Danger!
But in less than a second, or so it seemed, he realized that he was no longer in the big top at all.
There was no transition; it was just that the crash of sensations was so enormous and sudden that it took his brain a minute to process it.
He was standing in a street. It was night. He could feel the pavement under his boots, smell smoke in the air. There was a saliva-sweet taste in the back of his mouth, as if he had drunk a cup of bitter tea. All around him, people were running and screaming and crying and trying to establish order and failing. Their clothing billowed around them. Monstrously tall buildings huddled over the pavement, blocking out all but a thin orange strip of sky.
He could not distinguish even a word of what the people were shouting. The cadences sounded all wrong. Not like normal speech, nor yet like the Lamaroon his mother had spoken to him when he was little. The corners of Ferupe were different enough that they could seem like foreign countries. But this place was truly alien.
The people had tails. Long, pale rat-tails carried high behind them, which they used as third hands: holding bags and bundles aloft, lifting swaths of skirts, wrapped around children’s wrists. Now he knew where he was. Kirekune.
A man turned to scream something at him, his face stretched blank with terror. Crispin didn’t need to understand him to know what was meant. It’s getting closer! The windows in the tops of the buildings flickered redly with the light coming over the roofs.
So why was he, Crispin, standing still? Why wasn’t he afraid?
As if that flaw in the plausibility of the whole picture had shattered it, like a sheet of glass, he was no longer standing at all.
He was no longer himself. He was sensation without comprehension.
The night whistled blackly around him, windy and strangely warm. That warmth was of the air: the leaping orange glow that ringed the peak of the city-mountain before him, like a necklace of malignant orange crows. His cheeks stung with it and his eyes ran. The part of him that was still able to think wanted to shield his face, but he could not move his hands: he didn’t even have hands. Didn’t have a face. He was immaterial, swooping dizzily over a vast slum of shacks that crawled with people as tiny as ants fleeing a kicked anthill.
The face of the city-mountain loomed clifflike before him, honeycombed with black maws, lumpy with buttresses and built-up ledges. Round domes and needlelike spires pricked up like black hair all over the mountain’s head.
Closer, closer, and he was swooping up to one of the maws, entering it. He was drawn, pulled along as if he were on a string. The floor of the tunnel had been paved, creating a wide street. Filthy stalactites thorned the roof. Gaslights cast a black pool of shadow around each piece of rubbish in the gutter. The tunnel was empty but for a few groups of fleeing people. They all had long black hair. The tails held gracefully behind them gave them an oddly toylike appearance. They might as well have been clockwork mice. They came scuttling from around the sharp bend ahead, and from little tunnels that opened halfway up the sides of the main tunnel. Many of these lesser tunnels had sentry booth-like structures at the entrances, and the tiniest had curtains.
But if they were all fleeing, then Crispin was flying in the wrong direction. Why was he going back into the city, when it was on fire?
And again, the obvious question shattered the stream of images. He was standing in an empty street of the same city. A different street. Here, there were no crowds, no screams of fear. Crispin did not recognize these buildings with their elaborate facades, nor the crossroads farther up the steep hill where vendors’ stalls lay overturned, nor the still-lit gaslamps, to one of which a dog was chained.
The dog’s terrified barking was the only noise apart from the ominous background roar. Orange light flickered over everything. Crispin could hear the flames crackling further down the hill. Close-up, he knew, a fire sounded like a cacophony of trees cracking and elephants screaming and glass breaking, all rolled into one. So it was a good long way off yet. But still—too near—
And if he was correct, the fire was no longer above him, as it had been in the last street where he stood, but below him. He was on the peak of the mountain.
A stranger stood in front of him. Crispin blinked. Why hadn’t he seen the man before?
But before he could take in the details of the stranger’s appearance, the whole scene—sight, sound, smell, feel, and taste—fell to pieces with a long, bright, painless tinkling. It was as if his failure to recognize the man instantly had been a mistake in all possible worlds, a fatal step off the high wire of continuity.
It was like going through the windshield in a truck wreck—if you were extremely light, like Crispin Kateralbin, and were able after somersaulting thirty feet through the air to land well enough on wet leaves that you didn’t break anything worse than a shoulder. Cartwheeling disorientation took him through blackness, and redness, and heat, and cold, and nausea, and unbearable pain.
And left him, as limp as a dead rat, hanging on a trapeze under the wet, smelly big top on a rainy night in the Apple Hills, alone in the air, his swing gently slowing to a stop. Far below in the ring, people were standing in a circle around something blue. Many of the bleachers were overturned. (That reminded him of something. Something... What?) On the far side of the tent, a stream of locals were being shunted with some difficulty, like a herd of cows, out of the crowd gaps. Howard-the-lights’ cradle swung empty, and his glares were no longer aimed center air. Their beams dotted the sides of the tent with white circles.
Crispin hauled himself up onto the bar. He peered down between his feet, holding lightly to the ropes. The combined weight of the performers and ringhands gathered in the ring was squeezing mud up between the squares of red-and-white-checked ring lino. Suddenly, yet without surprise, as if he had known all along (and that reminded him of something too ... something ... what was wrong with him?) he saw that it was Prettie lying in the center of the ring. Prettie sprawled unmoving in her blue leotard and tights. She must be badly hurt.
“Oh, shit,” he murmured.
Flames...
Fading.
His first impulse—simply to let go of the trapeze and drop down to join them—passed like a breath. Slowly, feeling rather awful, since everyone seemed now to be looking up at him, he snapped his body into a swing, back and forth, back and forth. After building sufficient momentum, he released the trapeze and flew easily through the air to the catcher’s tower. He could not help feeling a little pleased with himself as he made a perfect landing. But as he descended the ladder, back into reality, the ugly, vaguely accusatory expressions on the faces below told him what he had really known all along. Prettie wasn’t just hurt. She was dead.
What had he done?
Flames...
He couldn’t remember. It was like blinking awake at the wheel, only to find that in a moment of exhausted unconsciousness, you have driven off the road. He stumbled as gravity reclaimed him into the heavy, dreary world of Smithrebel’s, where people parted to let him through and whispered as he passed, where nobody took the initiative to do anything, not even cover a dead girl’s body, not even straighten her neck or close her eyes, until the Old Gentleman arrived. Here he carne now, pushing through the curtains with a couple of ringhands behind him. He looked genuinely worried, as well he might, for Prettie was, had been, his star turn. Elise was crying. Herve was hugging his wife and staring at Crispin with a murderous eye. But Crispin himself could not take his eyes off the Old Gentleman. It was not Saul Smithrebel’s fault that his white, jiggling jowls, compressed between the collar of his red ringmaster’s coat and his top hat, looked over-painted, like a clown-face of sadness. But it was a truly remarkable sight, unprecedented in Crispin’s memory.
Smithrebel shouted, “In the name of the Queen! Tell me you got the gulls out before she croaked!”
Rain plinked on the roof of Sunflower 1 and on the raised shutters of the windows. Crispin slouched on one of the Old Gentleman’s tiny, hard chairs with his legs stretched halfway across the room. The Old Gentleman sat against the other wall of the truck, behind his shaky little desk, peering between stacks of papers as if over a siege wall. Everything about him suggested he was on the defensive—but this was his lair, this was his showdown, and Crispin refused to be drawn into participating. Even though, from the way the Old Gentleman was dragging out the showdown, that was what he seemed to be asking for. Even though part of Crispin wished he could say something which would really set the Old Gentleman on his ear. That would be a treasure to take away with him!
But on the other hand, what was there to say?
“Thanks very much, I’m sure, sir”?
He was fired. Sacked. Given the push.
“Of course, I don’t expect you to leave now,” the Old Gentleman said fussily. “Ridiculous to leave you stranded in the middle of these confounded hills, heh? No, you shall be my guest until we reach Weschess. Or Thrazen Domain. How does that sound?”
“Marvelous,” Crispin said flatly.
He detected mingled irritation and uneasiness in the Old Gentleman’s laughter. “Believe me, Crispin, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to! But feelings are running high. At this point it’s become a question of my authority.”
“No need to apologize.”
“I merely... ” The Old Gentleman sighed. “Crispin, you have always been so reliable. I don’t understand how you could suddenly—”
Crispin blinked. The Old Gentleman didn’t think he had meant to kill Prettie. Did he?
“Nobody else understands either. That is part of the reasoning behind their outrage. The feeling is that Herve and Elise... and the boy... ”
“Fergus.”
“Yes. That they are suffering enough already. That it would be unforgivable of me to keep you here, constantly reminding them of their grief. As if I cared more for a half-breed daemon handler than for my star performers. Do you see? I have no choice.”
You’re lying to me, Crispin thought. You know that everyone thinks I did it deliberately, because I was going to be let go from the troupe. Never mind that that makes no sense whatsoever. You’re afraid that if you show favoritism to me, the Valentas’ll pull out of the show. Then you’d really be up a creek, wouldn’t you? But you know, Old Gentleman, you’re the owner. You don’t, have to justify your whims. Nobody could force you to fire me if you didn’t want to.
“I was going to quit anyway,” he said, wishing it did not sound so much like the false bravado of a punished child.
The Old Gentleman yelped with happiness. “But I understand! Of course you, too, are heartbroken... You and she... oh, yes, I know. Everybody knew. And I understand perfectly. I remember how I felt when your mother passed away.”
Don’t you drag her into it! Crispin thought.
He had not actually had time yet to consider his feelings. At first, shock had overwhelmed him. Later, curled in the driver’s seat of Columbine 4, unable to face sleeping in the men’s quarters, he’d been overwhelmed by guilt. Guilt that grabbed him by the throat and overpowered him. And it drove him wild that he could not recall what he had done wrong. When he had failed to twist close enough for Prettie to catch his wrists, when he had, as Millsy told him, gone limp on the trapeze, failing even to look up as she tumbled thirty feet to the checkered linoleum and the elephant shit, screaming at him, reaching vainly... in her last moments, she had lost the grace which all her life had lifted her out of the ordinary. And Crispin had not the vaguest recollection of it. In his memory, there was no gap between Prettie alive, flying, and Prettie dead.
He thought of Millsy, lying in his bunk in Hollyhock 7, out cold along with a dozen other men who on most nights could be found transfixed behind the wheel of a truck. Crispin, too, should be there. For a daemon handler, not even tragedy outweighed the lure of an unexpected full night’s rest. The Old Gentleman would not usually let anything short of a fire stop Smithrebel’s from tearing down on schedule, but he had allowed that the Valentas, now reduced to two, deserved their night of vigil. However, most of the circus seemed to be treating Prettie’s death as a welcome excuse to suspend routine. The dripping night was dead silent but for a voice which Crispin recognized as Elise’s, sobbing and throbbing and falling like a hoarse reed pipe. Even Crispin, shifting and scratching in the darkness, had been appalled to feel a sense of relief blanketing his mind. Questions and answers came gradually to seem less vital.
Finally sleep rolled over him. Then there was no more Prettie hovering on the edge of his vision, no more Prettie asking with her big eyes if she could ride with him in the cab (and snuggle up under his arm, and kiss his neck), no more dreadful responsibility every night that she flirted with death. All the strings tying him to the Valentas were cut by the scissors of oblivion.
Until he woke before dawn, grinding his teeth, his body prickly with sweat. He couldn’t remember what he had been dreaming, even after it hounded him awake again and again. Drugged with exhaustion, for sleep had got its teeth properly into him, he dragged his coat over his head and allowed himself to be the subject of a tug-o’-war between exhaustion and the terror that lurked in sleep. Finally, when morning shone through Columbine 4’s windows and the birds of the Apple Hills gave full, dolorous voice, he gave up the fight for rest and crawled out of the cab in search of breakfast, grumpy as a wild elephant, and sore-eyed.
Now the Old Gentleman stared at him thoughtfully, fingers laced beneath sagging jowls.
“In all honesty, Crispin, I’ll be sorry to see you go. You are my last reminder of Anuei. In a way—though there were many women before and after—mmm?” He laughed, inviting Crispin to join in a masculine wink-wink-nudge-nudge. Crispin sat like a stone. The Old Gentleman shifted some papers from one side of the desk to the other. Why was he dragging this out?
“She was the love of my life, you know,” Saul Smithrebel said at last, with the air of one making a great confession.
“Yes, well, we’ve all gotta get over our losses sometime,” Crispin offered. “I mean, don’t look back too often.” From outside came the cranky roar of a lion, and an elephant’s mournful trumpet, and the voices of the roughnecks. Now that Smithrebel’s had finally started tearing down, it was proceeding at its usual whirlwind pace. Crispin shifted, thinking about all the things he ought to be doing. It had not quite hit him that he was no longer an employee of the circus; he would never again have to load trucks, feed daemons, hump rolls of canvas across a field, take down the cook tent. Never again.
The Old Gentleman stood up and came around his desk. Crispin did not stand; he would have had to bend his head—Sunflower 1, like all the trucks which had been made into living quarters, was partitioned horizontally as well as vertically, with the upper story reserved for storage. The ceiling was extremely low. Crispin looked up at the Old Gentleman with what he hoped was a pleasant grin (sunny boy holds no grudges). “Well, I suppose that’s that, then?”
“I’m looking forward to heavy bookings in Thrazen,” the Old Gentleman said. “It’s farm country, and odd though it has always seemed to me, there is far more money for the populace in farming than there is in the daemon industry. Then, of course, there are the army bases around the Thrazen War Road.” He paused.
Crispin had no desire to work on an army base. And if the Old Gentleman meant that he should join up... no, that would be unthinkable even from him.
“The point is, of course, that I shouldn’t think you’ll find it hard to get a job.” The Old Gentleman coughed. “You can travel with us all the way through Thrazen, if you like, though of course I can’t allow you to participate in the running of things as you have been. Then when we reach Thrandon, you’ll get two months’ severance pay. That seems to me the least I can do.”
The thunderous cloud over the horizon lifted a fraction. One of the peculiarities of Crispin’s affiliation with Smithrebel’s was that he never received anything over room and board. He was not sure whether this was Anuei’s legacy—she had been personally kept by the Old Gentleman, rather than receiving any regular salary—or whether it was simply the Old Gentleman’s skinflint nature. At least, and this was a larger comfort than it should have been, he knew it was nothing to do with his Lamaroon blood: the two roughnecks who were Kirekunis, and Kiquat, and the Izte Kchebukaran, got paid the same salary as anyone else. It had taken quite a bit of guts to approach them and work around to finding this out. Circus might be lower-class entertainment, but Smithrebel’s people, Crispin among them, considered themselves respectable and did not go around talking about money.
Millsy had no interest in money. This was another clue to his high-upper-end origins. He provided Crispin with beer coin whenever Crispin asked, but because one had one’s pride, this was seldom.
Now he was about to receive the first handout of his life.
“Mmm?” the Old Gentleman said, tipping his nearly bald head on one side.
“Come to think of it, I don’t know why I’d want to hang around until we get to Thrazen Domain,” Crispin said, grinning widely at the Old Gentleman. “I’ll just slink off, shall I? I wouldn’t want to make any unpleasantness worse. You know.” He paused to let the Old Gentleman get the drift of things. “People might think you might be doing something for me that you wouldn’t for anyone else.”
Was it possible for the Old Gentleman to turn paler? Crispin seemed to have succeeded in touching a nerve, though he had been probing without much of an idea where to pinch.
“But, my dear boy... Of course, I understand that in that case you will need more than a few pounds.”
“Deuce hands, maybe?” Crispin suggested pleasantly.
The Old Gentleman’s throat bumped. “Yes. Yes.” He fumbled in his pocket, and extracted crumpled pound notes one by one from handfuls of fluff, nuts, string balls, broken knife blades, and coins. Crispin could not take his eyes off the sorting process. There were fivers and tenners. Did anyone in the circus know that the Old Gentleman carried this kind of wealth on his person?
“Nine... ten. Let’s make it eleven, shall we?”
“Thanks,” Crispin said, pocketing the notes. He was vastly taken aback to see a gleam of what might have been tears in the cloudy blue eyes. He got slowly to his feet and unfolded his cap. Whatever was wrong with Smithrebel he wasn’t about to give the money back!
The Old Gentleman stepped back a pace, birdlike, rubbing his papery fingers together. “This isn’t right. This just isn’t right. There’s something... something I have always meant to tell you.” He paused. “Your dear mother wouldn’t have thought it right at all for me to send you off with nothing more than a few dry pound notes of your... your inheritance.”
He did an odd little tap dance. Crispin noticed that the black patent leather of Smithrebel’s shoes was scuffed and muddy. A thread of worry tugged at him. The slightest hint that the flabby little Ferupian might be more than a small-time circus monarch, destined to share the fate of all imperfectly competent monarchs—that is, to be the object of derision, flattery, and resentment in equal proportions—that he might, in fact, be a human being—had always unsettled him. Especially as the Old Gentleman tended to single him out to be the object of such hints. Crispin usually met the Old Gentleman’s oblique pleas for pity with a stony face. But now the recklessness of the freed criminal prompted him to say, “My inheritance?”
He wouldn’t put it past the Old Gentleman to have heisted some of Anuei’s belongings after her death. Maybe he was having an attack of conscience. Relics from Lamaroon? More of the famous forbidden props, most of which Crispin himself, at the age of twelve, had burned without opening the boxes?
His heart quickened. He knew he would not have the fortitude to leave those boxes unopened this time.
The Old Gentleman looked up, his blue eyes hooded. He shook his head. “No. I... I apologize. That was unprofessional of me. Go your way.”
Bullshit, Crispin thought. Frustration welled up inside him. He bowed sharply from the shoulders. “Well, then, in that case, thank you for your generous gift, Mr. Smithrebel, and farewell. It has been a pleasure working for you.”
He turned on his heel and pushed out through the curtains. A dark passage led to the lowered rear door of the truck. Oblivious of the trappings being loaded, the elephants hooting, a toddler crying for its mother, he jumped down to the mud and turned his face up to the rain.
He had a cramp in his neck. For a minute he stood feeling the tension drain out of his muscles.
Then he jammed his cap firmly onto his head, fingered the soft old notes in his trousers pocket, and went to find Millsy.
Millsy accompanied him some distance down the road. Not southward. The last thing Crispin wanted was to be overtaken by the circus and have rude jokes shouted out of the truck cabs at him. They walked north, back toward the towns where Prettie had performed.
This was truly the last of it, this hilly road overhung by dripping trees. As they walked, Crispin felt himself overcome by a wave of sentiment. He glanced at Millsy: a wooden mannequin moving jerkily, his feet weighted down by wisdom as if by cement overshoes. A master of secrets Crispin could never understand even if he was given a chance. A friend.
Ever since Crispin had become as competent a handler as Millsy himself, there had been a distance between them. There had been a time when Millsy poured out his soul to Crispin, night after night. He told the boy things he had probably never told anyone else. Even though Crispin had been too young to understand the half of it, he could remember if he wanted to.
Only he didn’t, particularly.
Only he couldn’t help it.
There had been good times later on. No matter what Millsy’s flaws, there was no one else in the circus worth arguing with. Sharing a bottle late at night, after a good show, when they were on a three- or four-night stand outside some big town where the Old Gentleman allowed they didn’t have to move to draw a new audience the next day. Talking daemons. Talking about humanity and politics and the war—the questions that talking about daemons inevitably brought up. Getting worked up the way you can only do when you’re drunk.
It had begun to rain again, and Millsy turned the collar of his coat up around his ears. Crispin stopped. There was a moment of awkward silence. The old handler said, “You ought, I think, to be able to make it back to Valestock in a couple of weeks if you go straight north. We came by an extremely circuitous route, after all.”
Crispin nodded. “If I was you,” he said, and paused as he remembered that the fates of Smithrebel’s were no longer his business. What the hell. Good advice comes back in cowries—one of Anuei’s sayings. “If I had Smithrebel’s ear, the way you do, I’d tell him to cut some of the shows on the itinerary and head straight for Thrandon. There’s no good dragging this out. The takings last show must’ve been shit.”
“Yes, they were,” Millsy said, gazing into the distance. “And we had to refund most of the entries after the accident. But you know how Mr. Saul is. I do not think I have a hope of changing his plans. All we can reasonably expect is that next time around, he will have learned his lesson with regard to the Apple Hills.”
“And maybe next time he’ll strike gold,” Crispin said, remembering the summer of the Happy Mountains. “And maybe bloody not.” He shifted his knapsack on his shoulder and looked down at his friend. “Why do you stay, Millsy?”
Millsy shook his head. “You mean, when I could have far better things? When I could be respectable, or rich, or both? I stay because I love the circus. I love it. You know that word, Crispin? Love.”
Suddenly Crispin was furious. How dare Millsy lie to him? Now that they were probably never going to see each other again, telling the truth had, paradoxically, become all-important. “That’s crap. Nobody loves being an entertainer. They just love traveling, being out of reach of the law.”
Millsy’s eyes glinted like steel ball bearings in nests of wrinkles. “You only think that because you yourself are not in love with the circus.”
Automatically, Crispin started to protest, but Millsy held up his hand.
“I have been watching you since you were a toddler—I am afraid sometimes you forget the great differences in our ages, my friend—and I know you better, perhaps, than you know yourself. Your mother, Smithrebel, Herve, Elise, and even poor little Prettie, all of them tried to—to convert you to the circus, if I may use the word without vulgarity. I was guilty of the same crime myself. Do you remember when I tried to make you into a trickster?”
“Queen, yes!” Crispin grimaced, remembering badly bitten fingers, occult wounds that did not heal for half a year, fits of shivering that took him unexpectedly during that period. Millsy had, he remembered, been badly disappointed, though he was at pains to conceal it. But he had waxed philosophical about the whole thing. It required an extremely rare combination of qualities to trick uncollared daemons; all women had the raw potential, but almost none of them the will. Men had the will—that was why ninety-nine out of a hundred handlers of collared daemons were male—but the wrong chemicals in their bodies. Millsy was a biological freak.
“But I failed. All I succeeded in was making you into a competent daemon handler. Which by no means limits you to working as an entertainer. Daemon handlers are needed in every single field, whereas tricksters are not. In the same way, only a few people need to know how to make candles, but everybody needs to know how to light them. So it was lucky for you, really, that you did not have my blood.” Ruefully, Millsy pinched his own thin forearm. “If you had followed in my footsteps, the circus would have had you for life. And I am convinced, now, that you would not have been content.”
“And Prettie wouldn’t be dead!”
Millsy winced. “Crispin, I do not know what happened. But she was courting Death. He would have come to her sooner rather than later, no matter what—it was just a stroke of bad luck that He chose you for His tool.”
Crispin gritted his teeth. “How dare you try to fake me with philosophy?” Anger almost choked him. “Bad luck my foot. I fucked up.”
“Does it gratify you to believe that?”
The rain drifted lightly through the trees.
“I’m gonna settle down,” Crispin spat. “I told the Old Gentleman I was gonna quit anyway—and it was the truth! I’ve had enough of this. It’s a mug’s game. Maybe there’s something wrong with me—born and raised in the circus, and all I can do is leave.” He stared into Millsy’s steely little eyes, trying to read him. “Come back through Lovoshire in five years and ask for me, I’ll be living in a fine townhouse with servants of my own and girls on both knees!”
“Oh, Crispin,” Millsy said with a catch in his voice.
“What? What?”
“You’ll only be unhappy if you fix your heart on that kind of life.”
“Can you read the future?”
“I know the ways of men!”
Crispin folded his arms. “You’re being insufferably obscure,” he said in Millsy’s own, rather affected accents. But Millsy was too agitated to notice.
“People are... I have lived among settled folk, as you have not, and I feel it my duty to warn you!” The old handler rocked on the balls of his feet. “Your skin. Your height. Those are only the most superficial of your differences from the average Ferupian! And those are the differences they will notice. Those are the differences they will reject you for!” He laughed, but it was more of a bark. “Why couldn’t you have waited to kill Prettie until we were in Kingsburg? There, there are other Lamaroons—you would have had a far easier time of it!”
Crispin gasped in disbelief. “Not you, too. Not you, too! Smithrebel thinks I did it—”
“On purpose, yes! He can scarcely help thinking that, and so do most of his employees, but not I. I trust you. You say you passed out in midair. I believe you. I only hope it was not the symptom of some illness which will return to plague you later in your life.”
The possibility was a horrid one. It had not occurred to him.
“I so much want you to have a happy life!” Millsy insisted.
Crispin could imagine Anuei, if she were alive, saying that. But if Millsy felt paternal toward him, this was the first he’d heard of it. He hardened his voice. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re really getting at? You’re warning me against a shitload of fake dangers. You’re not usually paranoid.”
Millsy shook, each segment of him trembling individually, as if his strings were being jerked by a great hand.
“You secretly want me to fail, don’t you?” Crispin said. “Just like you failed. You don’t stay with Smithrebel’s because you love it, you stay for the same reasons the deserters do.” He took a deep breath and deliberately dragged the squirming past into the present. “I know you got kicked out of the army, Millsy. I know you got kicked out of court. I bet there’s a lot of people trying to catch up with you.”
“You’re wrong,” Millsy said faintly.
“You told me all about it yourself. When I was little, and you’d come and get me at night, and—”
“No!” Millsy was shaking so violently now that Crispin feared for a second he would fall apart. “That’s unfair! Crispin, I had thought better of you!”
Maybe it was unfair, at that. Millsy obviously thought Crispin held those long-ago nights against him. But there had not been anything sordid about it. Only after Crispin grew old enough to know right from wrong had he started to think of the incidents as perversions. In reality, Millsy could not have been gentler. And the day that Crispin had first expressed the slightest discomfort, Millsy had withdrawn and never touched him again.
How tightly had he been holding himself in check, all these years?
That’s sickening! How can I think such things? To keep from dwelling on it, Crispin said loudly, “You told me all about your years at court! You told me how they plotted to kill you! You had to leave.”
“I chose of my own accord—”
“Yeah. Just like I’m leaving here of my own accord. Yeah. I was only a kid, but I remember how Queen-damned bitter you were!” He stared at Millsy. “And you’re not half as old as everybody thinks you are!”
“I have described the effects that tricking daemons can—”
“You’re what? Forty-five? That means—I know what’s wrong with you. You’re jealous of me. Because I have another chance. And you don’t.” He gestured around at the silent trees. “This is all you’re going to have. For the rest of your life.” He made circles with his thumbs and forefingers and thrust them at Millsy. “Nothing. Zero. Zip.”
Millsy whispered, “Galianis.”
“What?” Crispin shouted, nearly at the end of his wits, because this was the last hour he would ever spend with his friend, and he was wasting it on recriminations. “What are you saying?”
The first shades of dark had begun to fall. It looked as if Millsy was stroking the air in front of him. Then, all at once, Crispin saw the thing like a small blue child clinging in the crook of his arm. Millsy must have had the daemon with him all along. Galianis wore child-size breeches and a woolly jumper, probably cadged from one of the circus mothers. It had been asleep when Millsy called it to materialize; at its name, it opened enormous eyes and cleared a shock of pale hair out of its face with one hand. “Guests always welcome,” it piped. There was not a trace of intelligence in the saucer-sized orbs that fixed Crispin. “A budget imbalance will unfortunately be inevitable. Tastier than any other brand. Sweet yet spicy!”
Millsy rubbed the daemon’s hair. It responded to the caress by smiling, practically purring. But so would a kitten. “Closed every second Tossday for inventory,” it said, and hopped to the ground with the suddenness of a sparrow. Its stream of slogans, catchphrases, and overheard sentence fragments dropped to a mumble as it started to dig holes in the mud with its fingers.
That would get on my nerves inside five minutes, Crispin thought. But Millsy loves them like children. He sighed and drove his hands into his pockets.
Millsy looked up. His eyes were at once anxious, sad, and self-mocking. “What a mother hen I am,” he said. “I suppose I was trying to warn you against every eventuality. Although that’s not possible. I apologize.”
“Well, if nothing else works out, there’s always the army,” Crispin said.
Millsy laughed. “Yes.”
There was an awkward pause. The rain grew a little heavier. Crispin wondered where he was going to sleep that night; if he would even be able to sleep in the wet and the cold. Perhaps he should just keep walking. How long could he keep on going before he fell down? Or could he find shelter with the locals? A movement distracted him. Galianis had leaped back on Millsy’s shoulder. Two pairs of eyes regarded Crispin: one flat and pale blue; one whose dark, sad gaze sent a pang through Crispin, deep inside where he had forgotten it could hurt.
“I’m sorry if I said anything to offend you,” he said stiffly, formally.
“Oh,” Millsy said, and coming alive all at once, made a move to hug Crispin. Crispin instinctively stepped back. Millsy said with a rueful smile, “You devil! Not even this once?” and moved toward him again.
“Get off!” Crispin said violently, and jerked away. Something of his horror must have shown on his face. Millsy’s mouth quirked, but he did not try to hug Crispin again. “You can deny it to me, but not to yourself,” he said.
“You sicken me!” Crispin shouted. “I’ve had enough!” His throat was full again. “I tried to patch things up, dammit, and you—you’re still trying to sabotage me! Well, I’ve had enough!” He flung around and strode away into the gathering dark, feeling angry, stupid, and betrayed. Childishly, he kept expecting Millsy to come after him. Behind him was silence.
And after a moment: “Fresh every day. We don’t need your sort around here. A position is open to an experienced scribe.”
And it was too late to turn back, and Millsy was not coming after him. Crispin reached the top of the hill and risked a glance over his shoulder. Millsy stood in the confusion of their footprints—they had churned up the mud so much that it looked as if there had been a fight—his hands in his pockets, his overcoat flapping like a scare-the-crows’ ragged garment in a wind which was apparently localized. The daemon had vanished again.
Crispin swore aloud, and turned his face north.
Even in the rainy twilight, the grass of the verges was a brilliant peacock green. Darkness closed down from the top of the sky, finally erasing even the faint redness above the western treetops which had signaled the sinking of the sun behind the Wraithwaste. Little black squirrels came out and chee-cheed in the trees, as loud as the tree monkeys of the southern forests.
Crispin figured he might never have a house, or servants. But all he needed was a place to stay and a job which brought him enough money to keep a girl who made no demands on him. That was all he needed. Was it too much to ask?
Right now it seemed that it was asking for the earth. Millsy had made it seem that way.
And the memory of that moment reverberated in his head like the sound of a plucked guywire. His steps squelched faster. He would not slacken his pace. This was the only way he was ever going to get somewhere.
If you shut jour eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon.
—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan