Fessiery 1895 A.D. Lovoshire: Valestock
“Hey... up!” Crispin shouted. He bowed. “And now for the most dangerous feat performed by jugglers of any stripe, in any of the twenty-one domains! Ladies and gentlemen, can I have a volunteer from the audience?”
The urchins giggled and crowded each other. The scattering of daemonmongers’ wives with their black umbrellas, dresses which would have been able to stand up on their own, and wickerwork baskets in which they carried their excuses for going out to the shops—trifles (Crispin imagined) like thin slices of ham, little jars of goose-liver pâté wildly unseasonable hothouse berries—his mouth watered—ornate, remote creatures, they leaned their heads together and smiled disapprovingly. A week and a half of performing on the corner of Main Street had taught him that although they might linger longer than any others, only very rarely did coins come from those plump, suede-gloved fingers. Even the drab nannies who stopped occasionally to watch without visible sign of interest would occasionally send their charges over with tuppence to put in his cap.
He wondered if the mothers knew where their offspring had been when they kissed them good night. That type feared contamination worse than death. They were the same everywhere, whether their husbands’ business was daemonmongering, shopkeeping, manufacturing, or farming. They were People of Consequence, men and women who lived penned in by the perceived necessity of leisure, who had imperceptibly overrun Ferupe sometime during the last hundred years. It was their prejudices, direct and indirect, that had prevented Crispin from making an honest living in Valestock.
That he should have sunk as low as the commonest gypsy!
Well, at least he was juggling on Main Street, not in the slums, or the music hall. But performing at all, anywhere, meant swallowing his pride. He had wanted to hide his background. He had spent all but a pound of the Old Gentleman’s money on food, cigarettes, clothes, the bathhouse, and a haircut; then he had enquired after a job with every daemon handler in Valestock. Men at the waterworks, the fixit shops, the cell makers, the apprentice houses—and finally, after all those had turned him away, the daemonmongers themselves, though he was intimidated by the very sight of those well-kept shops that reeked subtly of money. Daemons were big business in Valestock, of course, as in all towns near the Wraithwaste, and all of the money was concentrated in the hands of Valestock’s five or six bona fide daemonmongers. Though word said that even they were not the end of the chain, that the real money went to their masters in Kingsburg. Their truckers made forays into the forests to collect the goods from the trickster women. Other minions evaluated the daemons, celled them for travel, and shipped them out—mostly to Thrandon or Salzburg, and thence to the war, but also, of course, to the rest of the country.
No other country in the world was as rich in daemons as Ferupe. In Valestock, even the taverns had daemon glares hanging outside the doors!
The daemonmongers’ shops were cloaked in vibrating auras that raised every hair on Crispin’s body. These auras were so thick he couldn’t believe the crowds flowed past the doors without noticing them. Inside were dark aisles of cells stacked to the ceiling, and shopboys dressed in yellow, whose hostility toward Crispin, like that of all the other men he had talked to, was unbelievable.
Every male over the age of twelve in this town worked in the industry. They made scarcely enough money to stay alive, and most of them would not see a daemon once in the year, but they were still insufferably proud. Maybe that was why Crispin could not find a job.
Perhaps the women, who here, even more than in the rest of Ferupe, must of necessity stumble through life on their men’s coattails, would have been easier nuts to crack. But he had not, and would not, sink to using sex to unlock doors. So he made the rounds of all the independent truckers who were currently in town. He wanted a secure position, and trucking on a haul-by-haul basis was anything but steady—but as it turned out, he might as well not have bothered, because the truckers stared at him with flat eyes and shook their heads. Crispin wondered what they had heard about him from the fixit men and the shopboys.
Finally, one driver-handler, sun-browned and kinder than the rest, had taken him to a slum eatery and, obviously thinking he was destitute, bought him two monstrous doorstep sandwiches. Over ale afterward, the truth had come out. “Boy, I don’t know why you gotta hear this from me,” the man had said. “But the fact is, in this part of the country, no matter how much you know about trucking, you ain’t gonna get hired. Now I’m from the east—Kythrepe—on the Cypean border—ever been there? I don’t have anything against darkies myself.”
Crispin held his tongue.
“My dispatcher’s based in Galashire, domain north of here, and frankly, round here’s the worst place in the country for people like you. Man wouldn’t let me bring anyone in for an interview—and yeah, I can tell you’ve got experience—if he’s... ”
The trucker fell silent. After a moment, he reached out and touched Crispin’s cheek. Crispin forced himself to sit still.
“Maybe you should go south. Be easier to find something down there.”
“Yeah, that’s what I wanna do,” Crispin said carefully. “I’m sick fed up of this rain. But how the hell am I supposed to get down there without a rig?”
The trucker had shrugged helplessly and called for more ale. They ended up getting stumbling drunk; Crispin slept in a doorway. It wasn’t so bad, so the next day, he removed his belongings from the rooming house (where, he now knew, he had not been imagining the proprietress’s frowning disapproval) and carried his knapsack with him to the lumberyard, where he purchased blocks of light wood to carve juggling pins. That night, he slept on a corner. The street couldn’t frown at you, or put you in the bunk with the wonky legs next to the door, or refuse to serve you breakfast on some flimsy pretext. And his remaining shillings were better spent, he told himself, making himself presentable in the bathhouse each morning.
Thus Valestock had slammed its doors in his face.
Now, by revealing his circus background to the dour crowds of the town, he had pretty well scotched any chance that those doors might crack open again. But what else could he do? Smithrebel’s would be deep in Weschess Domain by now, a good two hundred miles away. He couldn’t go back, even if he would.
His gaze roved around the crowd. He had already picked out a little boy who was hopping up and down hysterically beside his nanny. The kid had tried to be chosen to hold the juggling props every time. He deserved his chance, Crispin thought, since this would be the last routine of the day—even though from experience, he knew the eager kids tended to be cutups once they got any attention.
“You, kid!” He beckoned the little boy, who pulled away from his nanny with a squeak of joy. “All right, miss?” Crispin met the woman’s eyes. She moved her heavy head up and down. “What’s your name?”
Albert, as he introduced himself, was no exception to the eager rule. He danced around with the unlit torches, refusing to hand them to Crispin; he fell flat on his face, and when the crowd roared with indulgent laughter, he proceeded to do it again—and again, and again. A red-faced farmer came and handed him a shilling. A fellow in a grubby white coat, who had been watching for the last two performances, brought his meaty hands together for the first time. Finally Crispin had to shame Albert’s nurse into hustling him away by making cracks about the excellent discipline she imposed on her charges.
After Albert’s departure, the crowd lost interest. The respectable women lifted en masse, like a flock of gray parrots, and drifted away. Crispin went through his fire-juggling routine to the shrieks of the town urchins, whose fascination was gratifying, but not lucrative. At last he caught the torches, blew them out one by one, indulging for the kids’ sake in a bit of slapstick, pretending the flames just wouldn’t go out, and packed his props into his knapsack. Two small boys darted up to him and tugged his arm. “Show me, mister!” one of them squeaked. “I wanna be a juggler when I grow up! Why doncha get burned?”
Crispin grinned, tipped the takings into one hand, and stuffed his cap on his head. “Sorry, man. Trade secret.”
“There were a circus,” the other, younger boy said. “They had jugglers.”
“Yeah.” Crispin rubbed the coins together in his fist, making a noise like crickets. The boys giggled. “That’s where I learned. Everybody in the circus knows how to juggle—we all have to fill in sometimes, in spec.”
“Low-down trash,” the older boy said, without malice. “My dad says circus people aren’t no better’n gypsies an’ niggers.”
“Circus people are the best,” Crispin said.
“I bet I could learn to juggle better’n a circus kid! C’mon, mister!”
The younger boy’s forehead wrinkled. “Yeah, but yer whole family went to see it,” he objected. “And yer dad got drunk-as-a-dog an’ went with some whore!”
“My dad don’t go with whores! You shut that, take that back, Sykey, you bastard!”
Crispin winced as they flew at each other. When he was growing up, there had been no other children his age—Skeeze and Horace, Mrs. Beecorn the costumier’s twin boys, were four years younger, and Anuei had impressed on him over and over again how necessary it was for him to be gentle when playing with them. That was why he had not learned his real strength until the night he almost killed Saul Smithrebel. And after that he’d been careful. These boys, by contrast, knew no such thing as restraint. By the time they grew up, they would be scrappers right through, just like their dads, every bone in their bodies broken and mended twice over. But there was no need for them to kill each other today, not here.
“Leave each other out of it.” They writhed as he separated them.
“Circus trash!” the bigger boy squealed, and twisting, spat at Crispin. Crispin was so surprised he let them both go. They darted off into the crowds of Main Street.
“Damn,” Crispin muttered. He jerked the straps of his knapsack closed and hoisted it onto a shoulder. “Pure gutter! What can you expect?”
Night was falling. The passersby had a determined air, slogging grimly along with their heads down, as if they were caught in a collective dream in which steaming, perfumed dishes of supper hung just beyond their noses. The doors of the baker’s shop next to Crispin’s pitch were closed. Through the little square panes of glass in the windows, Crispin could see the shopboy sweeping the floor, tossing leftover loaves into a sack for rebaking. Above the awnings, windows glowed with gaslight. Silhouetted figures danced their domestic waltz behind the curtains. It was starting to rain.
“All right, move it,” a voice said.
Crispin swung around. It was the man in the white jacket who had been watching all afternoon.
“Can’t have none of that circus nonsense here. You’ll have to move along. Ay’ll escort you back to wherever you’re staying.”
“Who are you?”
“Me?” The man seemed to puff up. “Ay’m Constable Carthower,” he announced. “And Ay—”
“Can I see some proof of that?” Crispin asked. The man frowned, but his fat fingers dug in the breast pocket of the tight white coat. The garment was of a unique, peculiar design: round-collared, and tailored with panels so that it fitted like a second skin over Carthower’s man-tits and prodigious belly, flaring over his sizable butt like the skirt of one of Prettie’s leotards. Crispin vaguely remembered Kiquat—or somebody—speaking of provincial police as “white-coats”; but he had failed to make the connection when he saw Carthower in the crowd. He took pains to seem good-humored as he examined the constable’s badge, nodding at the meaningless embossed letters.
All circus people had a deep dislike of law enforcers—a mistrust that conflicted not at all with their patriotism, but reinforced it. Millsy had often said that if anyone told the Queen how her country was actually run, the poor lady would swoon clean away. Crispin chewed his lip, pretending to examine the badge, playing for time. What if he was going to be jailed? They took everything you had, in jail. That was how they paid for their police stations and salaried their heavies. “So what’s the problem, Constable?”
“You’re the problem, boyo.”
“Have I had charges brought against me?” This time, Crispin spoke with his best imitation-Millsy Kingsburg accent. He should have thought of it earlier. The constable was visibly disconcerted.
“You haven’t,” Carthower admitted reluctantly. But then his confidence in himself returned, and with it his threatening manner. “But you will, Ay can promise you that, if you don’t remove your little act off of this street!”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Constable,” Crispin said. “Over there”—he gestured to the other side of Main Street—“a band of fiddlers were playing all afternoon. Isn’t that more of a public disturbance than my humble sideshow?”
By now night had fallen. The constable’s face was implacable in the faint illumination from the baker’s windows, and red as an apple. “None of that,” he said softly. Crispin’s heart sank. The constable knew that he was putting it on. Carthower ran a fat tongue around his lips, as if barely able to control the desire to do unspeakable things to Crispin. “Listen—boyo—Ay get paid to keep the streets habitable. Take your act out on the eastern road. Be my guest. But we’ve had your kind dawdling here before—darkies—” He almost spat out the word. Do I look like a damned gypsy to you? Crispin thought. “And although we are always ready to give anyone a chance, in the past our goodwill has been abused. Yes! Abused? And Ay am afraid we can no longer tolerate your sort in this upstanding town. Providing a spectacle for gentle ladies. Corrupting the youngsters, too.”
Carthower was Law: he clearly knew himself, in hassling Crispin, to be well within the boundaries of his directive. If he had no charges now, Crispin knew he would have produced some by tomorrow. It was useless to protest. Yet that very realization drove him to argue. “I’m not doing any harm! If I wasn’t entertaining those kids, they’d be off nicking shit from your precious upstanding citizens!”
“Would they indeed,” Carthower said. “Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you—” He paused, and said deliberately, “Nigger.”
Crispin hissed. If it had come from anyone else he could have taken it in stride, but from this grease-pated, red-cheeked fellow, this scum of a scummy hamlet—Dropping his knapsack, he pulled back to swing at Carthower.
The constable stood quite still. His lips were curved in the ghost of a smile.
“Oh. Assaulting a police officer,” Crispin said. “That’s what you want to pin on me, is it! I bet it works most of the time, too—anybody would want to punch your mug in just so they don’t have to look at it! Did they hire you specially for the job of filling up the jail every night?”
A lock rattled, and a tantalizing scent of bread wafted into the damp night. The baker’s boy gaped fearfully at Crispin and the constable as he sidled out of the shop and locked up. Carthower stared back with the same red implacability he used on Crispin. The boy scuttled off into the night with comical speed.
Carthower said softly, “How’d you like to become Valestock County Recruit number sixty-seven, nigger? We’re having a bit of trouble meeting our quota this year.”
Crispin sensed that the policeman, in speaking of the war, had broken a personal taboo. It showed in the way he licked his lips. People in Valestock liked to pretend the war didn’t exist. And it was possible to do so, because here, the Wraithwaste served as an absolute wall between Civilization and Chaos. Only the airplanes in the distant sky might remind Valestock of Ferupe’s other business, which was not daemons. An unpatriotic thought flashed across Crispin’s mind: the Queen, in forbearing to establish army bases in Lovoshire, Weschess, or Galashire, seemed to be collaborating in the effort to spare the deep west any knowledge of the war on the other side of the forests. What had being wrapped in cotton wool like that done to this part of the world?
Crispin picked up his knapsack and narrowed his eyes at Carthower, trying to hide how frightened he was. “Thanks so much for the offer, Constable,” he said sarcastically. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with your quota. You won’t be seeing me around much longer, in any case. Go home and jack off, now; you’ve been having fun, but I’m afraid I shan’t be able to satisfy you. Not until you have charges to bring against me. And I can’t provide those either at the moment.”
He turned and moved away down Braselane Street. There was not a sound behind him. His spine crawled. Finally, as he turned the corner, he heard the constable’s measured steps move off.
“Asshole,” Crispin said, and forced himself to grin. He felt sick.
In the rest of the country, police-enforced draft quotas were rare. The sons and brothers of landed squires took officers’ commissions; and as for the rest, a certain type of citizen, though of course not the best, thought the army as honest a trade as whatever their fathers did, and a good deal more glamorous. But in the west, there were few squires: daemonmongers were the only nobility; and towns like Valestock needed all their able-bodied men to keep the wheels of the industry turning. No one wanted to join the army. Obviously, the police had got into the habit of killing two birds with one stone by filling their quotas from their black books.
Crispin had no real idea where he was walking to.
The “good” section of town lay mostly on the flat. As he crossed the bridge over the Applewater, all signs of affluence had vanished as suddenly as if they had been an optical illusion. Now he was in the slums, which the proliferation of the daemon trade had long ago caused to spread back up into the crevices of the hills. The windows of the little houses were redly lit by hearth fires. Only a few had gaslights. None had daemon glares.
Reluctant to ascend any farther, he turned, his boots sloshing in the mud that had replaced the cobbles underfoot, and started back toward the river.
He came on it suddenly as he entered River Street: a building shaped like a haybarn, painted colors no farmer would know the names of, twice the height of the houses that pressed against it on either side. Little colored daemon glares blinked fast around its open doors. People spilled outside, smoking, swilling ale from earthen mugs, laughing raucously.
The Old Linny Palace of Delights. (Thus he had heard Valestock’s citizens call the town’s only music hall, with varying degrees of approval.) Like all circus people, he disapproved of music halls on principle; and the few times he had gone slumming with Millsy or Prettie in other towns, to see for himself, the quality of the entertainment in the so-called Palaces and Pleasure Houses had been poor enough to reassure him that there was really no competition. But since Valestock’s respectable folk were such paragons of righteousness and virtue, perhaps even the homegrown song and dance of their servants, adjuncts, and parasites would be superior to that of the rest of the country, morally, if not artistically.
Ought to be good for a snigger, he thought rather desperately.
I had a girl an she was Prettie
Crispin started, then sank back.
She was the apple a Valestock city
When I took er to the music hall she wore erself out
Larfin an swillin ale and callin out—
All praise the Queen!
The band revved up with a wheeze of brass and crashed into the all-too-familiar chorus with excruciating vigor, as if they expected sheer decibels would somehow disguise the fact that they were off tempo and off-key.
Crispin sighed. Now if only they could manage to disguise the singer’s nasal tenor, too.
The chief aim of all the singers was, of course, to invent as many new riffs on Ferupe’s scores of national anthems as possible. The most interesting feature of the evening was the inhuman speed with which colored lights flickered over stage, pit, and gallery. Crispin stood and placed his hand on his chest, singing along with the sixty or so men and women in the hall:
All praise the Queen
Our hearts beat with hers
Slander the Queen
That is Ferupe you curse
Let me some day
Be graced by the sight
(exaggerated emphasis on the high note, a heavy-handed drumroll—Smithrebel’s band could play anthems far more evocatively, Crispin thought)
Of my Queen in the light
Of her virtue and might!
Grinning at each other, delighted with the power of their own lungs, the music-hall patrons flopped back down onto their chairs. Strange, Crispin thought, that such fervent patriotism could be coupled with ignorance of the war. He was having more trouble than he had anticipated forgetting Constable Carthower’s threats: the draft quota weighed on his mind; and now he thought life in the infantry could hardly be worse than this.
The tenor, his duty to the Queen discharged, swung back into a succession of bawdy couplets. No one was listening—in fact, they were making so much noise it was difficult to hear the singer—but that was the point, wasn’t it? Money meant so little that you didn’t even feel the need to watch the entertainment you had paid for. Ale slopped. Chairs crashed. In a corner near the door, a fight broke out. Sweaty-faced girls shimmied between the tables, platters of sausages and fried apples held over their heads.
Crispin clenched his fists under the table. He had no right to feel superior to these animals. Every last one of them had something he didn’t: work!
It was easy to tell the town men apart from the farmers. The farmers’ jackets hung raggedly on their big frames, their voices were less discreet than the townies’; they were accompanied not by shrill girls but by stout wives and children. Crispin would starve rather than sink to farming. These were not the prosperous tenant farmers of the heartlands; these were men and women whose only inheritance from their ancestors was a scrap of forest, who saw no better way to live than to scrabble a meager harvest of fruit from it. They led lives of dirt, poor food, and animal procreation. To become one of them would be the ultimate loss of face.
Yet he couldn’t even get a job sawing oak for daemon cells! Was he going to end up like this? Weather-beaten, alcoholic, unaware of the desperacy of his own situation? Not an intelligent thought left in his head, his only consolation an occasional drunken lark? Better the army!
It seemed as though the very lowest walks of life were the only ones open to him. The circus had left its mark on him. From the height of the flying trapeze or the truck cab, the gap between performers and patrons had seemed unbridgeable—but now here he was, lumped with poor souls who had worked around daemons all their lives, yet never felt the slightest curiosity about them.
The waitress he ordered an ale from looked at him distrustfully. She pocketed his coin with an insolent snap of the wrist, not speaking, and glanced at him over her shoulder as she moved away. He didn’t belong here. At least, not in her eyes. That was relieving, in an odd way.
The brew was foul. Thinleaf smoke thickened the air to fog. It smelled stomach-turningly sour. Crispin pulled out his own tobacco cigarettes and lit one, ignoring the glares of men who clearly thought he should offer them around.
His chair was so far over to the right of the pit that he could see straight into the left wings. People carrying assorted props rushed to and fro at a frantic rate. Craning backwards, he could see up behind the piece of scenery—whatever they called it—painted with a gigantic face of the Queen that depended from the roof at the front of the stage. Whenever the music went up, the rack of daemon glares installed behind the scenery swung into action, sweeping the hall, bathing center stage in a flood of color, the hoods that covered first one, then another snapping back with audible thocks. The main hall was lit only by gas hoods; the stagelights were far more complex. They swiveled and hopped with a life of their own, an array of mechanical chorus boys far better choreographed than anything on stage. Levers and gears extended up into the darkness of the roof. That pointed undeniably to the presence of a demogorgon here, in the Old Linny.
The show was almost over. Shouts of “T’morrer, moocher!” and “Love to yer lady!” echoed from the door. The tenor with the Prettie girlfriend had been replaced onstage by six reedy boys dressed in red ball gowns—a delegation from the Valestock Tap-dancing School for Young Ladies, according to the harassed master of ceremonies. Even before the first tap, there were shouts of “Back to th’ schoolroom!” Unobtrusively, Crispin put his ale mug on the floor and went backstage.
In the maze of steps and doors into which he found his way, the bustle seemed only now to be reaching fever pitch. No circus spirit here; this was work. People rushed past him, sometimes twice or three times in different outfits, without sparing him a glance. A few narrowed their eyes suspiciously in response to his “Pardon me... ” and hurried on. It was becoming more and more of an effort to sustain a polite tone, when finally a harried-looking girl with her arms full of the Tap-dancing School’s furbelowed red dresses stopped and turned to look at him. “Yes, can I... ”
Her eyes widened. Go on, girl, scream!
But she did not even fall back. Not that that was possible, really, in the narrow corridor. She clutched her armload of cheap and slithery red stuff closer to her breast. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Mister—I’ve forgotten his name, for the daemon handler who works here—”
She wore her black hair scraped back from her face in a bun, the way Prettie used to wear it; she had Prettie’s neat features. But her body was not like Prettie’s at all. She was unusually tall. Though small-hipped, she had generous breasts, crushed together in a low-necked bodice, and the shadowed cleft between them sank so deep that it practically invited a man to plunge his fingers down...
In the name of the Queen, Crispin told himself, this isn’t a girl you check out at your leisure, you openmouthed fool! She was already frowning. He favored her with a full-power grin, the one that never failed. “The man who handles the daemon,” he said as if he had never paused. “I’m afraid I’ve misplaced his name but... ”
“Rutridge,” she said. “Yes, he’s in the roof.” She shifted the costumes into her right arm so that she could gesture with the left. It was slim, the hand nearly as white as her breasts, the nails clipped short. “Go there, that way, then right, then there’s a door with a no-go cross on it, and you’ll see the stairs up.” She looked back at Crispin, hesitated a moment, and her smile flickered. She had bad teeth. It was the perfect touch. It placed her firmly in an age bracket, older than the nubile adolescent she had first seemed, but none of her teeth were gone; she couldn’t be over, say, twenty... “He’s in a cranky mood; if it was me I wouldn’t disturb him at his work—but I suppose he sent for you.”
“Of course,” Crispin lied. “Thank you, miss—”
But she was already gone, whisking away along the corridor and into a door, the red material flying behind her like wings. He memorized which door she’d gone into. Then, slowly, he started toward the corner she’d indicated, resigning himself to kiss ass and flatter ego and demonstrate intelligence and generally prostrate himself like a dog in the name of the great, the miragelike Position. She had one. If even a girl could get honest work, why couldn’t he?
Constable Carthower had told him why, even more bluntly than the trucker from Galashire had. But Crispin refused to believe them, despite the evidence, before giving the thing one more go. And after that... ? An insidious little voice asked him. After that, one more? And one more?
Go to hell, he told it. He ascended the ladderlike steps, careful not to make a sound that might disturb the man hunched into a niche of a vast wheel-and-lever apparatus that seemed to have dropped roots into the rafters like a skeleton creeper, glimmering metallic in the darkness.
Is this it?
Bloody well better be.
He wanted to bang loudly on the door, to release the frustration which had bubbled higher every minute he spoke with the daemon handler, but he just rapped with the unbruised knuckles of his left hand.
Backstage was silent. The gaslights which hung at the turnings of the corridors had mostly been switched off. Crispin had escorted the old handler out into the drizzle, nodding pleasantly at the litany of complaints and abuse issuing from the gray beard, which seemed not so much directed at Crispin as at the whole world, and specifically the vile intransigence of daemons. Rutridge did not question Crispin’s remaining inside the hall, where surely he had no right to be. He shuffled furiously off into the damp night, cursing. As Crispin closed the door, the smile dropped off his face faster than a broken clown-mask, and he found himself punching the doorjamb so hard it was a wonder he did not break his hand. He rested his forehead against the ancient wood and remained there for a few minutes, unmoving.
Then he went back inside.
He knocked again on the door.
But of course she had gone home long ago. The only people left in the Old Linny were the men sweeping out front, and the girls cleaning the kitchen and the bar.
Crispin glanced in both directions, then laid his ear to the door. It sounded as though somebody were inside... but it was probably just rats. Well, maybe he could sleep here tonight, provided he woke early enough to escape unseen. Better than the corner outside the daemonmonger’s, anyway! He laid his hand on the handle.
The door opened. Crispin jerked upright so fast he dizzied himself. The girl showed no sign of having noticed anything out of the ordinary. “Yes?”
“You told me where to find Rutridge,” Crispin said. “Remember? I wanted to tell you you were right. He’s a piss-mouthed old bastard.”
“Were you looking for a job? Mr. Knight’s the one you ought to have talked to, although I don’t think—”
Crispin pulled a face. “Not just any job. I’m a daemon handler.”
The girl nodded. “I see.” She held on to the side of the door. Behind her, Crispin saw a small, grimy room equipped with a full-length mirror and a ratty yellow velvet armchair in which she had been sitting; her sewing lay over its arm, the needle glimmering in the gaslight. She was only a slavey, he thought, left to finish her work after the costume mistress had gone home. There were lines of tiredness under her eyes.
But they were still amazingly beautiful eyes. And those breasts!
She was looking up at him wearily, without a trace of curiosity. He could not stand it any longer.
“I’m going for supper. Do you want to come?” He knew full well his rude tone made the invitation sound more like a proposition than any respectable girl would stand for. She drew a sharp breath and flinched upright. He growled, “Well?”
“It’s too late,” she said nervously. “Nothing’s open.”
“Oh, yes it is,” Crispin said. “Place called Slimey’s. It’s across the river. Truckers go there mostly. But some women, too. You won’t feel out of place.” He did not mention what type of women they were—or that it was almost certainly not her sort of place. Dammit, he needed to treat himself to a bit of pleasure after a long, hard day of failures. On a not entirely conscious level, he needed to prove that the power he’d once exerted over women still existed. He needed to give as little as possible, and in return get everything she had to offer.
“Do come,” he said in his best persuasive tone. “You’ve been working hard all night. I can see that. And it’ll be on me.”
She nodded slowly, considering the idea. Then she smiled brilliantly. It was like a blow in the face, a slap that stung as if he were meeting her for the first time, all over again. He saw stars.
“All right. Do you mind waiting while I change?”
Without waiting for an answer, she whisked around. The door closed behind her.
Left alone in the corridor, Crispin grinned hugely. “Fuck you, Rutridge,” he murmured. “Yeah, and you, daemonmonger sir, and you, madam landlady—yeah, and you, too, and all, Millsy—”
Another girl came around the corner. Her eyes flicked from the door to Crispin’s face. “Who are you?”
“I was about to ask you that,” Crispin said with a grin. Her lips were painted carmine red; she had rough skin and a figure that would have been an hourglass if she’d had much of a waist. She had been in the act of pulling the pins out of her pile of brown hair, but the front pieces still framed her face in greased loops.
“Doll,” she said. “Doll Henley.” She came closer to Crispin. “You trying to get some out of Rae, darlin’?” she whispered. “She’s a one, she is. Only been here a year. And strange, oh my!”
“Miss Rae and I are going for a late supper,” Crispin said in quenchingly aristocratic tones, staring down at her.
“Auggh,” she whispered, and tossed her head coyly. More brown locks slid down around her shoulders. “I can tell you’re looking for a tumble. There’s girls here who’ll give it to you. And girls who think they’re too good. See what I mean?”
“I believe so,” Crispin said. “You know, there’s a proverb about that. Girls that kiss, their chances miss; girls that tarry—”
“Oh!” She stepped back. Now, he knew, she would milk the insult for all it was worth. “Oh! You damned bastard—you—”
The door opened and Crispin’s supper partner stepped out. She wore a dress that had probably once been black, but was now a strange shade of violet-gray. It was tailored to fit her body from hips to throat, so that her neck rose like a stamen out of a trumpet of carefully stitched ruffles; the skirt swished in folds about her booted calves. When she saw Doll, she seemed to shrink a little.
“Well, if it isn’t the young lady herself,” Doll said.
“Come on,” Crispin said, pushing Doll firmly aside and taking her arm. “I’ve just been having a nice chat with your friend here. Miss Henley. Let’s go.” He led her past. As they moved away, Doll caught her arm, and Crispin heard her hissing vituperatively in her ear. Then Doll flung away so hard that the other girl staggered.
As he opened the backstage door, Crispin asked, “What did she say to you?”
Outside, the rain had stopped.
“Do you really want to know?” The girl—Rae—made a face. “She said I was a whore who puts a spell on all the best men and don’t let no one else get a look in.”
Crispin said, “Well, it’s nice to know she has such a high opinion of me.” Best to warn her now, perhaps. “Though if she judges men by their pockets, she was wrong as all he—out and out wrong.”
“She’s a fucking tart,” Rae said, as they picked their way along the side alley. Her language shocked him. “A tart. That’s what they all are. Scheming whores’d fall apart like corpses if they didn’t lace themselves up so tight! Sleep with one of ‘em, it’s a fucking death sentence!”
They came out onto River Street. No one was left about. The lights still blinked their colored patterns on the mud. The Applewater crawled beside the street, five feet down, black and silent, chopping at its banks with little waves.
As they made their way through the silent streets, Crispin realized the mood had been spoiled. Tension shivered between them. In the dim light from upstairs windows, he saw her worrying her lip; he felt vaguely guilty. It’s not your fault, girl.
He’d pay for her supper, take her home, and find somewhere to kip down. And tomorrow was another day. Although he had no idea what it might hold.
Slimey’s was hidden in a cellar, even farther from Main Street than the Old Linney—but in the other direction, out toward the eastern road, by which most traffic entered and left Valestock. There was an eighteen-wheeler parked in the street outside, but all the same, unless you knew, you’d never have thought to knock on the plain green door beside the tinware shop. At the bottom of a flight of stairs, the eatery served endless variations on bread, eggs, and pork, and endless ale. Tonight most of the tables jammed into the dark little cave were empty. Crispin had come here three times since the trucker from Galashire had first shown it to him. It was cheap (although to buy this meal, he had to spend his very last pennies, leaving only a pound note in his pocket) and nobody tried to talk to you if they didn’t like your looks. The only lights hung behind the counter. The dark did make the whores look better, although Crispin never had need of them. Not yet.
As the ugly waiter set down their plates, Rae finally broke the silence. “I’m afraid I don’t even know your name, sir,” she said lightly.
As they came in, everybody in the place, men and women, even the group of four brawny, drunken heartlands truckers, had stared at them. This had seemed to cheer Rae up. Her voice was bright with vitality now. But the quickness and grace with which she set down her cup of tea, curled herself on the stool, and sipped, head on one side, were not natural.
Crispin took a bite of eggs. “Crispin Kateralbin. And Miss Chester said your name was—”
“Rae.”
“Rae... ”
“Clothwri—” Then she stopped, and shrugged. “Rae nothing in particular.”
“Then what am I to call you?”
“Why not just Rae?”
All right, whatever!
After a minute, stirring her tea, Rae said, “So what did Rutridge say to you?”
He called me a worthless sap, an insult to his profession, a satanic instrument of the apocalyptic cults, and other things that would have made me laugh if he hadn’t been so deadly serious.
But Crispin could not repeat the language Rutridge had used, even though Rae herself had a foul mouth. Besides, he did not believe Rutridge had meant to insult him. The man was simply so battered in his soul that he no longer had a thought to spare for courtesy or consideration. Long years of daemon handling could do that—Millsy had often implied—especially if a man was without boon companions.
“He told me a lot of things,” Crispin said. “I didn’t get a chance to say I was looking for a job. As soon as he noticed me, he started railing about his own problems. Apparently his wife drinks, and he has to support her habit.”
The men at the next table were eavesdropping attentively. Rae threw them a poisonous look. Then she turned back to Crispin with a smile. “Yes, that’s right. We all know about Mrs. Rutridge at the Linny. And he does tend to go on, and nobody lets themselves get buttonholed any more. So he’s starved for an audience.”
Crispin put down his fork. “He didn’t understand a thing I was trying to tell him! That music hall really has possibilities. He’s not an innovator, he just puts his old daemon through its paces; but with that mechanism up there, you could do fantastic things! You could combine the colors, you could make designs on a backdrop—I’m on thin ice here, but I expect you could even write in lights—”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that.”
“I bet you could even get the fine folks down there to see something like that!”
“I wouldn’t count on—”
“I told him it wouldn’t cost anything to revamp the sequences; you’d probably even save money by cutting a couple of those crap acts you have out there now and putting on light shows instead. I told him I’d do it for room and board—”
“Look, I can see you’re not from around here—”
Crispin drew a breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean it that way.” She stretched out a hand as if to touch his cheek, as the trucker from Galashire had done, sitting at this very table or one of the ones next to it, but before the movement was half-completed she drew back. Crispin had in that split second prepared himself for the brush of her fingers. As he watched her hand drop as if in slow motion back to the tabletop, he had to restrain himself from catching it up.
There was a moment of silence, and then Rae said anxiously, “If it comes to that, I’m not from around here myself.”
“I didn’t think you were.” Crispin favored her with a smile. “I feel as if I ought to apologize for Rutridge. And me! But I—”
“No need,” Crispin said. “Let’s play confessions. Where do you come from? Until a little while ago I was with a circus. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show.”
He had tried her with it to see how she would react—like testing a sore muscle—but she only nodded. Her long, pale, perfectly sculpted face was serious.
“Miss Henley told me you’d only been at the old Linny a year,” Crispin said.
Without warning, her face crumpled. She sipped her tea distractedly. “Oh, don’t ask me!”
“Why? Are you ashamed of your background? Can’t be much more of an embarrassment than mine.”
She took a gulp of her tea. Then she fiddled with the buttons of her dress. She was flushing. “Come on,” Crispin wheedled. Taking the hand that lay on the table, he looked into her eyes. “Whatever it is—”
“Oh, yes it can be more of an embarrassment!” she said miserably. But she did not take her hand away. Her palm was soft and hot. He could feel the pulse in her wrist. “Do you want me to lie?”
“If you can make it really, really good... ” He stroked her wrist gently with his thumb.
She jerked away and sat upright. The men at the next table turned away, disappointed. Crispin saw her throat move inside the buttoned trumpet of her collar. “Please. No. Let’s talk about you.”
“We have been.”
“Oh, don’t go all masculine on me! I thought you weren’t that way—that’s why I came—”
Crispin could not help laughing out loud. “Then you’re a lot more naive than you look!”
After a second, she smiled hesitantly and took a ladylike sip of his chicory coffee; her mouth twisted, but she put the mug down quickly as if she hoped he wouldn’t notice. When she saw him watching with interest, she broke down in giggles and hid her face in her hands. “Oh, my!”
“Quite all right,” Crispin said, with as much of a bow as he could manage from a sitting position. “It’ll make it taste even sweeter.” He took a deep breath. He felt oddly exhilarated. It was a sensation he had never experienced before—except maybe, if he wasn’t deceiving himself, with Prettie, back in the early days, when they used to talk about flying...
Rae didn’t look so much like poor, dead Prettie any more. She was older, sadder, more worldly. If she was a flyer, Crispin thought, she would practice for hours a day to get every last little movement down right. But she’d never make a flyer. She was far too tall, and she had too good a figure. He did not try to continue the conversation. Slowly, she grew nervous.
“Daemon handling seems to mean a lot to you,” she said at last. “That is, it means a lot to almost every man in this town. But you’re different, you don’t have a job! Do you want to tell me why? Or is it something else I wouldn’t understand?”
Crispin laughed. This time, he had to wipe his eyes with the edge of his sleeve. “Rae, if you haven’t joined the trickster women by the age of what, twenty... ”
“Eighteen.”
“You look older.”
“I know.”
“Then there’s no way I could make you understand. Do you know that’s the first time any female has ever asked me about daemons! Blessed Queen. Most girls couldn’t care less—even around here, with all their dads and brothers in the business. Even though, without daemons, they wouldn’t have gaslights, water, cloth for their dresses, gold for their jewelry, there wouldn’t be any trucks, so there’d be no trade, for Queen’s sake you’d have to eat apples all year round!” He was getting carried away. He laughed, and filled his mouth with eggs.
Rae was looking at him with interest. “Daemons are in everything, aren’t they? I’ve always thought that. Ever since I was a kid—the garden of my—house—was full of them. But nobody here cares.”
“Then think how much less they care in the rest of the country! It’s absolutely bloody scandalous.”
“Yes.” She paused. “Still, for me it’s neither really here nor there. All I ever wanted to do was design costumes. Gorgeous costumes.”
He nearly laughed until he saw the look in her eyes.
“But I don’t have a hope of ever getting to be wardrobe designer at the Old Linny. Madame Fourrière works us like dogs.”
“You’ve been in music hall all your life, I suppose.”
“I worked my way across half of Ferupe with a traveling fairday act. The Fattest Man In The World—and he really was! I got so tired of sewing on buttons... ”
She had been with a traveling act. And she had found a permanent job. Crispin felt his face getting hot. “So what’s the difference between town fairs and the circus? No offense, Rae, but no one in the circus I come from would be caught dead in a music hall! And yet”— he banged his fork on the table—“and yet I’d be willing to bet my last farthing I couldn’t get a job sweeping the damn floors at your damn Old Linny! What’s the catch? Can you tell me what is the catch?”
“Oh, Queen,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand. Instantly he disliked himself for playing on her sympathy. No matter how genuine either of their feelings, it was a cadge. He pulled away. “Mr. Kateralbin, I know how you feel. I—”
The bouncer stood over them. Crispin gave him a slow, stony look. “Finished?” The man gestured to their empty plates. “You’ll ‘ave to leave. We’re closin’. Police rules, you know.”
“But look at all these people,” Rae said childishly.
The bouncer snapped his fingers. “You stay, you pay.”
Crispin rose to his feet, picked up his knapsack, and took Rae’s arm. Sometimes it was pleasant to tower over other men. He took a joy in the fear that fleeted across the bouncer’s face. “As a matter of fact we were just leaving.” He pulled Rae against his side, pleased that she was so beautiful, her face luminous as a candle flame in the gloom. “We have business elsewhere.”
The bouncer’s silent fury and frustration followed them like a miasma up the stairs, mixed with the sharp smell of newly hammered metal coming through the wall from the tinware shop.
“Wouldn’t sweep their damn floors,” Crispin muttered.
“I wouldn’t want you to,” Rae said.
Crispin escorted her back to her lodging, which were on Main Street, in the attic of a lodging house beside an armorer’s shop. Again, they did not speak a word as they walked; but the tension was gone, replaced by a comfortable silence.
Rae put her key in the door of the lodging house, and turned. “Will you be at the Old Linny tomorrow night?”
The question hung in the air.
“Maybe,” Crispin said, although he did not intend it. “You never can tell. Go on, now. Go to bed.”
Crooked teeth flashed. She turned and ran quietly up the stairs, her dress swirling around her boots. Crispin caught the door and closed it gently behind her.
Then he turned and walked off down Main Street toward Cranzelow, the daemonmonger’s corner, toward his hard cold nest in the doorway.
Head pillowed on his knapsack, he fell asleep almost instantly—and was wakened not by the nightmares which he could not recall, could never recall, but by the sound of running feet and voices, and the clanging of a bell, and—nightmare—no, reality—oh, Queen—the crackle of flames.
I can’t abear a Butcher;
I can’t abide his meat;
The ugliest shop of all is his,
The ugliest in the street;
Bakers’ are warm, cobblers’ dark,
Chemists’ burn watery lights;
But oh, the sawdust butcher’s shop,
That ugliest of sights!
—Walter de la Mare