Fessiery 1895 A.D. Lovoshire: Western Route 2
Darkness, and the rumble of the wheels. The dynamo headlights of the big rig cast cones of yellow light over the gravel road. In the fog, Crispin could not see more than twenty yards ahead.
As flatlands gave way to forest, he slipped into the familiar half-trance of travel. His instincts responded to each dip in the road, letting his mind drift free. His body, physically linked to the daemon via the whipcord, tingled in a state of mild arousal, tempering languor with excitement and a tinge of self-satisfaction.
Exhilarating to know that in two months he hadn’t lost the knack. Over daemons, at least, he could still triumph. This one was bigger and more wayward than any he had driven before: its owners, whom he remembered seeing in Slimey’s, were muscular giants, taller than him, and there had been at least two of them. He suspected they were not particularly good handlers. The Wraithwaste daemon responded poorly to the steering, and it kept trying to slack off speed. But he had it pinned down now, doing his bidding.
Easy. Easy as falling asleep.
Millsy would have been blown over backwards.
“Mmm, yeah,” Crispin whispered. Keeping his eyes on the road, he fished out a cigarette and lit it one-handed.
The trees peeled away into the darkness on either side of the road. The rain had stopped and it was a still, foggy night.
He exhaled slowly. He had stolen a truck. Stolen it. This would put him on the wrong side of the white-coats for a good long time. “Borrowing... !” He had known he was sealing his fate the moment he jimmied the door of the cab.
The settled life was exactly what it had seemed from the outside. And that was the awful thing. It had never been any use for him to try to fit in. Now he knew what it would take, and that he didn’t have it. Worse: no matter how much money he had, he would never have been able to do as he liked. The expropriated society of elephants, clowns, aerialists, and foreigners was the only world in which he belonged at all.
A shudder of loneliness turned the marrow of his bones to air. He pressed his foot down on the clutch, shifting up into sixth. The smooth clicking of gears and the daemon’s shudder of protest made him smile. Escape seemed to be the thing he was best at. A dubious distinction!
He had forgotten the girl asleep beside him on the seat.
Rae woke to the cold, gray light of late afternoon, with a bad taste in her mouth and a cramp in her neck. For a minute she wanted to go back to sleep, as she had done several times already; then she realized the truck had stopped. She rubbed her eyes, shivering as she untangled herself from the inadequate blankets. “Where—where are we?”
Crispin sat behind the wheel, as immobile as the music hall’s Living Statues, whose specialty was not to move no matter what the audience threw at them.
She started to speak again and then thought better of it. She had had ample opportunity to examine his profile while the miles rumbled away—she had not liked to break his concentration, even when he slumped and muttered to himself, and she wondered, frozen with fear, what on earth could be keeping the truck on the road? But his face still fascinated her, to the point that it forbade questions. When she first met him she had thought he was a darkie, but now she wasn’t sure. That aquiline nose. The high forehead. The prominent lips. He wasn’t black, but sort of yellow-brown. His eyelashes were even longer and thicker than Rae’s own.
Right now the eyelashes rested on the cheeks. The head drooped lower and lower on the chest. One of the massive hands fumbled almost vaguely with the cord that led down into the dash. Had he fallen asleep?
She touched his shoulder.
A mistake! Oh, oh, Queen! She felt his whole body tense, then relax, and he expelled a long, slow breath. “Bloody useless daemon!”
“What’s wrong?”
He turned to her, opened his eyes, and for a moment his forehead rumpled as if he was trying to remember who she was. “The daemon’s acting up. It’s hungry.”
She knew less than nothing about daemons. “Isn’t there anything to give it?”
“In the circus we used to feed ours on chicken, salt pork, even bread scraps. But boys like the ones who own this shit feed their daemons on little tiny other daemons. Splinterons, is what they’re called. Better performance, but the gorgons get used to it and then they won’t eat anything else, they’ll starve first. If there was any, they’d be here.” He slapped the middle of the seat. “Holding cell. But it’s empty. Look.” He lifted up the seat and slid back the wooden hatch underneath. “Nothing! They must’ve been planning to load up in Valestock.”
“What’s that?” Rae could see something glimmering deep inside the wooden box.
Crispin bent to peer in. “What? Oh, that. How can you—A tiddler. Wonder if I could—” His hand slid stealthily as a snake down into the cell. Rae watched him cup his fingers around something that looked almost like a toy soldier, except that it was luminescent blue, and naked, and wriggled on the palm of his hand—
And then was nothing.
She shivered, feeling something pass like an intangible wind through her, out of the cab.
He shook his hand as if it had been burned. “Wouldn’t even have whetted this pampered motherfucker’s—‘scuse my Kirekuni—wouldn’t even have whetted its appetite.” Using his other hand, he slid the hatch closed and let the seat bang down on top of it. “Used to getting all the eats it wants. Should never let a daemon get used to having its own way. Otherwise, it’ll choose to stop, just stop, and nothing short of a trickster can make it go again.”
Rae scowled. Outside the windows of the cab, trees rubbed wetly together, massed like patchy brown-and-green costumes hanging from the clouds. Ahead, the road was no more than a gap in the forest.
Crispin shook himself and smiled lopsidedly at her. “Cheer up! We’ll just have to go on shanks’ mare.”
“You haven’t told me where we are going,” she said, with an effort at a coquettish laugh.
“That’s because I don’t know, do I?”
“Oh.” She felt an almost physical longing for her little room on the fifth floor of the lodging house: her mirror, her pallet, the curtain behind which her dresses hung: all burnt now, black dust the engraving of the Queen and the bowlegged dressing table she’d bought for a song. How she had tried to anchor herself in the real world. And she had been punished.
Crispin said reluctantly, “If you want me to escort you back to Valestock, I will. That’s the least I can do in fact. I shouldn’t have brought you this far.”
“It’s all right,” she said forlornly. “I don’t have anything left. Nowhere to go.”
She waited for him to respond. He would have to look after her, of course. One of the strictest rules of the road was that men cared for women, no matter what. But it seemed vitally important to know if he was pleased with the prospect. When he didn’t speak, she tried the laugh again and said, “Well, then—where are we?”
“Somewhere on the western road. Not that it’s been a road for quite a while. More of a rut.” A trace of satisfaction crept into his voice. “I’d say we could give Valestock seventy or eighty miles right now.”
Oh, by the Queen!
She sat still, biting her fingers, trying to keep the tears from her eyes.
Once, maybe, she would have forgotten herself and begged him to take her deeper into the forest. West! To Kirekune! But last night’s craziness had abandoned her.
“Mmm. I’m hungry, too.” He slouched back in the seat. “You?”
She could not answer. She was crying. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. Stress—loss—hunger—all of those, triggering something else. Don’t—oh, please don’t—let him see—
Kirekune!
Ferupe had killed both her parents. They had not lived to see the end of the Dynasty. After Saonna died, Rae had felt herself called to reclaim the heritage her parents had forsaken. She had lain awake at night, heart beating fast, planning her glorious mission into the west. At the age of eleven she ran away from the Seventeenth Mansion. It wasn’t long before she fell in with a company of patriotic playactors; they’d treated her badly but she’d been lucky, she knew now, that they had found her before someone worse did. For years she wandered, switching from one lot of travelers to another whenever the first lot headed south. She crossed half of Ferupe, tending northward, drawn to the snowy pass Saonna had described, and the vision of that glittering city where she might belong.
But adult comprehension led her to realize that because of what she’d done to herself, even if she made it across the pass where her father had died, she would be just another freak. And anyway she was not free to go. Despite everything, she was still a child of the Dynasty. Her upbringing bound her to Ferupe. The knowledge of transcendence returned to her fantasy-dazzled mind like a razor-pinioned bird returning to a glade. The bird settled on a bough, bending it nearly to the ground. It clacked its iron feathers and sang to her, an eerie tune in a minor key.
She gave up trying to get to the northern pass and signed on with Tom, The World’s Fattest Man, Music Hall Prodigy. Wherever the show went, she went, without a backward glance. And once again, she cried at night, because she knew that she alone, out of all the ignorant illiterate Ferupians around her, was burdened with knowledge.
By the time she reached Valestock, she wanted only to settle down, to find a measure of happiness before transcendence wiped all such things from the face of the world. She knew it made her weak and materialistic, but she couldn’t help it. The deep west was the last place she wanted to settle down in; but it was in Valestock that she was offered a real job. Making actual costumes for the stage, with Madame Fourrière.
She had said good-bye to The World’s Fattest Man and by the time she realized her mistake, it was too late. Her life in the Dynasty and in traveling shows had sheltered her from the real world to a degree that she did not appreciate at the time. Getting enough to eat had never been a problem on the road: a pretty young girl could, if hunger pinched badly enough, always sit herself on someone’s lap and share his dinner in return for allowing him to fondle her. Men tended to give you food anyway, in the same way they would give a pet dog scraps. It was what they expected to get in return that became the problem. One realized the value of one’s virtue very quickly. Protecting it had been a full-time job for Rae, on top of her other duties. She had quickly developed her own brand of coquetry.
But shortly before Valestock, she had reached the age where her refusal to be bedded was an actual insult to the men around her. None of them even thought of marrying her; she wouldn’t have taken them if they had; and she wasn’t going to find anybody else as long as she kept traveling.
So she stopped.
What she did not know was that in Valestock, society had many different layers, like a sandwich cake. When she took a job at the Old Linny, she buried herself at the very bottom, in the crumbs. And no one was there to help her up. On River Street, one was either a married woman or a never-to-be-married woman; there was no in-between ground, much as Rae tried to create it. She did not see why she could not step smoothly into the part of young lady, alone in the world, but quite respectable, and oh so marriageable! So, in the face of her landlady’s clear disapproval, and aware that she was being charged a special “entertainer’s rate”—she knew what that meant: a whore’s rate—she rented rooms on Main Street. Doll and the other girls at the Old Linny hated her for it. Didn’t they understand that all she wanted was a good name? She wept in secret, and hated them back. By the time she realized that, in fact, they understood her snobbishness better than she did, she had ruined her chances of being accepted among them.
After that, what could one do but wear the gown they had given her?
She started taking up with men deliberately. It was easy to heat them to boiling point, have them quivering at her feet, and then let them fall on their faces for the other girls to pick up. And it made her feel, briefly, powerful. Although she knew that they would all hate her, every one, if she let them find out her secret.
She wanted someone who wouldn’t hate her. She wanted a husband, an income, a house—or even just rented rooms—she wanted in-laws who would help a young couple get on their feet.
But she had finally come to face the fact that working for Madame Fourrière would not help her find any of these things. Madame was a genius, exiled from the Kingsburg Ballet because of a vendetta on the part of the principal ballerina—so she said. The costumes that she and Molly, the other assistant, codesigned were magical. But Madame Fourrière and Molly used Rae like a slave. She would stand among the racks of clothes at night, when she should have been mending, fingering the sateens and velvets, breathing in the smell of camphor and old sweat. It was the only time she got to handle the clothes.
Scurrying through the stinking corridors of the Old Linny late at night, quiet as a house mouse so that the maintenance men would not hear, she wished for her tail back, so that she could flick it gracefully, perfecting the picture. And when she peered out of her mousehole, the future was bleak. She could remain in Valestock, or she could go on the road again. Either way, she had not enough years remaining to grow old. Her “affectations” would never become manageable “eccentricities.” The saddest thing in the world was that she would not have anyone to hold her when death started spreading from the capital. She would die young, and she would die alone.
Maybe it was this sensation of black-glass pincers closing on her, closing, closing, that had prompted her to ask the man that question she had never asked anyone before: Will I see you tomorrow?
She had not known that he would take her west. The possibility of getting to Kirekune this way, through the Wraithwaste, through the war, terrified her. But last night in the truckers’ eatery, she had not even been thinking about Kirekune. She had liked Crispin for a reason she did not understand—the very opposite of physical, to put it one way. She had thought, Maybe—maybe—
And then the fire.
She saw with sudden terror that he had seen the wetness on her cheeks. His face wrinkled. He put an arm around her shoulders and patted her. The asexuality of the touch was like a slap. She found herself crying harder.
“Girl! By the Queen—Look, if you want to go home, tell me.”
“I don’t think you understand,” she said, sobbing. “I have no home. All I have in the world is the clothes on my back.”
“But if you keep on crying, I won’t know what to think! I’ll think you want to go back to Valestock. And I know I said I’d take you, but to be quite honest, I think we’d both get arrested!”
“Anywhere but Valestock,” she said at last, when she had herself under control. Her voice quavered. She despised herself for it. “It’s—it’s up to you!”
“Anywhere but Valestock.” Crispin rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, well, I have a few ideas. The way I see it, we’ve burned our bridges behind us; there’s really only one place to... no. No, no. I won’t tell you yet. I’ve got to think about it for a while. But I promise everything’s going to be okay.” He grinned. His smile was almost as good as a fire, warming her. Not a raging fire (smoke creeping under her ill-fitting door, the reek of burning oil: PANIC PANIC PANIC) but a comforting hearth-fire.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She admitted she was.
“I’m going to go see what’s in the trailer. The back wheels aren’t coming down heavily, so if there’s a load, it’s really light. But you never know.”
“I’ll go look,” she said, suddenly needing to get clear of him for a minute, and, kicking her feet free of the blankets, she wrestled with the door handle and jumped to the ground. It was much farther down than she remembered from last night. Luckily, the mud flung aside by the truck was soft.
“But, oh,” she whispered, picking herself up, “oh, my best dress!”
She was gone before he could stop her. He sagged back. The daylight scratched his sore eyes. He rolled down the window, rested his elbows on the edge, put his chin on his hands, and closed his eyes. The drips from the trees on his head were cool and regularly paced.
Sleep took him from the inside outward, suffusing his body with a warm heaviness that made him not want to move ever again. He hadn’t experienced this degree of exhaustion since mornings in Smithrebel’s, when he would sit in the cab of whatever rig he’d been driving, sleeping yet at the same time listening to the familiar sounds that told him the big top was about to go up and it was time for him to stir about.
“Empty boxes,” Rae’s voice said from below.
He opened his eyes. She was standing under the window of the cab, looking up. Beautiful, yes beautiful, even covered with mud and soot, her eyes puffy from crying. (Please, Queen, let her not make a habit of it!) She was smiling waterily. Her arms were filled with an assortment of little wooden boxes which he recognized as transport cells for daemons.
That night he lay on his back beside a tower of cartons that he had erected in the middle of the trailer to give her some privacy. Outside, a light rain was falling. He could hear her turning restlessly on the other side of the stacked boxes. So she couldn’t sleep either.
A heavy meal of bread and cheese sat uncomfortably in his stomach. Living by one’s wits seemed to be a quagmire into which one sank deeper not through inertia, but through struggling. Ransacking the truck for edibles, he and Rae had discovered only carton upon carton of daemon cells: “Product of Fewman and Fewman, Valestock, Lovoshire Domain,” she had read on them (confirming Crispin’s guess that she was far better educated than she had a right to be), but no daemons inside with which Crispin might have placated the rebellious gorgon. And nothing humans could eat, either. But Crispin still had that pound note in his pocket, and he said to her, “There’ve got to be people around here we can buy food from. Come on.”
Oh, the naiveté of the morning.
Sure enough, walking back along the road, they had come to a set of little turnoffs into the woods, just wide enough for, say, an oxcart. They chose one at random. As they followed it the forests gave way to many little apple orchards separated by unruly hedges. “Oh, how lovely,” Rae said, clasping her hands to her breast. “I was beginning to think we’d left civilization behind altogether.”
Most of the trees were bare, but one large orchard was planted with a different species. Heavy, glossy, white apples bowed down the branches. Five or six dark-haired boys, wrapped against the cold in shapeless layers of rags, moved slowly from tree to tree, pulling a great wheeled basket with them. When they saw Crispin and Rae, they gaped.
“Eh,” shouted the boy at the bottom of the ladder, after a minute. “Traders?”
“We’re looking for your parents,” Crispin called across the orchard. “Where d’you live?”
After a minute, the child jerked his chin in the direction they were going. “ ‘Tisn’t much farther.”
“I’m so hungry,” Rae whispered to Crispin. She stepped onto the grass and closed her hand around a low-hanging apple. “May I?” she called out.
One of the children seemed agitated, and pulled his brother’s smock. The brother shook his head and wrenched away. “Go on, lady!” he said, then bent his head and said to the smaller child, his rough voice carrying clearly between the trees, “Go youse, tell Mam traders coming.”
The little boy trotted off, looking fearfully over his shoulder.
Crispin watched Rae eating her apple as they continued down the path. From time to time, she picked threads of dark hair from between her lips. Something about the shape of those long, long thin fingers—the boniness, the sallow hue of the knuckles—reminded him of something ... something ...
The road opened onto an earthen clearing in the trees, bisected by a broad, muddy stream. On either side of the ford clustered log houses and outbuildings on low stilts. Hollyhocks grew tangledy around the feet of the stilts. Geese, hobbled pigs, and small children wandered along the stream. The women appearing in the doorways looked unfriendly.
Crispin squared his shoulders and marched up to the nearest woman, conscious of Rae lingering behind him, her apple core concealed in her hand.
Oh, Queen.
In the turpentine-smelling darkness of the trailer, he sighed.
What a disaster!
Rae was breathing deeply, peacefully now.
He had started off on the wrong foot by offering the women money. It was no good. They recognized the pound note, but they would have none of it. And, of course, it would be of little use to them, seventy miles from Valestock. Over and over, they had stubbornly repeated that the traders always brought barter goods; where were the barter goods?
“We have some nice little boxes,” Rae ventured timidly.
“Shush,” Crispin whispered. The women wanted knives, tanning chemicals, rennet, cloth, thread. They would have no use for wooden boxes with slogans on.
And then the women’s voices became suspicious. It was the wrong time of year for traders, anyway. What was Crispin doing here? Did he have a truck? Where was it? He would have to talk with their men. The men were off in the wildwood, hunting. He could come back at night.
It was then that Crispin realized he had made a mistake. He took Rae’s hand, and they backed away, smiling apologies. Crispin watched the tiny glassless windows of the house for movement. Eyes showed in the darkness, and his heart quickened, but it was only a toddler pressing his nose to the sill.
When they were out of sight around a curve, he grabbed Rae’s hand and doubled back into the woods. Rae said, “What?” but he dragged her along.
“I’m not going to take that shit. You’ll see.”
The sogginess of the earth enabled them to move soundlessly. When they had circled back within sound of the hamlet, they scrambled up a tree to wait. Rae complained in whispers about the state of her dress. “I haven’t another—”
Crispin grinned and twitched the sleeve of her man’s coat. She was clinging to a slightly lower branch. Her face, foreshortened, looked childishly young. “I’ll cut down one of my shirts for you. Should reach your ankles. You’ll be proper.” When her face fell, he laughed softly. For a moment she looked hurt, then she saw the joke, and joined in.
Night fell slowly, almost imperceptibly. The bark of the tree had a musty, bready odor. Crispin leaned his cheek on the trunk and fought tiredness, listening to the hamlet settle down for the night, geese being chased into their house, pigs into theirs, children being put to sleep.
When the occasional song of birds stopped, yellow spots of light appeared through the trees—candles in the windows of the huts. The stream burbled on in the night, talking of loneliness and constant motion. Rae fell into a doze, clinging on her branch. When the last candle had been extinguished, Crispin woke her.
They approached the hamlet with as much stealth as if they were tracking a daemon. Once, back before Crispin was handling, the daemon of Hollyhock 9 had somehow escaped its cell. Collared but not celled: that was the most dangerous sort of daemon of all. It had fled like a whirlwind between the tents. Luckily, the circus was only just setting up, and there were no townies on the lot. Gibbering, it stunned every living thing in its path, desperate to escape the silver collar which kept it from dematerializing. It had not intelligence enough to scrape the silver against a sharp edge, or to dash out into the desert. Millsy took command calmly and naturally. It wasn’t his daemon—his were uncollared—but he was Smithrebel’s authority on all things occult. He sent everyone into cover, and then produced a five-foot-square piece of silver lame from his sack and hid between two blacktops. (Twelve-year-old Crispin goggled from a nearby truck.) Two of Millsy’s own daemons materialized, dressed in their little sweaters and breeches, and ran after the escaped one, herding it like a runaway bull, driving it eventually into the gap. Then Millsy simply dropped the lame over it, anchoring it to the ground.
It had been that incident that pushed Crispin toward Millsy for the second time. Calm bravery in the face of danger was a side of Millsy he had not seen before, an aspect of daemon handling he had not really known about. He was twelve. Anuei had been dead two months, and he had been apprenticed to the Valentas for a year.
It had all been circumstances, the way it ended up, hadn’t it? If the daemon hadn’t escaped, Crispin might not have become a handler. If he hadn’t been a handler, he could have become a better aerialist, and Prettie would not be dead. Looking back at his childhood, he sometimes thought he could have been good at nearly anything; unfortunately, Millsy’s flattery had seemed more agreeable than Herve’s system of punishment and discipline, and so it had been handling.
Not that he would give up daemons for the world.
Slipping through the wet woods with Rae’s hand in his, he thought that he should have been more than one person. In order to accommodate all the conflicting impulses and abilities and weaknesses that came of being a half-breed, he should have been a whole set of tall brown brothers and sisters.
But his father had died. Joe Kateralbin. The man Anuei had told him so many stories about.
They slid quietly into the clearing. Not a soul stirred in the darkened houses as Crispin pulled Rae toward the little outbuilding he had earlier marked out as the pantry-storehouse for the huts on this side of the stream. It did not take long for them to slide the bolt back, fill one sack with loaves and another with cheeses and dried fruit, and tiptoe out again. They couldn’t hear a sound over the rippling song of the brook. But his skin crawled as if with worms, and until they got well away into the orchards he expected to feel dogs barking and voices behind him. He even fantasized the crack of a gun, and a starved daemon hitting between his shoulder blades. Except for the truck—which had felt as though it wanted to be his—he had never stolen anything before.
When they reached the road proper, he saw Rae’s face gray and stretched in the moonlight that filtered through the clouds. She was gnawing on a hunk of cheese.
“Here.” Suddenly ashamed of himself, he nudged her. “Give us some.”
Sitting on tarpaulins in the half-empty trailer, they shared the food in silence. Rae’s hands moved languidly, and her eyes were unfocused, as if she were thinking about something else altogether. Strangely enough, she did not seem bothered in the least by their crime.
For the umpteenth time, he turned on his side, trying to get comfortable. He had given her both the blankets. He pictured her curled in a snug ball, breathing deeply.
The circus existed outside conventional law. To settled folk, Crispin had never been more than an untrustworthy darky. What was so wrong with finally fulfilling their expectations?
Moral compromise glimmered very near. On either side of the way he would have to walk—he could see the way clearly in the darkness, a jeweled aisle like a peep show floating in the air—people mouthed and danced silently. Some he recognized, and some he didn’t. Daemons curved in and out around all of their feet.
He turned over, and the picture vanished. It wasn’t doing him any good to lie here worrying!
Rae sighed in her sleep.
The clarity of that vision had unnerved him more than he cared to think about. He could not lie here any longer. Damned if he wouldn’t—damned if he wouldn’t—
He uncurled to his feet and stepped around the partition. “Rae?” he whispered. “Are you asleep?”
No answer. He bent down and touched the blanket-shrouded figure. Her hair spilled like black oil, tributaries diverging over the lanolin-slick wool. She did not move.
Damned if he wouldn’t—
He knelt and touched her hair, smoothing it back from her temple. Her eyelashes cast a dark shadow on her cheek and the side of her nose. Her mouth twitched. She was sleeping soundly.
He brushed her lips with his own. No response. But already the fire was starting. Want fueled need. Need to lie beside her, to embrace every inch of her. Not to take her, but just to touch her. And Queen, how he needed to feel her soft hands touching him, caressing him with the ardor Prettie had never seemed to realize was possible. For Prettie, passivity had been the height of compliance. It had taken a southern prostitute to awaken Crispin to the delights that lovemaking could, and should, hold. And Rae wasn’t a whore, she was a townie, and Crispin was convinced that at some point in the past, she had been gentry. It lent her an allure that made the prospect of getting into bed with her absolutely irresistible.
He was shivering. He kissed her again, a little bit harder. This time he wasn’t imagining it, her breathing did check. And her mouth held his for a moment. He rested his elbow on the blanket, then lay down, still kissing her. Her eyelashes didn’t move, but she turned slightly onto her back, opening her arms. When he slid under the blanket, and found her clothed in long underwear under her petticoat, her kisses became sweeter, deeper. Her hands came up and held his: she allowed him to touch her breasts, but not any lower.
That was all right. It was enough. Languidly kissing her gave him a feeling of being adrift in a blue-green sea. He could have cried with gladness that she had not pushed him away. Her embrace was the temperature of the hottest, sweetest-perfumed bath. There was no such thing as time, or cold, or urgency.
In the darkness, her eyes were pitch-black slits.
“Rae,” he whispered. “It’s me. I’m here.”
“I thought you were a dream,” she said sarcastically. Then she was kissing him again, and her hands ran all over his body. She was undoing the catches of his shirt, running her fingers down his stomach. He couldn’t stand it anymore; he thrust his hand down behind her, over her buttocks, and her laughter became a sudden gasp of terror, and she grabbed his hand and pulled it away—but it was already too late.
He wrenched away from her as if he had been shocked by a daemon. Sitting up, “Rae?!”
She hunched into a ball, dragging the blankets tight around herself. “Go away!”
“No. I don’t know—what the hell—” Anger and incomprehension beat redly behind his eyes. His first thought had been that somehow she was a man—but behind her—no, it was ridiculous, nothing else about her was masculine, it must be a deformity! In that case he needed to know what it was. A deformity wasn’t so bad. He needed to know. Suppressing the turmoil in his mind, he held her down and systematically unwound the blankets, then lifted up her petticoat. Ignoring her dry-eyed sobbing and flailing against him, he felt the protrusion at the bottom of her spine through her underwear. It was about the length of his index finger. It was mushy soft, but it definitely had a bone. It ended in a fleshy flap.
She had stopped threshing. She lay on her face, her petticoats up around her shoulders, crying into the tarpaulin.
Finally it hit him. The “deformity” was the amputated stump of a tail.
She was—or had been at one point—a Kirekuni.
“And I’m surprised you didn’t guess it before!”
Crispin realized he must have spoken aloud.
“You pig-stupid imbeciles. I hate all of you. You can’t see what’s in front of your noses! Go away. Go away.”
He scarcely heard her. He sat on his heels, gazing at her in disbelief.
A Kirekuni!
So much for sweet mystery. Oh, if only one thing would turn out how it seemed—
“I’ve ruined everything,” she sobbed quietly. “Now you hate me. I knew it would be like this.”
“I didn’t guess,” Crispin said dully. “Your hair—skin—I should have guessed. Why do you hide it?”
“I have to!” She sat up and grabbed for her dress. Her face was wet and pink with tears. She buttoned the faded poplin feverishly over her petticoat, yanked her hair free and shook it out. “How would I get any work without pretending?”
“In the circus where I—”
“Oh, the circus. Yes, I could have been a freak! And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather conceal what I am than have everybody staring at me!”
“The way they stare at me?”
She sunk her face into her hands. “You don’t understand the littlest thing about me!”
“Ah,” Crispin said. “But I know. I know about you. What are you going to do now?”
He watched her cry without reaching out to comfort her. The thought of touching her was repugnant now. But he would have to be kind. He had promised. The shock was no excuse. Of all peoples, the Kirekunis had the worst reputation for their lack of compassion, their blind obedience to their rulers, and their decadent sexual mores. If Rae came of that place, it explained a lot of her mystery. But her nature itself wasn’t what horrified him the worst. It was the fact that she had hidden it—the physical violence that she’d done to herself, or had someone else do to her. He felt betrayed and sick.
“Can I stay with you, Crispin? Please don’t send me away.” She took his hand, and remembering the caresses those same fingers had delivered a few minutes ago, he couldn’t help pulling away. “Just take me with you. I won’t be trouble. Please—”
“Why would you want to keep company with a freak like me?” he said angrily.
Hot tears dropped on his fingers as she kissed them. “We’re both freaks. We neither of us have any business in this country!”
“Why did you do it to yourself?”
“You understand. You must understand. How nice it would be if other people thought you belonged in this country. How nice it’d be if you could really, honestly believe it yourself, even if it was only for a little while.” Her hair fell down to hide her face. “You have tremendous physical courage, and if it’d been possible, you would’ve done the same as I did. So don’t even bother pretending to be disgusted.”
He forced himself to breathe evenly. “My mother told me never to slug anybody for calling me nigger,” he said. “Hell of a woman, my mother, she was as black as the bottom of a river. Words didn’t bother her. She had other ways of getting her point across. Apparently in Lamaroon they sing, and so on. So it wasn’t because of that that she was so quiet. It was because she was a stranger here.”
Rae stared down at her crossed ankles. “My mother loved words. She had me come and read to her when she was dying.”
“Is that why you ran away?” From where? Not Kirekune? He could not figure it out.
“She died when I was ten. I ran away when I was eleven.”
He could not prevent his eyes from going to her skirts. Her ankles peeked out from under the ruffled hem. If he did not know, he would never have guessed. He hadn’t guessed. “But why?” he asked again. “Why?”
She closed her eyes. “Have you ever been angry? With somebody? Enough to hurt them?”
“Course I—”
“And did you?”
Crispin shrugged. “Yes.” He was remembering Saul Smithrebel.
“Well, I wasn’t ever strong enough to hurt anybody. Except myself.” She shrugged.
Bile rose in Crispin’s throat. It was too ghastly. The knowledge that this fragile girl had been capable of such terrible self-mutilation made him wary of touching her.
“Queen,” he said, standing up. “I—”
Outside, a bird squawked. Another joined in. Crispin stood frozen as the noise spread throughout the immediate forest: twitters, tweets, hoots, and brief burbles of song, a symphony of alarm.
“Someone’s coming!”
The rain had stopped. The birds slowly quieted.
“What’s going on?” Rae scrambled to her feet.
“Sssh.” His straining ears caught the unmistakable noise of a branch pushed out of someone’s way, whisking back into wet undergrowth. “Yes.” Quietly, he swept the blankets and tarps together on the floor, knotting them into an unwieldy bundle. “Quick quick quick now.”
Himself, twelve years old, two months after his mother died, standing stiff and straight beside Poppy 2. Red Bob and Kiquat and Grouser and Harry stood like shadows at their stations around the outside of the circled trucks. The circus was traveling north, along the Cypean border. Local prejudice against “westlanders” had necessitated night-long sentry shifts. You never knew which of the quiet, white-blond, sun-darkened people streaming out after the show might be coming back that night. Once they tried to steal a truck. Other times, it was circus children. In the inner domains, it was believed that gypsies stole babies; that might be right, but Crispin had never seen evidence of it. In his experience it was in the infertile, red and open east, where necessity had crowded out compassion as weeds crowd out flowers, where people would do anything for fat, dark-haired children to raise alongside their own hollow-chested offspring.
Crispin’s own father had been an easterner who, sick of his desert home, had taken to the road with Smithrebel’s thirteen years ago. So Anuei had said. Every night during the show Crispin could not help searching the upturned faces, looking for those few he would recognize: his relatives.
The gun lay heavy and oil-smelling in his arm. The night was empty, purple-shadowed.
He remembered the way you knew when that noise in the sagebrush wasn’t a dragonet, or a fox.
Rae laced her boots. The tears had dried on her face. A Kirekuni. “Let’s go, Crispin. Let’s get out. I don’t want them to find us.”
Crispin agreed wholeheartedly. But he was not so worried about being caught out in his theft of the food as he was about the other dangers he had scented in the hamlet. What was his little bit of thievery, if that was, as he suspected, a village of thieves? Did they perceive themselves as governed by the law at all, these people who lived out on the edge of nowhere? Crispin slid to the rear of the trailer. The tailgate would have to be dropped; there was no other way of escape. He listened with all his body to the small noises of the night.
It was the sibilants of their whispered speech that gave the approaching men away. He beckoned Rae. She was doing better than he’d expected. She slid her feet soundlessly along the planking, and when he passed her the bundle of blankets and food her arms trembled only a little. If she was afraid, she was also in control of herself.
From right behind the tailgate, barely two feet away, a whisper: “Give us that here—”
Just as Crispin’s hand was about to close on the big latch, he felt something sharp prick the heel of his thumb. He flinched back. Rae stifled a gasp. A piece of metal had been introduced underneath the latch and it was being fiddled about from outside.
All in one instant, Crispin grabbed Rae’s wrist, flicked the latch open, and launched himself against the tailgate, intending to smash the intruders to the ground. But the resistance he had counted on was not there. As the heavy wooden slab crashed to the earth, he staggered and lost Rae. Something lashed the back of his neck. As he rolled to his feet he saw Rae being clutched close by a heavy, fair-haired man in a leather jerkin, roughly the size and shape of a boulder. The man’s teeth and dagger glinted. The clouds had scattered and the moon rode high in a black-violet sky, shedding a light onto the road which seemed preternaturally strong after months of pitch-black, wet nights. There was another man behind Crispin. Crispin spun and punched him in the diaphragm. As the man’s knees buckled, his knife fell, and Crispin snatched it up out of a rut. His own dagger was out of reach in his knapsack—in Valestock he had not worn it because of city rules, and he had not thought to put it back on. Rae, girl—the boulder-man was yammering something about traders—
The third man came around the side of the truck. When he saw Crispin, his expression changed from disgruntlement to shock. In the moment before his hand moved to his dagger sheath, Crispin calculated the risks of turning his back on the boulder-man, decided to go for it, and charged the other would-be thief, slamming him against the side of the truck so hard that he could feel the daemon in its cell wake and shiver up some tension in the braced wood of the chassis. “... garg.” said the man. His mouth was open, and his fingers scrabbled at Crispin’s wrists, but Crispin was not thinking clearly, and he did not slacken his grip. Rae! He shook the man by the shoulders, so that his head cracked against the wood, and wheeled again to face the boulder.
In the moonlight the man’s face was like a big gnarl of wood, split by a smile. Steel hovered at Rae’s stomach. Not her throat. There was a mark of cruelty and cowardice. Thank Queen, he thought inarticulately, too poor for guns—no chance if a daemon gun—
“False pretenses,” Rae choked. “He says we come here under false pretenses!”
“The hell is that to do with—”
“I’ve told him there’s nothing in the truck that he might want! He won’t believe me!”
The boulder’s voice was surprisingly high, with a tone of injured righteousness. “Impostors! Youse enticed our women and left nothing to show, no gifts, not even no name!”
“Entice your women?” Crispin exclaimed. “That what they told you? Got my own woman, haven’t I? No need for your whores, have I?”
“Crispin,” Rae sobbed. She had been holding up well before, but now she seemed understandably terrified. She screeched as the boulder-man’s knife pricked her abdomen.
Crispin weighed the second man’s knife in his hand. Its owner tried to rise. Absently, Crispin kicked him in the throat. It was not a good blade. He bounced it, trying to find the balance. The boulder’s voice became oilier. “But why are youse here? Looking to do a little business, maybe, were youse? Wrong time of year for apples, but—”
“Same kind of business your women do when the traders come?” Crispin retorted. “Oh, yes, I’m sure!”
“Youse be a gypsy!” the boulder shot back. “Youse always ready to—”
Without even really thinking about it, Crispin threw the knife. It caught the big man in his right eye and entered an inch and a half before stopping. Some of Rae’s hair was caught in the wound; she screamed without stopping as she wrenched out of the suddenly stiff arms. The big man staggered backwards, flailing.
“Oh, hell,” Crispin said under his breath, and pulled her past him into the forest at the side of the road, just as the third man stirred and began to wake.
The forest smelled ever crisper and greener as they plunged desperately into the night. Crispin heard the boulder’s death gurgles behind them for longer than he would have thought possible.
“Where—are we going?” Rae gasped.
“Dunno,” Crispin told her. The wet earth gave squelchily under their feet. They would be leaving a clear trail: their only hope was to get far enough away that the hamleters would not bother coming after them. “Somewhere it won’t matter.”
She did not ask again. As she hurried along, she pushed her hair out of her face, disentangling it roughly from her eyelashes and lips. It was nerve-wracking how she seemed to trust him. Had he not insulted her? Why should she trust him?
“Here, you’ll wear yourself out,” he told her. “Slow down.”
For both prophet and priest ply their trade through the
land, and have no knowledge.
—Jeremiah 14:18