Marout 1893 A.D. The Wraithwaste
“I think we’re lost,” Crispin said, chewing his lump of cheese slowly. “I don’t know why we didn’t turn back when we had the chance. I must have been out of my mind.”
Waiting for Rae to reply, he squinted up through the thickety undergrowth, searching for some break in the flat gray clouds. There was none. If only he had a compass! He could not remember when the green fertility of the Apple Hills forest had given way to this living graveyard. It must have happened very slowly—or maybe all at once, overnight, while he was asleep. The forest smelled dusty, as if nothing had lived here for millennia—and during the day it was as silent as a desert. Not a single bird gave tongue, though they sang at night. They were ordinary birds, he had seen them, but they sounded like boys and girls. Their voices meandered over the snortings and crashings of wild animals in the pines, an orchestra of wildness. The stink of daemons clogged the air. He felt daemon claws on his skin all the time, curious talons of power brushing his neck, and it took all he had not to blow up at Rae. She wasn’t the reason they were in such a fix. In fact she had practically nothing to do with it. It was all his fault.
Most of the pines looked dead. Shocks of brown needles fell into pieces at a touch. Crispin had given up trying to get the splinters out of his clothes and hair. Rae, on the other hand, tended her appearance industriously, braiding her hair into long shiny ropes and winding them onto the back of her head, all ready to be dusted over again until it looked like an unglazed coil pot. Since losing her hairpins in the flight from the truck, she had been using twigs.
She was combing her hair now, kneeling on a mossy stone at the edge of the stream. The black curtain of it swayed over the water. The stream was a ribbon of greenery and life winding through the pines, full of fish that were absurdly difficult to catch. Crispin and Rae made their bivouac beside a different stream every night. The nights were the worst he had ever experienced. When he was walking, he didn’t have to think. But at night, his worries sat like hunger in his stomach, keeping him from sleep. Where was he going? Where he was taking Rae, who had given herself so completely into his care? It had only been eleven days—they couldn’t have gone very far—yet he had not seen any signs of civilization since they entered the pines. Once, six biplanes, laden low with supplies for the troops at the war front, had glided west beneath the clouds. He had stared after them, knowing it would be futile to shout.
The road along which they had come from Valestock must continue somewhere in the forest, and Crispin presumed it led to the war front. At this stage, even that would be better than nothing. But they had left the road at a tangent, and no amount of zigzagging had helped them recover it.
And there was something else, which he did not think Rae had noticed, even though she had glimpsed the splinteron in the holding cell, something few girls would have seen. Certain trees shimmered as if they were surrounded by a ring of heat. It was not so much that the effect jumped out at you, as the way it didn’t. On a couple of occasions he had gotten a fix on these illusions and tried to approach them, but somehow he found himself turning aside, and before he knew what was happening the place would be far behind him, a flicker as if of movement among the trees. At such times he always felt watched. Of course it was nonsense: he was being watched, yes indeed, by invisible daemons, hundreds of them, but not by anything else. Yet he could not stop looking for human footprints in the dead needles, or blazes like the ones he himself made on the tree trunks to ensure they did not go in circles, carved by the hands of strangers, woods-folk.
He was almost grateful at night when the daemons crept close to him, crawling over his skin, drawn by his bodily warmth nearly to materialize, because it distracted him from his worries. Uncollared daemons could be dangerous—but unlike collared ones, only if provoked. He had to concentrate on fighting the impulse to brush them off.
It might have been easier if he had been able to talk to Rae. But she was even more of a mystery now than she had been the night they first met at the Old Linny. The fact that she was Kirekuni explained her not at all. She had not cried since they entered the Wraithwaste. Her cheery unflappability, her refusal to listen to his worries—it was all an act, he knew it, but he could not tell what was underneath. Looking at her now, voluptuous in the shirt and trousers he had loaned her, he could not believe he had ever touched her. Neither of them ever made reference to what happened between them before the men from the hamlet broached the truck. Crispin had constantly to search for signs of her Kirekuni heritage in her face to remind himself of his stupefying discovery.
Now she said, “You know we can’t go back. You’re a murderer, Cris. They’d string you up. Anywhere in the western domains.”
“At least in jail I’d get regular meals. I’d be willing to die for one real meal, I think.” He swallowed the last of the cheese and rubbed his stomach regretfully. The hunger pangs were arrows of pain. Aware that they had to conserve their provisions, he pulled a dried apple out of his knapsack and bit into it. The texture was that of old leather, but it filled his mouth with sweetness. “I don’t understand why you’re not more worried.”
She shrugged. “I trust you.”
“You don’t understand how stupid that is. I keep trying to tell you.”
She merely gave a tinkling laugh. The ends of her hair caught up drops from the surface of the stream. The liquid speech of water and stones made up for her silence: she was a creature of the morning, she could not be expected to answer in human speech.
It may have been at that moment that Crispin fell in love. He knew in some corner of himself what was happening. Shaking his head to clear it, he reached into the bag for another dried apple.
Then he stopped. “There’s a demogorgon right behind me. Quite a large one. Can you see it?”
“A kind of shimmering?”
“Yeah, it would be.” Crispin shuddered and, all in one movement, stood up and spun around to confront nothing.
Downstream, where the black water curved into the trees, a fish jumped. The daemon vanished into the air with a tumult of power.
The exact nature of daemons’ relations with the visible world was unclear, Millsy had said sometime long ago. Unmaterialized, did they exist in the air? On another plane altogether? In physical places, like earth, or water, or the bodies of animals? No doubt there were trickster women who knew the answers, who could dispel the myths that made daemon handling far more difficult, no doubt, than it needed to be. But such secrets were not for the heads of men.
Crispin’s scalp tingled. He bit into the apple and drove his fingers through his hair, scratching.
“Are we still in Ferupe, do you think?” Rae asked. She shook back her hair and started to plait it.
“Hurry up,” Crispin said. “Course we are.”
But suddenly he was not sure. If they were no longer in Ferupe, that could explain a good deal. The Wraithwaste... at what point did it stop being Ferupian? Those places in the trees at which you could not look, no matter how you tried... “The Wraithwaste is Ferupian. That’s why we’re at war.”
“Some places don’t have any nationality. Some places just are.”
“Oh, now you’re talking through your hat,” Crispin said.
She lifted her hands behind her head, looping her braid around itself. “No, I’m not,” she said around a mouthful of twigs. She never had had much of a sense of humor, and recently she seemed to have none. “I’m saying what I think. And now I’ll say some more. This place is stranger than anywhere I’ve ever been. And, Crispin, there are people here. I know it. It’s just that they haven’t let us see them.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I think we’re getting near a place of trickster women.”
Crispin sighed. “The trickster women. Yes, of course! That’s exactly who I want to approach with my hat in my hand! Take us in! Care for us! Feed us! I know you’re kindly old girls—”
“Oh, shut up,” Rae said violently. “Let’s see you come up with a better idea, then!”
“I don’t think trickster women even exist. They’re a story you females cooked up to try and prove something.”
“Where do daemons come from, then?”
“How should I know? Maybe daemons don’t exist, either—maybe they’re a mass hallucination! Maybe civilization is a mass hallucination, maybe Ferupe and Kirekune and the war is all a dream you and I had last night! We think we remember having pasts! We think we remember being apart! But in fact this is all there’s ever been, we’re gonna be alone here forever and ever—”
Reflexively, both of them looked around at the impenetrable mossy thickets.
After a moment Rae said, “I never thought there could be a place without people. I never... Maybe I was wrong.”
The brook sang softly to itself. Somehow the sound did not lessen the endless silence of the forest, but emphasized it, as lettering points up the whiteness of a piece of paper. Rae’s fingers had stopped moving in her hair. She looked frightened. It tore at Crispin’s heart.
“Of course there’re people here,” he said, less confidently than he had meant to. “All we have to do is find them. And we’re wasting time right now.” He picked their bags up and snapped his fingers. “Come on. Your hair looks just as good down.”
“Does it really? I’ll leave it down, then.”
He stood impassively as she shook her head a couple of times, freeing the braids, then rolled up the trousers he had lent her and splashed across the stream to join him.
They walked in silence. The air was cold and dry, but Crispin grew hot from walking and tied his coat around his waist. The pines stood far enough apart that it was not necessary to force a path through them. Their trunks were practically branchless for twenty or thirty feet—like flaky pillars holding up a ceiling of interlaced boughs. Soft dead needles carpeted the ground, and brambles and puffball mushrooms grew around the bases of the trees. Little collections of skeletons lay half-concealed by fungi-encrusted fallen trunks. In some places, the green-stained bones were piled into knee-high cairns: the refuse collections of the largest and most fastidious daemons. Crispin walked a few paces behind Rae. He had heard too many stories of travelers losing each other in broad daylight in places like this to let her out of his sight. Apparently she had heard some of the same stories, for she never stopped glancing over her shoulder at him. The fifth or sixth time he caught her looking, he made a face at her.
She burst into nervous laughter. “Oh, by the Queen, Cris. Don’t do that!”
He crossed his eyes and let his jaw hang.
“Aaaah!” She sagged against a tree trunk, “I can’t help thinking something’s got into you when you do that!”
There was a note of real fear in her voice. He returned his face to normal. “Well, we can’t stop now; it isn’t even the middle of the morning.”
“Yes... ” She did not move. “Crispin, I’m afraid. There’s nobody. And there’s so many daemons. I know you think I can’t feel them, but I can. And you... you... ”
Her head was buried in the arm that rested against the tree trunk; her shoulders quivered. She seemed to be inviting his touch.
“Girl. I’m doing the best I can, What do you want?”
“I want—” She gasped. “I don’t know what I want. But I do know it’s pointless to go on. There’s no end to this waste, We’ll never reach Kirekune. And yet we can’t stop, can’t stop—”
If they were trying to reach Kirekune, this was the first Crispin had heard of it. He suppressed the slur that leapt to his tongue. “So we won’t go on. We’ll try and turn back, although I doubt—”
“No! No! You don’t understand. We’re both going to die anyway. Why did I leave Valestock? We’re all going to die.”
Alarms went off in Crispin’s head. Never since he had known her had she confessed to weakness. This was what he had dreaded most, all these days. He said robustly: “While there’s life there’s hope.”
“I’m not holding you responsible, Crispin! You’ve been wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. But—but... I just don’t think I can go on any farther.”
Crispin went to her. “Are you sick? Are you tired? We’ll stop right here for a day, maybe two; you can rest. I’ll try and kill a rabbit for us—I used to be pretty good with the throwing knife—”
She laughed a trifle hysterically. “You still are! But rabbits aren’t such easy targets as men!” She lifted her head, her long hair spilling back. “I can go on, of course I can! Oh, Queen, I’ve been playing the part of a silly female for so long that I can’t stop, but I can’t help feeling it’s pointless, because there’s really only one important thing in all the world, one thing. Do you understand?”
He could not make her go on in this state. He made her sit down on the ground, in the pine needles, with her back against the tree on which she had been leaning. The brown musk of crushed puffballs rose. She coughed. Crispin dropped his knapsack and sat down opposite her. “It’s all right, I promise. We’ll have a rest, and then you’ll—”
“No, let me explain! I have to explain!”
He closed his eyes. “Explain what?”
“Queen... There’re certain things I’ve known ever since I was a child. I used to try and tell people sometimes. It’s called evangelizing. But you can’t help it, really. You want so badly to tell someone else, so they know, too. I left off when I realized nobody understands. But you—I feel like I can’t go any longer... ” Her words trailed off. “Since I left the Mansion... ”
“A mansion,” Crispin said. “So you are nobility. You never would tell me your family name.”
“I’m not nobility! That’s not it at all!”
He touched her hand, silencing her. “Start at the beginning.”
“All right.” She drew a deep breath. “All right. My aunt owned a whorehouse in Okimako—she may still, for all I know. That’s where my mother grew up. My father was the son of merchants. My name is Akila—in Kirekuni that’s ash, not the tree, but what’s left over from a fire. Rae Ash. I’ve been going by Clothwright for years, but I—I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“But you did lie to me,” Crispin said, suppressing the high note of unreason that threatened to creep into his voice. “You didn’t tell me you grew up in a cult.”
“How do you—”
“It’s true, isn’t it? Just say yes.”
“You’re not as stupid as you look, Crispin Kateralbin!” Then she seemed to crumple. “Or is it that obvious?”
“Just putting two and two together,” Crispin said. “They tend to add up to four.” His voice fell flat and loud on the silence of the forest. Once again he had the feeling of being watched. He could barely keep from twisting around.
“All right. It’s true,” Rae said.
“Which cult? The Nihilists? The Apocalypists? Did you help them set that fire in Valestock? Have I been your dupe all along?”
“I wouldn’t set foot in an Apocalypist house if they paid me! I’m a child of the Dynasty.”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of them.”
“The Glorious Dynasty. It’s the only cult that receives true revelations. That’s why they don’t need to advertise, like the Apocalypists do. See here, Crispin. This is how I was taught it.” Like a schoolchild, she folded her hands in her lap. “Everyone in the civilized lands—Ferupe, Kirekune, Cype, Izte Kchebuk’ara, the Mim, Eo loria, the Pacific islands—is descended from your Royals. As the Ferupian influence expanded over the centuries, the webs of kinship that lead, by however circuitous a path, back to the Monarch, spread, too—through rape, droit de seigneur, polygamy, miscegenation. The Significant Lizards of Kirekune are also related to the Ferupian Royal family, and intermarriage continued until the beginning of the war. When, around the tenth century, the Kirekunis began to expand their empire, history repeated itself on the other side of the continent. By the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier, both the western and eastern hemispheres were infected with Royal blood. You and I, and everyone in the world, are distantly related to each other and to the Queen. To be human is to be Royal.”
She paused for breath.
“Thus, anything which affects the Queen affects us to a lesser degree, just as a tug on a knot makes all the threads leading out of it vibrate. This is evidenced by the way in which in the last century, as the monarchy declined, society has also declined, giving rise to decadent customs, widespread fear of the future, and, simultaneously, the rapid development of new and hideous twists on daemon technology, which in their turn cause the war to escalate further. All this can have but one result: the death of the Queen.”
Crispin started. Her singsong voice had almost hypnotized him, but that jerked him out of his trance. “That’s the most unpatriotic, traitorous thing—”
“But death—death has no lesser degree. Death is simply death.” Her voice quivered. “And so when the Queen dies—as must inevitably happen—and she has no direct descendant who can inherit her responsibilities at the center of the knot of humanity—why, then, we must all die with her. No one knows what shape the apocalypse will come in. All that has been revealed to us is that it will come.”
“But—” Crispin spluttered. “Why is the Queen the knot? Why not the Lizard Significant? You said they were related—it makes no sense—”
“Because the Queen is directly descended from Thraziaow, the first King ever! Because—because that’s the way it is, do you hear! The way it is!”
Crispin could not take his eyes off her.
“The war has already rendered the Queen unable to bear a child. It will kill her soon. Maybe we have twenty years; maybe ten; maybe two.” Rae’s evident belief in what she was saying made each of her words ring with conviction, like Millsy’s when he spoke of daemons. And why shouldn’t they? She, too, was speaking of what she knew. Only in her voice there was an element of despair. “Maybe she’ll die tomorrow. I’m not privy to the secrets of the court. And that’s why I can’t—anymore. I just can’t. I had to tell you.”
To Crispin it seemed impossible, absurd, that she should start to cry now. He almost laughed. He caught her in his arms and held her close. “Oh, Rae. Oh, Rae, Rae. Is that all. Is that all it ever was? It’s not true. Culties are crazy. It sounds slick, but it isn’t based on anything, anything at all. And to think you’ve been plagued by lies like that ever since you were a kid!”
“But it isn’t lies.” She was crying in his arms, but not holding onto him. “I can’t make anyone understand, not even you. I don’t know the right words!”
He lifted her up, looked into her tear-stained face. He wanted to kiss her and comfort her; but that would be unforgivably irresponsible. Any sympathy at all would be an implicit agreement with her crazy cultie theory. It would be a validation of her baseless despair. He pushed her upright and said roughly, “Stop it. It’s your nerves. And if you know it’s your nerves, you’re all right, see what I mean?” He mopped off her face with the edge of his sleeve. She did not resist. “Used to happen to me all the time. Waiting in the performers’ entrance, when I was just beginning on the flying trapezes. I’d think about how easy it would be to fuck up and break my neck, and all of a sudden I couldn’t go on. I’d just start bawling. Well, I was only a kid. It was lucky for me I had Herve, that was my old man, to knock me into shape. First he’d slap me on both cheeks—pow, pow—and it’d be such a shock I’d stop. The audience couldn’t hear anything because of the band out front. Then he’d say ‘Hold still, child,’ and put some powder on my nose. If I only had some powder, I’d fix your face, too.” He looked at her, narrowing his eyes. “See what I mean? See what I mean? Circus and music hall aren’t that different, are they?”
Her whole body shook with a sigh. “No, they’re not.”
“There, see? You’re all right now.” He stood up and pulled her to her feet. She would not look at him. “We have a long way to go. Come on.”
“But to where?” she murmured as she buttoned up her coat. “To where?”
“Rae—”
“No. I’m sorry. Sorry about that. I think you’re right, this place is getting to me!”
“Could happen to anyone.”
She unbuttoned her coat all the way down again. “But it doesn’t happen to you! I wish I was like you! You’re so steady! You’re so confident!” She bit her nails. Crispin felt flabbergasted. Finally, he slapped her gently on the back.
“We really do have to get going.”
She was silent, her head bowed, as they started to walk.
And dozens of miles of haphazardly crowded pines and winding streams amplified the silence between them. Crispin’s boot crushed through a fox’s scoured skull. The faint sonic whine of an airplane made him look up.
Ten days later: The end of Marout. The Wraithwaste
“Oh, the lovelies!” Rae breathed.
Crispin could not speak. For the first time since entering the Wraithwaste—indeed, for the first time in his life—he was seeing daemons materialize in their natural habitat. The ground fell away suddenly from the place where they stood concealed in the trees. A stream poured down over exposed rocks to form the pool below, then, wider and darker, flowed out of the other side of the dell. Bright sparks of color flittered over the surface of the pool. On the banks there were snowberry bushes and holly, white berries and red mingling so closely they seemed to grow from the same branches. Small pink flowers misted the rocks around the fall. Around the pool grew yellow flags.
And the daemons!
Some lounged in the grass, looking like families having their Sunday picnic in the park, except that none of them stood more than two feet high, and all were naked. They yammered in their curious language of odd phrases and advertising slogans, served each other little delicacies on plates made of woven pine needles, finger-combed each other’s hair. These more human daemons fascinated Crispin, yet repelled him, like Millsy’s pets, whom the sentimental old trickster had dressed in children’s clothes. Other, smaller ones sat on the branches of the pines, picking termites out of the bark with long, monkeylike fingers. And those that darted and hummed over the water, aimless as mayflies, but the size of crows—those made him want to echo Rae: “Oh, the lovelies!” They had iridescent wings. They had bodies like adult men and women. Unlike the daemons on the banks, who were mostly dull in color, the fliers came in all the hues of the rainbow. Their voices were like the chimes of tiny bells. He had never seen such daemons in captivity; he supposed they were not strong enough to be used in transformation engines. One could probably use them to feed large daemons, or burn in daemon glares. The economics of it would have to be worked out.
Smiling, he glanced at Rae. She had clasped her hands between her breasts in that theatrical yet wholly unself-conscious gesture she used.
“I wonder what draws them here,” he whispered. “They don’t generally materialize like this.”
“They’re beauties. I think beauty will last. Only humanity has to come to an end. Because people are like a canker in the world. But these—these are natural.”
“Oh, Rae, not that again!” It was torn from him. Mistakenly, perhaps, he had thought the matter resolved days ago. “I thought you’d—”
“The Easterners, and the Apocalypists, say the whole world will be destroyed—not just humanity—but I don’t think that can be true. After all, these little creatures haven’t done anyone any harm. It’s people who have done them harm.”
Below, a daemon shrilled in a voice of alarm: “Twice the range of the F-98! New top-of-the-line model! Ten gallons of oil shipped with each item!”
Crispin spun back toward the clearing. His skin prickled, and his hair stood on end. “Sssh!”
Down below, the daemons were exclaiming loudly, grabbing each other’s hands and vanishing. Something larger was coming. Crispin closed his hand on Rae’s arm, ready to drag her away, because it was coming from behind them, but before he could move he felt it pass, sweeping down into the grotto, and there came a noisy bubbling from the pool, as if masses of water had been suddenly displaced. For a moment all was silent, the surface flat. A small daemon on a branch gibbered with fear. Then the big daemon reared a glistening white head out of the pool and sighed pale flames that hissed on contact with the water.
On the other side of the pool, a forearm ten feet long snaked out of the water and a hand the size of an umbrella curled around a clump of flags near the bank, crunching them off.
“Stay back,” Crispin whispered,
“Will it come after us?”
“I dunno. Never seen one this big. It’s not a daemon, it’s a demogorgon. This’s the kind of beast they use in municipal waterworks. Factories. Places like that. Thousands of dp.”
Without warning the daemon shot its other arm up out of the water and grabbed the little brown daemon on the tree branch. There was a flurry of movement too fast to be seen and then the hideous, all-too-human face sank beneath the water. Severed bits of the brown daemon rose to the surface of the water and bobbed on the ripples.
“Shit, I’d like to have those bits,” Crispin whispered.
“No.” Rae grabbed his arm. “Don’t go down there. Don’t you dare!”
He shook her off. The prospect of possessing the remains of an occult beast was too good to miss. Who knew what uses the bones might have! Calling daemons—repelling daemons—
Quietly, he scrambled down the steep ground beside the waterfall, keeping behind the bushes. Unobtrusiveness was the thing. Luckily the grass on the floor of the dell was tall enough that he could eel through it on his stomach. As he approached the pool he put his hand on a small daemon. It jerked away, and he felt the sting of it throughout his body. For a moment his vision went black. But when he recovered he could see the water before him, and he eased forward another foot or so, sliding his hand down toward a finger that floated within reach. Then a hank of black hair. Stuff them in a pocket. Another—
There was a smell of burning that he could not identify. It crossed his mind that it might be the smell of burnt water—an occult stink, if ever there was one!—and Rae’s voice pealed out, high and desperate. “Crispin! Behind you!”
He rolled over, throwing his arms up in front of his face. All he saw was a confusion of brown robes—and faces, faces, faces. Though he realized afterward there could not have been more than two of them, they moved so fast they seemed half a dozen. A girl’s voice. “What are you doing here!” Another: “Sally, look out, the daemon!” And all the water exploded upward out of the pool, drenching Crispin, blinding him, and a whiplash of light cracked across his eyes.
He woke to feel hard, cold ground under his cheek. This was nothing unusual, and at first he thought it was simply the beginning of another day of walking; then he opened his eyes.
It was night. Slowly, he got to his feet. The blood rushed to his head and he almost fell over. Staggering, he caught onto a bush, then hummed softly in pain as he extracted the prickles from his palm. The waterfall gushed noisily. All around he felt the dancing urgent presences of daemons. Now he could see a little. So he had not gone blind.
“Rae!”
His voice was weak. And his eyes hurt. His fingers found blood crusted in his brows and the creases of his eyelids. The strangers had struck him across the face after the big daemon stunned him, he guessed, but though they had had him at their mercy, they had left him lying. Had he been of so little importance to them? Common sense told him they would probably be coming back.
“Rae!”
Slipping and cursing in the dark, he clambered back up beside the waterfall to the spot where they had stood to watch the daemons at play. Astonishingly, the knapsack and blankets were still there, and he seized on them with a grunt of relief. But a haphazard search of the vicinity revealed no signs of Rae, nor of a struggle.
In his dazed state the emergency was unquestionable. Swearing softly to himself, he recovered his coat, put it on, and slung their belongings across his shoulders, then plowed upstream through the thickets until he could cross the fast-flowing stream easily. “Rae,” he murmured to himself as he pushed on through the forest. “Rae, Rae, Rae.” The sound of his own voice comforted him, as did the fact that his throat appeared not to be as badly damaged as he had thought. “Rae, Rae.”
He searched for her for what seemed an infinitely long time, as often as not half-asleep on his feet. On the branches overhead, avian virtuosos sang solos. The trills crawled down his spine like drops of ice water. At some point he realized that the footing had got a lot easier, and that he was no longer having to avoid trees. Tiredness dulled the delight which came of the sudden knowledge that he had hit the road again.
It wound like a river of pine needles through the forest. He followed willingly, stumbling from time to time on the hacked-off tree stumps hidden under the sharp carpet. He was not too far gone to note that none of the curves were too tight for a truck. The branches of the overhanging trees had also been lopped off. Nobody except the driver of a big rig would have had that done. Could it be that he had not left civilization at all? That the Wraithwaste had seemed a wilderness just because he did not have a map?
Stopping in mid-stride, he put his head back and gazed at a strip of solid, midnight blue sky. Though the clouds obstructed the stars, it had been a long time since he had seen any open sky at all.
The road forked in two. By this time he had nearly given up hope of finding where the strangers had taken Rae, but in a final bid for lit windows, he chose the narrower road. It ended in an empty clearing where a gigantic, peeling pine thrust out of the bare earth. Nothing moved. There were strange objects hanging from the high branches of the pine, and peering up through the dark, he thought he made out carcasses. The song of night birds pierced his ears as loudly as a crescendo from a trained choir. A light flared behind him and in its brief, hallucinatory glare he saw that the bark of the pine was crawling as if it were covered with ants.
He swung to see where the light had come from, and the ground gave way under his boots and he fell, bumping and rolling over sharp corners, into blackness.
It seemed only an instant later that he woke to find a face hanging over him which he decided must be a dream, or perhaps, because of its clarity, a vision: the face of a child no more than six years old, possessed of dark brown skin on which two ripe black eyes showed purple and yellow. The child’s lips worked soundlessly. Crispin tried to sit up, banged his head on a tree root hanging overhead, and rolled over, moaning.
“Get up,” the little boy said, pulling at him. “He wants to talk to you. Come on, darky.”
The word on the child’s lips carried no sting. Crispin twisted himself around in the root-roofed crevice, wincing at the pain of new bruises, and stood up. Even when he stumbled into the middle of the room he had to bend his head. It was a low, brightly lit cavern, the worst pigsty he had seen in a long time.
“His name is Orphan,” said the old hermit. He pronounced it strangely, as he did everything—Orpaan. Crispin nodded, eating as fast as he could. The stew the little boy had served him was extraordinarily delicious. He was aware that there were far more important things to do than eat, but his body was rebelling: it refused to let him ignore its cries. Maybe the stew was poisoned. He didn’t care. At least he wouldn’t die hungry. “My name is—” The hermit paused, contorting his wrinkled apple of a face. “Call me the old gentleman.” He sniggered.
Crispin stopped with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Old Gentleman?”
The hermit nodded eagerly.
Crispin’s moniker for Saul Smithrebel, a lifetime ago, had been “Old Gentleman.” It had been born as a childish attempt at sarcasm, but by the end it had become a token of grudging deference to the ringmaster. Calling this strange Wraithwaste hermit by Smithrebel’s title would be like classifying a skunk with a venomous asp. “I used to know someone else called that.”
Bad move. An expression of wrath grew on the hermit’s face.
“No offense,” Crispin said hastily, putting down his wooden bowl and readying himself to spring back—though there was practically nowhere to spring back to in the junk-jammed cave. “No offense, I’m sure.”
The little boy, who had been silent since he delivered Crispin to the hermit, pushed himself between the old fellow’s knees and, placing a hand on either bony thigh in a curiously adult gesture, turned to face Crispin. Crispin nearly laughed out loud at the sudden resemblance of the composition to pictures he had seen of the young Queen with her father, King Ethrew. “His name is Jacithrew Humdroner,” the little boy announced emphatically.
“And what about you,” Crispin said with a smile, ignoring the hermit’s frown.
The child turned his face away and put his thumb in his mouth. “‘M Orpaan,” he mumbled indistinctly. “Mum ‘n da got kilt bee sojers.”
The impulse which must have been building in the hermit’s brain for a good minute and a half finally reached fruition. He howled and smacked the little boy in the side of the head. Orpaan flew past Crispin, across the cave, and pushed himself under the low-hanging roots as if he were trying to burrow into the earth. That he did not cry out struck Crispin as terrible. Growling, he seized Jacithrew Humdroner’s bony wrists, jerking the old man to his feet. The red beast cavorted inside his head. He gulped, and blinked several times to clear his brain. It was only necessary to make a point, not to do murder. He placed his left hand ostentatiously in his lap and squeezed Jacithrew’s wrists in the other until bones rubbed together. “Don’t ever hit him again,” he said between his teeth. “All right? Hear me?”
“Let me go!” Jacithrew gibbered. “I’ll tell you lovely things, true things, things you’ll never ever ever know if you hurt me!”
“Huh!” Crispin considered the old man. Liquid eyes stared up in terror through tangled gray dreadlocks. For the first time, he noticed that though Jacithrew’s face was as wrinkled as a pug dog’s behind the forest of beard, his skin was a good three shades darker than Crispin’s. Like Orpaan’s. How did that come to be? Some daemons were dark-skinned, too. Was the old fellow a weird kind of intelligent daemon, half-human perhaps, neither fish nor fowl? Or was he merely an eccentric hermit? And in any case, what was he doing in the middle of nowhere with a child?
Jacithrew gave a sudden great heave. Crispin tightened his grip. The room was lit by daemon glares nailed to the plunging taproot in its center. In the real world, outside the western domains anyway, daemon glares were luxuries, but in the Waste things were obviously different. A radiance far brighter than gaslight emanated from the silver cages. Each object in the cave, from the logs piled beside the fire hood to the thread-roots hanging from the ceiling to the wooden machine fragments—some as large as beds, some smaller than a man’s hand, some half-cannibalized for parts—cast shadows like black paper cutouts.
He felt a tentative tap on his arm. It was the child. “Please let Jacithrew go,” Orpaan whispered. “Please please please. He’s me new dadda see, since me mum and me real dadda got kilt. He tends after me, please. I tend after him. See.”
It was impossible to refuse such a request. Crispin let Jacithrew go; the old man flopped back onto his three-legged stool with a shriek. Orpaan, to Crispin’s astonishment, climbed onto Crispin’s knee and sucked his thumb feverishly, all the time keeping an eye on Jacithrew as if he were afraid the hermit might hit him again.
Without warning, Jacithrew leaned forward and said clearly, “The orphan takes to you. You are one-of us.”
“What? One of who?”
“Your skin, your eyes! You are one of the ancient folk, the masters of daemons! Had you been one of the pale folk”— Jacithrew made a surprisingly swift chopping motion with one hand—”I would have gulletted you as you lay at my mercy. But now I am convinced of your heritage!”
He was mad.
“I had not thought there were any more of us left. There is Hannah, of course. But she is different.” He plucked at Crispin’s arm. “And you are so strong—so healthy!”
As mad as a Marout hare. The old man’s ravings nearly topped Rae’s carefully worked-out future history for a tall tale.
On the other hand, if Crispin humored him, he might just get a second bowl of stew out of the bargain. Soon he would be strong enough to start searching for Rae in earnest. He settled the little boy more securely on his knee, mindful of the child’s bruises. “Jacithrew, huh?” he said to the old man. “How’d you get a name like that? Sounds like a noble. A squire, anyhow. But I’ve already been wrong about that once, and I swear if you’re a noble, I’ll eat my hat.”
They soar by the ponds of Heaven,
go sporting to the farthest darkness,
showing what it means to have a body hit no desires,
to keep living on and on to the end of time.
—Mu Hua