26 Avril 1893 A.D. The Raw: The Lovoshire Parallel:
Pilkinson’s Shadowtown
Two days later, Crispin, Rae, and Orpaan entered the village of Pilkinson’s Shadowtown, on the edge of the Raw, and certain things became far clearer to Crispin than they had in Ferupe, where people did not experience the approach of the war directly, as a blow which can be ducked or borne, but rather subtly, like the scent from an onrolling charnel cart, which is inescapable. In Shadowtown, by contrast, everything was as harsh and black and white as the sun at midday.
The century-long Kirekuni advance had caused the trickster women to batten their doors against outsiders and plant wards of oak around their gardens, but they, like the Wraiths, had existed before the war, and many of them hoped to survive it. Shadowtown had no such history or aspirations. In fact, as Crispin realized before he and Rae and the child were there long enough to get a square meal, it was no town at all. It was a toilet for soldiers’ whims. Its demolition date had been fixed before it was even built. It was in no better a position than a sand castle in the way of the rising tide. (For at least twenty years, certain Kingsburg advisors to the Queen had annually predicted the ground Kirekune would gain that year, and they had consistently been proved right, for the figure did not change; though it was unlikely that the Queen heard anything of these estimates on her hill of silken pillows, with her Cypean cats in her lap, and her ears ringing with her courtiers’ compliments.)
There were perhaps ten women to every man in Shadowtown. Dogs and cats—as opposed to daemons kept collared for food—were as rare as gold. People might be born in Shadowtown, live there, and die there, but the stammering fire that dropped out of the sky at night and burned holes in their houses worked on them from the minute they first took a breath. They thought no more about hope or fear than they did about love. The hopelessness of the place settled immediately about Crispin’s shoulders like a too-heavy coat. But he shrugged it off and led Rae and Orpaan down the rocky, dusty street—if it could be called a street—with the confidence of a prince.
Most of the houses were either half-built or half-burnt: it was difficult to tell which. Gray-painted tanks, trucks, and motorbikes were parked everywhere. Soldiers smoked cigarettes as they messed with the engines. They paid no attention to Crispin, Rae, and Orpaan. Shushing Rae’s protests, Crispin pulled her and Orpaan straight through a group of them into a building that smelled like a tavern. There, he ordered them a slap-up dinner. He still had one pound of the money the Old Gentleman had given him, and though the bill was rubbed almost blank by months of unfolding and refolding with sweaty fingers, the Wraith barmaid took it without so much as a glance into his face.
They were halfway through their meal, Rae and Orpaan eating with a desperate speed which Crispin knew would make them sick later, he pacing himself with water, when soldiers with yellow epaulets on dark green uniforms surrounded their table and he knew his show of confidence had backfired.
He pushed back his chair and stood up. He saw a flicker of disconcertment in seven out of eight pairs of eyes, but not in those of the wiry, middle-aged man who faced him from behind Rae’s stool. This man had double epaulets that stuck out six inches beyond his shoulders. He said conversationally, “Out of the Waste, are you?”
“And still weary from the journey,” Crispin said with as much Millsy-style dignity as he could muster.
“Aye. Not many come that way.”
“Last was before ye joined up, Snyder,” one soldier said to another, a very old man, and sniggered.
“In fact, I’m sorry to admit I don’t know exactly where we are.” Crispin strove for a look of amiable puzzlement. “I left Valestock with my family more than a month ago. I don’t even know if it’s Marout or Avril.”
“None but fools or them with the hangman behind them would go west. ‘Spect them in Valestock would be interested to know of you. Aye, well, they won’t be hearing for a good while yet,” the two-epaulet man said drily. “You’re in Pilkinson’s Shadowtown, but all Shadowtowns are the same from Khyzlme down to Sudeland—isn’t that so, boys?”
The men muttered a ragged yes. “But we got the best ho’s for miles, right ‘ere,” one of them added boldly. The officer nodded and smiled, acknowledging his men’s laughter. His gnarled hands rested on Rae’s shoulders, massaging. Rae’s carved-out face was white and dry; the food stains on her lips looked as garish as paint. The officer’s index fingers wandered into the hollows of her throat, between the tendons that stood out in painful relief.
“Arrest them. Take him out to Chressamo. Do what you like with her; she seems used up. The child—” he shrugged. “Is he really yours?” he asked Crispin, giving a final cruel squeeze to Rae’s shoulders and stepping back. “I think not. He’s Shadow, and you are not.”
Strong hands grabbed Crispin’s wrists, ready to twist his arms behind his back. Even through the red haze that was clouding his mind, he knew that in his present state of weakness he wasn’t going to be able to get free. Why wasn’t Orpaan calling his daemons? Just when they could be really useful! The child’s eyes darted wildly, but he did not move. One of his hands held a forkful of stew in midair, and it was trembling so violently that lumps of meat fell to the table. “He’s my son!” Crispin shouted. “If you harm him, I’ll kill you and every last one of your descendants!”
The officer laughed. He was at least forty, and his expression was pleasant. “Haven’t any, my friend. You clearly know little about the war. It would be interesting to find out what you’re doing here. Perhaps we’ll talk again—I don’t have much to do with Chressamo, but you never know. All right. Take him.”
He turned away, and as if in slow motion Crispin saw his mouth open and the sound of words come out. He was hailing the bartender.
Orpaan knew when Crispin started fighting the soldiers that his new Dadda and his new Mama were going to die this time for real. Soldiers didn’t stand for this kind of thing. Soldiers had sent ferrets with fire-fuses strapped to them down into the root houses of his village. Soldiers had slung him into a tree as if he was a dog that was worrying their legs. Soldiers were merciless. Jacithrew’s words echoed in his head: They hate us. They call us not Wraiths, but Shadows. They think we are less than human, created merely to serve and amuse, and if we fail to obey—and even when we do obey—they deem it their right to do what they will with us. He had said that long, long ago, all the way back, when they stood watching the smoking ruins of the trees, a child and a harmless ancient, the only two survivors of their village, while the air ate away at the corpses of those who had been gunned down, and soldiers lit cigarettes off the embers. That was before they fled east, before Jacithrew went strange. Orpaan had still loved him after he went strange, but he no longer said things that made sense. The night Crispin came had been the first time in over a year that Jacithrew had mentioned the pale people, who had once been the subject of endless discourses. One of the reasons Orpaan had liked Crispin was because of this seemingly restabilizing effect he had on Jacithrew.
Which had turned out to be a bad thing, too, in the end!
He sat frozen at the table. Rae hugged him so tight it hurt. Crispin’s struggles made everyone else flee the bar. Orpaan could not fend off the memory of Jacithrew lying in the ruins of his flying machine, nor could he fend off the far older memory of his parents’ and neighbors’ screams coming from beneath the ground, and the smoke. Usually he could make himself not think about those things, but now they met and mingled. He smelled burning daemons. He saw flames spilling out of the doors in the trees.
But it wasn’t Crispin’s fault!
Crispin! Oh, Crispin! He had knocked over a laden table, and his arm was bleeding freely. The barmaids had retreated to the far wall of the place, and they were passing a beer bottle among themselves, commenting on the fight. Orpaan’s lungs had seized up as they did when he was too frightened even to call his daemons. Amanse! Fremis! Sueras!
Had Crispin not stumbled through the roof... But the jolt to his and Jacithrew’s life had jolted Jacithrew’s addled brains, too. The old mania had taken him, the mania which had made him an outcast within their village, humored but despised. Jacithrew meant The Old Man Who Wants To Be A Soldier. He was so named because it was his obsession to be able to fly. The night Crispin came, he had sat cackling by the fire until dawn, and the next morning, to Orpaan’s horror, he had started work on the flying machine again.
The villagers had feared the soldiers, but not taken their threats seriously. At the water festival a man had dressed up as a soldier and people pelted him with pine cones.
Then the forest-clearing troops came, and nobody laughed any more.
With a scream Orpaan broke away from Rae and ran outside.
The sun was shining brilliantly. A group of children were shooting ball bearings for marbles in the dust. Orpaan dashed across the street and around a daemon tank with enormous, chain-ringed wheels. They shouted at him and scrambled to their feet. He knew he had knocked the game apart; he hoped they weren’t angry. Across the street, a soldier came out of the tavern. “Kid! Where the fuck did ‘e go?”
“Hide me,” Orpaan begged the biggest boy, who was lanky and pinched-faced, dressed like the others in ragged shorts. His skin was so tanned—or so dirty—it was nearly black. Like the others, he smelled of sweat and filth. “They’re killing my Dadda!” A mist of transparent bubbles rose and fell in front of his eyes. He felt as though he were going to faint.
The boy looked down at Orpaan. “You ain’t got no Dadda,” he said contemptuously. “No one ain’t got no Dadda.”
Scrupulously truthful, nearly in tears, Orpaan said, “Well, he isn’t really my Dadda, but he tends after me. And they’re hurting him. My Mama’s there, but she can’t do anything! Please, please—”
“T’ain’t your Mama, is it?” a girl said with a giggle. She pointed at the door of the tavern where Rae stood with her hands over her mouth, trying to see between the soldiers in front of her. “She white as paper!”
“Pretty lady,” said another girl.
“Well, she’s Kirekuni.” Orpaan fell over himself trying to explain. Why didn’t they understand the emergency? He wanted to flee back into the tavern, try and pull the soldiers off Crispin by main force, but he had started this, and now he had to finish it. He sensed that the children would turn nasty faster than you might spin a knife in the air. “She’s not really my Mama either but she—”
“Kirekuni!” two or three girls sang. Their hair fell to their knees in knotted masses. Even through his fright and dizziness Orpaan understood that they were singing softly so that the soldiers should not hear. “Long-tail rat-ass bone-face lady! Mouse-lady! Lizard-lady! Kire-cunt cunt cunt!”
Orpaan let out a sob, and tried to steady his voice. “I have daemons! Shut up ‘bout my Mama, or you’ll get it!”
“He has daemons.”
“Sure he has daemons.”
“You don’t come out of the Waste, you come from Bennett’s Shadowtown, you all fronting,” said the littlest boy spitefully. “No guts.”
“Show us them then, you baby prick,” said the tallest boy. Orpaan felt a sting on the back of his neck, and knew someone had shied a ball bearing at him. He didn’t turn around. “All right!” There was another sting, on his leg. “Amanse,” he added softly, frowning as he drew the daemon toward him. The three had not followed at his heels, the way they usually did: they were hovering invisibly in the middle of the street, raising little puffs of dust as they snapped up the lizards that scuttled there. “Amanse. Amanse.”
Eight feet of green-furred muscle slid out of the air. “Special convoy!” she shouted shrilly. “Troop 170 Dragon to SP13! Eddie Brickett’s gone south, haven’t you heard?”
The kids yelled in disbelief. Amanse interpreted this as a threat to Orpaan, and dug both hands into the tall boy’s arm, twisting with her nails until she had ripped away a chunk of flesh. Meanwhile, she rubbed her bottom against Orpaan’s middle in greeting. The tall boy screamed and backed away until he fell against the tank. His arm was gouting blood. Two of the girls rushed to him. Orpaan screamed, too, in horror. “Amanse! It’s not my fault, it’s not my—”
Someone growled in anger, and Orpaan was borne forward into the dirt. “Armaments 54 secure and present, sir!” Amanse shrieked, and Orpaan heard her teeth meeting with a crunch in human flesh, and the weight came off Orpaan’s back for a minute, but then returned with a thud, winding him. Something crunched in his chest. His forehead banged rock.
The soldiers had handcuffed Crispin and they were frog-marching him out of the tavern, but the beast would not go quietly. It snarled at the sergeant and wrenched out of its captors’ grip, out into the sunlight. Momentarily blinded, it shook its head and made a noise of fury. Even the sun was its enemy. Fight, fight, fight!
Orpaan lay unmoving on the other side of the street, blood on his skull and torso,
The beast rushed out of Crispin as quickly as a fire’s heat when a door is opened.
A troop of soldiers leaned against a truck fifty yards away. Bright eyes watched from the windows of a half-charred house. Small brown hands gripped the windowsills. Crispin heard the children commenting on his stupidity.
The soldiers jostled up on either side of him, but he dashed away from them, across the street. “Orpie!” No response. Crispin dropped to his knees beside the small, inert body. His inability to free his hands frustrated him beyond words. Like a dog lapping water, he bent and laid his cheek on Orpaan’s back. He tasted blood. It was bitter, and still warm.
The child was dead. The brilliance of the sun dissolved into diamonds. Crispin shouted. The caterpillars of the tank in front of him gleamed like a mosaic, an unreadable message encoded in the lost language of objects from whatever power had allowed a child to be killed this way. There was no explanation for the blood pooling sticky and black in the dust. No explanation for the blood on Crispin’s fingers and lips. No explanation for the vast, metal-scored sapphire of the sky. No explanation for the handcuffs biting into his wrists or the soldiers yanking him to his feet.
He twisted against them with growing desperation. Must make amends to Orpaan, must avenge him, but what could he do, what could he do? Half an hour ago there had been Rae, and with her beside him he could have done anything, but they had taken her away, Queen knew to where, Queen knew whether he would ever see her again! The small dark face, half-pressed into the dust, had no expression on it. Orpaan’s life had been too short and too much scarred by violence to have been happy. But recently—recently, despite the direness of their circumstances—Crispin had often thought he glimpsed a look of peace on the child’s face. If that were true, all the efforts Crispin had made on Orpaan’s behalf, which Rae had sometimes intimated to him were pointless, would have been worthwhile. But now he would never know.
From within the house came the sound of children’s laughter, wild and merry, and something struck Crispin on the cheek. A ball bearing. It bounced into the middle of the road. Crispin roared and pulled free of the soldiers, who were so startled they actually let go, and plunged toward the house. Inside, feet thudded up creaking stairs. “You little bastards! I’ll get you! Yeah, run, go on, you can’t get away—”
The soldiers had him again, seven of them shoving all around him, and this time they made no attempt to avoid injuring him. It was all he could do not to shriek as they pulled his hands up behind his back and kicked his ankles with steel-tipped boots. Finally the epauletted officer intervened. “That’ll be all,” he said in his dry voice. “We want him able to walk. Intelligence has enough on their hands without sending an ambulance to Pilkinson’s Shadowtown for an arrest of no consequence like this one.”
“I’ll give you no consequence,” Crispin snarled. But the beast would not come back. The sergeant laughed and strode off. Crispin was pushed after him. Unutterably weary, he let his head drop between his shoulders and his eyes go out of focus, until a buffet of cold wind alerted him to the fact that they had come out from between the houses. He looked up.
It was the first real sight he had had of the Raw. The sky dwarfed everything on the ground. It was the hugest sky he’d ever seen, and the cleanest.
In the south, the sky was white-hot and creamy. In the north, a clear sunny day came maybe once every ten years. In the east, appropriately enough considering the general temperament of the people there, the heavens were pure brass. Only in the heart of Ferupe (remember that glorious summer) had Crispin seen skies like this. A dome of pure lapis lazuli, unmarred by a single cumulus. Only the silver sky beetles in hot pursuit of each other, and burning streaks of red and yellow and blue and green arcing up from the horizon to catch them. They tracked their fiery dance across the inside of his head as he looked from the sky to the man-made badlands below. The landscape was cluttered with various buildings—abandoned settlements? military bases? and a pale brown road wound out into the hilly plain. There was no telling how far the desuetude spread. But the sharp gray shadows of mountains on the horizon looked no taller than the first joint of Crispin’s index finger. The plain must be at least two hundred miles across.
Nothing moved out among the burnt-out buildings. There were dryland cypresses and baobabs. A few pines. Juniper and eyebright crawled at Crispin’s feet, and creepers hazed the outlines of the rocks and ruins.
Could the fauna be as sparse as the greenery? If so, he had reached heaven.
Since he, Rae, and Orpaan came out of the last straggling bit of the woods into Pilkinson’s Shadowtown, the throb of too many daemons had mercifully faded. Although the occult world was quiet, the mundane wasn’t. The wind sighed and moaned over the bare desert with an insistency which spoke of never ever letting up.
The soldiers pulled Crispin toward a jeep which was idling on the road into the plain and pushed him under the tarp roof. Two of them got in after him and made him sit down with his back to the cab. The other five reached in to cuff him a few times for good luck, then moved off down the road toward Shadowtown.
“Bet you liked having me helpless, huh?” Crispin shouted after them, maddened by the punches. “Bet there’s a shitload else you’d like to do to me—cowards!”
One private turned and spat, but none of the others paid any attention. The soldier on Crispin’s left, a fat gingery fellow, slapped him on the side of the head. Through the dinning in his ears he heard the epauletted officer getting into the front of the jeep, speaking to the driver. Then the daemon whined in protest, and the jeep jolted into motion.
The naked land peeled away on either side of the road. Crispin felt sick: it was going backwards.
There was a crack between the tarp that covered the back of the jeep and the cabin. He tipped his head back. The metal lip dug into the back of his neck. High in the sky, a plane swung and dived. Another came after it, and there was the faint stammer of gunfire.
His heart pounded in his throat. The taste of spring embittered the wind.
Nothing about us except our neediness is, in this life, permanent.
—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves