15 Jevanary 1896 A.D. The Raw: Cerelon’s Shadowtown
“ So how’s it going?” Butch said immediately, peering at Crispin as if he expected there to be something wrong with him.
“What do you mean, how’s it going?”
They were in the Officers’ Club in Cerelon. Crispin had arrived with Commandant Lennox, who had invited him for drinks at XII Base and then in town. Lennox said everyone who was anyone in the air force would be there: this was the monthly occasion when nearly all the captains and commandants got together and got drunk. The general briefing meeting the next day was known as the world’s best cure for a hangover. Crispin had tried to get out of attending the night before, but finally he had caved in to Lennox’s insistence. When they arrived at the club, Lennox had been swooped up by a crowd of colleagues, and Crispin, not knowing anyone, had felt somewhat out of things until he spotted Butch on the other side of the room.
This was the first time he had seen Butch since leaving the Lovoshire Parallel. He hadn’t been off base for a month—he could hardly believe it now, but the days went by so fast—knocking the squadron into shape. He had not let them know it, of course, but when he first took two crews of them on an offensive mission, their shoddy formation flight and poor aim had appalled him. They had lost two men, and only managed to strafe their target—a battalion of Kirekuni ground troops—once before they had to run for home.
“Everything’s going great guns!” he told Butch.
Butch looked shifty and stirred his martini. “How’re you getting on with the boys?”
“Marvelously! And you?”
“Takes some getting used to, but now I’ve promoted Lance and Potter and Jansson to lieutenant, it’s not half-bad. Are you sure you—”
“What’d you do with the old lieutenants?”
“Demoted ‘em, of course,” Butch said, puzzled.
Crispin bit back the caution that sprang to his lips. He would never have dreamed of demoting any of the lieutenants he had inherited from Jimenez. And none of the crewmen he’d brought from Lovoshire expected promotions, either. The barrier of class prevented them from even thinking about it. Potter was the only one who might have got difficult; that was why Crispin had not been sorry, in the end, to hand him over to Butch.
“Good, no, that’s good, everything’s going swimmingly,” he repeated while he wondered what was going on in Butch’s mind.
The Officers’ Club consisted of several small rooms for gambling, snooker, and private conversation, a supper room, a roof terrace where receptions were held in better weather, and a large indoor clubroom with a bar in the corner. In the center of the room stood a curious sculpture: a cylindrical daemon glare taller than a man, its glass smoked to soften the light, around which a crystal bead curtain fell forever downward, sparkling, throwing prismatic light through the fog of tobacco smoke. Crispin hadn’t been able to resist examining it up close. He had discovered that the “beads” were actually drops of water that slid down needle-thin rods to the base of the sculpture, and were recycled up to the top again. The ornament provided the only light in the room, although unlit daemon chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls were polished paneling. Potted trees stood here and there, between fat leather armchairs. Considering what city the club was in, considering the pasts and futures that enclosed every officer like a nacreous, impermeable shell, the atmosphere was astonishingly festive. Probably it was because they were all so drunk. Crispin had held off on the cognac, wanting to keep his head, but Lennox had been quite tipsy by the time they arrived, and from the fixed, insectile limpidity of Butch’s gaze, Crispin guessed he was pretty far gone, too.
“Couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Butch said now, intensely. “After what I heard.”
“What?”
“One-thirty! It’s the worst squadron in the whole parallel. It’s got an absolutely terrible reputation.”
“Terrible reputations seem to be my lot in life, don’t they?” Crispin knew this side of his friend. Butch was capable of fixating on an unfounded rumor or supposition and letting it consume him. “Finding out the truth behind them, I mean. I haven’t heard the rumors, but there’s nothing wrong with the men. They’re willing and competent. Their last captain was a brainless idiot, but nothing’s broken that I can’t fix. According to the record our weekly tallies are already higher than they were under Jimenez. I had a spot of trouble the first day, but that’s water under the bridge now.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“What do you think?” Crispin gave Butch a wry look.
“I knew it!”
“Well, what else? Be reasonable.”
“Cris, I was worried,” Butch said all in a rush. He was very drunk, Crispin saw now. “I heard about your squadron. The worst possible assignment you could’ve been given. One-thirty’s last captain, he was a southeasterner, right, and they said he had Lamaroon blood, too, he was curly-headed, browner than a Cypean! And you know the way regulars’ minds work! It was completely unnecessary to send you there!”
“They must’ve thought they were fucking cursed,” Crispin said, keeping his voice light. “It’s a good thing I didn’t know that, or I’d never’ve had the guts to deal with them the way I did.”
“You got screwed!” Butch said. “Someone—”
“Did it deliberately. Yeah... ”
The room was a sea of noise and smoke, the talk of the officers and Wraith girls so heavily punctuated with laughter that Crispin had a momentary flashback to the evening he’d spent in the pit of the Old Linny Music Hall in Valestock, Lovoshire. The atmosphere was the same here, except for the cultivated accents and the violence of their educated repartee, each word a bludgeon designed to bruise and wound. Even when QAF officers were off duty, they were still at war.
A party of officers was bearing down on Crispin and Butch where they stood by the wall.
“Someone wanted me to fuck up,” Crispin said finally. “Whoa.”
Butch rolled his eyes. “if you’re going to start on Vee again—”
“You bloody well told me yourself that One-thirty was the last place any reasonable commandant would’ve posted me! He’s trying to see how much I can take. He’s trying to break me.”
“Mistakes happen,” Butch said. His eyes were wide and strange. He gulped the last of his martini. “Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Just had to find out how you were getting along, that’s all. Forget it—” He swung toward the approaching officers, holding out both hands. “Collins! Allendez! Guterman! Let me introduce you to—”
The way the captains brushed him off was expert, Crispin thought. Their tones held just the right mixture of heartiness and indifference. Before he knew what was happening, he and Butch had been separated, and Crispin had been introduced all around and was caught up in a party of men by the bar arguing raucously over aerial strategy, and Butch was still standing by the wall, half-hidden behind a potted miniature elm, an unreadable expression on his face. He looked as if he had just bitten into a sour olive.
Before long Crispin found himself a center of attention. It was as if now that his colleagues had decided to include him, they were going the whole hog. Vichuisse was there; Crispin felt a thread of pleasure when it became apparent that the Salzeim officers weren’t paying half as much attention to the commandant as they were to him, a lowly captain. In fact the other commandants seemed to make no secret of the fact that they found Vichuisse tiresome. If Crispin had been them, he would have felt the same, and might not have managed to conceal it as well: he had never seen Vichuisse so ingratiating, or heard his laugh so whinnying. To Crispin, the commandants’ talk or strategy was fascinating and informative. But Vichuisse kept silent when the rest were discussing the war, breaking in only when the topic shifted to who had made what faux pas or been seen with what young pilot. The captains kept their faces expressionless at such times; Lennox, Figueroa, and Hawthorne maintained a semblance of weary interest.
for the second time in his life, Crispin came close to feeling sorry for Vichuisse. The commandant was not stupid. He could not fail to be aware that he was being disrespected.
And why were they hanging on his, Crispin’s, words, and plying him with drink? Probably it was just because he was a new face in a crowd of old ones. And maybe they hoped he could replace Captain Eastre, who had been killed earlier in the month after being a favorite of his colleagues for six years, and who had to all accounts been a fabulous wit.
Crispin had a natural wariness of getting drunk, and he’d already had too much, really. He lit another cigarette and leaned toward Salemantle, a captain of Lennox’s who seemed more intelligent than most of them. “You were surrounded over no-man’s-land? Have to hear how you got out of that one. Never know when it might happen to me. Knock wood.”
“Knock. See, I have these signals for my wingmen. I carry noise flares, and I set them off when things are getting bad. One for ‘every man for himself,’ two for ‘by me,’ and so on.”
“Useful trick!”
“Try it! It works! So I signal them to clear off up out of it. They told me later they thought I’d gone mad, but they did it. That left me alone in the middle of the lizards—”
There was a disturbance by the door, and Crispin and Salemantle turned with the rest. A tall, thin man came in, taking off his overcoat, passing it to a servant. His hair and trouser bottoms were wet with rain. Though Crispin had never seen him smile so widely before, he recognized that face: it was Sublieutenant-Marshal James Duncan, arriving late.
“Duncan!” Vichuisse got up and hurried toward him. “My dear man! We thought you weren’t coming!”
Duncan cut him dead. He walked straight past him and shook the hands of the less obtrusive commandants Figueroa, Lennox, and Hawthorne.
“Kateralbin!” Now Duncan was facing him, beaming. Crispin stood and automatically shook the sublieutenant-marshal’s hand. “I wasn’t going to come tonight, but I wanted to see you. Congratulations on your successes!”
“Thank you, sir—it’s only been a month,” Crispin stammered. “
Nonetheless! We all thought One-thirty Squadron was beyond redemption. And your four-shift plan is working out rather well.” Crispin glanced involuntarily at Vichuisse.
“Tony told me the idea originated with you,” Duncan said. “Upright of him, eh? Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson plans to extend the system to the rest of the sector, and possibly the entire parallel, depending on whether tallies continue to improve. It’s a viable alternative to increasing squadron size, a measure we have been debating for some time. We have only lost one ranking officer under this system, and that was Captain Eastre; but that was nothing to do with you. In fact, if we were to blame anyone for Eastre’s death, it would have to be the officer who was flying command with him.”
That had been Vichuisse.
“Eastre was a man of great competence. It is regrettable. But all in all, losses are down and kills up.”
“Thank you again, sir!” Crispin’s mind was whirling.
Duncan turned to Vichuisse, bold-faced. “And my congratulations to you, Tony, for your shrewd choice of captains! I have heard good reports of Kateralbin, obviously, but also of Keynes. Is he here? I should like to speak with him, too.”
Everyone watched while Duncan found Butch and congratulated him with the same effusion he had used toward Crispin. Then the sublieutenant-marshal moved on to the next man. It became apparent that he was making a point of speaking individually with every officer in the room. The knot in Crispin’s stomach loosened. He even felt a touch of pride. Duncan had approached him first! That had to be a mark of honor.
It took the best part of an hour for the sublieutenant-marshal to make the rounds of everyone in the club, including the bargirls. By the time Duncan and Vichuisse could be seen retiring to a corner, Crispin was enjoying his third whiskey and soda, and paying less attention to the political undercurrents of the party than before. But all the same, he cringed when he saw Vichuisse practically bobbing up and down before the sublieutenant-marshal. It was obvious that Duncan was criticizing Vichuisse for his role in Eastre’s death. But still. He has no sense of self-respect! Crispin thought in disgust, not for the first time.
He slumped back in his armchair and took a long swig of liquor. No one seemed to hold Vichuisse against him, or against Butch, Emthraze, or Burns; but he could not escape the feeling that in shaming himself, Vichuisse shamed his captains, too.
The officers occupying the circle of armchairs they had drawn up were arguing, hotly and illogically, over the merits of screamers from different local factories. Captain Emthraze, who had been hovering near Crispin most of the evening, leaned toward him and said in an undertone, “That was quite a dressing-down Duncan gave him!”
“I couldn’t hear. How do you know?”
“Oh, I know Duncan! He doesn’t mince his words. But on the other hand, I don’t know Vichuisse. He was your captain; you’re far more familiar with his ways than Burns or Salemantle or I. What do you think?”
“Of Vichuisse?”
“Mmm.”
Crispin narrowed his eyes at Emthraze. The intelligent dark face puckered with earnestness. Emthraze didn’t look as if he were trying to trap Crispin. But if he wasn’t, what did he want? A southerner (so it was said) from an ancient, molding aristocratic house, Emthraze had so far joined in the carousal with less gusto than the rest. In flight, he was a solid team player, lacking the competitiveness which had been Eastre’s downfall. If anyone around here knew about keeping his mouth shut, it would be Emthraze.
And yet-
Crispin’s loyalty to Vichuisse was stronger than he had known. It swayed him.
“Why don’t you ask Keynes? He’s over there.” Crispin jerked a thumb at the corner where Butch sat nursing a drink in silence.
“We’ve already asked him. He seems perfectly reliable.” And weak-spirited, said the rueful smile on Emthraze’s face. “It’s you who hasn’t committed one way or the other.”
One way or the other? “What’s that supposed to mean?” Emthraze just smiled.
“What did Keynes say then?” Crispin tried.
“We are all in agreement.”
Crispin was silent. Matters political had to be communicated through manner and deference (or lack of it), not words. Anything else would have been suicide. That, of course, was why Emthraze was being so vague. But it all came down to politics in the end. The rest of the captains were banging their fists good-humoredly on their armchairs as they argued. The Wraith girls behind the bar looked exhausted. The air was sour with smoke. Emthraze regarded him with serious brown eyes.
In his drunken state Crispin knew it would be very easy to commit himself to words he would regret later. He took a sip of his drink. “Let me ask you—what did you think of our last commandant? Elliott?”
“Oh, Elliott... ” Emthraze shook his head. “No one could compare to him. His loss—a tragedy.” He seemed to mean it. “We were all certain Burns would get the appointment, but then... ” He let the sentence hang.
“Burns seems capable enough,” Crispin said. “I haven’t really spoken to him. Not man to man.”
And what can they do about Vichuisse now he’s got the commandancy? Crispin thought. Nothing. Why don’t they concentrate on scheming against the lizards, not each other? Honestly, sometimes I wish I was in the Kirekuni army—at least, according to Mickey, they respect their superiors! He drained his glass.
“He’s appropriately named,” Emthraze said. “Burns, that is. D’you know why?”
Flames...
“If he’s that teed off by not getting a promotion, I daresay he didn’t deserve one in the first place,” Crispin said. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“We wouldn’t have cared which of us got the promotion,” Emthraze called softly after him. “But when it’s a question of our men’s lives, and influence, not competence, determines the hierarchy, one has to wonder if—” Emthraze broke off, as if he realized that he was getting dangerously close to treason and that people could hear. “Kateralbin, just talk to Burns! I strongly suggest it.”
“Tomorrow, all right?” Crispin called over his shoulder. Without giving Emthraze a chance to reply, he circled the water-dripping sculpture to the corner where Butch sat alone.
Butch looked up. Even in the half-light, Crispin could see his eyes were bloodshot.
“Come on.”
Butch didn’t move. Crispin took his arms and pulled him to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this fancy-ass backbiting. Enough. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“Nor do I,” Butch said wonderingly.
“Let’s get shot of this dump.”
They made their good nights and left the Club; by common consent, they wandered out of headquarters. Cerelon after curfew was a miserable sight. The night was cold even for Jevanary, and drizzly. A fetid mist clouded the moonlight. Lacking any normalizing agency such as a comptroller’s office, Cerelon knew nothing of plumbing, running water, gas, or street cleaning. Unpaved and badly littered, the streets were really just twisting routes between the habitations which, over time, had encrusted the land between the Army HQ, the QAF HQ, the depots, and the metalworks. Few of them were wide enough to take a jeep. When they were on duty, soldiers stuck to the main thoroughfare. Off duty, they stole to the civil sectors like ferrets to a rabbit warren. The houses here were shabby, dark, and uninhabited-looking. A flash of light as a door was opened, or a burst of laughter from behind blackout shutters, betrayed the fact that Cerelon was packed as full of people as a Kingsburg slum. When Crispin drove through the city in daylight with Lennox, he had been struck by the grim tension in the air. It had taken him a few minutes to understand that there were no children in Cerelon. No one loitered, no one played in the gutters. Men and women scurried warily about their business, dead-eyed as Wraiths in Shadowtown. But even in Shadowtowns there were children. Cerelon had its Wraiths, of course, thousands of them; but except for a few madams, they did not live in the Ferupian sector. They had their own shantytowns on the outskirts. Like the Ferupians, their business was to bleed the soldiers of their temp pay. One had to wonder, Crispin thought as he and Butch passed a young Wraith woman and a private, arm in arm, where all the pay the soldiers frittered away went.
Butch looked after the pair as they passed into the dark. Crispin looked at Butch. “You know this place better than I do. Where’re we going?”
“To hell in a handbasket,” Butch said. “Fringetown’s crawling with half-breed kids. Lots of them are already grown-up, and they can pass. David Burns is one... ” He looked at Crispin, not too drunk for instant contrition. “You know what I mean.”
“I meant where are we going,” Crispin said.
Butch stopped walking and stared up at the moon. “My driver’s gonna collect me at dawn. I wasn’t thinking... Jeep’s parked back at HQ, but I don’t know where Waller’s at.” He tore his gaze from the white half shell in the sky and looked around the shadowed lane. “Around here somewhere, if I know him... ”
Crispin had no inclination to turn back to HQ. He started walking again. Butch followed, stumbling. Crispin steadied him and found that Butch needed the support; if Crispin let go, he would fall over. Butch’s heart was beating wildly. His breath seemed not so much labored as absentminded—as if at any moment he might forget to inhale. Crispin wrapped his arm around his back. The other’s body was as hot as the outside of a daemon cell after a five-hour flight. “We’d better sit down for a bit.” Crispin pulled him toward an outside staircase that zigzagged up the front of a two-story building.
“What, here, are you crazy? They’d have us in five minutest”
“They?”
“It’s after curfew, nobrain. You think just because there’s soldiers, there aren’t cat burglars and pickpockets and knife boys and suchlike scum, too?” Butch spat.
Crispin hadn’t thought. The exclusive society of pilots had deconditioned him to towns; but Cerelon was just as much a town as it was an army base—more the former, if anything. He adjusted their course so that they were walking in the shadows of the eaves. After a couple of minutes, warily surveying the side streets, he said, “Butch. What do you think of Emthraze?”
They turned a corner, passing a windowless building from within which came the notes of an accordion.
“He’s all right.”
“That it?”
Butch turned his face toward Crispin. His breath reeked. “Course not! A man’s a man, isn’t he? Course Sade’s got his thing, just like everyone else! But, Cris, I dunno—”
“Dunno—”
“Him and Burns and Salemantle... and I dunno who else. Lennox maybe. Though I can’t credit it. I can’t understand it. I don’t know why they won’t just leave me out of it.” Butch shook his head in anger. “I joined up to fly, by the Queen, not to play at conspiracies like some damned courtier!” He paused. “I was presented at court once, did I ever tell you that, Cris? Dad presented me. I didn’t hardly dare to look at her. It was June—”
“What year?”
“Queen, who can remember? I was eleven. No, ten, it was the year Cassie was born. My fifth sister. Squires’ wives have so many babies, Cris, more than commoners ever do. I’ve always thought that’s weird. Maybe it’s so there’ll be enough officers if they keep on enlarging the army the way they’re doing... I’m twenty-five. That means it was ‘81.”
“I was there, too,” Crispin said, laughing.
“At court?”
“No, in the suburbs with the circus. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show. Running around half-dressed—do you remember how hot the summer was in Kingsburg that year?—riding an elephant in a little Eo Ioriel getup in spec!” Crispin shook his head.
In the moonlight, Butch smiled. “I hated court! It was supposed to be a special treat that Dad was taking me along... he had to go and pay the copper taxes every year, but he usually took Edward, my oldest brother. The shit I had to wear was so stiff with rhinestones and embroidery I could hardly move. Had to kneel to everyone we saw. My knees hurt for weeks. Black-and-blue!”
“I don’t suppose your dad ever took you to the circus.”
“Queen, no! He’d sooner have taken me to an opium den. Or the music hall.”
My girl worked in the music hall, Crispin almost said, and then remembered he had to lie to Butch. A wave of sadness passed over him. As if sensing it, Butch squeezed his arm with his elbow and said frankly, “Nostalgia’s a bitch, huh?”
A crowd of people surged out of a doorway ahead of them, laughing and talking, and crossed the road to vanish as quickly as they had appeared. A sweet breath of incense hung for a moment on the rank air.
Butch squinted up at the sign, its colors muted in moonlight. “Look out for the Dancing Pig... that’s Waller’s spiritual home, that is!” As he spoke, he squeezed Crispin’s arm again, affectionately.
Crispin thought, Butch, I—
Butch, you’re drunk, drunk!
He shook his head, trying to clear it.
“Was the circus an amazing place?” Butch asked.
“What do you mean, amazing?”
“Sometimes I wish I’d been you. Where have I ever gone? One nasty, cold corner of Dewisson. Kingsburg. Training camp. And the fucking Raw. Growing up in the circus... that must’ve been something else.”
“Wasn’t all that. We went hungry. And we lived in the backs of trucks. And we worked like dogs. I was trained for the ring, and then as soon as I got bigger the ringmaster started me on heavy labor, and thank the Queen if I’d never had the chance to learn daemon handling I’d still be doing that. Killing myself to show people a good time.”
“But you’ve been everywhere. The south, the heartlands, the east, the west, the north, the cities! I never even thought about seeing other places before I met you.” He paused. “Too late now. Been thinking a lot lately about what I’ve missed... but it’s too late now.”
The night swirled like liquid around them. In the distance, over the grumble of the city, they could hear screamers shrilling. The flames had never been farther away; Crispin was completely rooted in the instant; and yet the awareness of death hanging over his head filled him with dread of the next instant, and the next. Adrenaline pounded through his body. His heart beat in a lumbering rhythm he could almost hear. “Daniel. I appreciate your confidence in me.”
“Friends to the end,” Butch said, and put his other arm around Crispin. It would have been an embrace except that they were both facing the empty street. For a fraction of a second everything mutated, eddying, and the street was the pathway of Crispin’s vision, lined with strange people in foreign clothes. The air coruscated. And who was that grinning as he vanished into an alley? But almost immediately Crispin was back in Cerelon. A woman started hoarsely to sing in a second-story room. Crispin sought Butch’s hand and gripped it clumsily.
“I thought you’d changed,” he said.
“You’re the one that’s changed,” Butch said seriously.
“Bullshit,” Crispin said, laughing, and pulled away. The sign over the nearest door bore rude script: the dancing bore. He couldn’t stop laughing. When Butch saw the sign he joined in, too. “Betcha this is your Waller’s hideaway!”
“It better be; I’m far too drunk to drive a daemon,” Butch said grimly, and they entered a bar misty with smoke, lit by daemon glares shaded with red cloth, packed with tables over which brown and white faces hung close together, smiling and sweating; but Waller was not among them; and as the patrons noticed Crispin and Butch’s captains’ bars (for everyone in Cerelon could read decorations, even if they couldn’t read books) and fell silent, they left, and found their way with some difficulty and a great many accusations of stupidity back to the QAF HQ, where they located Butch’s jeep and requisitioned a disapproving sentry to drive them to Air Base XV, five miles outside Cerelon. This he did with an appalling lack of control over the daemon, several times nearly overturning the jeep in potholes. When they reached XV it was 4:20 A.M. by Crispin’s pocket watch. The night patrol had returned and the dawn patrol taken off an hour ago. Apart from the noise of the wind over the Raw, all was silent. They kept their voices down as they slunk toward Butch’s quarters. Crispin did not want to be seen by any night-shift groundsmen: the plan had been for him to stay in town with Lennox. They entered the captain’s office. The blackout shutters had been pulled and everything was dark.
When they lay down to sleep after a substantial nightcap, Crispin realized just how drunk he was. Too drunk. Butch’s quarters were pitch-black. Crispin felt weightless, disoriented, as though he were lying on the top of the carousel Smithrebel’s had had when he was a child and it was spinning; he could hear the chiming national anthem it played, and yet his limbs were so heavy he couldn’t move. A leg lying across him, an arm under his neck. He was fully clothed except for his boots, and yet he felt cold. He wriggled closer against the warm body beside him. The person sighed and wrapped arms around him. Some impulse made Crispin turn his head to see the face on the pillow. Pale skin over jutting bones... thin-lipped mouth... it was Butch, of course. His friend. He had never had such a friend.
For an instant his head cleared, but the dizziness reclaimed him and he shifted closer to Butch, seeking warmth, the embrace, the safety of two-ness. Butch sighed again—asleep or not?—and hugged him so close that their faces touched and their legs entwined.
Friendship. This was all new.
Crispin had grown to manhood in the society of older men and women. There had been no boys his age in Smithrebel’s. And except for that one summer when he was fifteen, he had never known any local kids. Never had a friend before. Never. He wanted to tell Butch that, what he hadn’t been able to say earlier, when they were in Cerelon, but his mind was not working well enough, so he kissed him instead. He meant it as a cheek kiss but somehow it ended up a mouth kiss. And then came something he hadn’t felt in months: but it wasn’t urgent, it was only pleasurable... and Butch was kissing him back.
Crispin’s eyes fluttered closed.
Lips. Tongues. Warm and brandy-flavored. The strange familiarity of the male mouth.
Hands. Hands and mouths on skin that had never before seemed desirable.
Try as he might, afterward, torturing himself with the effort, he could not remember at what point he drifted asleep.
The next day, the captains, commandants, mistresses of the screamer factories, Sublieutenant-Marshal Duncan, and Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson of the Salzeim Parallel sat in the briefing room in QAF HQ. A dogfight was going on overhead. The city lay quiet, cowering. It would have been bad form to so much as glance out a window; the officers and trickster women kept their faces stony as they strained to hear Thraxsson’s voice over the noise. All the men were nursing hangovers. The women seemed more alert, but they did not speak. Two had a truculent, militant demeanor; the other looked browbeaten and rested her head on her hand. She wore the trickster woman’s traditional brown wool, where her companions wore feminine versions of QAF uniform.
The briefing was merely a formality; the offensive and the defensive would continue along the same lines as before. Except in terms of success or failure, which were not the concerns of this meeting, it made no difference that three of the officers at the table were new. Next month one or two more would have changed.
Crispin scribbled a few details of Thraxsson’s strategy on the flyleaf of a pamphlet containing exhortations to glory by the Queen, which he was supposed to read to his men. (Most of them were illiterate, as he had been.) He would receive a more comprehensive transcript from the shorthand clerk later. Butch, sitting on the other side of the table, would not meet his eyes. It was the first sign Crispin had received from him that the events of the night before could not simply be a forgotten indiscretion. Of course neither of them had said a word that morning. Treating the whole thing as a drunk dream, Crispin had more or less succeeded in putting it out of his mind. But the part of him that remembered was furious with Butch for acting so oddly. Did he want everyone to know?
But after the briefing, when the officers lit cigarettes and mingled around the table, Butch behaved quite normally, though he still would not look directly at Crispin. He even went so far as to introduce Crispin to Captain Burns.
“Delighted,” Burns said, his dark eyes level. Now that Crispin knew he was a Wraith half-breed, it was impossible to miss, although one could have taken him for a southerner, or a dark-haired easterner who had not been long out of the sun. He was in his late twenties. “I’m looking forward to flying with you, Captain. I like the four-shift plan. It means each of us will get a chance to see how the others operates.”
“You and I are flying patrol together next week,” Crispin said. “Unless there’s an emergency in the meantime.”
“Knock wood.” Burns’s voice was deep and carrying. He actually turned and rapped the briefing table with his knuckles, as if calling a meeting to attention. The conversation quieted.
To ease the awkward moment, Crispin said, “How long have you been in the parallel, Burns?”
“David, call me David. Long as I’ve been flying. Eleven years—twelve this summer.”
Crispin whistled. Burns’s face crinkled in a grin. “Pure luck.”
“I need some of the good kind! Come out to XXI when you’re free and we’ll discuss it over a beer or two,” Crispin invited him.
“Mmm, XXI!” Burns said in his loud voice. “I was stuck in that shithole for a year and a half! It was my first assignment.” He chuckled. “I’ll visit, but I won’t stay. I wish you the best of luck, Captain, because you’re gonna need the Queen’s intervention if you ever want to get out of there alive!”
Vichuisse was standing not five feet away, arms folded, watching them with an unreadable expression. Crispin made a horrified face at Burns.
“Yeah!” Burns went on, seemingly oblivious. “Sarehole! That base is right in the line of flight from one of the biggest Kirekuni air bases on the front to Cerelon. They used to fire-strafe us just for fun. We’d always be scrambling!”
“That hasn’t happened to me yet, but—”
“Must be because we’ve got a bunch of ace captains in our sector this year. You, me, Sade, Butch, and Alan Eastre was the very best of us, Queen keep his soul—we’re holding ‘em off.” Burns winked. Crispin nearly choked. The older man knew exactly what he was doing. “Because it’s certainly not due to the quality of our command, think you? I haven’t received a communiqué that made sense in weeks. And I know who Alan was flying with when he went down. The hierarchy these days... appalling! When a war drags on and on and on, the bureaucracy can get away with slack. They know they can drag their feet, the real men will carry them.”
Vichuisse walked away, his steps measured, clicking.
“No offense, Lieutenant-Marshal, I’m sure,” Burns added wickedly, pulling a face in the direction of Thraxsson, who was chatting with Lennox, Figueroa, Hawthorne, and the trickster women on the far side of the briefing room.
“Captain, I hope your luck is good.” Crispin shook his head. “You’re pushing it.”
And the smile vanished from Burns’s face, and Crispin remembered what Emthraze had said last night, that Burns was on fire. He could believe that now. He decided to trust the. Wraith-blooded captain.
“I hate him,” he murmured, jerking his head in the direction Vichuisse had gone. “I owe him everything—I came up from the ranks, did you know that? From rigger. He boosted me. And I hate him. You’ll probably think I’m an ungrateful sod—but, Queen’s body, I don’t need him anymore!” He shook his head, unable to put his distaste for Vichuisse into words. Right now he wanted to be flying. He wanted wind roaring past his ears and a KE-122 in his sights. He couldn’t bear another minute of this sticky crisscrossing web of plot and counterplot.
“None of us need him,” Burns said. “I came up from the ranks, too, and every promotion I’ve gained, I’ve had to fight men like him for it. I’ll take you up on that offer of hospitality. In a week or two, when I have space to breathe. They’re coming at us like gnats out at XVII right now.” He made warding-off gestures as if he were evading the Kirekunis where he stood. “And I’m gonna have to oversee Alan’s squadron, too, until they decide which of his lieutenants to promote... None of us need a millstone around our necks.”
And then the smile was back, for Commandant Figueroa had moved up to them with two captains from his sector.
Early that afternoon, Crispin flew solo back to Sarehole. Among other things, he considered Burns. He was dubious about the captain’s revolutionary talk—surely Vichuisse could not be that much worse a commandant than Elliott had been, or than Lennox, Figueroa, or Hawthorne? But all the same, Crispin liked Burns. He was clearly all there. Which was more than could be said for a lot of the fellows Crispin had met last night. Crispin had not trusted Emthraze or Duncan—or for that matter, Butch, the first time they met—the way he had instinctively trusted Burns. And since Butch was acting so strangely now...
The Raw scrolled past beneath Princess Anuei’s wings, moving as fast as a bolt of camouflage fabric unrolled down a hill. The daemon responded with gratifying sensitivity to the whipcord. It was a young, strong beast, and before coming to Sarehole Crispin had fed it personally, handpicking the healthiest splinterons from the seething barrels in the storerooms. Now he no longer had time for that, but he’d put the fear of the Queen into the riggers, and they seemed to be doing a good job. He ought to trade Princess Anuei for a Cerdres or a Killer Bee, a machine that suited his dignity, but he was putting it off—this kite was his. He’d rebuilt her in the scrap hangar of Pilkinson’s Air Base II. Of course she’d been refurbished countless times since then, but she was still Princess Anuei. One Anuei had brought him into the world; it would be fitting for another Anuei to accompany him out of it.
But not yet, Queen, not yet!
He flew close to the ground, jinking through lulls and blasts as the wind rushed over the hills, keeping an eye on the reflectors. The sky was as good as empty—a Ferupian patrol several miles to the north, nothing to worry about. From time to time, flames leapt up, orange and flickering, from hollows on the ground or from around the boles of trees. He was used to them—they came whenever he found himself alone—and he concentrated on ignoring them. The smell of open air braced him. Blowing from the battle lines, the wind was so cold it was spicy.
The noon patrol hadn’t yet returned, and the runway was clear when he landed at Sarehole in the middle of the afternoon. No damage seemed to have been done to the base while he was gone. Had it only been one day? Seemed like forever. A few pilots were up and about. They greeted him with delighted salutations.
He had gained his men’s liking as Vichuisse had never been able to. That in itself was a victory, he thought as he listened to his lieutenants’ reports later, sipping a brandy, keeping his counsel. Jones, Taft, Carnation, Kimble, and Hammersmith were all first-rate officers, and they trusted him.
But he had half-consciously come to accept what Burns had said: that his squadron, like Butch’s and Emthraze’s, like the late Eastre’s, could never live up to potential under their current command. Burns’s prognosis seemed truer yet when Crispin learned that Lieutenant Taft had lost two of his men, and sustained damage to his own Gorgonette, in an offensive mission he’d flown in conjunction with a crew of Vichuisse’s yesterday.
From rude darkness the hero rose; amid songs of praise, destiny chose him; in wind and dust, his three-foot sword, armor donned for the altars of the land; wings to his father, pure in civil virtue ...
—Tu Fu