2 Maia 1896 A.D.
Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches
The old Blacheim clattered westward across the sunlit ridges and shadowed gorges of the Raw Marches. Early that morning they had crossed into Kirekune.
It had taken Mickey most of the previous day to pilot the airborne banger across the resettled territories, the two-hundred-mile-wide band of pastureland that he now thought of, in Ferupian, as the Occupied Raw. He was afraid to push the sick old daemon too hard. At sunset he’d put her down in a goat pasture so Crispin could take over the whipcord. It had felt like setting foot for the first time in a strange country. Mickey’s memories of his year at Anno Marono, hundreds of miles to the south, flying Wedgehead with Izigonara’s 20th, seemed oddly distant, irrelevant to this emergency. So, too, did the Occupied Raw seem irrelevant to Mickey’s sense of urgency. They hadn’t yet escaped the war, but you’d never have known it. The grass was the same faded green it had been at Air Base XXI, Sarehole, the air just as soft. Something about the light of the setting sun flattened the landscape, giving the far-off mountains a look of stage scenery. The stream from which they refilled their canteens tasted of metal.
For a hundred years the Kirekuni Empire had been irrigating the former Wraithwaste as it captured it, saving the territory from desertification. Significant Disciples had built brand-new Anno villages and imported villagers from the Ochadou Plains west of the Raw Marches. Settlers and empire-expanding paraphernalia alike had to be either flown across or trucked south from the Teilsche and Lynche passes into Kirekune: the Marches were impassable by land. The Annos farthest from the war front were impoverished little hamlets where, despite the Disciples’ efforts, the Chadou engaged in the same sleepy struggle to survive that their countrymen did on the other side of the mountains.
It couldn’t have been less like the Raw that Mickey and Crispin had just left, that narrow strip of deforested, quickly parching land rife with military activity, buffered from the Wraithwaste only by the Shadowtowns. Mickey tried to tell Crispin they were more or less safe now. Kirekuni SAPpers and airmen stayed on their bases; they didn’t roam freely across what was after all land belonging to ordinary Kirekuni citizens. Crispin wouldn’t relinquish his conviction that the countryside was crawling with Disciples. And Mickey couldn’t blame him for being jumpy. They might be deserters, fleeing from Ferupe for dear life, but all a Disciple patrol would see was their QAF uniforms.
If so much as a harmless Chadou child had come on them while they rested and ate, Mickey suspected Crispin would have shot it. He kept touching his holstered daemon pistol as if it were a lucky charm. Even while he comforted the daemon, his face pressed against the warm wood of the Blacheim’s fuselage, his arms trying to hug its great curves, he’d kept on glancing around for danger. Didn’t he trust Mickey to alert him? Did he think Mickey had secretly turned into a lizard the minute his foot touched Kirekuni soil? Mickey was still a QAF pilot on a sortie. He was as careful as ever not to use his tail to grasp something when a hand would do as well—it was so important to impress on Crispin that now neither of them belonged to any air force, Mickey was on Crispin’s side. But Crispin hadn’t even noticed.
Below, the Blacheim’s shadow scudded across the jagged western slopes. Sitting idle in the rear cockpit, Mickey had to keep looking down at that shadow to remind himself where he was, what was happening. After twelve straight hours in the air he was starting to share the beast’s consciousness as if he were in the pilot’s seat, its pain and fear coloring his resurgent memories of the country to which he was returning.
He still wasn’t sure he should have come. He’d been going to stay at Air Base XXI to put Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson off the trail. He’d had it all planned out. He’d have claimed responsibility for shooting down Commandant Vichuisse, the incompetent whom everyone in the squadron had hated. Crispin would have been far away by then, flying high and free in his maneuverable little Gorgonette, Princess Anuei. And in Crispin’s absence, the traitorous Captain Burns of 96 Squadron would surely have settled for Mickey. He had to have someone to carry the can. It wouldn’t suit his purposes to blame Vichuisse’s death on the disastrous encounter with the enemy during which it had taken place. Merely having been the only survivor of a fiasco wouldn’t warrant the promotion of a man like Burns, a half-Wraith who’d worked his way up from the ranks. And it was promotion Burns craved. If he were to make commandant, he needed to be a hero-patriot, the best of the best of the best. And who’d make a more appropriate counterweight to balance his rise to power than Mickey, the Kirekuni turncoat whose traitorousness was, after all, an open secret, whose execution had merely been put on hold by the Bureau of Intelligence at Chressamo?
Staying in Ferupe to face his fate would have been the first noble thing Mickey had done in his life. And who more worthy of such a sacrifice than Crispin, the only genuinely principled man Mickey had ever known, the only man who didn’t have a cowardly bone in his body?
He should have expected that Crispin’s principles wouldn’t countenance Mickey’s dying for him!
Crispin hadn’t admitted it was a matter of principle, of course—he’d said he needed Mickey. Kirekune might as well be the dark side of the moon for all I know about it. Just how far d’you think I’d get in Okimako without someone who speaks the language? But he was just giving Mickey an honorable way out of going through with his plan to martyr himself. And Mickey had taken it. That was what he couldn’t forgive himself for. When he fired on Captain Burns yesterday morning, risking his life to save Crispin’s, he’d thought he was shaking his lily-livered monkey for good and for all—but the monkey had spoken, again, and dived down the first available bolt-hole. It was the coward in him who’d agreed to return to Kirekune. When he suffered such persecution and humiliation at the hands of 80 Squadron that he’d seriously considered suicide as a solution, the coward in him, Yozi, hadn’t let him take his own life. Yozi remembered Okimako and love and wine and sweet things. Yozi refused to believe that even if he did make it home, he’d find himself an outcast, an embarrassment to his family. And probably find himself being tried as a deserter from the SAF, too—that had been more than three years ago, but Significance could hold a grudge for three hundred.
The wind in the open cockpit was dry and cold. Mickey knew it was like an oven on the ground. West of the Raw Marches, Maia was summer, and summer meant murderous heat everywhere in Kirekune except perhaps on the northern plains, or on the western coast, where Mickey had never been. In Okimako in summer, the sewerlike Orange River was so full of people day and night there was practically no room for the water. In Okimako, in Kirekune. Ever since they flitted across no-man’s-land into enemy airspace late yesterday afternoon, Mickey had been aware the rules of the game were subtly altered.
And Crispin hadn’t spoken into the tube in hours. Mickey wanted to say something just to see if he’d respond. While they flew up the eastern slopes, the daemon wheezing in the thinning air, Crispin had issued a stream of instructions and brittle banter. But then they’d crossed the ridges. Sunlit knife edges standing up between canyons unfathomably deep, black as if they were filled with water, but no water anywhere; and then those gave way to slopes scored by deep gullies running east-west now instead of north-south. Occasional birds sailed by on the head wind. The daemon was tiring. Mickey could no longer pretend he wasn’t hearing it cough, snort, and roar in pain, its voice audible over the wind. It was too old. All Crispin’s coaxing had made no difference.
“—any ideas?” Crispin’s voice crackled through the tube.
“What? What did you say?”
“I said I don’t think there’s any way we can land here! Do you have any ideas?”
Mickey grabbed the speaking tube close to his ear. “Why do we have to land?” He wanted Crispin to say it. He glanced down through the slipstream at slopes and miniature cliffs, crags and dusty red gullies reduced by height to deceptively shallow wrinkles.
“Why d’you think? I can keep her in the air maybe another fifteen minutes.”
Mickey had thought his terror glands deactivated by exhaustion and nervous overload. He’d been wrong. “I don’t want to die!” he muttered aloud, “dammit, not now—”
“What? What? Speak up!”
“You couldn’t fit a motorbike down any of these valleys!”
“Well, the daemon’s senile: I might be able to convince it this crate is a motorbike...” Crispin’s voice wandered: he must be mentally wrestling to keep the daemon from giving up altogether.
“I’ve lost it!”
Curiously enough, the Blacheim felt steadier now that she was gliding. The altimeter needle plunged—800 feet; 700 feet. Crispin cursed steadily into the speaking tube. Mickey saw it then, some way behind them. A triangular valley. It looked like an open vise, but no one would have thought of landing on that rampart-construction site behind the Ferupian lines either, would they? “Bring her round,” he said, rapping on the tube to get Crispin’s attention. “A hundred-eighty degrees. Think you can manage it?”
“Bring her around? Where to?” Crispin howled. “Best bet’s to try and hold the glide and take our chances on the slopes!” But even so he was bringing her around in a tight banking curve, raising the starboard aileron and lowering the port one just a little so that the Blacheim swooped gracefully back the way she had come without losing unnecessary height. Mickey didn’t take his eyes off the dials. “Don’t overshoot! Do you see it?”
“A fucking hang glider couldn’t land in there!”
“Any other ideas?”
Mickey heard a short dry crackle, which, after a moment, he identified as laughter. “All right, say your prayers!” He knew better than to speak again. Their lives depended on Crispin’s manipulation of the plane. From this low the valley looked reassuringly wide. The question was whether, as the tall rock cliffs drew closer together at the eastern end, it remained wide enough to provide a long enough taxi. The instruments showed the tail wind as a frightening thirty knots. Mickey had a horrible vision of both the Blacheim’s wingtips plowing into the sides of the canyon and the fuselage tearing like the body of a butterfly with its wings ripped off by a capricious child. He wanted to close his eyes, but he remembered Crispin saying yesterday evening as the sun set over the Occupied Raw, setting grass and trees and aircraft all on fire: If nothing else, I want to see my death coming and spit in its eye—
His hands checked his harness. He could hear the wind singing over the rocks, a thin loud bell-like sound that wavered up and down a scale of four or five notes, distinct from the roar of the Blacheim cutting through the air. The aircraft entered the mouth of the canyon at precisely the same moment as the landing gear touched rock. Mickey caught his breath in awe. There was at least fifty feet clear off either wing. Touch; bounce, bounce, touch and rip of rubber tearing away; scream of brakes and the clank of the wing flaps snapping down. “Sweet Queen,” Crispin gasped into Mickey’s ear. “I’m gonna fuck it up—it’s gone...”
Mickey said nothing. He knew they were safe. That very first touch had installed in him a sense of security. Scream, shriek, plunge, and halt. The starboard wingtip was six inches from the cliff.
2 Maia 1896 A.D. 11:30 P.M.
Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches
“Out of the frying pan into the bloody Queen’s Birthday bonfire.”
Crispin exhaled a white plume of smoke, staring out from the mouth of the valley over the seemingly endless expanses of the twilit foothills. Now they were west of the Marches, day lasted longer—the sun couldn’t just duck below the mountains, it had to trace a long, excruciating descent to the horizon. This high up, the air wasn’t hot as Mickey had expected, but dry. The sun and wind leached every drop of moisture from the body. He had seldom been gladder of nightfall.
He usually permitted himself to use his tail in the lighting of cigarettes, but after glancing at Crispin, he struck the steel on the rock with his right hand, awkwardly. The Queen’s Air Force had cured him of left-handedness. As a result, he’d probably be clumsy for the rest of his life; maybe it was just as well that looked to be a very short time. He said, “You’re talking as though it’s hopeless.”
“If you can see a glimmer, you have sharper eyes than I do.”
Mickey glanced back into the gully. The Blacheim stood on its torn-up wheels at the end of the canyon like the ungainly flying bomb box it was. A mystery how it had ever taken off in the first place.
“That daemon’s a lost cause. Good night, Gramps. We can while away our last days composing its eulogy.”
They had both tried talking to it and got no response. Mickey had poked his head inside the engine cavity and removed the hatch of its cell, expecting a lash of power to blind him—but nothing happened. Through the silver mesh he saw it crouching cramped, a giant in solitary confinement, hands hanging over wrinkled yellow knees, head sunk to scaly chest. Judicious poking with a silver screwdriver had made it snarl, but when he pushed a wriggling splinteron through the feed hole in the mesh, it hadn’t reacted, allowing its intended prey to scramble freely about the cell and even swing on its long, matted black hair.
“You can’t give up now,” he insisted, feeling simultaneously desperate and put-upon. What right had Crispin to get fatalistic?
Crispin leaned against the corner of the cliff. “Did you know humans can eat daemon meat? Don’t look at me like that. I did, once. We could survive quite a long time on the splinterons, and if it dies, that should be enough to get us to the plains.”
Mickey couldn’t tell whether Crispin was joking. “We don’t have enough water.”
“No.” Crispin looked up at the sky, exhaling smoke. “Stars’re coming out, look.” His voice was thoughtful. “Mick, d’you ever find yourself forgetting things that weren’t all that long ago, accidentally on purpose, like?”
Mickey flashed on Izigonara’s 20th, hearing catcalls when he walked by the gunners’ barracks. Miki...miki-noko. They made it sound like night birds, trilling in falsetto. If you didn’t know what they were saying, you wouldn’t have understood. Birds. Or cats. Miki...He frowned at Crispin, wondering what he meant. Significant, a man could lose his mind over that face! Crispin looked even more exotic now than he did in daylight—almost like a full-blood Lamaroon. The lips did it. Wide, perfectly defined, and in the gloom you couldn’t see that they were cracked from the wind. A man could lose his mind—or his heart—
“Don’t stare at me like that!” Crispin threw away his cigarette and pushed himself upright. “Why don’t you do some thinking for yourself for a change? I’m not a hero! Never have been, not, and never will be! So don’t look at me like I’m going to come up with a way out of this!”
Maybe not, but you’re still my hero, Mickey thought. He shook his head, half-smiling, and retreated a couple of paces defensively.
“Say something, dammit, or I’ll have to say it for you. The way you look at me...” Crispin shook his head. “Did you hear that? I’m getting to be as bad as you! Reading shit into people!”
Mickey had never known anyone less predictable. Was that what goodness was? Unpredictability? Because for some reason he couldn’t disabuse himself of the belief that Crispin was good.
“But you were right about Burns. And I never saw it. Didn’t see it until it was on top of me. Queen, I was so blind!”
Mickey said aloud, “Have you considered that maybe what you call blindness is a function of goodness?”
“If so, I’ll pass!”
“So do you think you were wrong to trust Burns?”
“Hasn’t that been made abundantly clear by now?”
“Well, no. Materially, yes, I suppose so.” Mickey glanced around at the dark canyon, and out to the west. Night concealed the foothills utterly. “But morally you were right to trust him, and he was wrong to betray you.”
“The bloodsucking double-crossing half-breed,” Crispin said halfheartedly. “And you’ve dodged the issue of whether we were both wrong in the first place.” He was silent for a time; then, just as Mickey wondered whether he’d fallen asleep, or fallen off the side of the mountain, his voice wandered out of the darkness again, so deep and bitter Mickey’s skin tingled. “I’ve had it up to here with morality, Mick. I’ll tell you something. I was thinking in terms of morality, too, even at the time. I saw myself as being in the right. Vichuisse was in the wrong, simply because he was incapable of effective leadership. I was acting on behalf of all our men. I was selfless, I didn’t want the commandancy, I just wanted justice for the regulars and for all the friends I’d lost to his incompetence; I was a crusader, dammit!” He laughed unpleasantly. “In other words I was a fool. Don’t say anything!”
Mickey closed his mouth. He had indeed been about to protest, but it was merely an automatic reaction.
“It was personal from the word go. You were right about that. But you don’t know how long it had been going on. It was personal from the day Vichuisse first picked me out and made me a pilot. It was personal from the day I was arrested in Shadowtown. Those Intelligence bastards! They tell you you’re fighting for Ferupe and for the Queen and for honor and glory and so damn on and so forth, but that’s a load of daemon shit. It’s all schemes and strategies and power plays whether you’re a slop boy or a general. You against me, me against you, man against man, man against woman...My mistake, my transgression, was buying into Burns’s scheme. I should have seen where things were at right from the beginning. Every man for himself is where it’s at—and as for honor; it’s just as much a scam as the pension, because ninety-nine percent of those poor sods back on bases won’t ever get within spitting distance of it. And I’m not having none of it from now on.”
Mickey had an idea Crispin was not speaking to him at all, but he couldn’t let the captain’s tirade pass without comment. “I never had any ideals,” he said. “I didn’t join the Disciples because I was a patriot. It was because someone had broken my heart, and I never wanted to see him again.” The minute he said it he could have kicked himself.
But Crispin didn’t even seem to have heard. “No more of it! Whoever is without ideals, he’s got a head or two on his shoulders? And, Mick, that shit about virtue you were spouting a while back? Seems to me it all boils down to goodness being the same thing as having more illusions than the next man. Which is a fair definition of stupidity! Hah!”
Mickey gathered his thoughts, which had scattered like pigeons from a rooftop. “That’s beside the point. What interests me is the question of what you’re proposing to substitute for illusions. If, mind you, they are illusions, which I still don’t buy.”
“You’ll buy it soon enough when we start fighting over the last drink of water,” Crispin said.
Mickey chose not to have heard that. “Answer me that. If goodness is an illusion, then what’s behind it?”
Evil. He waited to hear it. But Crispin was apparently not angry enough to fall into that trap. Mickey heard him shifting against the cliff, ten feet away in the darkness. “I don’t know. Honestly, Mick, I don’t. Whatever’s left, I suppose.”
“And that is?”
Silence.
“Crispin!”
Scratch, and the blue spark of steel on stone. The tip of a cigarette glowed orange. As Crispin drew on it, his face leapt out of the darkness, and the smoke showed up as a white visible cloud. “Something that isn’t any of your business, Pilot.”
Crispin had pulled rank. Mickey heard his voice come out clipped. “Might as well sleep while it’s dark, mightn’t we, sir? Time enough for talk tomorrow.”
“Time enough for fuck-all tomorrow,” Crispin said. “I’m getting that kite in the air if it’s the last thing I do.”
“With or without me, I presume,” Mickey said angrily. Not since he was a child had he walked out on a contretemps: he’d always been the one left with the sentence half-finished, the conciliatory gift still in pocket, watching the door swinging, in the ringing silence peculiar to the ten seconds after a parting blow. But now he spun and walked down the canyon, his ears buzzing with hatred. Halfway to the aircraft, he turned and shouted, “Maybe there is something to be said for being dragged up in a circus! It gives you quite a way with words!”
“Oh, I wasn’t putting my mind to it,” Crispin called after him, sounding completely unperturbed. “If I had been, you’d have known! And anyway, I don’t do my fighting with words, unlike some people!”
Crispin must have heard, and taken in, what Mickey had involuntarily said about having his heart broken. Mickey could think of no other reason for him to have turned so horrible. He must have thought Mickey was leading up to something. It’s one thing to guess about a person (and within the boundaries of taste, Mickey had never tried to hide anything) and quite another thing to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Child! he told himself, dropping to the ground against the wheel of the Blacheim. The canyon was cold, although mercifully sheltered from the wind. Dust bit his nostrils, making him sneeze. The wind hooted over the top of the canyon, that mournful five-note song of aloneness. Nearby, tiny feet scribbled on rock. Child! Now how do you face him?
But Crispin had been known, among other things, for his skill at jollying up disheartened regulars; and that was what Mickey still was, and Crispin was still a captain. After giving him an hour to cool down, Crispin crunched back to the Blacheim and kicked him in a friendly fashion. He chatted with apparent ease of mind as he passed blankets out of the airplane. “I’d never have thought of bringing these. I’d have counted on making it over the foothills before I got tired enough to need them. Good thing I brought you along, huh?”
Mickey said none of the things he thought of in response. He grunted and took the blanket, along with a single swig of water and a dry biscuit Crispin called a “midnight snack.” By this time the night was pitchy. Mickey lay still, listening to the small scrapings and fumblings as Crispin took off his boots and rolled himself up in his blanket somewhere on the other side of the wheels. It made Mickey feel unpleasantly vulnerable to be lying right under the enormous, wrecked double tires, where the plane would roll over him if it shifted even a fraction. As he wriggled around to lie alongside the wheels, under the belly of the Blacheim, he heard Crispin’s voice, so near that he started up in a panic and thrust his fingers into Crispin’s face.
“Ouch! No, it didn’t hurt. No, I just wanted to know...” Crispin stopped.
“Sorry.” Mickey lay back down, carefully. His bruises hurt, but he had slept on less comfortable things than bare rock before, and at any rate he was so exhausted he would probably have slept like a baby on a bed of nails.
Crispin said, “Um, I’m aware that you and Vichuisse were...I mean, after that awful scene in my office—”
“I remember,” Mickey said shortly. Two days before his death, Vichuisse had paid a call on Crispin, and requested Mickey’s presence in Crispin’s office, whereupon he had blithely and inaccurately reminisced about the pseudo-relationship they had had in the Lovoshire Parallel. Mickey had wanted to turn into smoke and drift through a crack in the wall. “What is it?”
“I know it’s intrusive of me to want to know, and you’re welcome to punch me in the nose if you’re offended. I just wondered...”
“If it was by my choice?”
“How did you know?”
“Of course you wondered that. Never mind that the fact that it wasn’t should have been obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes in his head who doesn’t think anyway that all Kirekunis are born sexually perverted.”
“I don’t think that,” Crispin said with unexpected definiteness.
“Good!”
“But—then, why did you go along with him? If you—you weren’t attracted to him?”
“Why did you? Different currency, same transaction.”
“I—” Crispin stopped, and gave his lion cough of a chuckle. “All right. Score one for you, Mick.”
“Morality aside, some men are better off dead.”
“Unfortunately, it’s usually the other kind who end up that way,” Crispin said in a voice that could have been hostile, or regretful, or nothing in particular. Mickey wished he could see his face. But the low-slung blackness of the Blacheim above them blocked out even the faint light of the stars. The remark had had a ring of finality; neither of them said anything else.
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land