The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  “A fresh face is the stamp of a life unlived,” he said aloud, and swirled his old cloak onto his shoulders.

  “What?” Bru said again.

  Irritation welled up in Millsy. Despite the heat he fastened his cloak all the way down. “Anon, my friend!” Before the young man could ask where he was going, he pushed through the curtains that partitioned off the quarters, strode between head-height piles of canvas, and leapt over the lowered tailgate into sewage-colored mud. Head down to avoid meeting anyone’s eye, he crossed the vacant lot around which Smithrebel’s trucks were parked. The carousel stood on a flatbed trailer near the gap in the fence which passed for a gate. The gaily painted side panels of the trucks glowed as brightly as the Ferupian flag that would fly from the peak of the big top when it was erected. Saul Smithrebel always had the trucks repainted in the last town before Kingsburg: the circus had to work to hold its own in a city where more than five traveling shows would be playing at any given time.

  Millsy strode between the low mud-brick houses of the suburb. Guarze, it was called. Smithrebel’s set up here every time it came to Kingsburg. Laundry filled the tiny front yards, flapping like flocks of birds descending onto scattered crumbs—but if there had been any crumbs, the scavenging cats, dogs, dragonets, and flightless crows would have gotten them already. Guarze. Spoken in the guttural drawl of Kingsburg, the word alone conjured long, dreary days at factory benches, bracketed by scant hours of sleep in rooms which no one had the time or inclination to beautify.

  Much of the industrial north was like this, and none of the working people—whose fathers, or grandfathers had sweated their lives away, too, only in cornfields instead of factories—ever questioned their lot. Yet it was unthinkable that they should be content with such penury. One could almost despise them for it. And their country cousins, too, who knew no world beyond the perimeter of the squire’s estate, whose ears were deaf to the call of filthy lucre even though they didn’t know, as the slum-dwellers did, that the city’s promises were all false. But these same men, women, and children were the ones who filled any circus’s audience. One could not despise one’s patrons. And in the years since Millsy had come to work for Saul Smithrebel, he had gradually realized that every single hayseed and slumrat desired liberation somewhere in his or her tarnished little soul. He knew he was crazy, knew that the pounding of life had driven him honest to heavens crazy, when he found his eyes filling with tears at the thought that they would never be truly liberated, because that was not the way the world was made. The circus was the closest approximation of joy they would ever see.

  True freedom couldn’t be bought. You had to reach out and grab it with both hands. That was what Millsy had done. He had been brought up on a tenant farm in the heartlands, barefoot and starving, but he had put that behind him. None of his cronies in the court had known he was born a peasant, just as none of his friends in Smithrebel’s knew he had been the Queen’s ambassador to Kirekune.

  He’d only kept one of the vows he made as a child, and that was the vow never to have children himself. He never wanted to subject another human being to the misery in which he’d been born. The peace he had finally achieved as a ringside magician and truck driver in a small-time traveling circus was simply not worth it.

  But now there was Crispin.

  He sighed loudly, wrenching at his cravat as he walked.

  Crispin, born in the back of a truck four years after Millsy arrived at the performers’ entrance of the big top with his daemons, materialized, following him like dogs, to stage an impromptu tricking daemonstration for Saul Smithrebel that led to his being offered a position at a skinflint’s salary of six shillings a week. (It had since risen to ten.) Millsy hated children. Hated them! But Crispin had wormed his way under his skin. He was six years old now, and looked ten or eleven. Being half Lamaroon, he was as easy to pick up as a baby: a specimen the physicians of Kingsburg would surely have loved to get their hands on. What mysteries Nature conceals, the experts knoweth not, Millsy thought. All the aerial acts would have had Crispin for a novelty turn, except that his mother, Anuei, wouldn’t allow it. Elise and Heine Valenta, two-fourths of the Flying Valentas, even wanted him for apprentice when he came of age. Anuei violently opposed the Valentas. But Saul Smithrebel supported their claim. He might even have put the idea in their heads for all Millsy knew. And Millsy knew Anuei would never stand up to Saul. The conflict was still years off—a child could not start proper training until he was at least nine or ten—but Millsy could see it coming, like a black splotch on Saul’s big map of Ferupe.

  That meant it was up to Millsy.

  The Valentas did not understand that once Crispin got a little older he would not take orders from anyone. But Millsy understood that perfectly. He would not make a single demand on Crispin. And because of that, Crispin would come to him willingly.

  Millsy had already seen the small child watching the truck drivers coax their daemons into consciousness on cold winter nights. He’d seen him, entranced, sniffing the exhaust which filled the air as the engines warmed up. And after long nights on the road, he’d seen him sidle up to the handlers again, when they talked the daemons into quiescence, their heads and shoulders deep inside the engine cavities of the giant tractors. Crispin would listen, mouthing the words. You ugly bastard... smelly snakely grass-eater... Handlers used a limited repertory of persuasion on their daemons. The controlled violence of the relationship between men and daemons was what drew many to handling who would otherwise have been soldiers or policemen or criminals. Some said daemons understood every word out of your mouth; some said they were no more intelligent than fish. Millsy was a trickster, like the women who lived in the forests and captured wild daemons, and so he knew that the former was closer to the truth, but he would have had to be crazier than he was to give away trade secrets.

  You’re not going nowhere! So calm the hell down ‘fore I flay the skin off your ugly skelliton!

  There was less than no chance that Crispin, too, would be a trickster. But Millsy would not have wished it on him in any case. All he wanted was to be able to share the joy of handling with the child.

  That animated little face, the color of clove honey...

  Admit it, old man, he thought with a flash of disgust, you’re half in love with the child!

  He shook his head violently and tramped on, muttering.

  In Guarze only the very small children stayed home from the factories. They looked up from their games, open-mouthed, dirty-eyed, as Millsy passed. The hem of his cloak swept the garbage-strewn dirt road. The weight of their neediness struck at him. How lucky the circus children were! Fate had not dealt Crispin and the others a particularly enviable hand—but all the same, they didn’t know what it was like not to have enough to eat. He sank his chin into his collar, not acknowledging the children’s whining pleas, and passed on beneath the ancient (and strikingly beautiful) stone arch marking the entrance to Guarze, into another mordant suburb named Hastych, and thence across the Eine into another world: one of the prosperous towns that snuggled against the walls of Kingsburg, Rotterys. Here all the houses had slate roofs like black paper hats, and their secret price tags were commensurate with the snotty manner of the maids hurrying through the streets. Everyone in Rotterys wished to be able to say that he lived in the Burg, and paid through the nose for the privilege of only having to stretch the truth a little.

  The black worm of the Eine, oozing between the cobbled “river walk” on the Rotterys side and the sink-mud on the Hastych bank, fostered a sense of separation from the slums. But rich and poor alike breathed the same air. Thick with summer heat, evil-smelling, and vibrating with the far-off roar of the demogorgons in the factories. The noise was a contamination. It was everywhere. Even in the depths of the palace, if by a miracle everybody stopped speaking for a second, one heard it: thud. Thud, Rrrrrrrr-thud. Thud.

  By the time he’d found his way through the twisting streets to the gates of the city proper, his body w
as dripping with sweat under the layers of regalia. He bought a fruit drink from a farmer-stallkeeper. As he counted out the coppers, he longed to be young again. Oh, instead of a mumbling, crazy old man in fancy dress, to be the boy with iron in his eyes and steel at his hip and gold in his pockets whom nobody in the court dared to cross. He had been a favorite. Once she had even spoken to him! He had crossed the northern pass into Kirekune and knelt as her ambassador before the Lizard Significant, full of high hopes, and failed to gain even the slightest concession from that august creature. And on his return she had said—

  The failure of Millsy’s mission had began the pattern of defeats which was to drain Ferupe and her Queen. Soon Gift Mills was no longer the darling of the court, but a tool that had turned in its mistress’s hand. He had left the capital because he could not bear the thought of living out the rest of his life in the shadow of his one-time celebrity. He knew also that if he stayed, that life was likely to be short.

  The cold fruit juice cleared his head. His face heated with shame as he realized that for several minutes he had been lost in nostalgia. Nostalgia!

  Standing out of the way of the bustle, he gulped the juice down. Why should a ten-year-old failure matter in the least? Traveling with Smithrebel’s, he was happy. Happy!

  He lifted his eyes to the Salubrious Gates. Ajar, they looked as if they were about to fall and crush the market. Hundred-foot-tall marvels of black-painted wrought iron, they were the only entrance for miles into the stone wall that beetled like gray doom above Rotterys. He would not want to live even for a day with that hanging over him. Maybe that was why everyone here stared at the ground as they walked.

  Moles! Blind, petty moles!

  The haze of longing for the past which had clouded his mind since the circus came within a hundred miles of Kingsburg cleared. His thoughts were as lucid as crystal. Never like this anymore. Except with his daemons...

  He threw his pottery juice bulb down to hear it shatter, and shouldered between shrill-voiced, foul-mouthed marketgoers toward the gates. Soon he would see his old friends. Then he would remember exactly why he had left the court.

  The palace was unspectacular compared to the rest of the Heart of Kingsburg. It was the oldest building in the capital, built as a fortress before there ever was a capital by King Thraziaow, who had come out of the west to lead Ferupe under the flag of the Twenty-One United Domains. It was blocky and ill-proportioned. The buildings that crowded close around it, leaving mere cracks for streets, soared gracefully over the palace: the Hall of Justice; KPD HQ; Astrologers’ Hall; the Crown Prince’s Mansion (inhabited now only by servants); the Stock Exchange; the ancient church of God, now the Royal Opera House; and dozens of others. In the Heart of Kingsburg, there were no residential buildings, though in reality, the top floors of many of the public halls were in use as apartments.

  The newer palaces dripped with balconies. They were airy with arches, and their spires strained toward the sky. If you stood in the maze of fountains on the plaza in front of the old palace, the spires hemmed in the sky like broken ice. It had been said that standing among the fountains was like drowning, looking up through the icy water to the surface.

  The old fortress lay low like an old dog among children. Each block of pink granite was polished to brightness. The arrow-slit windows sparkled, and the heavy porticoes were freshly ornamented each day with flowers. Millsy entered in a river of people that got thinner at each police checkpoint. Every time, he flashed his rings and was shown through.

  He had, in fact got the sequence of rings wrong. But none of the guards knew the difference until he penetrated the labyrinth to a depth where daemon-scented air whooshed out of grilles in corners, and the walls were no longer stone but carpet. Barkings, whoopings, and chee-cheeing sounds exploded close at hand. Millsy knew they could be traced to expensive pets (mostly animals that were never meant to be pets; he still had the scar where a bird of paradise had pecked him ten years ago). Niches displayed artwork from far countries and from every domain in Ferupe, with no glass to protect any of it. Visitors who got this far were expected to be above pocketing the knickknacks.

  “You a prince?” the policeman said with disbelief, dropping Millsy’s hands. “Whatcha wearing anyway?” He eyed Millsy’s scruffy cloak. Millsy felt shame climbing up his neck. “No, I—”

  “You’re a foreign prince. With connections to Kirekune. That’s what this says.”

  The policeman sat on a camp stool in the middle of a small lobby. He had an antique gray-marble side table for a desk. The checkpoint was more for show than security.

  “A foreign prince. Show you, mate.” He began to flip through a ringbook printed specially for the illiterate, full of drawings of bejeweled hands. “Ain’t no foreigners authorized—”

  “I apologize. It has been years since I wore my rings,” Millsy whispered.

  The policeman looked up, eyes narrowing, sharp words springing to his lips. One hand went to his truncheon.

  Millsy undid his cloak and swept it back from his shoulders.

  An entering pair of courtiers who could have been twins, so ruggedly handsome were they, so springy their dark curls, laughed at the scene.

  By the time Millsy found his way to the suite of Lady Gregisson, one of his oldest friends and a lady-in-waiting to Royal Cousin Dorthrea, he had lost all his desire for social interaction. Only loyalty drove him on. Through Christina Gregisson, and if not through her then through Sam Kithriss (if the old fellow was still alive!) or Boy Charthreron, he would wangle a glimpse of the Queen.

  People were looking at him strangely. He realized he had been muttering to himself again.

  Under the gaze of the lackeys at the door of Lady Gregisson’s suite, he gathered himself and presented his rearranged rings.

  The lackeys conferred. Then one of them vanished inside. The others resumed staring at him. They were all tall, red, and muscular. The skimpy tunics worn by Izte Kchebuk’aran men showcased their powerful arms and chests to perfection. Millsy wondered whether they resented having to dress like barbarians, now that they were employed in the most civilized place in the world. Such a question would never have occurred to him in the old days, but now it seemed of paramount importance. What were the Kchebuk’arans thinking? He was on the verge of asking them when the fourth one came back.

  “Lady Gregisson is not in her suite,” he said flatly. “However, her steward says that she is hosting Royal Cousin Dorthrea, Royal Second Cousin Sathranna, Royal Second Cousin Athrina, and Royal Aunt Melithra, as well as others, at tea on Sammesday. You are on the standing list of individuals who are welcome to join the Lady’s parties at any time. Thank you.”

  “But she must be at home,” Millsy said. “I sent her a note from Severidge saying I would be coming.” He forced a laugh. “That was ten days ago.”

  “Thank you,” another Kchebuk’aran said.

  “Sammesday is the last day of my stay in Kingsburg. I am not sure whether I can—”

  “Thank you.”

  And over the course of the next few hours he came to appreciate Christina’s generosity, yes, the generosity she had displayed on leaving him on her standing list when everyone else had either crossed him off or presumed him dead. He wandered from door to door to door, jumping at servants, shaking his rings at them like a dancer jangling castanets for their entertainment, and with each rebuff he descended lower in the underground palace until he was in such rarefied territory that he had absolutely no hope at all of getting past any of the footmen who lined the walls like mannequins modeling different versions of the royal livery. None of his erstwhile friends had been Royals. Royals did not have friends. (Though he had spoken to her once, yes, spoken to her, and she had said... )

  He should have expected this. But somehow he had assumed—the former ambassador to Kirekune, they couldn’t pretend he didn’t exist—

  Then again, maybe he did not, or only in ghostly form. The footmen watched him without turning their heads, doz
ens of pairs of eyes swiveling as one. He flapped his hands at them as if he were shooing pigeons. His voice cracked. “Minions! Minions, do you hear me? The world is above your heads, and it is a bright sky which you will never see, cocooned down here!”

  The underground palace was shaped like an inverted pyramid buried in the ground, with each level designed on the same basic floor plan, but as you descended, the plan got simpler and simpler, the area enclosed by the halls which you could reach without an entrée smaller and smaller. The lowest floor of all was a simple square of hallway with only three doors beside the one to the stairwell. Two doors had one dejected-looking royal footman each. The other had none. There was a smell of must. The carpet on the floors and walls looked water-stained.

  Millsy walked around the square twice. The second time, both footmen thought about challenging him, and decided to do so if he walked around again (he saw every step of the thought process in each pair of eyes).

  From their posts they could not see each other. Somewhat wildly, he wondered if they ambled to the corner to chat when no one was around. Would that be considered scandalous, a breach of loyalty to the Queen and to themselves? He did not know. He had lost his feel for the court code.

  Lost his feel—

  It had been slightly less than a decade. A blink, in the scope of the Dynasty. But things moved fast at court, even while they did not move at all. Not Sam, he wouldn’t have started it. Probably Boy Charthreron: he’d been a back-stabber even at twenty. Millsy could just see him spring-cleaning his list of friends, standing perhaps in the middle of a whirl of servants who were industriously feather-dustering his rooms (Boy’s life was one long, painstaking practical joke) declaring with a flip of the fingers that old Gift was probably dead, and if he wasn’t, he’d always been a bore, anyhow. “If he resurrects himself from the provinces again, Moose, you know the line. Who’s next?”