The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Squire Carathraw’s lips were loose and perpetually wet from sucking on the stone bottle he carried. He wore clothes that he seemed to have inherited from a much smaller, poorer man. All the children said he lived in a ditch, but he managed somehow to be as fat as a pig. Rae had nightmares in which she saw him standing over her, his mucky boots planted on the mattress, pointing with shaking fingers to the gilt cherubs around the ceiling of the dorm that were all flaked and falling down.

  Every time his voice was heard in the drive, she and Daphne ran to hide, laughing hysterically with fear.

  But he was going to die.

  She worked her clay angrily.

  The little stream gurgled like a baby. Rae, be happy! Rae, be hap-ap-appy!

  This stream was better than any other in the whole hundred-mile-long Plum Valley because it had fish in it. (Culties did not kill anything to get their food, not even fish. They lived for the most part on rice from the eastern plains that came once a month in trucks.) When you went paddling in the big pool in the woods, you could feel trout and minnows and freshwater guppies slithering against your legs, and of course you had to scream louder than anyone else. If you tried to walk upstream from the pool, though, you found you had to get out of the water. The stream wound in a deep defile through the tangly woods that surrounded the mansion, now and again vanishing beneath the wall-like thickets that subdivided all the lands where the children were allowed to play. Rae and Daphne sometimes stood at the very edge of the trees, looking wistfully down over a sunny patchwork of fields and hedges. They never ventured out. Not two girls alone. Blond bully Colm had a scar on his shoulder that he showed off constantly. It was the place where a splinteron from Farmer Jelleby’s daemon gun had had to be ripped off. Colm said he hadn’t even cried. Well, isn’t that nice for you, Rae would think, folding her arms and silently fuming. She knew that if she even saw Farmer Jelleby pointing his gun at her, she would cry.

  Colm, nasty Colm, was going to transcend just because he belonged to the Dynasty. Was that fair? Rae wondered. She looked up. “Is that fair?” she said aloud to the trees.

  “What?” came Daphne’s laughing voice. “Is what fair, Ray-baby-oh?”

  Rae whirled around, clutching her clay to her chest. She didn’t see Daphne until the other girl waved. She was sitting in a tree a little way down the stream, her bare legs twined around the branch, her chin on her hands, her long reddish hair dangling,

  All the members of the Dynasty, boys and girls, men and women, had long hair, but Rae’s was the loveliest—second only to the Shard boys’. Because she was a Kirekuni. “How long have you been sitting there?” she shouted.

  “Not long. I thought you were going to hear me climbing up, but you didn’t.” Daphne’s voice vibrated with injury. “You weren’t in bed last night. How am I supposed to know if you’re all right, or what?”

  Awww, Rae thought. She glanced at her heap of actors and material and decided to leave them for later. She stood up. “Okay, Daphne the Squirrel.” She climbed to the top of the bank and pushed through the weeds and undergrowth to the bottom of Daphne’s willow. It was so branchy Daphne had not been able to get very high. Rae stood on tiptoe and stretched up both her arms. She could almost grab Daphne’s hair. “Come on down!”

  Daphne held on, looking solemnly down out of her pinched brown face. She was darker-skinned than Rae, and shorter—but then, Rae was as tall as any of the twelve-year-olds. Sister Flora said that if she didn’t stop growing, she would never become a consort.

  “Where were you?”

  Something clogged Rae’s throat. She swallowed, hard. But she couldn’t keep it from coming out. “Daphne, if I ran away, would you come with me?”

  “Tee hee,” Daphne said loudly. “Tee hee!”

  “I mean it!”

  “You bloody well do not!” Decisively, Daphne swung off her branch and landed with a grunt on the earth. She picked herself up and brushed off her knees. She wore summer shorts cut from last winter’s breeches, which before she inherited them had been the property of some hireling in the days of Squire Carathraw. They were belted around her flat chest with a piece of red ribbon. “Come on, dummy, don’t you want anything to eat? I’ve got some honey in my cupboard in the ballroom. Brother James gave it me.”

  “Yummy yummy honey,” Rae sang, right on cue, sadly.

  “Oh, you’re being silly!” Daphne shouted. “Silly!” She threw her arm around Rae’s shoulders. They ducked to avoid a branch as they started through the woods. “Yummy honey. Ouch, my foot. Yummy yummy yummy, Rae-baby-baby... ”

  Rae joined in reluctantly. The song irked her, and after a moment she realized why: she was not a baby any more, not Sister Flora’s, not Brother James’s, not anybody else’s. She thought she would be Daphne’s a little longer, just to keep her happy. But it was not real.

  if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have

  one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

  a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

  it will be a heaven of black-red roses...

  —e. e. cummings

  Book Two: The Catch

  The Open Air of the World

  Jevanary 1893A.D. Ferupe: Lovoshire Domain

  Midwinter, just after the turn of the year. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show was in Lovoshire Domain, at the westernmost point of the grand itinerary that Saul Smithrebel had sketched anew on his map last year, rumbling slowly southward through the Apple Hills. Lovoshire was a domain renowned for nothing except its massive, millennia-long flirtation with the Wraithwaste, the daemon-infested forest that stretched for thousands of miles along Ferupe’s western border, over which the war with Kirekune was being fought right now. The Wraithwaste had never really been part of Ferupe. It was alien, unknown, colonized only by trickster women. In the rest of the country, the name of Lovoshire evoked a dark glamour. Beyond Lovoshire lay only the trackless Waste, and the exotic glory of the war front, into whose brilliance all young soldiers vanished. And beyond that... Kirekune!

  Here in the Apple Hills one often saw airplanes gliding high and silent overhead, on their way to the front from the air bases in Salzeim. But there were no bases in Lovoshire itself, nor (for some reason known only to the Queen) in any of the other heavily forested western domains. Here, the war might as well have been a thousand miles away. People’s everyday business was quite different, and of a great deal of interest to Crispin: it was daemons. It had been years since the circus passed through daemon country. He had only been fifteen the last time around. So this time, Lovoshire held a special attraction for him, too.

  It was an attraction, however, which vanished quickly when he remembered that in the Apple Hills, in Jevanary, it rained every day without fail. He and the other drivers muttered disloyally that it had been a mistake on Mr. Saul’s part to come here in winter. What a fool the Old Gentleman was! The takings were unbelievably meager.

  Last time, it had been Aout. High summer. The hills had been far greener than they were now. And the dark-haired people hadn’t hidden in their wooden villages, putting their heads out when the musicians struck up, drawing them quickly back in when they glimpsed Missy, Charmer, and Two-Tails, the elephants. They had been so generous with themselves, so joyous, that the circus had not been able to do anything more than plug into their summer-long celebration, crystallizing the giddiness, synchronizing the overflowing energy into one glorious three-hour performance after another.

  Even the Old Gentleman’s chronic sense of lateness had abated. He had consented to do one show after another in the same location for as long as the appleseeds kept coming. Each clink of coin, to him, rang another note in the tune of a Ferris wheel. That had been his fixation ever since the daemon in the carousel died and they had had to sell it for scrap. A Ferris wheel! Prohibitively expensive, considering a twenty-foot daemon would be needed to power it—but maybe not! A tipsy-giggly-making chiming Ferris wheel from whose top you could see mile
s over the forest!

  Crispin’s mother had been dead three years when he was fifteen, but he’d only just succeeded in forgetting all the things she had used to tell him. He passed the summer in a daze of elderflower wine. The hills were the sort of place where young men ought to have been thin on the ground, most of them having been snapped up by the army; but in the west, for some reason, the recruiters were not so gung-ho, and the population of the appleseed towns was gloriously skewed in favor of the young. In every village, Crispin met up with the local boys and drank cider under haystacks. He sobered up only when he was due to perform. (Always on the verge of getting himself chucked out of the troupe, never quite crossing that line. Elise Valenta had threatened to eject him more than once—but he knew they couldn’t do without him. How he’d capitalized on that knowledge!) And he’d had a fling with a different girl every night. As a rule western girls were more prudish than heartland, prairie, southern, or northerners, but they were also more beautiful. (So it had seemed to him.) When they got drunk, the usual taboos fell away like layers of confining garments, and the dubious looks that Crispin provoked in all strangers, female or male (to which he had, at fifteen, achieved a hard-won immunity) gave way to the smoldering immobility of attraction. Attraction they could not repress, and did not want to. At fifteen, he hadn’t been immune to that.

  “Best damn summer I remember,” he said sourly, as he, Millsy, and Kiquat the snowman climbed down from their truck cabs. They surveyed the site.

  “Bloody shithole.” Kiquat flexed stiff fingers. “Here?”

  The roughnecks were making so much noise unloading the trucks that the dense silence lingered only in negative. The Old Gentleman had given the signal to stop in a field at the top of a hill, where the road paused for a breather before plunging down again into another dizzying series of hairpin bends. It was apparently used as a travelers’ rest, though what travelers passed through here with any regularity, Crispin couldn’t imagine. Probably gypsies—though he hadn’t seen any of that lot on the roads for ages, not since they got out of the southlands. On the trunks of the trees that leaned over the field, various symbols had been hacked. He’d peered at them as he parked Poppy 2. Most of the carvings looked as old as the hills themselves, and as meaningless. They were unlikely to be real writing: in Lovoshire, a schoolteacher would look as out of place as the elephants did. But Crispin wouldn’t have known if they were. Like most circus people, he was illiterate, and he had no problem with that. Millsy said that knowing how to read and write caged you in. Millsy claimed to have had a Kingsburg education, and subsequently forgotten every letter, every equation, and the name of every constellation and flower he had ever learned. “Quite a feat,” Crispin would say sarcastically whenever he mentioned it. They had been friends so long that Crispin wasn’t fooled. Forgetting was not that easy. But everyone had to have his little secrets, and Crispin was not one to pry into things.

  Kiquat wandered off to sleep somewhere. Droplets of dew gathered on the straggling ends of Millsy’s beard as he listened to Crispin’s recollections of that good summer. His bloodless lips were pursed, his head tipped on one side. Joining his thin hands together inside the sleeves of his overcoat, he nodded appreciatively whenever Crispin came to a salacious bit.

  “Yes. Yes, I do remember. But I’m afraid you have it wrong, my young friend. That wasn’t the Apple Hills, it was the Yellow Sweeps, as they call the lower hills of the Happy Mountains in Galashire. A westerly range—but more pleasantly situated than this Queen-forsaken place... This is the first time since you were born that we’ve taken the southward leg this close to the Wraithwaste.” He shrugged sadly, his thin body swaying from top to toe. “And I hope it will be the last. Mr. Saul is not pleased with the takings. Not at all. He thinks it is due to the activity of cults around here. Those of the locals whom they have not drawn in, they have got under their sway... ”

  “Load of tripe,” Crispin said. “If you ask me, the problem is there’s so many daemons in the woods. They mess people up.” He tapped his temple. “No one’s going to go to the circus if they’re sleepwalking half the time.”

  “I could be coaxed into agreement with you. But tell that to Smithrebel.”

  Crispin breathed slowly, watching his exhalations puff white in the air. Last time the Old Gentleman was pleased with the takings, he thought, King Ethrew was on the throne in Kingsburg! He doesn’t understand that altering the itinerary does nobody any good. What he needs to do is build us a better reputation. Visit the same places over and over. Over and over. Smithrebel ‘s ought to be a name like Furey’s, like Gazelle’s, Murk & Nail’s...

  Too tired...

  The two months they had expected to spend in these muddy, slimy hills were nearly over. All anybody wanted to see now was the last, long downhill run which would carry them out of the fog and rain into the flat farmlands of Thrazen Domain. Sweeter than a girl’s kiss to Crispin would have been the sight of the sun. And last night, while he was at the wheel of Sunflower I, staring entranced at the headlights bouncing along the road, the Old Gentleman had crawled forward through the hatch from his quarters, and sitting forward with his hands on his kneecaps, regaled Crispin with long-winded anecdotes of his own boyhood in the circus.

  Why? Crispin wondered. The Old Gentleman took an interest in him that was more than unusual, it was creepy. Crispin believed the Old Gentleman had a grudge against him—probably for some fucked-up reason to do with his mother—and was trying to kill him, but was too much of a coward, and too greasy a professional, to stain the circus annals with any “accidents.” So he had to employ dirtier, subtler schemes.

  It had been worse when Anuei was alive. Crispin had felt he had to protect her from the Old Gentleman. Saul was just not good enough for her! One time when he was ten he’d walked in on them. Grunting and bouncing in the dark of Daisy 3, The Old Gentleman wriggling like a white worm on top of Anuei’s black bulk. Crispin had gasped and stiffened, and the red-eyed, growling beast inside him rose up and took a flying leap at the Old Gentleman and tried to rip him bodily off his mother.

  That was the night he first knew, honest to the Queen knew, that he was strong. The Old Gentleman tried to hush the incident up, but of course people found out. You can’t very well pretend a battered face, a swollen groin, and a broken arm are all the result of falling off a chair.

  And not long after that had come the night when Mike Valenta’s trapeze ripped loose from the rigging, dashing him to the mats thirty feet below. His back was broken in seven places. The Flying Valentas found themselves without a catcher, and Smithrebel’s bereft of its star turn. It was then that the Old Gentleman interfered with Crispin more intrusively than any owner had a right to interfere with his performers’ children. Despite Anuei’s violent, silent disapproval, Crispin was made an aerialist.

  Queen, how he had hated the Old Gentleman for forcing that wedge between him and his mother. Working with the Valentas was the first thing he had not been able to talk to Anuei about.

  But since then...

  Perhaps the Old Gentleman had not even thought about Crispin’s probable unhappiness; perhaps that had merely been the egocentrism of a child, who traces everyone’s motives back to himself. Perhaps it had just been the circus instincts bubbling to the top in Saul Smithrebel’s dried-up, one-track brain. For Crispin turned out to be a good catcher. He would never have made a flier. He was just too tall and bulky. But his weight—he weighed less than Prettie herself—his big ugly hands, and his ability to swing head down for hours without getting dizzy, made him, Herve freely admitted, a better catcher than Mike had been. Rock-steady. It used to worry Crispin that Herve didn’t know that was all just an act of will. Rock-steady! In truth, in those early days, Crispin had been racked by a paralyzing fear of heights.

  But gradually he came to enjoy flying, even to believe he loved it. Days, days, and more days. Rehearsals and performances. Tape-wrapped wrists and ankles slapping into chalk-dusted palms. The tricks you lear
n to ensure that someone’s life is safe in your hands, even when it looks to the audience as if a thousandth of a second’s miscalculation means the flyer’s death. It’s all a matter of being on.

  The Old Gentleman’s interference, however, had more repercussions. While Crispin tried to juggle his responsibilities to his mother and to the Valentas, he ended up neglecting Millsy. Millsy was the only adult who had taken a real interest in him as a child. They were friends and playmates; and Millsy taught Crispin geography, history, and everything it was possible for a child to learn about daemons—all the knowledge he might have needed, in fact, except reading and writing, against which Millsy was violently prejudiced. To Millsy, and only to Millsy, Crispin had confessed that he still hated his mother’s lover—that giving Smithrebel a broken arm hadn’t made any difference—that every time the Old Gentleman tried to talk to him, he wanted to attack him again. If the Old Gentleman wouldn’t leave Anuei, couldn’t he at least leave Crispin alone?

  There had once been an understanding that Crispin would become Millsy’s apprentice, that their friendship would, so to speak, be legitimized. But neither of them ever mentioned it after Crispin started training with the Valentas. Their night meetings came to an end. And Crispin hated the Old Gentleman for that, too.

  But even when he was rushing to practice tumbling with Herve at five in the morning, there had been the hot, seductive stink of daemon breath wafting out from under the hoods of the trucks; exhaust staining the night as the engines turned over; and prickly hints of not-scent around the cotton-candy machine, the carousel, the appliances in the cook tent. His defection to Millsy had been gradual but inevitable.