The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  He wondered if the mothers knew where their offspring had been when they kissed them good night. That type feared contamination worse than death. They were the same everywhere, whether their husbands’ business was daemonmongering, shopkeeping, manufacturing, or farming. They were People of Consequence, men and women who lived penned in by the perceived necessity of leisure, who had imperceptibly overrun Ferupe sometime during the last hundred years. It was their prejudices, direct and indirect, that had prevented Crispin from making an honest living in Valestock.

  That he should have sunk as low as the commonest gypsy!

  Well, at least he was juggling on Main Street, not in the slums, or the music hall. But performing at all, anywhere, meant swallowing his pride. He had wanted to hide his background. He had spent all but a pound of the Old Gentleman’s money on food, cigarettes, clothes, the bathhouse, and a haircut; then he had enquired after a job with every daemon handler in Valestock. Men at the waterworks, the fixit shops, the cell makers, the apprentice houses—and finally, after all those had turned him away, the daemonmongers themselves, though he was intimidated by the very sight of those well-kept shops that reeked subtly of money. Daemons were big business in Valestock, of course, as in all towns near the Wraithwaste, and all of the money was concentrated in the hands of Valestock’s five or six bona fide daemonmongers. Though word said that even they were not the end of the chain, that the real money went to their masters in Kingsburg. Their truckers made forays into the forests to collect the goods from the trickster women. Other minions evaluated the daemons, celled them for travel, and shipped them out—mostly to Thrandon or Salzburg, and thence to the war, but also, of course, to the rest of the country.

  No other country in the world was as rich in daemons as Ferupe. In Valestock, even the taverns had daemon glares hanging outside the doors!

  The daemonmongers’ shops were cloaked in vibrating auras that raised every hair on Crispin’s body. These auras were so thick he couldn’t believe the crowds flowed past the doors without noticing them. Inside were dark aisles of cells stacked to the ceiling, and shopboys dressed in yellow, whose hostility toward Crispin, like that of all the other men he had talked to, was unbelievable.

  Every male over the age of twelve in this town worked in the industry. They made scarcely enough money to stay alive, and most of them would not see a daemon once in the year, but they were still insufferably proud. Maybe that was why Crispin could not find a job.

  Perhaps the women, who here, even more than in the rest of Ferupe, must of necessity stumble through life on their men’s coattails, would have been easier nuts to crack. But he had not, and would not, sink to using sex to unlock doors. So he made the rounds of all the independent truckers who were currently in town. He wanted a secure position, and trucking on a haul-by-haul basis was anything but steady—but as it turned out, he might as well not have bothered, because the truckers stared at him with flat eyes and shook their heads. Crispin wondered what they had heard about him from the fixit men and the shopboys.

  Finally, one driver-handler, sun-browned and kinder than the rest, had taken him to a slum eatery and, obviously thinking he was destitute, bought him two monstrous doorstep sandwiches. Over ale afterward, the truth had come out. “Boy, I don’t know why you gotta hear this from me,” the man had said. “But the fact is, in this part of the country, no matter how much you know about trucking, you ain’t gonna get hired. Now I’m from the east—Kythrepe—on the Cypean border—ever been there? I don’t have anything against darkies myself.”

  Crispin held his tongue.

  “My dispatcher’s based in Galashire, domain north of here, and frankly, round here’s the worst place in the country for people like you. Man wouldn’t let me bring anyone in for an interview—and yeah, I can tell you’ve got experience—if he’s... ”

  The trucker fell silent. After a moment, he reached out and touched Crispin’s cheek. Crispin forced himself to sit still.

  “Maybe you should go south. Be easier to find something down there.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I wanna do,” Crispin said carefully. “I’m sick fed up of this rain. But how the hell am I supposed to get down there without a rig?”

  The trucker had shrugged helplessly and called for more ale. They ended up getting stumbling drunk; Crispin slept in a doorway. It wasn’t so bad, so the next day, he removed his belongings from the rooming house (where, he now knew, he had not been imagining the proprietress’s frowning disapproval) and carried his knapsack with him to the lumberyard, where he purchased blocks of light wood to carve juggling pins. That night, he slept on a corner. The street couldn’t frown at you, or put you in the bunk with the wonky legs next to the door, or refuse to serve you breakfast on some flimsy pretext. And his remaining shillings were better spent, he told himself, making himself presentable in the bathhouse each morning.

  Thus Valestock had slammed its doors in his face.

  Now, by revealing his circus background to the dour crowds of the town, he had pretty well scotched any chance that those doors might crack open again. But what else could he do? Smithrebel’s would be deep in Weschess Domain by now, a good two hundred miles away. He couldn’t go back, even if he would.

  His gaze roved around the crowd. He had already picked out a little boy who was hopping up and down hysterically beside his nanny. The kid had tried to be chosen to hold the juggling props every time. He deserved his chance, Crispin thought, since this would be the last routine of the day—even though from experience, he knew the eager kids tended to be cutups once they got any attention.

  “You, kid!” He beckoned the little boy, who pulled away from his nanny with a squeak of joy. “All right, miss?” Crispin met the woman’s eyes. She moved her heavy head up and down. “What’s your name?”

  Albert, as he introduced himself, was no exception to the eager rule. He danced around with the unlit torches, refusing to hand them to Crispin; he fell flat on his face, and when the crowd roared with indulgent laughter, he proceeded to do it again—and again, and again. A red-faced farmer came and handed him a shilling. A fellow in a grubby white coat, who had been watching for the last two performances, brought his meaty hands together for the first time. Finally Crispin had to shame Albert’s nurse into hustling him away by making cracks about the excellent discipline she imposed on her charges.

  After Albert’s departure, the crowd lost interest. The respectable women lifted en masse, like a flock of gray parrots, and drifted away. Crispin went through his fire-juggling routine to the shrieks of the town urchins, whose fascination was gratifying, but not lucrative. At last he caught the torches, blew them out one by one, indulging for the kids’ sake in a bit of slapstick, pretending the flames just wouldn’t go out, and packed his props into his knapsack. Two small boys darted up to him and tugged his arm. “Show me, mister!” one of them squeaked. “I wanna be a juggler when I grow up! Why doncha get burned?”

  Crispin grinned, tipped the takings into one hand, and stuffed his cap on his head. “Sorry, man. Trade secret.”

  “There were a circus,” the other, younger boy said. “They had jugglers.”

  “Yeah.” Crispin rubbed the coins together in his fist, making a noise like crickets. The boys giggled. “That’s where I learned. Everybody in the circus knows how to juggle—we all have to fill in sometimes, in spec.”

  “Low-down trash,” the older boy said, without malice. “My dad says circus people aren’t no better’n gypsies an’ niggers.”

  “Circus people are the best,” Crispin said.

  “I bet I could learn to juggle better’n a circus kid! C’mon, mister!”

  The younger boy’s forehead wrinkled. “Yeah, but yer whole family went to see it,” he objected. “And yer dad got drunk-as-a-dog an’ went with some whore!”

  “My dad don’t go with whores! You shut that, take that back, Sykey, you bastard!”

  Crispin winced as they flew at each other. When he was growing up, there had
been no other children his age—Skeeze and Horace, Mrs. Beecorn the costumier’s twin boys, were four years younger, and Anuei had impressed on him over and over again how necessary it was for him to be gentle when playing with them. That was why he had not learned his real strength until the night he almost killed Saul Smithrebel. And after that he’d been careful. These boys, by contrast, knew no such thing as restraint. By the time they grew up, they would be scrappers right through, just like their dads, every bone in their bodies broken and mended twice over. But there was no need for them to kill each other today, not here.

  “Leave each other out of it.” They writhed as he separated them.

  “Circus trash!” the bigger boy squealed, and twisting, spat at Crispin. Crispin was so surprised he let them both go. They darted off into the crowds of Main Street.

  “Damn,” Crispin muttered. He jerked the straps of his knapsack closed and hoisted it onto a shoulder. “Pure gutter! What can you expect?”

  Night was falling. The passersby had a determined air, slogging grimly along with their heads down, as if they were caught in a collective dream in which steaming, perfumed dishes of supper hung just beyond their noses. The doors of the baker’s shop next to Crispin’s pitch were closed. Through the little square panes of glass in the windows, Crispin could see the shopboy sweeping the floor, tossing leftover loaves into a sack for rebaking. Above the awnings, windows glowed with gaslight. Silhouetted figures danced their domestic waltz behind the curtains. It was starting to rain.

  “All right, move it,” a voice said.

  Crispin swung around. It was the man in the white jacket who had been watching all afternoon.

  “Can’t have none of that circus nonsense here. You’ll have to move along. Ay’ll escort you back to wherever you’re staying.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Me?” The man seemed to puff up. “Ay’m Constable Carthower,” he announced. “And Ay—”

  “Can I see some proof of that?” Crispin asked. The man frowned, but his fat fingers dug in the breast pocket of the tight white coat. The garment was of a unique, peculiar design: round-collared, and tailored with panels so that it fitted like a second skin over Carthower’s man-tits and prodigious belly, flaring over his sizable butt like the skirt of one of Prettie’s leotards. Crispin vaguely remembered Kiquat—or somebody—speaking of provincial police as “white-coats”; but he had failed to make the connection when he saw Carthower in the crowd. He took pains to seem good-humored as he examined the constable’s badge, nodding at the meaningless embossed letters.

  All circus people had a deep dislike of law enforcers—a mistrust that conflicted not at all with their patriotism, but reinforced it. Millsy had often said that if anyone told the Queen how her country was actually run, the poor lady would swoon clean away. Crispin chewed his lip, pretending to examine the badge, playing for time. What if he was going to be jailed? They took everything you had, in jail. That was how they paid for their police stations and salaried their heavies. “So what’s the problem, Constable?”

  “You’re the problem, boyo.”

  “Have I had charges brought against me?” This time, Crispin spoke with his best imitation-Millsy Kingsburg accent. He should have thought of it earlier. The constable was visibly disconcerted.

  “You haven’t,” Carthower admitted reluctantly. But then his confidence in himself returned, and with it his threatening manner. “But you will, Ay can promise you that, if you don’t remove your little act off of this street!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Constable,” Crispin said. “Over there”—he gestured to the other side of Main Street—“a band of fiddlers were playing all afternoon. Isn’t that more of a public disturbance than my humble sideshow?”

  By now night had fallen. The constable’s face was implacable in the faint illumination from the baker’s windows, and red as an apple. “None of that,” he said softly. Crispin’s heart sank. The constable knew that he was putting it on. Carthower ran a fat tongue around his lips, as if barely able to control the desire to do unspeakable things to Crispin. “Listen—boyo—Ay get paid to keep the streets habitable. Take your act out on the eastern road. Be my guest. But we’ve had your kind dawdling here before—darkies—” He almost spat out the word. Do I look like a damned gypsy to you? Crispin thought. “And although we are always ready to give anyone a chance, in the past our goodwill has been abused. Yes! Abused? And Ay am afraid we can no longer tolerate your sort in this upstanding town. Providing a spectacle for gentle ladies. Corrupting the youngsters, too.”

  Carthower was Law: he clearly knew himself, in hassling Crispin, to be well within the boundaries of his directive. If he had no charges now, Crispin knew he would have produced some by tomorrow. It was useless to protest. Yet that very realization drove him to argue. “I’m not doing any harm! If I wasn’t entertaining those kids, they’d be off nicking shit from your precious upstanding citizens!”

  “Would they indeed,” Carthower said. “Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you—” He paused, and said deliberately, “Nigger.”

  Crispin hissed. If it had come from anyone else he could have taken it in stride, but from this grease-pated, red-cheeked fellow, this scum of a scummy hamlet—Dropping his knapsack, he pulled back to swing at Carthower.

  The constable stood quite still. His lips were curved in the ghost of a smile.

  “Oh. Assaulting a police officer,” Crispin said. “That’s what you want to pin on me, is it! I bet it works most of the time, too—anybody would want to punch your mug in just so they don’t have to look at it! Did they hire you specially for the job of filling up the jail every night?”

  A lock rattled, and a tantalizing scent of bread wafted into the damp night. The baker’s boy gaped fearfully at Crispin and the constable as he sidled out of the shop and locked up. Carthower stared back with the same red implacability he used on Crispin. The boy scuttled off into the night with comical speed.

  Carthower said softly, “How’d you like to become Valestock County Recruit number sixty-seven, nigger? We’re having a bit of trouble meeting our quota this year.”

  Crispin sensed that the policeman, in speaking of the war, had broken a personal taboo. It showed in the way he licked his lips. People in Valestock liked to pretend the war didn’t exist. And it was possible to do so, because here, the Wraithwaste served as an absolute wall between Civilization and Chaos. Only the airplanes in the distant sky might remind Valestock of Ferupe’s other business, which was not daemons. An unpatriotic thought flashed across Crispin’s mind: the Queen, in forbearing to establish army bases in Lovoshire, Weschess, or Galashire, seemed to be collaborating in the effort to spare the deep west any knowledge of the war on the other side of the forests. What had being wrapped in cotton wool like that done to this part of the world?

  Crispin picked up his knapsack and narrowed his eyes at Carthower, trying to hide how frightened he was. “Thanks so much for the offer, Constable,” he said sarcastically. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with your quota. You won’t be seeing me around much longer, in any case. Go home and jack off, now; you’ve been having fun, but I’m afraid I shan’t be able to satisfy you. Not until you have charges to bring against me. And I can’t provide those either at the moment.”

  He turned and moved away down Braselane Street. There was not a sound behind him. His spine crawled. Finally, as he turned the corner, he heard the constable’s measured steps move off.

  “Asshole,” Crispin said, and forced himself to grin. He felt sick.

  In the rest of the country, police-enforced draft quotas were rare. The sons and brothers of landed squires took officers’ commissions; and as for the rest, a certain type of citizen, though of course not the best, thought the army as honest a trade as whatever their fathers did, and a good deal more glamorous. But in the west, there were few squires: daemonmongers were the only nobility; and towns like Valestock needed all their able-bodied
men to keep the wheels of the industry turning. No one wanted to join the army. Obviously, the police had got into the habit of killing two birds with one stone by filling their quotas from their black books.

  Crispin had no real idea where he was walking to.

  The “good” section of town lay mostly on the flat. As he crossed the bridge over the Applewater, all signs of affluence had vanished as suddenly as if they had been an optical illusion. Now he was in the slums, which the proliferation of the daemon trade had long ago caused to spread back up into the crevices of the hills. The windows of the little houses were redly lit by hearth fires. Only a few had gaslights. None had daemon glares.

  Reluctant to ascend any farther, he turned, his boots sloshing in the mud that had replaced the cobbles underfoot, and started back toward the river.

  He came on it suddenly as he entered River Street: a building shaped like a haybarn, painted colors no farmer would know the names of, twice the height of the houses that pressed against it on either side. Little colored daemon glares blinked fast around its open doors. People spilled outside, smoking, swilling ale from earthen mugs, laughing raucously.

  The Old Linny Palace of Delights. (Thus he had heard Valestock’s citizens call the town’s only music hall, with varying degrees of approval.) Like all circus people, he disapproved of music halls on principle; and the few times he had gone slumming with Millsy or Prettie in other towns, to see for himself, the quality of the entertainment in the so-called Palaces and Pleasure Houses had been poor enough to reassure him that there was really no competition. But since Valestock’s respectable folk were such paragons of righteousness and virtue, perhaps even the homegrown song and dance of their servants, adjuncts, and parasites would be superior to that of the rest of the country, morally, if not artistically.