The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  That was all right. It was enough. Languidly kissing her gave him a feeling of being adrift in a blue-green sea. He could have cried with gladness that she had not pushed him away. Her embrace was the temperature of the hottest, sweetest-perfumed bath. There was no such thing as time, or cold, or urgency.

  In the darkness, her eyes were pitch-black slits.

  “Rae,” he whispered. “It’s me. I’m here.”

  “I thought you were a dream,” she said sarcastically. Then she was kissing him again, and her hands ran all over his body. She was undoing the catches of his shirt, running her fingers down his stomach. He couldn’t stand it anymore; he thrust his hand down behind her, over her buttocks, and her laughter became a sudden gasp of terror, and she grabbed his hand and pulled it away—but it was already too late.

  He wrenched away from her as if he had been shocked by a daemon. Sitting up, “Rae?!”

  She hunched into a ball, dragging the blankets tight around herself. “Go away!”

  “No. I don’t know—what the hell—” Anger and incomprehension beat redly behind his eyes. His first thought had been that somehow she was a man—but behind her—no, it was ridiculous, nothing else about her was masculine, it must be a deformity! In that case he needed to know what it was. A deformity wasn’t so bad. He needed to know. Suppressing the turmoil in his mind, he held her down and systematically unwound the blankets, then lifted up her petticoat. Ignoring her dry-eyed sobbing and flailing against him, he felt the protrusion at the bottom of her spine through her underwear. It was about the length of his index finger. It was mushy soft, but it definitely had a bone. It ended in a fleshy flap.

  She had stopped threshing. She lay on her face, her petticoats up around her shoulders, crying into the tarpaulin.

  Finally it hit him. The “deformity” was the amputated stump of a tail.

  She was—or had been at one point—a Kirekuni.

  “And I’m surprised you didn’t guess it before!”

  Crispin realized he must have spoken aloud.

  “You pig-stupid imbeciles. I hate all of you. You can’t see what’s in front of your noses! Go away. Go away.”

  He scarcely heard her. He sat on his heels, gazing at her in disbelief.

  A Kirekuni!

  So much for sweet mystery. Oh, if only one thing would turn out how it seemed—

  “I’ve ruined everything,” she sobbed quietly. “Now you hate me. I knew it would be like this.”

  “I didn’t guess,” Crispin said dully. “Your hair—skin—I should have guessed. Why do you hide it?”

  “I have to!” She sat up and grabbed for her dress. Her face was wet and pink with tears. She buttoned the faded poplin feverishly over her petticoat, yanked her hair free and shook it out. “How would I get any work without pretending?”

  “In the circus where I—”

  “Oh, the circus. Yes, I could have been a freak! And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather conceal what I am than have everybody staring at me!”

  “The way they stare at me?”

  She sunk her face into her hands. “You don’t understand the littlest thing about me!”

  “Ah,” Crispin said. “But I know. I know about you. What are you going to do now?”

  He watched her cry without reaching out to comfort her. The thought of touching her was repugnant now. But he would have to be kind. He had promised. The shock was no excuse. Of all peoples, the Kirekunis had the worst reputation for their lack of compassion, their blind obedience to their rulers, and their decadent sexual mores. If Rae came of that place, it explained a lot of her mystery. But her nature itself wasn’t what horrified him the worst. It was the fact that she had hidden it—the physical violence that she’d done to herself, or had someone else do to her. He felt betrayed and sick.

  “Can I stay with you, Crispin? Please don’t send me away.” She took his hand, and remembering the caresses those same fingers had delivered a few minutes ago, he couldn’t help pulling away. “Just take me with you. I won’t be trouble. Please—”

  “Why would you want to keep company with a freak like me?” he said angrily.

  Hot tears dropped on his fingers as she kissed them. “We’re both freaks. We neither of us have any business in this country!”

  “Why did you do it to yourself?”

  “You understand. You must understand. How nice it would be if other people thought you belonged in this country. How nice it’d be if you could really, honestly believe it yourself, even if it was only for a little while.” Her hair fell down to hide her face. “You have tremendous physical courage, and if it’d been possible, you would’ve done the same as I did. So don’t even bother pretending to be disgusted.”

  He forced himself to breathe evenly. “My mother told me never to slug anybody for calling me nigger,” he said. “Hell of a woman, my mother, she was as black as the bottom of a river. Words didn’t bother her. She had other ways of getting her point across. Apparently in Lamaroon they sing, and so on. So it wasn’t because of that that she was so quiet. It was because she was a stranger here.”

  Rae stared down at her crossed ankles. “My mother loved words. She had me come and read to her when she was dying.”

  “Is that why you ran away?” From where? Not Kirekune? He could not figure it out.

  “She died when I was ten. I ran away when I was eleven.”

  He could not prevent his eyes from going to her skirts. Her ankles peeked out from under the ruffled hem. If he did not know, he would never have guessed. He hadn’t guessed. “But why?” he asked again. “Why?”

  She closed her eyes. “Have you ever been angry? With somebody? Enough to hurt them?”

  “Course I—”

  “And did you?”

  Crispin shrugged. “Yes.” He was remembering Saul Smithrebel.

  “Well, I wasn’t ever strong enough to hurt anybody. Except myself.” She shrugged.

  Bile rose in Crispin’s throat. It was too ghastly. The knowledge that this fragile girl had been capable of such terrible self-mutilation made him wary of touching her.

  “Queen,” he said, standing up. “I—”

  Outside, a bird squawked. Another joined in. Crispin stood frozen as the noise spread throughout the immediate forest: twitters, tweets, hoots, and brief burbles of song, a symphony of alarm.

  “Someone’s coming!”

  The rain had stopped. The birds slowly quieted.

  “What’s going on?” Rae scrambled to her feet.

  “Sssh.” His straining ears caught the unmistakable noise of a branch pushed out of someone’s way, whisking back into wet undergrowth. “Yes.” Quietly, he swept the blankets and tarps together on the floor, knotting them into an unwieldy bundle. “Quick quick quick now.”

  Himself, twelve years old, two months after his mother died, standing stiff and straight beside Poppy 2. Red Bob and Kiquat and Grouser and Harry stood like shadows at their stations around the outside of the circled trucks. The circus was traveling north, along the Cypean border. Local prejudice against “westlanders” had necessitated night-long sentry shifts. You never knew which of the quiet, white-blond, sun-darkened people streaming out after the show might be coming back that night. Once they tried to steal a truck. Other times, it was circus children. In the inner domains, it was believed that gypsies stole babies; that might be right, but Crispin had never seen evidence of it. In his experience it was in the infertile, red and open east, where necessity had crowded out compassion as weeds crowd out flowers, where people would do anything for fat, dark-haired children to raise alongside their own hollow-chested offspring.

  Crispin’s own father had been an easterner who, sick of his desert home, had taken to the road with Smithrebel’s thirteen years ago. So Anuei had said. Every night during the show Crispin could not help searching the upturned faces, looking for those few he would recognize: his relatives.

  The gun lay heavy and oil-smelling in his arm. The night was empty, purp
le-shadowed.

  He remembered the way you knew when that noise in the sagebrush wasn’t a dragonet, or a fox.

  Rae laced her boots. The tears had dried on her face. A Kirekuni. “Let’s go, Crispin. Let’s get out. I don’t want them to find us.”

  Crispin agreed wholeheartedly. But he was not so worried about being caught out in his theft of the food as he was about the other dangers he had scented in the hamlet. What was his little bit of thievery, if that was, as he suspected, a village of thieves? Did they perceive themselves as governed by the law at all, these people who lived out on the edge of nowhere? Crispin slid to the rear of the trailer. The tailgate would have to be dropped; there was no other way of escape. He listened with all his body to the small noises of the night.

  It was the sibilants of their whispered speech that gave the approaching men away. He beckoned Rae. She was doing better than he’d expected. She slid her feet soundlessly along the planking, and when he passed her the bundle of blankets and food her arms trembled only a little. If she was afraid, she was also in control of herself.

  From right behind the tailgate, barely two feet away, a whisper: “Give us that here—”

  Just as Crispin’s hand was about to close on the big latch, he felt something sharp prick the heel of his thumb. He flinched back. Rae stifled a gasp. A piece of metal had been introduced underneath the latch and it was being fiddled about from outside.

  All in one instant, Crispin grabbed Rae’s wrist, flicked the latch open, and launched himself against the tailgate, intending to smash the intruders to the ground. But the resistance he had counted on was not there. As the heavy wooden slab crashed to the earth, he staggered and lost Rae. Something lashed the back of his neck. As he rolled to his feet he saw Rae being clutched close by a heavy, fair-haired man in a leather jerkin, roughly the size and shape of a boulder. The man’s teeth and dagger glinted. The clouds had scattered and the moon rode high in a black-violet sky, shedding a light onto the road which seemed preternaturally strong after months of pitch-black, wet nights. There was another man behind Crispin. Crispin spun and punched him in the diaphragm. As the man’s knees buckled, his knife fell, and Crispin snatched it up out of a rut. His own dagger was out of reach in his knapsack—in Valestock he had not worn it because of city rules, and he had not thought to put it back on. Rae, girl—the boulder-man was yammering something about traders—

  The third man came around the side of the truck. When he saw Crispin, his expression changed from disgruntlement to shock. In the moment before his hand moved to his dagger sheath, Crispin calculated the risks of turning his back on the boulder-man, decided to go for it, and charged the other would-be thief, slamming him against the side of the truck so hard that he could feel the daemon in its cell wake and shiver up some tension in the braced wood of the chassis. “... garg.” said the man. His mouth was open, and his fingers scrabbled at Crispin’s wrists, but Crispin was not thinking clearly, and he did not slacken his grip. Rae! He shook the man by the shoulders, so that his head cracked against the wood, and wheeled again to face the boulder.

  In the moonlight the man’s face was like a big gnarl of wood, split by a smile. Steel hovered at Rae’s stomach. Not her throat. There was a mark of cruelty and cowardice. Thank Queen, he thought inarticulately, too poor for guns—no chance if a daemon gun—

  “False pretenses,” Rae choked. “He says we come here under false pretenses!”

  “The hell is that to do with—”

  “I’ve told him there’s nothing in the truck that he might want! He won’t believe me!”

  The boulder’s voice was surprisingly high, with a tone of injured righteousness. “Impostors! Youse enticed our women and left nothing to show, no gifts, not even no name!”

  “Entice your women?” Crispin exclaimed. “That what they told you? Got my own woman, haven’t I? No need for your whores, have I?”

  “Crispin,” Rae sobbed. She had been holding up well before, but now she seemed understandably terrified. She screeched as the boulder-man’s knife pricked her abdomen.

  Crispin weighed the second man’s knife in his hand. Its owner tried to rise. Absently, Crispin kicked him in the throat. It was not a good blade. He bounced it, trying to find the balance. The boulder’s voice became oilier. “But why are youse here? Looking to do a little business, maybe, were youse? Wrong time of year for apples, but—”

  “Same kind of business your women do when the traders come?” Crispin retorted. “Oh, yes, I’m sure!”

  “Youse be a gypsy!” the boulder shot back. “Youse always ready to—”

  Without even really thinking about it, Crispin threw the knife. It caught the big man in his right eye and entered an inch and a half before stopping. Some of Rae’s hair was caught in the wound; she screamed without stopping as she wrenched out of the suddenly stiff arms. The big man staggered backwards, flailing.

  “Oh, hell,” Crispin said under his breath, and pulled her past him into the forest at the side of the road, just as the third man stirred and began to wake.

  The forest smelled ever crisper and greener as they plunged desperately into the night. Crispin heard the boulder’s death gurgles behind them for longer than he would have thought possible.

  “Where—are we going?” Rae gasped.

  “Dunno,” Crispin told her. The wet earth gave squelchily under their feet. They would be leaving a clear trail: their only hope was to get far enough away that the hamleters would not bother coming after them. “Somewhere it won’t matter.”

  She did not ask again. As she hurried along, she pushed her hair out of her face, disentangling it roughly from her eyelashes and lips. It was nerve-wracking how she seemed to trust him. Had he not insulted her? Why should she trust him?

  “Here, you’ll wear yourself out,” he told her. “Slow down.”

  For both prophet and priest ply their trade through the

  land, and have no knowledge.

  —Jeremiah 14:18

  A Fortunate Fellow

  Fessiery 1895 A.D. /1209th Year of the Lizard.

  The Raw: 52˚N Sector: 3,000 feet

  Yozitaro Akila felt the bullets plow into Miss Drybones’s undercarriage. The knowledge that he’d been hit pierced the sweating frenzy of battle. Half a second later Ju’s voice came through the speaking tube. “Daemon!”

  Yozi’s stomach clenched. For a second he forgot about the other Gorgonette in his sights, and in that moment the Ferupian banked and dived away to safety, leaving the immediate sky empty. The deafening roar of Miss Drybones’s daemon engine died away in a matter of seconds, leaving Yozi with his hands trembling on the stick and the whipcord, Ju, shouting incoherently in his ear as the wind boomed over the cockpit. Screamers, fired from the Ferupian antiaircraft guns below, streaked blue, red, and green around the plane. Yozi dodged the hail of little daemons instinctively. He was in a blue funk.

  The KE-111, a two-man biplane, had only one engine, and now the daemon that powered it was dead, eaten by an enemy screamer that had somehow gotten inside the cell housing. All the instruments read zero. They were gliding.

  “Going to make a forced landing.” Yozi pushed the stick forward, and they swooped down. Below, no-man’s-land sparkled with starved screamers.

  “He’s still on our tail,” Ju barked. “Hold her steady.”

  In the horrible silence of the dead plane, Yozi heard the tracer bullets leave the rear gun turret.

  “Got him,” Ju said in exactly the same voice. In his mirrors Yozi could see the Ferupian kite staggering, its pilot fighting desperately to hold the machine level. The Gorgonette’s rudder had been damaged, but its daemon cell was evidently not ruptured, since the propellers were still blurring round. Yozi held Miss Drybones to her glide, and Ju fired again, this time with deadly accuracy, and the Gorgonette wallowed in the air as a blade of its right propeller went spinning.

  They had sunk out of the dogfight, and no one was chasing them, even though Miss Drybones was a s
itting duck: the Ferupians all had enough to do to keep the rest of Yozi’s Wedge off their tails. But Yozi himself had not the ghost of a chance. He was too far from the Kirekuni lines even to think about swinging back toward home. The mission had been to ground-strafe the Ferupian 83 Squadron’s base, where, scouts’ reports said, the 83 had recently installed ack-ack guns; so his Wedge had piled out of Anno Ma on a fine winter morning, and all had been going smoothly until they had the bad luck to meet up with a patrol crew of Gorgonettes over no-man’s-land. To bring a Queensdog down on top of his own men and fry them behind their barricades was a highly praised achievement—not least because it was so difficult to make a kill while simultaneously dodging ack-ack. Both sets of lines, separated by about two hundred yards, were equipped with antiaircraft guns, so you were just as likely to get riddled with bullets by your own side as to get screamer-infested by the enemy. Nonetheless, each Wedge of Izigonara’s 20th fought over no-man’s-land at least once a month.

  The unholy din of screamers had faded now but that was only because Miss Drybones’s descent had taken them behind the Ferupian lines. Ju was shouting in Yozi’s ear, berating him, demanding why the hell he couldn’t try to bring them down in no-man’s-land, where Kirekuni troops might find them, and if not them, then the plane with its valuable instruments and guns. Pilots were dispensable; aircraft less so. Yozi didn’t answer. A cold clarity had come over him. He had felt it a few times before in his life, and he knew what it was. He did not want to die. Therefore, he was not going to take a single risk which might lessen his chances of getting out of this alive.

  He knew he was a coward, and he didn’t care. Flight Command could sing for their kite parts. He had seen the survival statistics for pilots shot down in no-man’s-land. There wasn’t ten feet of unrutted ground. Landing was impossible. You ended up in flames.