The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  The guards descended on Yozi. He judged it wisest to cooperate. As he was frog-marched across the cavern, out of the corner of his eye he saw the gray man yank the translator out of her chair and pull her onto his lap. As she sank down Yozi saw that her dress fell in a clean line. She had amputated her tail. Or had it amputated for her.

  That night he slept dreamlessly for fifteen hours between linen sheets, beneath the ground. The next day he spent beneath the sun in the back of an open truck. As darkness fell they were still rumbling north. Screamers traced patterns like fireworks on the horizon. Yozi drowsed, trying not to fall against any of the other men, Ferupians all, who sat blanket-wrapped along the sides of the truck. Vivid images swam in his mind: the women of his childhood, his mother’s “girls,” with their eyes like black olives and tails wrapped in bright ribbon. Snatches of their voices came so loudly in his head that each phrase nearly woke him up. After them came the parade of men who had each so briefly held a place in his heart, after he chose the worst possible way of escaping that world of bonbons and chamber music and purse-lipped penny-pinching. He hadn’t wanted to become a workhorse, a benign unprotesting butt for the women’s jokes like his uncle June. So at the age of eighteen he had entered the Disciples. He was now twenty-one, and he had not gone one day without regretting that decision.

  Since his posting to Izigonara’s 20th, he had come close to resigning himself to dying in combat. Now, however, after this latest disaster, cowardice throbbed like energy in him.

  He was wide-awake and he did not want to die. His fingers and toes tingled in the moonlight and all of the sleeping Ferupian soldiers were handsome, especially the fair ones.

  Oh, the animals I saw every day from that cockpit!...

  What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself.

  Nobody had ever had such a lovely time as this!

  —Roald Dahl

  The Farthest Darkness

  Marout 1893 A.D. The Wraithwaste

  “I think we’re lost,” Crispin said, chewing his lump of cheese slowly. “I don’t know why we didn’t turn back when we had the chance. I must have been out of my mind.”

  Waiting for Rae to reply, he squinted up through the thickety undergrowth, searching for some break in the flat gray clouds. There was none. If only he had a compass! He could not remember when the green fertility of the Apple Hills forest had given way to this living graveyard. It must have happened very slowly—or maybe all at once, overnight, while he was asleep. The forest smelled dusty, as if nothing had lived here for millennia—and during the day it was as silent as a desert. Not a single bird gave tongue, though they sang at night. They were ordinary birds, he had seen them, but they sounded like boys and girls. Their voices meandered over the snortings and crashings of wild animals in the pines, an orchestra of wildness. The stink of daemons clogged the air. He felt daemon claws on his skin all the time, curious talons of power brushing his neck, and it took all he had not to blow up at Rae. She wasn’t the reason they were in such a fix. In fact she had practically nothing to do with it. It was all his fault.

  Most of the pines looked dead. Shocks of brown needles fell into pieces at a touch. Crispin had given up trying to get the splinters out of his clothes and hair. Rae, on the other hand, tended her appearance industriously, braiding her hair into long shiny ropes and winding them onto the back of her head, all ready to be dusted over again until it looked like an unglazed coil pot. Since losing her hairpins in the flight from the truck, she had been using twigs.

  She was combing her hair now, kneeling on a mossy stone at the edge of the stream. The black curtain of it swayed over the water. The stream was a ribbon of greenery and life winding through the pines, full of fish that were absurdly difficult to catch. Crispin and Rae made their bivouac beside a different stream every night. The nights were the worst he had ever experienced. When he was walking, he didn’t have to think. But at night, his worries sat like hunger in his stomach, keeping him from sleep. Where was he going? Where he was taking Rae, who had given herself so completely into his care? It had only been eleven days—they couldn’t have gone very far—yet he had not seen any signs of civilization since they entered the pines. Once, six biplanes, laden low with supplies for the troops at the war front, had glided west beneath the clouds. He had stared after them, knowing it would be futile to shout.

  The road along which they had come from Valestock must continue somewhere in the forest, and Crispin presumed it led to the war front. At this stage, even that would be better than nothing. But they had left the road at a tangent, and no amount of zigzagging had helped them recover it.

  And there was something else, which he did not think Rae had noticed, even though she had glimpsed the splinteron in the holding cell, something few girls would have seen. Certain trees shimmered as if they were surrounded by a ring of heat. It was not so much that the effect jumped out at you, as the way it didn’t. On a couple of occasions he had gotten a fix on these illusions and tried to approach them, but somehow he found himself turning aside, and before he knew what was happening the place would be far behind him, a flicker as if of movement among the trees. At such times he always felt watched. Of course it was nonsense: he was being watched, yes indeed, by invisible daemons, hundreds of them, but not by anything else. Yet he could not stop looking for human footprints in the dead needles, or blazes like the ones he himself made on the tree trunks to ensure they did not go in circles, carved by the hands of strangers, woods-folk.

  He was almost grateful at night when the daemons crept close to him, crawling over his skin, drawn by his bodily warmth nearly to materialize, because it distracted him from his worries. Uncollared daemons could be dangerous—but unlike collared ones, only if provoked. He had to concentrate on fighting the impulse to brush them off.

  It might have been easier if he had been able to talk to Rae. But she was even more of a mystery now than she had been the night they first met at the Old Linny. The fact that she was Kirekuni explained her not at all. She had not cried since they entered the Wraithwaste. Her cheery unflappability, her refusal to listen to his worries—it was all an act, he knew it, but he could not tell what was underneath. Looking at her now, voluptuous in the shirt and trousers he had loaned her, he could not believe he had ever touched her. Neither of them ever made reference to what happened between them before the men from the hamlet broached the truck. Crispin had constantly to search for signs of her Kirekuni heritage in her face to remind himself of his stupefying discovery.

  Now she said, “You know we can’t go back. You’re a murderer, Cris. They’d string you up. Anywhere in the western domains.”

  “At least in jail I’d get regular meals. I’d be willing to die for one real meal, I think.” He swallowed the last of the cheese and rubbed his stomach regretfully. The hunger pangs were arrows of pain. Aware that they had to conserve their provisions, he pulled a dried apple out of his knapsack and bit into it. The texture was that of old leather, but it filled his mouth with sweetness. “I don’t understand why you’re not more worried.”

  She shrugged. “I trust you.”

  “You don’t understand how stupid that is. I keep trying to tell you.”

  She merely gave a tinkling laugh. The ends of her hair caught up drops from the surface of the stream. The liquid speech of water and stones made up for her silence: she was a creature of the morning, she could not be expected to answer in human speech.

  It may have been at that moment that Crispin fell in love. He knew in some corner of himself what was happening. Shaking his head to clear it, he reached into the bag for another dried apple.

  Then he stopped. “There’s a demogorgon right behind me. Quite a large one. Can you see it?”

  “A kind of shimmering?”

  “Yeah, it would be.” Crispin shuddered and, all in one movement, stood up and spun around to confront nothing.

  Downstream, where the black water curved into the trees, a fish jumped. The daemon vanishe
d into the air with a tumult of power.

  The exact nature of daemons’ relations with the visible world was unclear, Millsy had said sometime long ago. Unmaterialized, did they exist in the air? On another plane altogether? In physical places, like earth, or water, or the bodies of animals? No doubt there were trickster women who knew the answers, who could dispel the myths that made daemon handling far more difficult, no doubt, than it needed to be. But such secrets were not for the heads of men.

  Crispin’s scalp tingled. He bit into the apple and drove his fingers through his hair, scratching.

  “Are we still in Ferupe, do you think?” Rae asked. She shook back her hair and started to plait it.

  “Hurry up,” Crispin said. “Course we are.”

  But suddenly he was not sure. If they were no longer in Ferupe, that could explain a good deal. The Wraithwaste... at what point did it stop being Ferupian? Those places in the trees at which you could not look, no matter how you tried... “The Wraithwaste is Ferupian. That’s why we’re at war.”

  “Some places don’t have any nationality. Some places just are.”

  “Oh, now you’re talking through your hat,” Crispin said.

  She lifted her hands behind her head, looping her braid around itself. “No, I’m not,” she said around a mouthful of twigs. She never had had much of a sense of humor, and recently she seemed to have none. “I’m saying what I think. And now I’ll say some more. This place is stranger than anywhere I’ve ever been. And, Crispin, there are people here. I know it. It’s just that they haven’t let us see them.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I think we’re getting near a place of trickster women.”

  Crispin sighed. “The trickster women. Yes, of course! That’s exactly who I want to approach with my hat in my hand! Take us in! Care for us! Feed us! I know you’re kindly old girls—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Rae said violently. “Let’s see you come up with a better idea, then!”

  “I don’t think trickster women even exist. They’re a story you females cooked up to try and prove something.”

  “Where do daemons come from, then?”

  “How should I know? Maybe daemons don’t exist, either—maybe they’re a mass hallucination! Maybe civilization is a mass hallucination, maybe Ferupe and Kirekune and the war is all a dream you and I had last night! We think we remember having pasts! We think we remember being apart! But in fact this is all there’s ever been, we’re gonna be alone here forever and ever—”

  Reflexively, both of them looked around at the impenetrable mossy thickets.

  After a moment Rae said, “I never thought there could be a place without people. I never... Maybe I was wrong.”

  The brook sang softly to itself. Somehow the sound did not lessen the endless silence of the forest, but emphasized it, as lettering points up the whiteness of a piece of paper. Rae’s fingers had stopped moving in her hair. She looked frightened. It tore at Crispin’s heart.

  “Of course there’re people here,” he said, less confidently than he had meant to. “All we have to do is find them. And we’re wasting time right now.” He picked their bags up and snapped his fingers. “Come on. Your hair looks just as good down.”

  “Does it really? I’ll leave it down, then.”

  He stood impassively as she shook her head a couple of times, freeing the braids, then rolled up the trousers he had lent her and splashed across the stream to join him.

  They walked in silence. The air was cold and dry, but Crispin grew hot from walking and tied his coat around his waist. The pines stood far enough apart that it was not necessary to force a path through them. Their trunks were practically branchless for twenty or thirty feet—like flaky pillars holding up a ceiling of interlaced boughs. Soft dead needles carpeted the ground, and brambles and puffball mushrooms grew around the bases of the trees. Little collections of skeletons lay half-concealed by fungi-encrusted fallen trunks. In some places, the green-stained bones were piled into knee-high cairns: the refuse collections of the largest and most fastidious daemons. Crispin walked a few paces behind Rae. He had heard too many stories of travelers losing each other in broad daylight in places like this to let her out of his sight. Apparently she had heard some of the same stories, for she never stopped glancing over her shoulder at him. The fifth or sixth time he caught her looking, he made a face at her.

  She burst into nervous laughter. “Oh, by the Queen, Cris. Don’t do that!”

  He crossed his eyes and let his jaw hang.

  “Aaaah!” She sagged against a tree trunk, “I can’t help thinking something’s got into you when you do that!”

  There was a note of real fear in her voice. He returned his face to normal. “Well, we can’t stop now; it isn’t even the middle of the morning.”

  “Yes... ” She did not move. “Crispin, I’m afraid. There’s nobody. And there’s so many daemons. I know you think I can’t feel them, but I can. And you... you... ”

  Her head was buried in the arm that rested against the tree trunk; her shoulders quivered. She seemed to be inviting his touch.

  “Girl. I’m doing the best I can, What do you want?”

  “I want—” She gasped. “I don’t know what I want. But I do know it’s pointless to go on. There’s no end to this waste, We’ll never reach Kirekune. And yet we can’t stop, can’t stop—”

  If they were trying to reach Kirekune, this was the first Crispin had heard of it. He suppressed the slur that leapt to his tongue. “So we won’t go on. We’ll try and turn back, although I doubt—”

  “No! No! You don’t understand. We’re both going to die anyway. Why did I leave Valestock? We’re all going to die.”

  Alarms went off in Crispin’s head. Never since he had known her had she confessed to weakness. This was what he had dreaded most, all these days. He said robustly: “While there’s life there’s hope.”

  “I’m not holding you responsible, Crispin! You’ve been wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. But—but... I just don’t think I can go on any farther.”

  Crispin went to her. “Are you sick? Are you tired? We’ll stop right here for a day, maybe two; you can rest. I’ll try and kill a rabbit for us—I used to be pretty good with the throwing knife—”

  She laughed a trifle hysterically. “You still are! But rabbits aren’t such easy targets as men!” She lifted her head, her long hair spilling back. “I can go on, of course I can! Oh, Queen, I’ve been playing the part of a silly female for so long that I can’t stop, but I can’t help feeling it’s pointless, because there’s really only one important thing in all the world, one thing. Do you understand?”

  He could not make her go on in this state. He made her sit down on the ground, in the pine needles, with her back against the tree on which she had been leaning. The brown musk of crushed puffballs rose. She coughed. Crispin dropped his knapsack and sat down opposite her. “It’s all right, I promise. We’ll have a rest, and then you’ll—”

  “No, let me explain! I have to explain!”

  He closed his eyes. “Explain what?”

  “Queen... There’re certain things I’ve known ever since I was a child. I used to try and tell people sometimes. It’s called evangelizing. But you can’t help it, really. You want so badly to tell someone else, so they know, too. I left off when I realized nobody understands. But you—I feel like I can’t go any longer... ” Her words trailed off. “Since I left the Mansion... ”

  “A mansion,” Crispin said. “So you are nobility. You never would tell me your family name.”

  “I’m not nobility! That’s not it at all!”

  He touched her hand, silencing her. “Start at the beginning.”

  “All right.” She drew a deep breath. “All right. My aunt owned a whorehouse in Okimako—she may still, for all I know. That’s where my mother grew up. My father was the son of merchants. My name is Akila—in Kirekuni that’s ash, not the tree, but what’s left over from a fire. Rae Ash. I’ve been goin
g by Clothwright for years, but I—I didn’t want to lie to you.”

  “But you did lie to me,” Crispin said, suppressing the high note of unreason that threatened to creep into his voice. “You didn’t tell me you grew up in a cult.”

  “How do you—”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? Just say yes.”

  “You’re not as stupid as you look, Crispin Kateralbin!” Then she seemed to crumple. “Or is it that obvious?”

  “Just putting two and two together,” Crispin said. “They tend to add up to four.” His voice fell flat and loud on the silence of the forest. Once again he had the feeling of being watched. He could barely keep from twisting around.

  “All right. It’s true,” Rae said.

  “Which cult? The Nihilists? The Apocalypists? Did you help them set that fire in Valestock? Have I been your dupe all along?”

  “I wouldn’t set foot in an Apocalypist house if they paid me! I’m a child of the Dynasty.”

  “Can’t say I’ve heard of them.”

  “The Glorious Dynasty. It’s the only cult that receives true revelations. That’s why they don’t need to advertise, like the Apocalypists do. See here, Crispin. This is how I was taught it.” Like a schoolchild, she folded her hands in her lap. “Everyone in the civilized lands—Ferupe, Kirekune, Cype, Izte Kchebuk’ara, the Mim, Eo loria, the Pacific islands—is descended from your Royals. As the Ferupian influence expanded over the centuries, the webs of kinship that lead, by however circuitous a path, back to the Monarch, spread, too—through rape, droit de seigneur, polygamy, miscegenation. The Significant Lizards of Kirekune are also related to the Ferupian Royal family, and intermarriage continued until the beginning of the war. When, around the tenth century, the Kirekunis began to expand their empire, history repeated itself on the other side of the continent. By the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier, both the western and eastern hemispheres were infected with Royal blood. You and I, and everyone in the world, are distantly related to each other and to the Queen. To be human is to be Royal.”