The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  The funny thing was that his heart was beating so fast in his throat with the anticipated pleasure of seeing her again, he didn’t know whether he’d even be able to get the words out.

  Orpaan was exhausted, hiccupping softly with the last of his tears. He stumbled and nearly fell. Crispin forgot Rae. He lifted Orpaan into his arms. The child was a little lighter than Crispin himself.

  Orpaan’s eyes were wide. “Cris, the Wraiths are here,” he whispered, looking around big-eyed, as if he was afraid they were being watched. “They want to get me. I have to go away.”

  Crispin could not help glancing around in his turn, but the pines seemed empty. In fact, ominously so. Though it was full dark by now, he could not hear a single night bird. “How do you know?”

  “I can feel ‘em. Can’t you feel ‘em?” Orpaan shuddered. “Some things I know! Cris, let’s please not stop here!”

  Crispin shook his head tiredly. “Sometimes you act like a tetchy old man. But all right.” He surprised himself by planting a kiss on Orpaan’s cheek. The boy grimaced and swiped at the spot. “I’m gonna carry you for now, but you’ll have to climb down when we get there, cause we’re gonna have to be real maneuverable. You know what that means? Maneuverable?”

  Orpaan did not answer. His whole body was trembling. Crispin suppressed a pang of worry.

  That afternoon, returning from reconnaissance at Holstead House, having witnessed the arrival of the daemonmongers’ men, his head abuzz with plans, he had found Jacithrew tinkering again with the flying machine. The old man was evidently keyed up into a mood of giddy delight. As soon as he saw Crispin, he hailed him, and began to conduct a one-sided conversation so rambling Crispin wasn’t sure whether Jacithrew was talking to him or to himself. His mood was a complete change from his usual dour scurryings to and fro. And this was no rabid outburst, such as he sometimes indulged in. Crispin was completely at a loss. When Orpaan handed Jacithrew a wrench instead of a hammer, and the old Wraith hit the child open-handed, leaving bleeding scratches on his face, it would normally have been all Crispin could do not to wring Jacithrew’s neck; but today the incident just contributed to his growing sense of bewilderment. He had no idea how to deal with Jacithrew in this mood. He washed the blood off Orpaan’s face, took him downstairs (hardly noticing that the guard daemon was gone and the door clearly visible in the pine trunk), lit the fire, and sat Orpaan down by it. Then, unable to suppress his curiosity, he brewed himself a mug of acorn tea and leaned against the pine to watch the machine take shape.

  As the twilight gathered, and Jacithrew’s loud, shrill monologue stopped making the least bit of sense, the machine grew and grew. The last of the parts that had lain about the downstairs room assumed their rightful identities. Three more pairs of wings, held apart by wooden struts, were layered on top of those that Jacithrew had already attached to the contraption. A carrying cradle developed on the chassis, and a propeller appeared on what Crispin could not help thinking of as the front grille, though there was no grille in sight. Finally, Jacithrew hopped out onto the ground and circled the machine, tittering with pleasure. “Help me raise it!” he ordered Crispin. Crispin jumped; he hadn’t realized Jacithrew knew he was there. And as always when he had underestimated the old man, wariness made him decide to humor him, for risk of offending him.

  Can’t do any harm, anyway, he thought, as he climbed the tree, unlooped the bunches of ropes he’d put there before, and knotted them around the machine. Then, using a branch as a fulcrum, he hoisted the machine all the way up to the peak of the pine, anchored the ropes to the ground, and let it sway there, cradled by dozens of little branches. Jacithrew had succeeded in making it very light for its size. Every time Crispin brushed against it, his skin prickled with the presence of daemons.

  He’s just gotta get this craze out of his system, he thought as he climbed down. He’s been obsessed for days. It’ll work itself out ff I go along with him—

  “Oh, I will escape now!” Jacithrew caroled, prancing round and round. Crispin saw Orpaan looking out of the door in the tree and mouthed, Go back inside, “Yes, I will fly and fly and fly away from this dead place, to a land where all is life. I will fly south to Izte Kchebuk’ara, where the sun shines all day and there are beautiful red-skinned women, where there is wine to be drunk beside a sparkling sea, where there is hope for an old man!”

  At that moment they heard an airplane in the distance. Its advent cast a spell of silence on all three of them. When it was directly overhead, Jacithrew broke the quiet. He cantered back and forth, waving his arms and shouting, “Halloo! Halloooo! Storky-porky! Wild goose, bend your neck, wild swan, dip down!” He coughed. “Down, down! Dip down!”

  The noise of the aircraft’s great daemon engine grew fainter as it passed into the west. For a second Crispin, squinting upward, thought he saw a pale spot like a face appear on the fuselage. Then there was a faint whine and something hit the forest, about a mile away, with a long ripping crash. A flock of birds rose into the sky like dust from a beaten carpet.

  Jacithrew stopped shouting.

  Crispin followed the birds with his eyes.

  Jacithrew shot a glance around, like a naughty child who finds himself momentarily unobserved, then made a dash for the rope ladder and began to climb.

  Rae didn’t move. She was on her knees staring at the dead man. Crispin had to drag her to her feet. “Pull yourself together!” he hissed in her ear. He had to act confident. It wouldn’t do to let her see that his plan had already been shot to pieces. The plan hadn’t included killing anyone, let alone a man who was innocent, even if he had been trying to rape her. Crispin hadn’t meant to throw the knife: it had just happened, the same way it had happened back on that Lovoshire road. But this time the red beast had not done it. Killing the trader had not been an act of rage, but of some deeper, more difficult logic than Crispin used every day.

  Orpaan stood in the doorway with his back to them, a small ragged figure with ridiculously big ears. Sueras and Fremis stood on either side of him, immensely tall and thin and crooked, their hands resting on Orpaan’s shoulders. Daemons were sweeping over them and out into the night. But Orpaan did not move, and neither did his two demogorgons. It was they who had put the old woman and the lovebirds in the bonfire clearing out of commission. The five had simply fallen silent and slumped against each other; Orpaan said they were stunned. That was when Crispin’s plan had started going off course. What was it in the Wraiths’ racial mentality? he wondered wildly. A passivity, an inability to think in terms of the long range, which combined with the accident of their dark skin made them perfect targets for the Ferupian patriotic spirit? It was incomprehensible how, with power like this at their disposal, they could have allowed themselves to be exploited for so long!

  The sensation of all the daemons fleeting past Crispin was halfway between total pain and the feeling of swimming naked in a waterfall. He recognized the onset of a trance state and shook himself. In the name of the Queen!

  He grabbed Rae and shoved past Orpaan out of the house. The wind had dropped. It was so quiet now that he could hear the crackling of the last of the bonfire, two hundred feet into the woods. The pines seemed to have marched closer to the walls. The cold wormed its way into his bones.

  “It’s the daemons,” Rae gasped suddenly. “Can’t you see them? They’re up on the roof! They’re all around the house! Anthea—Liesl—Hannah—I’m sorry—” She hid her face in his chest. Her body heaved violently. She wasn’t crying, she was having hysterics. He could tell she had been holding it in for a long time, but all the same!

  “Orpaan!” he hissed.

  The child, still staring into the daemon house, was pacing-slowly backwards onto the bare earth. His daemons had become invisible again.

  “Orpaan—”

  Two women, one dark and small, one fair and tall, appeared on the threshold. Their clothes looked hastily put on. They stared disbelievingly at Rae, seeming scarcely to see Orpaan, though the child
stood directly in front of her. Every alarm in Crispin’s mind shrilled. He stared at them, trying to make eye contact, make them notice him. We can settle this... we can still settle this...

  The fair woman met his gaze. Her lip curled. The humming of the daemons which had gathered into a cone over the house grew slowly louder. Crispin’s skin itched as if it were being pulled taut over his face and scalp.

  Rae wrenched away from him. He saw her mouth opening in a scream he could not hear, felt her shaking him. Her tear-slimed face wavered like a reflection in a warped mirror. Suddenly the odd pulling sensation ceased. There was a smell of burning hair. Crispin staggered, nearly blacking out as blood rushed to his head.

  The fair woman slumped against the jamb of the door and slid to the ground. The dark-skinned woman let out a cry and stooped for a moment over her friend; then she rose and there was a terrible expression on her face. Orpaan still had not moved.

  Daemon winds swirled down from the top of the house, cutting through Crispin’s body like sweet-edged knife blades. Orpaan staggered back, then recovered. Rae wrung her hands. “Don’t worry, darling,” Crispin shouted inanely, “Don’t worry!” What he wanted to communicate to her was that the Wraith woman was getting the worst of it. Her face had creased into lines of pain, and an unnatural light danced over her scalp, as if she had doused her hair in a bucket of cold fire.

  “That’s what she did to you!” Rae wept, tugging at his arm. “It’s a Wraith trick that the trickster women stole, but she’s a Wraith, too, and she’s really good at it, and he’s killing her! What is he, a daemon? I don’t—oh—” Her voice changed. “Fineas, Sumannin, Tsuricus—”

  The dark woman fell to her knees, retching. Horror cracked the daemon-induced glaze over Crispin’s mind. He had not meant to kill anyone, and yet Jacithrew lay dead in the forest, and another dead man lay in the house, and the fair woman slumped dead in the doorway, and the five around the bonfire were probably dead as well, and all of it was his fault! If Orpaan died, too, for nothing, it would become insupportable. He lurched forward, swept Orpaan off the ground, and turned to run, the child writhing feebly in his grasp.

  Which way? Which way? There were people in the pines, old, young, male, female. In the first gray light of the dawn, which was just touching the sky, they looked like creatures of tree roots, coated with ash. A stone’s throw away, they were looting the pockets of the five Ferupians around the bonfire’s embers. Crispin swung around again to grab Rae, who seemed incapable of moving, and froze as he saw the daemons avalanching up into the sky like an upside-down waterfall of jewels. They were invisible, of course, but he could feel each beast so strongly he knew them like pieces of his own body that were being washed off into the air. “Oh, Crispin,” Rae sobbed, clinging to him. “Hurry hurry hurry! Oh, Queen, I knew it, I knew something like this would happen! Let’s go, oh, please—”

  The daemons stung their heels like thrown stones as they made their escape. Behind them the dark woman sobbed unheedingly over her dead friend. The trucks stood like skeletons in the road, their tarp-roofed trailers ribbed and shadowed. Later Crispin would be surprised that he did not think of stealing one. For that morning, carrying Orpaan, leading Rae, he must have walked twenty miles around curves and swerves, through ruts and sand hills, under thorns and creepers, over fox spoor and daemon bones, past the weed-blurred end of the road into the forest, before exhaustion finally got the better of fear and he muttered to Rae that he was going to lie down and sleep even if all the daemons in the Wraithwaste descended on them when he closed his eyes.

  Her earlier hysteria had been replaced by a kind of pliant cooperativeness. She nodded, her lips bloodless, eyes swimming red. It was still deadly cold but the sun had come out, a fuzzy white circle at the top of the sky.

  Avril 1893 A.D. The Wraithwaste

  After the road ended, all was daemons. During the day, naked pines clawed at cold gray skies, or were lashed into a semblance of life by dry winds; at night, the throbbing darkness worked on Crispin’s ears until he could no longer tell whether the buzzing was inside or outside his head.

  They had come away from the destruction of Holstead House with nothing. Crispin had to struggle so hard just to keep himself, Rae, and Orpaan alive that he had little time to think about the change that had come over Rae. She had stopped resisting his advances, seeming finally to have accepted his rescue as proof of his love for her—a love he no longer understood himself. Her submissiveness might, of course, just be a by-product of their extreme circumstances. But when he had time to think about it, he felt not. It was as if their separation and reunion had produced a bond deeper than friendship, deeper than his responsibility for her, deeper than the physical lust which she now allowed him to satisfy in her body. If tempers flared, or hunger deadened speech, that bond remained. He could tell by her eyes when she was thinking about him.

  “A Kirekuni,” he muttered to himself sometimes.

  But it didn’t matter anymore. The love he felt for her when she allowed him to sleep in her arms with Orpaan curled between them or snugged around one of their backs, when she let him kiss her lips and breasts and even fondle the poor stump of her tail—it was not like anything he remembered. Occasionally he wished Orpaan weren’t there. But even if Jacithrew had not laid it on him, he could not have deserted the boy. The other Wraiths hadn’t taken Orpaan in before; they were not likely to now. And if the daemonmongers’ men had found him, at the very most they would have shipped him back to a Lovoshire orphanage to spend his childhood in misery. Crispin wouldn’t have subjected a mongrel puppy, let alone Orpaan, to life in Lovoshire. Privately, he assumed all of the responsibility for the atrocities Orpaan had committed—and this bond, which the child did not know about, was almost stronger than his love for Rae.

  Bad enough even with both of them here! Stumbling through the Waste, his future drained of possibilities, his past an unrecoverable idyll, his sleep plagued by visions of cities.

  He was in a city now, all right—the deserted city of the Wraiths. More than once the three of them had crashed through the roof of a weather-weakened root home, and as they sprawled in the soil, skeins of daemons had risen like smoke.

  Here where daemons were the only living beasts, they materialized almost at random, fearing nothing at all. Though once they might have fed on the flora and fauna of the forest, now they lived off each other. The cairns of bones Crispin and Rae had noticed before, which marked big daemons’ territories, had become as common as mushrooms—and they ranged from knee height to the size of a small hill.

  Crispin had given up his attempts to hail the airplanes that droned with increasing frequency across the sky. But without telling Rae, he was doggedly tracking them westward. Their only hope of survival lay in making for the war front. Queen knew what would happen to Rae and Orpaan once they got there. War offered financial rewards to men, but only death to children and disgrace to women. Crispin’s experiences in the Wraithwaste had given him confidence that he himself would be all right. But Orpaan and Rae...

  He was feeling the pinch of having others dependent on him.

  Orpaan, too, had changed. The night of the killings at Holstead House had been the last time he displayed any sort of fortitude. Perhaps it was the aftereffects of Jacithrew’s death. Or perhaps he understood that he and his daemons had killed six people—Crispin had tried to explain it all away, but he did not seem to understand. At any rate, although Sueras, Fremis, and Amanse were still keeping company with the party, Orpaan had not materialized them since the night at the house of trickery. He seemed completely cowed. No longer did he offer suggestions and advice as if he was another adult. He merely trailed along, holding Crispin’s hand, his thumb in his mouth. Although in their circumstances the very thought was so petty as to be ridiculous, Crispin feared he was jealous of Rae.

  Orpaan made a constant, conscious effort to understand things. His recent string of failures to do so frightened him and made him miserable. He had thought
he understood Jacithrew; but Jacithrew had died. He had thought he understood his daemons; but his daemons had powers he had never even guessed at. (He didn’t even want to remember that.) Nonetheless, now that Crispin was always talking to Rae, not to him, Orpaan spent most of his time in silent communication with Amanse, Sueras, and Fremis. They comforted him when he remembered Jacithrew. We’re still here anyway, they said, even if those rotten devils Kankeris and Gelfitus cut out. The sleazes. But we love love love you! We’re not gonna leave!

  And being in the “fuzzy” state of communion made the Waste look less stark—like it could be the forest near Holstead House, which was equally barren but somehow friendlier. It made him forget how hungry he was. Communion also kept him from remembering other things. If he remembered some of the stuff that had happened to him in his seven and a half years, he would start screaming. He knew. It had happened before.

  But you couldn’t talk to daemons all the time; it stopped being pleasant and got annoying, like having your head patted too much, the way Jacithrew used to do, except Orpaan had never dared to pull away from him. And when he started thinking about Jacithrew, he wished he had never helped him with the flying machine. Because no matter what Crispin said, it had been all his fault. All his fault that it was no good, not like the airplanes that flew overhead like beautiful jeweled darts. His fault that it had been a clunky toy that could no more fly than could a wooden plank. And because it hadn’t flown, Jacithrew—Dadda, though he wasn’t really Dadda—had died.

  And now Orpaan was afraid Crispin and Rae, who he’d thought might be his new new Dadda and Mama, were going to die, too. Because there wasn’t any food.