The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  When Orpaan let himself come out of the fuzzy-happy trance, he knew this part of the forest. It was horribly similar to the place where he had been born. Only Wraiths could squeeze a living from this wilderness! If he had known Crispin was going to come here, he would have tried to explain about everything being dead, and then maybe Crispin would have changed his mind. But now it was too late.

  Too late. Nothing to do, nothing to say. He could only try to keep up with them.

  More than anything, he was scared of getting lost.

  And he was worried about Rae. Crispin’s girl. Her skin was so dull, her hair tangled, and she’d cut her dress up the front so she could walk. It didn’t look right. Not like Hannah’s dress. Hannah had always looked right; but Hannah, too, was now a part of the past. The only thing about Rae that still shone was her lips, because she was always licking them.

  And Orpaan was worried about Crispin. Rae didn’t watch him when they were eating, but Orpaan did, and Crispin never ate anything. But Orpaan didn’t dare mention it, he didn’t dare say anything that might get on Crispin’s nerves, because sometimes, usually when he thought he was alone, Crispin would get angry, and there was the chance he might turn that fury on Orpaan. He was like Orpaan’s nearly forgotten Dadda, like that. At night, when he thought Rae and Orpaan were sleeping, Crispin would get up and walk a little way away, and curse and kick and punch trees, and then lean his head against a tree trunk, and Orpaan knew he was crying. That was when he wanted to run out and hug him and say, It’s okay, fella, cause I love love love you! Just the way his daemons said it to him.

  But he did not dare.

  Rae was far more open. She cried while they were walking, silently. There was never any warning when she was going to start, her mouth would just wobble, and water, invaluable water, would drip out of her eyes.

  Orpaan liked to lie in between them at night, so that he could stuff his hands down his sides, one next to each of their chests, and monitor their breathing. Sometimes he didn’t sleep all night himself, he was so busy keeping watch over them.

  And day followed hungry day, and he was always thirsty no matter how much water he drank, and Amanse and Sueras and Fremis hissed in chorus to him at night in a way which they mistakenly believed to be soothing. Perhaps it would have been soothing to daemon kids. It kept him awake. But Orpaan knew they meant well, so he did not like to disillusion them.

  What really was soothing, although he had not wanted it to be at first, was the way Rae hugged him and talked to him. Orpaan guessed that she used him to avoid talking to Crispin sometimes, and he felt bad for taking sides—but when she held him, he couldn’t possibly pull away. When she wanted, she was kinder than any other woman he had ever known, even his real mama. “It’s a good thing you didn’t stay with Hannah and the rest of the tricky ladies,” he told her once, when he felt like talking. “You’re much too nice!”

  Crispin was leaning against a tree watching them. His laughter sounded bad. “Hear that? Even he agrees with me!”

  Rae hid her face in Orpaan’s hair. “At least I would have lived to see my nineteenth birthday. I had such plans, Crispin! Not like you. Which is ironic, considering what I believe in.” Her voice had gone small and sad. She shook herself—and Orpaan—and went on, “You’re always in a rush to get somewhere better, but you have no idea where that is. And look where you’ve got us now!”

  “I work things out as I go along,” Crispin said. “And I know one thing: I would never sell myself into slavery for the price of a bed and a meal!”

  “That just proves how little you know of the world,” Rae said. She started to cry. Through her sobs, she hiccupped, “It wouldn’t have been slavery, anyway! They loved each other! And now they’re dead! Liesl, Mother, the twins, Anthea—”

  The anger vanished from Crispin’s face. He came toward them, and Orpaan reveled in the crush of bodies as he wrapped his arms around both of them. Crispin smelled of sweat, a good, familiar smell that brought back ancient memories. “Not as much as I love you. Nobody could ever love you as much as I do.”

  And Rae allowed herself to be calmed. It was always easy for Crispin to calm her. Orpaan sometimes thought he provoked her to anger deliberately, just so he could calm her again. But it was none of Orpaan’s business. While Crispin was kissing her tears dry, Orpaan wriggled unobtrusively away and went to look for pinecones that still had the kernels in them.

  When he had gathered a pile he knelt on the ground to pick the nuts out. He was astonished, and horrified, to feel warm wetness splashing on his knee. He looked around to see if either of them had noticed; but they were still wrapped around each other. He wiped his eyes hard. If they saw him crying, they might think he wasn’t happy. And he was. He was hungry, but he was happier than he had ever been in his life.

  The only time Crispin ever felt himself getting impatient with Rae was when she refused to speculate about where they were going, or how much longer they could last. Instead she would push her emaciated face into his neck and kiss him, sucking his skin as if she thought she could get some nourishment from it. The forest had become so sere and juiceless that even clean running water was precious; they were living on roots and keeping their spirits up with talk of banquets. At least, Crispin was. Rae would just keep walking, her face a blank, and he had the uncomfortable impression that her mind was somewhere else altogether, and his voice ran on, unheard.

  He thanked the Queen that he had been born half-Lamaroon, constructed of air and muscle, needing only a few bites of food a day to keep walking. But in the mirror of a puddle, the morning after one of the Wraithwaste’s infrequent rainstorms battered the land, he saw that his cheeks had hollowed to caverns and the bones beneath his eyes stuck out like crags. Rae had told him before that the eyes themselves glowed “like ripe cherries.” He’d been pleased, because he thought she was joining in his running dark joke in which he compared everything around them to edibles; but now he saw what she meant. Appalled, he sat back on his heels.

  Rae and Orpaan were around the other side of the ruin in which they had sheltered last night, digging in the long-abandoned vegetable garden. By some freak of fate, just as the storm hit, they had had their first piece of luck since fleeing from Holstead House: a deserted farmhouse, complete with menagerie and overgrown potato patch, which had certainly once been a house of trickery. Within the walls of what had once been the kitchen, stone flags underlay dead brambles, and the incessant throb of crowded, seething, self-devouring daemonkind faded to a buzz. It was like coming in out of cold which has numbed your flesh. The rain drummed on the broken-in roof. They had woken early and hurried outside into sunshine. Rae’s excitement at the possibility of finding potatoes in the garden made her seem as young as Orpaan.

  Strangely enough, the bleaker their situation became, the oftener Orpaan was coming out of his trance state. He had shown Crispin and Rae how to kill daemons that he materialized, and cook and eat them. He liked the furry ones; he said they were “softer.” But even the flesh of “soft” daemons was so mouth-parchingly sour that you could only stomach tiny amounts of it before you vomited, with the result that they were all constantly nauseated. On the other hand, it was definitely better than nothing at all.

  The sun shone brilliantly. Water dripped down Crispin’s neck from the dead-creeper-swathed branches of the pines. The crashing of the invisible sea of daemons was so loud that he could hardly hear Rae and Orpaan chattering. With the clarity of a hallucination, he imagined what the air would look like if he could see them: millions of naked sprites of all shapes and sizes, pursuing and devouring each other with the frenzy of a hundred piranhas caught in three feet of water. And the world, Millsy had once told him, was like water to them, with no demarcation between air and earth and tree and man—the daemons could move through them all as smoothly as ghosts, and their passing left no mark. Only oak trees stopped them, as did silver, and there wasn’t much of either around here. The daemons were a river rolling and curling back
on itself, trapped behind a dam. But where was the dam? And when would it break?

  Rae said that the Wraithwaste had been shrinking for hundreds of years. Soon it must reach its critical minimum area. Crispin could feel the imminence of that critical moment more and more clearly, the harder he concentrated on the subsonic noise of the daemons.

  Danger! Danger! Danger! rang the alarms, as he slid imperceptibly into a trance.

  Wearily, he forced his eyes open. He pushed his hands into his hair. It felt like a bird’s nest. Rae had fallen into the habit of occupying her evenings, once they were too tired to walk any more, in separating his hair into dozens of fat, matted worms. She never smiled or talked as she worked. It was as if her life depended on keeping her hands occupied, and nothing else.

  Overhead the sky was a pale winter blue. To the west, planes glinted in the sunshine like silver insects, circling as lazily as the flies that waltzed beneath tent roofs in summer. As a child, between shows, Crispin had sat alone in a corner of the women’s dressing-room tent and stared at the flies, wondering without wanting to know what his mother was doing in her black top outside which the queue of men was often five or ten long.

  Exotic dancing. Giving ‘em tattoos where they want them.

  Balloon Lady. Lovely lady.

  Every now and then, near the horizon, one of the airplanes tumbled out of the sky. Crispin had never seen such a thing in days of watching them. He narrowed his eyes. Was this how they landed? There were twenty-two planes—then another faraway bluebottle spiraled down.

  “Twenty-one,” he said aloud, decisively. He stood up, ignoring the wave of dizziness that threatened him.

  He should not have sat down to rest! Delay inevitably brought thoughts of how nice it would be never to go on at all; delay had caused him just now to sink down into the slow-dripping Wraithwaste day. He would not let that happen again! It would probably be necessary to die soon. But he would do it without a murmur. And he would do it on his feet!

  And so would Rae and Orpaan—even if he had to hold them up! He shouted, “Come here and bring him! Never mind the potatoes! We’re going on right now!”

  ... the presence of the child evoked a feeling like that of a sailor who sees by the compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving is far off the right course, but that he is incapable of stopping, that every minute is taking him farther and farther away from the right course, and that to acknowledge that he is off course would be just the same as acknowledging that he is undone.

  —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  Nothing About Us

  26 Avril 1893 A.D. The Raw: The Lovoshire Parallel:

  Pilkinson’s Shadowtown

  Two days later, Crispin, Rae, and Orpaan entered the village of Pilkinson’s Shadowtown, on the edge of the Raw, and certain things became far clearer to Crispin than they had in Ferupe, where people did not experience the approach of the war directly, as a blow which can be ducked or borne, but rather subtly, like the scent from an onrolling charnel cart, which is inescapable. In Shadowtown, by contrast, everything was as harsh and black and white as the sun at midday.

  The century-long Kirekuni advance had caused the trickster women to batten their doors against outsiders and plant wards of oak around their gardens, but they, like the Wraiths, had existed before the war, and many of them hoped to survive it. Shadowtown had no such history or aspirations. In fact, as Crispin realized before he and Rae and the child were there long enough to get a square meal, it was no town at all. It was a toilet for soldiers’ whims. Its demolition date had been fixed before it was even built. It was in no better a position than a sand castle in the way of the rising tide. (For at least twenty years, certain Kingsburg advisors to the Queen had annually predicted the ground Kirekune would gain that year, and they had consistently been proved right, for the figure did not change; though it was unlikely that the Queen heard anything of these estimates on her hill of silken pillows, with her Cypean cats in her lap, and her ears ringing with her courtiers’ compliments.)

  There were perhaps ten women to every man in Shadowtown. Dogs and cats—as opposed to daemons kept collared for food—were as rare as gold. People might be born in Shadowtown, live there, and die there, but the stammering fire that dropped out of the sky at night and burned holes in their houses worked on them from the minute they first took a breath. They thought no more about hope or fear than they did about love. The hopelessness of the place settled immediately about Crispin’s shoulders like a too-heavy coat. But he shrugged it off and led Rae and Orpaan down the rocky, dusty street—if it could be called a street—with the confidence of a prince.

  Most of the houses were either half-built or half-burnt: it was difficult to tell which. Gray-painted tanks, trucks, and motorbikes were parked everywhere. Soldiers smoked cigarettes as they messed with the engines. They paid no attention to Crispin, Rae, and Orpaan. Shushing Rae’s protests, Crispin pulled her and Orpaan straight through a group of them into a building that smelled like a tavern. There, he ordered them a slap-up dinner. He still had one pound of the money the Old Gentleman had given him, and though the bill was rubbed almost blank by months of unfolding and refolding with sweaty fingers, the Wraith barmaid took it without so much as a glance into his face.

  They were halfway through their meal, Rae and Orpaan eating with a desperate speed which Crispin knew would make them sick later, he pacing himself with water, when soldiers with yellow epaulets on dark green uniforms surrounded their table and he knew his show of confidence had backfired.

  He pushed back his chair and stood up. He saw a flicker of disconcertment in seven out of eight pairs of eyes, but not in those of the wiry, middle-aged man who faced him from behind Rae’s stool. This man had double epaulets that stuck out six inches beyond his shoulders. He said conversationally, “Out of the Waste, are you?”

  “And still weary from the journey,” Crispin said with as much Millsy-style dignity as he could muster.

  “Aye. Not many come that way.”

  “Last was before ye joined up, Snyder,” one soldier said to another, a very old man, and sniggered.

  “In fact, I’m sorry to admit I don’t know exactly where we are.” Crispin strove for a look of amiable puzzlement. “I left Valestock with my family more than a month ago. I don’t even know if it’s Marout or Avril.”

  “None but fools or them with the hangman behind them would go west. ‘Spect them in Valestock would be interested to know of you. Aye, well, they won’t be hearing for a good while yet,” the two-epaulet man said drily. “You’re in Pilkinson’s Shadowtown, but all Shadowtowns are the same from Khyzlme down to Sudeland—isn’t that so, boys?”

  The men muttered a ragged yes. “But we got the best ho’s for miles, right ‘ere,” one of them added boldly. The officer nodded and smiled, acknowledging his men’s laughter. His gnarled hands rested on Rae’s shoulders, massaging. Rae’s carved-out face was white and dry; the food stains on her lips looked as garish as paint. The officer’s index fingers wandered into the hollows of her throat, between the tendons that stood out in painful relief.

  “Arrest them. Take him out to Chressamo. Do what you like with her; she seems used up. The child—” he shrugged. “Is he really yours?” he asked Crispin, giving a final cruel squeeze to Rae’s shoulders and stepping back. “I think not. He’s Shadow, and you are not.”

  Strong hands grabbed Crispin’s wrists, ready to twist his arms behind his back. Even through the red haze that was clouding his mind, he knew that in his present state of weakness he wasn’t going to be able to get free. Why wasn’t Orpaan calling his daemons? Just when they could be really useful! The child’s eyes darted wildly, but he did not move. One of his hands held a forkful of stew in midair, and it was trembling so violently that lumps of meat fell to the table. “He’s my son!” Crispin shouted. “If you harm him, I’ll kill you and every last one of your descendants!”

  The officer laughed. He was at least forty, and his expression
was pleasant. “Haven’t any, my friend. You clearly know little about the war. It would be interesting to find out what you’re doing here. Perhaps we’ll talk again—I don’t have much to do with Chressamo, but you never know. All right. Take him.”

  He turned away, and as if in slow motion Crispin saw his mouth open and the sound of words come out. He was hailing the bartender.

  Orpaan knew when Crispin started fighting the soldiers that his new Dadda and his new Mama were going to die this time for real. Soldiers didn’t stand for this kind of thing. Soldiers had sent ferrets with fire-fuses strapped to them down into the root houses of his village. Soldiers had slung him into a tree as if he was a dog that was worrying their legs. Soldiers were merciless. Jacithrew’s words echoed in his head: They hate us. They call us not Wraiths, but Shadows. They think we are less than human, created merely to serve and amuse, and if we fail to obey—and even when we do obey—they deem it their right to do what they will with us. He had said that long, long ago, all the way back, when they stood watching the smoking ruins of the trees, a child and a harmless ancient, the only two survivors of their village, while the air ate away at the corpses of those who had been gunned down, and soldiers lit cigarettes off the embers. That was before they fled east, before Jacithrew went strange. Orpaan had still loved him after he went strange, but he no longer said things that made sense. The night Crispin came had been the first time in over a year that Jacithrew had mentioned the pale people, who had once been the subject of endless discourses. One of the reasons Orpaan had liked Crispin was because of this seemingly restabilizing effect he had on Jacithrew.

  Which had turned out to be a bad thing, too, in the end!

  He sat frozen at the table. Rae hugged him so tight it hurt. Crispin’s struggles made everyone else flee the bar. Orpaan could not fend off the memory of Jacithrew lying in the ruins of his flying machine, nor could he fend off the far older memory of his parents’ and neighbors’ screams coming from beneath the ground, and the smoke. Usually he could make himself not think about those things, but now they met and mingled. He smelled burning daemons. He saw flames spilling out of the doors in the trees.