“Yes, sir,” Ash said mockingly behind him.
Crispin gritted his teeth and moved into the darkness.
Any thought of stopping in on his crew was long gone. As he opened the door to the officers’ quarters, lifting it a little so that it didn’t creak, he whispered: “Left-handed! Who would have thought it!”
It was a little warmer after he closed the door. A brazier of daemons burned at the far end of the room, between the bunks. The brazier was completely hooded, or else it would have lit the room bright as day; as it was, a thin line of white glowed on the floor around the hood. The room smelled of musk and unwashed bodies. As the most junior lieutenant, Crispin had the bunk closest to the ceiling. He laid Vichuisse’s cat-o’-nine-tails on the lockers at the other end of the room. Standing by the brazier, he stripped and pulled on his pajamas, then climbed the ladder past Festhre’s and Butch’s sleeping forms. The sheetbag was icy. Forcing himself not to shiver, he thought:
Rae wasn’t left-handed—
But she was brought up in Ferupe. Most likely when the culties taught her to write, she had to use her right hand. That would’ve taken care of it.
He hadn’t thought of her in months. But she had been on his mind, consciously or unconsciously, most of the evening.
It’s that damn lizard reminded me, he thought with sudden anger. Got to avoid him in future. Got more important things to think about than the past. I was only a kid then. Must avoid—him in future—must remember to avoid...
And sleep closed over him, the dreamless sleep of pure exhaustion to which all those who handle daemons succumb, and just as he was sinking he realized something that almost made him come awake again, something which talking to Mickey Ash had brought to the forefront of his mind.
He did not want to die.
Dying just didn’t fit in with his plans to reap more honor and glory than any other pilot in 80 Squadron’s history, and eventually be promoted to flight captain, from which position he would be pensioned off at the ripe age of thirty-five, when he would be able to lead a comfortable life in Kingsburg. Money and a military title would force society to accept him as it had not accepted the poor circus boy. He had vague plans to become part-owner of a real theater, a theater that staged classy dramas and operas for nobility in masks, to buy his way into a whole string of operations...
Yet death was a probability, not a possibility. How did he dare to plan for the future?
He could not die. He would not.
“Can’t lose your nerve now, boy,” he mumbled. “Gotta fly tomorrow.”
He wrinkled his nose, turned over on his side, and slept. The crackling of flames which he had heard so clearly a moment ago stopped.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds...
—W. B. Yeats
Not Everyone Dies on the Battlefield
For almost three years, the disturbing hallucinations Crispin thought of as “visions” hadn’t bothered him. When he first came to 80 Squadron as a rigger, their absence had been his only consolation. He had been desperately unhappy. He had not been able to make friends, and he yearned agonizingly to fly. His menial tasks bored and frustrated him to tears. It seemed cruelly unfair that the ranks of the regulars should be sealed to him. But then, unbelievably, Vichuisse had opened the doors wide, and the excitement of becoming a pilot, quickly followed by Fischer’s death and Crispin’s promotion to crew lieutenant, and the thousandfold complexities that entered his life that day, erased his nostalgia. Clearheaded in the absence of the visions, he understood that they, like his love for Rae, poor dead Rae, had merely been symptoms of the emotional weakness of his younger self. That self he now regarded with tolerance. Sometimes, secure in his rank and his plans for the future, he reminisced about Rae—revising the circumstances of their meeting to fit the version of his past his friends knew—and Butch would reciprocate with the story of his first love. This had been the daughter of a worker in Butch’s father’s copper mines. Butch had romanced her for four months before he departed for the QAF training camp in Lynche. The pair had corresponded—he with long, passionate letters he knew she would have to have read to her, she with gifts of chickens or cakes that inevitably arrived spoiled—until she announced she was marrying a laborer’s son. Butch said his heart had never recovered from that blow. And indeed, for as long as Crispin had known him he had been celibate, unusually so for a pilot, rejecting the advances of both men and girls with sad smiles.
As a result of Crispin’s repeated exposure to Butch’s story, and his own dislike of the mawkish sentiment with which they toasted their “true loves,” Rae, in Crispin’s memory, had degenerated into a character similar to the village maiden: a shallow, naive music-hall girl whose only distinguishing characteristics were that she had happened to be a cultie and a Kirekuni. (And both those things he left out of the story he shared with Butch.) Perhaps it also had to do with Mickey Ash, the lizard traitor, happening to have the same very old, very common last name she had had. Occasionally Crispin found himself forgetting that the version of his life he told Butch was not true—and experiencing a sharp disappointment when he remembered.
In the story, he substituted Rae Clothwright for Prettie Valenta. He said he had simply grown tired of the circus life and decided to join up. To the lieutenants, who all came from privileged backgrounds, this was laudable. Crispin had taken a step up in the world.
It was lucky none of them knew that circus people looked down upon the military, officers and enlisted men alike, with the virulent contempt for those who follow orders that only entertainers can profess without hypocrisy.
Crispin slept: no longer an entertainer, but a participant in the real, deadly game. And both the vision of Okimako and the real, the vibrant Rae poured back to him in a confused tumble of images.
It was Rae. But it was not Rae as he had known her.
Standing in a stone room, her arms folded, with a fierce, closed, proud expression on her face. Vanishing along a stone corridor in a flurry of women, their high heels clattering like gunfire: women dressed like Rae in black from head to toe. Rae standing in a sunny courtyard, shimmering in a haze of invisible daemons. Rae—and this was the worst image of all—smiling at a daemon, tall and purple and naked, that shambled beside her with its arm through hers—talking to her?
No!
Even in his dreams Crispin knew this was all wrong. She had sworn she would never have anything to do with daemons again, that they withered the souls as well as the bodies of those who tricked them. (Of course, that had been before she, Crispin, and Orpaan started to starve; hunger had made her turn around and unblushingly praise the kindness of the trickster women.)
Long black hair blowing across an orange sky. Rae standing above the pyre of Okimako, as tall as a steeple and ethereal, like a cloud figure on the sunset.
No!
Four-fifths asleep, Crispin twisted onto his back and groaned, massaging his crotch. The image was powerfully erotic, but it was wrong. She had wanted more than anything to be homely. Her beauty and her race had combined to deny her the things in life she most wanted. And it made her miserable to be worshiped.
He could have sworn the sound of a voice woke him. He was lying in his bunk staring at the splintery ceiling three feet above. His body was clammy with sweat. The daemon brazier filled the room with a faint directionless glow. After a few seconds the glow got so strong that it could not possibly have been coming from the brazier. But this did not seem in the least strange to Crispin. He noted it only as one might note that the sun was rising after a long night. He sat up—ducking his head to avoid hitting the ceiling—and looked down.
She sat cross-legged on the strip of floor between the bunks. When she heard him moving, she looked up and smiled. The impact of her beauty hit him like a blow from a twenty-foot daemon. She held something in her lap. It was movi
ng, “What the fuck is that?” Crispin said.
“This?” She lifted the bundle, holding it against her shoulder, bouncing it. With a shock Crispin saw it was a child. An octopus baby, with legs and arms as long in proportion to its small torso as an adult’s should be. In the strange light its skin looked blue, unhealthy. “This is Jonathan,” Rae said proudly. “My son.”
“What?” Crispin sputtered. “All this time I’ve been yearning after you—” In the dream he did not flinch at saying things he would not even have let himself think in reality. “And you’ve been going off getting married and having babies? Queen damn it! It’s just like what happened to Butch! I swear!”
“I haven’t a clue who Butch is,” she said with uncharacteristic asperity, patting the baby on its swaddled bottom, “but it would be a strange coincidence indeed if it was the same as what’s happened to me. Which is a very long story indeed. I don’t know if I should even begin—” Suddenly, the baby squalled. Its cry echoed through the officers’ quarters. Rae’s face fell. She looked around in fear. “Cris—”
There was an odd scent: it smelled like spicy food frying, something with chili peppers.
“Cris!” Rae almost wailed. “I’m not happy here! Please come and get me! I can’t believe you’ve forgotten about me. Am I just a walk-on in your past? That’s what I am here—a bit player. But I didn’t think I was that to you. I thought I was more—more than I ever—”
Without thinking, Crispin started to jump down, to go to her. His head met the roof with a crack which certainly ought to have woken the others, even if the baby’s crying and the strong smell had not. For a moment all he could see was blackness. Flecks of light spun in the void. He fell back onto his bunk.
And he was in Okimako.
He was standing high up on the hill with the flames below him, in the very place from which missteps had taken him twice previously.
He glanced wildly about the broad, empty street. Several minutes must have passed. The fires lower down and higher up on the hill must be eating the goodness out of the air, for it was ridiculously difficult to breathe. His lungs worked like bellows. And the heat had grown so powerful that he could not understand how it was that no flames were in sight. The broken windows and open doors of the fantastic, pastrylike houses lining the street were black, empty.
Imperceptibly, he stopped being Lieutenant Kateralbin on the night of the fourth of Novambar with a patrol to lead tomorrow, and became Crispin-in-the-future. His hair was still buzzed in a Ferupian military-style cut, but he wore Kirekuni clothes. He was panting from the climb. He had no control over the urgency that drove him.
A minute ago he’d glimpsed him. The one he searched for. He’d taken one of the cross streets farther up the hill, heading uphill. Where did the dunghead think he was going?
Crispin would never find him. Not in an old city where all the houses were standing open, asking to be entered, holding out the promise of a thousand and one cubbyholes where a fevered mind might imagine it could escape the flames. Nonetheless, he had to try. It was his only hope. (Their only hope.)
He set off uphill again at a jog-trot, not hurrying anymore. There was no use in hurrying.
It was after he had passed the second, or third, west-twisting side street, that from up ahead, from the direction of the deadly orange glow that haloed the top of the mountain, he heard the sound of rushing water.
He came awake with a nauseating twitch. Really awake this time; the difference was self-awareness. The first thing he thought was that his dream had got one thing right. His sheetbag was soaked with sweat. Gradually, he became aware of a keening, groaning noise.
He forced himself to stop, and to open his eyes.
“Thank the Queen!” Festhre’s mournful-clown face peered over the side of the bunk, gaunt in the first light of dawn. He must be standing on the edge of his own bunk, the bottommost one. As Crispin twisted to see what was clutching his shoulder and arm, Festhre rather shamefacedly eased his hands out from under Crispin’s body. “You were shouting! I thought it was the bugle. But it’s not time yet.”
“Shit. Was I shouting?” Crispin found it hard to speak. He was still breathing hard.
“I can’t imagine why none of the others woke up! We did have quite a wassail last night—before you and Butch got back—we invited a few crewmen in; perhaps Red and Keinze are sleeping the sleep of the remorseful.”
“What did I say?”
“Unintelligible, my dear. Absolute gibberish.”
“Not—no names?”
“Not that I heard.” Festhre’s tone grew just a little ugly. “Why, were you dreaming about poor Miss Clothwright? Your divinely beautiful long-lost love?”
Rae, and she’s alive! Crispin wanted to shout. She’s—do you hear—alive!!!
Then he remembered.
It had only been a dream.
“Fuck Miss Clothwright,” he snarled. Festhre started back, only just managing to hold on to the bunk, his harlequinlike face falling. Crispin tore himself loose of his sheetbag and blankets. “I’m on today,” he said between his teeth. “I might—as well—get up.”
“Well, I’m not on today. And I’m going back to bed.” Festhre dropped catlike to the floor with that grace peculiar to him, and so improbable, given his gawky body. “Sleep is at a premium in these parts, and I intend to get my full share. Good morning. Next time you have nightmares, I won’t wake you.”
If you hadn’t wakened me, I might have found him, Crispin thought. I wasn’t making any mistakes this time! Going for his locker at the other end of the room, he called over his shoulder, “Sorry, Brian. Thanks,”
The only response he got from the bottom bunk was another sniff. But he knew Festhre wasn’t insulted. It was impossible to insult him: he always bounced back like a billikin. Or else he was better at hiding his feelings than anyone Crispin had ever known. Out of all the men in the squadron, he would have done best in a circus. He had the face for it, anyway, Crispin thought. Wouldn’t even need to wear paint.
He buttoned on his flight suit with vicious, jerky movements.
As he was tugging an extra sweater over his head, it happened.
A wall of flame burst roaring out of the floor, rising up all about him, surrounding him in seconds, arching over his head, frizzling his hair, parching his lungs, cracking his skin, blackening his hands in front of his face. The flesh was melting off the bones of his hands and there would be nothing left to protect his eyes. The heat. The heat—
In the windy wake of the flames’ sudden absence he found himself bent over, trembling violently, the heel of his hand between his teeth and the taste of blood in his mouth. Dazed, he straightened up and looked around. There was no soot on the floor. In their bunks, Festhre and the other officers slept. The air was as chilly as one might expect on a winter’s morning. Gray light fingered through the crack at the bottom of the door.
His faltering fingers encountered something on his scalp, clothed in the fuzz of hair the razor had left behind, but no less tender for that: a lump the size of a hard-boiled egg.
Probably not everyone dies on the battlefield. No! The determination not to die will guide us to a bright, mirror-like state of mind.
—Sonu Hwi
Supposed 2 Feel Nothing
Two and a half years earlier, 6 Maia 1895 A.D.
The Raw: Pilkinson’s Air Base II
Two and a half years ago, 80 Squadron had had a better posting than Fostercy: Pilkinson’s Air Base II, near Pilkinson’s Shadowtown. Crispin arrived in spring, one of five recruits dropped off by a troop carrier on its way to Shadowtown. He’d only been free of Chressamo a week, and had spent most of that in trucks being shuttled here and there, north and south: a speck of dust on the game board of the Raw, wafted in the wind of much larger pieces being moved about. On the night of Maia 6 he was finally on his way to join 80 Squadron, trying not to fall asleep as the troop carrier jounced over the Raw. The other recruits destined for 80 Squadron—four b
oys several years younger than Crispin—were out cold, oblivious to the teeth-jarring jolting of the flatbed. They were fresh out of boot camp. Later Crispin discovered that they had had no idea what kind of posting they were getting; all they had been told was that they were joining a QAF squadron in a noncombat capacity. In this respect Crispin was better off. He had been given a rigger’s job because he was actually a daemon handler, not because he had failed to pass the tests that would have sent him into combat.
He felt at once physically alert and mentally exhausted. His body was still sore from the sadistic attentions of the Chressamo guards, Freeman and Drown, with whom he had become exceedingly familiar. For twenty days he had been holding off sleep, keeping what he feared at bay; he slept only when he was too exhausted to keep it up any longer. He did not know he was wasting his energy—the visions had deserted him, and would leave him in peace until he was once again forced into confrontation with his own mortality two and a half years later.
He had had a good five hours of sleep in the canteen in Arvant’s Shadowtown yesterday morning, so he sat up straight in the dark among the snoring boys, who were as yet so new to daemon handling, and so poorly trained, that they could not feel the daemon beneath them, feel it straining and shuddering every time it had to pull the troop carrier over a rise. It was old. Surprising that its driver hadn’t detected how close it was to death. Or perhaps not so surprising. The few army handlers with whom Crispin had spoken had revealed in their conversation, whether voluntarily or unknowingly, the small extent of their expertise.
The wind blowing through the slatted sides smelled of dust. It licked over Crispin’s newly shaved scalp like a big animal’s breath. Spring had lasted perhaps four days. How different from everywhere else in Ferupe, where spring was a prolonged taste of paradise! But the Raw was not in Ferupe: its weather and the rhythm of its seasons were those of the plains of Kirekune. For four days the rain had been torrential and the sunlight slopped over one’s hands like melted butter and the ground smelled wet. Even the carrion-crow voices of the women of Shadowtown had seemed to soften in response to the softening of the air. The hills had changed color, red earth and dark green scrub giving way to a blanket of pale green. But now, on the fifth day, although the blanket was still in place, it was starting to look dusty. The air was drying out and the winds were whispery and laden with shadows even at midday.
The War in the Waste Page 34
