A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  Greater Significance had an eye like a gunner, and its hands lay as heavy on his shoulders as the treads of a tank, squashing him into the mud. His past had well and truly caught up with him. Mickey felt trapped between his creditors, his family, his crimes, and the Disciplinarians. The books looked the same however long he cooked them: Achino-uchi was going under. He could cut corners and buy on credit and take loans on the strength of the establishment’s good name, but ultimately nothing would make any difference. Just to stay alive, he had to be the soul of courtesy and hospitality to the foreigners whom Significance regularly billeted on him, whose expensive tastes were ruining him. These ruddy merchant-farmers, these sausage moguls, these sharp-nosed European nobles. For all their pomp and snobbery, they tended to squeamishness. They only ever wanted fat little girls with their tails bobbed. They wanted everything just like it was in Vienna, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo, and morning coffee in bed, too.

  And Mickey couldn’t afford to serve them coffee, black tea, tea with milk, green tea, Bloody Marys, only the usual danke schön—sausages, potatoes, croissants, buttered rolls, fried bread, bacon, porridge, actually you might as well ask for the moon, my dear Herr—just two raw eggs and an orange, what do you mean no oranges? What will the Board of Certification have to say about that? There was no Board of Certification and there had been no hotel until Greater Significance seized on Yoshitaro Achino as the man to provide good old-fashioned hospitality to foreigners whose letters of recommendation branded them middle-class. Merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, or of unspecified profession, they were less important to Significance than the diplomats They prudently confined to the palace, more respectable than the black marketeers and opium dealers and “tourists” who, although they, too, had their business in the old city, had to find their own accommodation somewhere out of Significance’s sight and reach. Significance wanted the Western investors in reach. And Achino-uchi wasn’t just in reach, it was under Their thumb, so it was also the ideal lobster pot for the pestiferous missionaries They wanted an eye kept on. Mickey had to be that eye, too.

  How had he dared to hope his record had vanished with the SAF? He’d bobbed and smiled and offered drinks to the Disciplinarian stinginspectors, believing himself safe, out of reach, believing himself astute. Then Daisuke had come to the front door, all alone in last summer’s heat, gangly and deferential in his New World-style suit and hat. A quiet word if it’s not too much trouble, Monsieur Achino…

  Upstairs Fumie and the girls rested in their bowers, waiting out the middle of the day.

  And of course Mickey had said, yes he’d said, he was the man for the job, no trouble at all. He was sweating like a European under his fine silk tunic and jacket and over-vest that told the world he was one of the richest men in the new city that had reclaimed itself, pride intact, from the rubble and the disgrace and terror of the Fire which hadn’t catalyzed the transformation racking Okimachi but been only a symptom of it, Coincidence’s little contribution to the fin de siècle, helpfully making everything obvious. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? Daisuke sat at the kitchen table in the half dark with his hands clasped before him and recited the charges that could be brought against Mickey for his desertion from the Significant Air Force in Fessiery of the 1209th Year of the Lizard, 1893 by the Christian calendar, when he had attained the rank of Wedgehead and did willingly cooperate with his captors, subsequently conspiring to treachery against Significance. The words fell like drops of water on the flags, and Mickey kept on being polite.

  Playing the hotelier was numbing and exhausting. The geishas, upcountry flowers to the last petal, wouldn’t serve meals or do any task they suspected might be the province of maids (and you couldn’t get a real maid to work in an establishment so widely known to be a holding-house for Significance: all the employable women in Okimachi had better offers every day now that Society had come back to life, offers not sodden with rumors of foreign corruption) so Mickey was not just major-domo and host, but chef and waiter and doorman and allais, a multiplicity of roles he found utterly humiliating, and all of them had to be characterized with a servility that was slowly but surely eroding his dignity, his strength, and whatever ambition he had left at this late date.

  Well, tonight he wasn’t taking anyone to Achino-uchi. He’d even told the geishas to turn away clients with appointments—and there were few enough of those nowadays. The new city knew Fumie was unwell; Mickey didn’t want any of his bill-paying regulars to see or hear her on a night when it had taken three people to wrestle her upstairs. More to the point, on her bad days, her hearing became so sharp that she could detect doors opening and closing all the way at the bottom of Dragyonne Street. And if she were to hear men she knew unburdening themselves to the geishas, when she saw them next she would insult them so incisively they would never come back.

  She’d learned to pick the lock of her room.

  Mickey had tied her in a chair once, fastening the specially ordered restraints himself, and after five minutes he’d relented. He couldn’t bear the sight of her ratted hair swinging as she strained at the bonds, her teeth showing, foam, her eyes rolling. The next day, when she “recovered her composure,” she penned him a delicately remonstrative note of reproof and hand-delivered it to his room at five in the morning. She snuggled into bed beside him while he read it. Gaise, hiding in the wardrobe, nearly choked laughing. Gaise didn’t take Fumie seriously.

  On her good days, she reigned as queen bee, sex kitten extraordinaire, holding court in her bower, cat’s-cradling the household into a cocked hat. Mickey would countermand her orders later. His attempts to disillusion her only had the effect of making her go shopping.

  And tonight Fumie and her composure were wandering at opposite ends of the fields of madness. And so, once again, Mickey was going to have to impose on Ashie, who had escaped to Swirling only to be put on the spot all over again by the wonders of modern transportation. Taking these extreme risks with Daisuke’s charges always made him nervous. Daisuke’s contact with the foreigners after Mickey brought them back was minimal, and so far he hadn’t caught on. But there was potential for disaster. Mickey belonged to the Okimachi Aviation Society, an organization of ex-SAF officers, both noble and common, who’d come home to enough money to keep on indulging their passion for flight in the aftermath of daemonology. They patronized Kirekuni engineers and diesel importers, contributing heavily enough to Okimachi’s still-recovering economy that Greater Significance didn’t dare take their refurbished Horogazis and KEs away, or raze their hangars on a pretext. Nonetheless, at Society meetings they all strove to keep from talking politics. Instead they found common ground in memories of the war. Mickey had never thought he’d enjoy reminiscing about his time as a Wedgehead, but on days when he compared past and present and the present came off worst, the Society was his consolation: the only window in his cell. Daisuke had warned him that he was not to exploit the Society for subversive purposes. If he ever found out Mickey was disobeying orders, that would be the end of the OAS as far as Mickey was concerned, and possibly the end of Mickey himself, too.

  The wind tore at Mickey’s robe, lifting the hem to reveal his flight boots, threatening to snatch away the left-hand pilot’s glove he stuffed in his pocket. At last the Englishmen emerged along the carpet of light that unrolled into the courtyard when the great doors opened. Both wore black tie with cactus-flower buttonholes no longer intact. They staggered like the walking wounded. Few foreigners—for that matter, few Okimachians—could survive an evening of Greater Significance without injury to style and/or spirit. This pair, despite the decrepitude of their tuxedos, looked to be in the best of humor. Perhaps they thought they’d struck a deal to their own advantage. Poor dears, the English, they placed such trust in the binding power of a man’s word, a misconception which a couple of weeks’ stay in Kirekune inevitably redressed—but many obtained what they believed to be agreements sooner than that, and trotted off home jiggety-jog, none the wiser.

 
; The two men grinned and blinked about disarmingly as the palace doors clanged shut. Mickey took a last drag from his cigarette, tossed it into the closest fountain, and went to meet them. “There you are,” shouted the larger in tones of satisfaction. “Gorgeous night, eh? Eh?”

  The thinner Englishman glanced about for Mickey’s right hand, saw the dangling sleeve, and seized on his left hand instead with drunken aplomb. “Cyril Wigglesworth, my dear man. I say, what a relief it is to get away from all those military types. We’ve got ‘em at home, too, of course. And now there’s such a lot of trouble with the Boers, everybody kowtows all over the place, exactly as you say General X, oh, absolutely Admiral Y, I must say success suits you Major Z, don’t you know, a sort of embarrassed admission of total dependence is the only way I can describe it. Do you know, I’m convinced now that the Queen is dead poor old England has decided to give up the ghost along with her, I mean after all, what is there left worth living for? That’s why I came East don’t you know? What, what, what? I certainly couldn’t have tolerated another weekend in the country watching the King massacre grouse.”

  It was a cold night. Cyril Wigglesworth sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Came East to get away from his harridan of a mistress. Gave her five hundred a year but she wants eight,” the large man informed Mickey importantly. “Call him Wiggly. I do; because it’s what he does.”

  It gratified Mickey that the Englishmen had the self-confidence to refrain from introducing themselves as walking manifestos of sexual peculiarity. He preferred to be nameless, and he didn’t mind being faceless, but he disliked being taken immediately for a pimp. Even a hotelier was better than that. He decided to be pleasant. “Not at all cold for the time of year! I trust your audience went well? Kirekune is a delightful country in which to do business!” he said, quickly using up half his stock of English small talk.

  “Demned ungrateful I call it, she’s thirty-five this year and even if she won’t admit it, her mirror will,” Wigglesworth protested.

  “He hasn’t a mistress. He’s a flaming queen. Bernard Blythe-Frye.”

  “‘Whaley,’” Wigglesworth corrected with a laugh.

  Blythe-Frye would have made three of his companion, and he had chins to go round. His truncated sentences were far easier to follow than Wigglesworth’s torrent of idiom. Mickey judged foreigners by the same standard as he judged Greater Significance—the less trouble to follow, the better; and “Old Boys” spoke much simpler, to-the-point English than the company clerks who represented the other face of England’s involvement in the East, the men like Wigglesworth whose cheeks tic’ed with the strain of maintaining their composure, who half killed themselves in order to monopolize every conversation and be witty at the same time, who smelled of too much hair oil and looked sharp out of the corners of their pale eyes, and whose idea of Heaven was immolation between the legs of a generously built woman.

  “This rascal here,” Wigglesworth said, returning his attention to the conversation, “known each other since forever, couldn’t believe my eyes in Shanghai at the consul’s wife’s birthday ball, Whaley! I said. If it isn’t Wank-In-The-Woghouse Whaley minus his hair! He answers to Whaley, Blubber, Woghouse, or even Wanker if you catch him off guard. I assure you you won’t be out of place.”

  And he cast a searching eye at Mickey as if to see who, exactly, was inside the lizard costume. They must have been prepped. It was always easier when Daisuke sent Mickey the sort of men who would have sought out Kirekune’s brothels on their own, eventually. Mickey mustered a smile and beckoned them to follow him into the raging darkness. Dust from the construction sites downhill whipped into their faces. The palace complex had been the only site in Okimachi undamaged by the Fire of 1212. Wigglesworth wouldn’t stop talking. Even the moon baring itself at them, low over the northern wall of the courtyard, wasn’t enough to shut him up.

  “What a beautiful night it is. A good night to get in an airplane,” Mickey said.

  Wigglesworth interrupted his own monologue. “What? What? Fly d’you mean? In the sky? That your hobby, then? Doesn’t seem logical that it works, do you know, but then again, sometimes I think that east of Bombay, logic and illogic change places, simply get up with a minimum of fuss and change places!” His laugh was a bray. “Now, of course, they’re talking about building ‘em at home.”

  “My airplane is very logical,” Mickey said. “At a certain speed the pressure of the air flowing under the wings is enough to counteract the force of gravity acting on the plane’s mass.”

  Wigglesworth hesitated, then doubled over with laughter. He spluttered, “Whaley, I’d rather deal with Significance than the bloody Chinks any day! Tails or no tails, at least this lot has a sense of humor, what? what?”

  Mickey laughed again, to prove to Wigglesworth that he’d assessed the Kirekuni race correctly.

  Blythe-Frye rumbled, “Pity about these blackcoats running all over the shop. Weren’t half so many last…this time last year. I’m afraid I find it rather disgusting. Then again, they must be endured, eh? City’s in a bit of a flammable state. Recovering from regrettable incident. One has to keep the commoners in line in case they do themselves a mischief.” He addressed himself to Mickey. His eyes glowed red in the moonlight. “Expect where we’re going, in your logical airplane, there aren’t so many blackcoats, are there? I expect things are a good deal more fun, eh?”

  Mickey seized eagerly on the opening. “Very, very fun. Where we are going, the difference between lawful and unlawful resolves into the difference between pleasurable and not pleasurable.” It was another of his stock lines, and it applied to Ashie’s Swirling just as well as to his Okimachi. Blythe-Frye’s eyes glowed even brighter, and Wigglesworth jerked, mouth opening and hands flapping, but they had reached the courtyard gates, and Mickey excused himself to explain to the nearest Disciple. As the man examined his pass the wind wuthered under the stone arch. The light from the lanterns flickered only halfway up the walls. These had borne high reliefs of Significants past and present, but had recently been chiseled clean. A small change one could pass off as a vagary of architectural fashion, except that Greater Significance had made the decision to eradicate the carvings. In a lull in the wind, Mickey heard a confirmation of his worst fears for Okimachi’s future, and the world’s. “That Lord Shusuke, eh, Woghouse?” Wigglesworth was muttering. “What a bloody faggot. I know it’s the pot calling out the kettle, but he is. What a foppish little imbecile. I kept trying to get to the point, gently you know, then a little bit more directly, but he kept fiddling with his cravat with his tail, one knot after another…wouldn’t look me in the eye. I finally got him to come out in the open, of course. I may have been too reckless, I mean, erhmm, with the estimates, but I had to make it sound attractive, Woghouse, if the rumors from the City are to be believed he’s the one who matters around here as far as we’re concerned, the only one we have a hope of being introduced to at any rate. I think I made a good impression.”

  The Disciplinarian was consulting a list of foreign names transliterated into Kirekuni characters. Mickey closed his eyes and saw Fumie’s face. She wore her grimace, nose and mouth scrunched up as if she were perpetually searching for the right words to communicate the secret of her inaccessibility. She fluttered like a moth in her mysterious discomfiture.

  “Well, they wouldn’t have sat me next to him, would they, if they didn’t expect some sort of an understanding to be reached?”

  “Can’t assume you’ve got one on that basis.”

  “Oh, for all you know you might have been seated next to the Significant himself, Woghouse, you were so busy chatting up that piece with the snake-charmer chignon on your right! And blushing quite prettily she was! Wouldn’t have minded a bit of that myself: leg of lamb isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but show me a man who doesn’t perform better for a little harmless flirting to gussie up his ego, and I’ll show you a monk!” Wigglesworth produced a braying haw haw haw. “And a
fter an hour or so of Shusuke and his cravat, I would have flirted with a monk!”

  “Thought you did that without provocation.”

  “Ony when they’ll allow me. For a moment there, though, I almost thought Shusuke was…”

  “They want ‘em back tomorrow night,” the Disciple told Mickey, putting away his list. Mickey ground his teeth in exasperation. He’d wanted to hear what else Wigglesworth had to say about Shusuke, who was one of Greater Significance’s favorite pawns. “Sundown. Sharp.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Mickey told him. Repocketing his pass, he nipped to the fading edge of the lanternlight, squinting across the outer plaza unofficially known (since the Fire of 1212) as the Square of the Human Barricades. The car was idling in the mouth of Summit Street. Mickey waved. For once, Gaise hadn’t fallen asleep: he eased the long black Renault XV closer, engine chugging, tires clicking across the smooth paving stones. Mickey beckoned the Englishmen. “The night awaits, gentlemen!” He laughed.

  “So it does!” Wigglesworth sang exuberantly, clapping his hands. “And what does it hold? Pray do tell!”

  “Before we get into the car,” Blythe-Frye said, and laid a heavy hand on Mickey’s shoulder as he was turning.

  “Oh, don’t worry, you can tell me in detail as we drive along.” Mickey would have given a good deal to remove that piece of red meat from its possessive place on his shoulder—and from its owner’s wrist. “My chauffeur is ‘in the know’ as I believe you say! He is as much family as my sister, who will be your hostess tonight.”