“I’m sure they do.”
The tides of the air wafted her nearer. She seemed imbued with a glittering. The rain had dried off; it was something else, something like visible electricity that clung to her hair and gave her eyes an unearthly brilliance. A scent clung about her that wasn’t the scent of rain. Her veils washed forward, weightless, around his hips as she swayed so close he recoiled. “But do you think I want them to know I am here?” she murmured. “Why do you think I announced myself as Miss Achino rather than Sister Rain? Next thing, I should find myself in an interrogation chamber here or in the Disciplinarians’ headquarters, trying to explain what I am not responsible for—why Breeze chose the Enclave over a stately home like this. No, thank you! I beg to be allowed to choose, at least, my own torture cell!”
She laughed merrily, and he saw the bright pink inside of her mouth, her crooked teeth.
“And all I would be able to tell them—and you can tell them for me, Yoshi, if you are ever asked—is that. My love understood that her only Queen-given right on this earth was the right to choose her own prison.”
“I can’t let you leave like this.” Mickey grabbed her by the arms. “At the very least I’m going to see you safely home.”
She gave a mirthless little laugh, shaking her head. “Cousin, you’re just like every other man in the world sometimes.” She stepped back, out of reach.
He understood then that the whole time she’d been on stage. She was acting. And he’d been fooled by her ability.
“You could have been in the Royal Opera!” he blurted without thinking.
She started. Something changed in her eyes. Then she answered gravely, “So I like to imagine. But there’s no Royal Opera anymore. And perhaps it’s as well for those of us who haven’t the courage of our aspirations.”
“There’s the Kherouge Opera, there are other road companies besides Authrond’s—”
“The daughter of one of my Sisters writes plays. I encouraged her, I’m afraid. Now, she has the courage of her aspirations—as, indeed, I had when I was her age, although mine were more modest—but were she to go out into the world, she would face terrible handicaps. Compared to her, I had everything going for me. But I learned, as she will, that running away isn’t the same thing as escaping.”
“Semantics,” Mickey said excitedly. “Look, if I tell Crispin that you still want to…”
She reached out and laid her finger to his lips.
“There’s only one thing I want you to tell Crispin. Will you? Tell him that I thank him for illustrating so perfectly—or I should say, for being such a perfect illustration of—the folly of leading a double life.” Her gaze slid past him to the servants in the doorway. “I wish to leeeeve now!” she shrilled, in a clever parody of Mrs. Sibelye-Enkhoupista’s screech. “Will it please you to show me ou-out!”
“I can’t convince you, can 1! Are you sure you’ll be all right? Honestly, Rain?”
She looked back at him as the footman handed her her rain shoes. “I told you, I enjoy walking alone.”
She had deliberately misunderstood, he realized with gratitude.
“Only when I’m alone am I really alert. Aware. Of—of things.”
After a moment he understood what she was referring to. “But there are real dangers on the streets, too!” he called. The footman and the maid were walking her along the hallway like Disciplinarians flanking a prisoner. “I’m going to send a private investigator disguised as a tradesman tomorrow, to make sure you got back safe and sound!”
She might have replied. He heard only the thud of the gargantuan front door being thrown open on the night, as on a dungeon.
2 Marout 1900 A.D. 2:27 A.M.
Mickey tipped the maid and the footmen and lingered for a while, chatting, to make sure of their silence. He climbed wearily back upstairs, barely noticing an Enkhoupista lady hurrying to or from some tryst, clutching her negligee. It took him some minutes to locate his and Crispin’s rooms. Crispin was still sitting in the armchair, with all the lamps out except one, and the windows closed against the rain. The air was dense with smoke.
“If you’d only had the courage to talk to her, it could have made all the difference,” Mickey said disgustedly, slamming the door behind him. “She was ready to break free of the Enclave.”
Crispin shook his head without looking up. “She’ll never leave that place.”
“You didn’t see her tonight. And you didn’t pay enough attention to her this afternoon. You were all caught up with your gorgon theories. Significant, she’s—how old is she? Twenty-two, twenty-three? She’s young enough to marry, or do whatever she—”
“She’s already a widow, if you want to speak in terms of marriage. She was in love with the Breeze female. She’s going to raise Breeze’s daughter with her own two. For my money, she’s the best shot any of those poor mites have at being normal, and I admire her commitment to them. She’s making a noble sacrifice. The last thing I wanted to do was make it harder for her.”
Mickey ground his teeth. “You mean you didn’t want to make it harder for yourself. You didn’t want to see her because you couldn’t stand to be reminded that she’s stopped loving you, not the other way around.”
Crispin winced. Mickey felt guilty for a moment: he knew that if Crispin had asked, Rae would have left the Enclave without a second thought. But the satisfaction of having pinpointed Crispin’s weakness justified the overstatement. “You still love her. Admit it.”
“At this point, love is as irrelevant to her as it is to me,” Crispin said viciously. “The truth is that she’s lost her looks and she knows it. She’s playing it safe, staying where her bread is buttered, where she can salve her conscience by convincing herself she’s doing some good.”
“Lost her looks!” Mickey wanted to spit. He growled, “If you’d seen her just now, I don’t think you’d be so damned critical!”
“Quite the lady’s champion, aren’t we,” Crispin jeered. “Realizing the error of your ways at long last? Or once a faggot, always a faggot?”
His tone hadn’t the slightest hint of humor in it. It was the first time he had ever deliberately trampled on Mickey’s particular sensitivity. Shock and pain galvanized Mickey like poisonous adrenaline, reacting with the frustration that had filled him when Rae walked out on him, and he jerked, clenching his fists, transported by a rage that astonished him. “You fucking hypocrite. Show me an ex-forces man who hasn’t screwed anything on two legs, and I’ll show you a castrato! And in your case, well”—he almost choked—“if I remind you that one definition of a faggot is a man who fucks another man by choice, because he wants to, I don’t think I need remind you of anything else!”
“I thought we were friends,” Crispin said sullenly.
Look at him sitting there with his fucking Scotch and his fucking cigarette! He isn’t even bothering to look at me! He’s so sure he’s safe, he’s not even on his guard!
“A true friend wouldn’t have left Swirling when you did.” Mickey would have said anything, no matter how painful, to get Crispin to look at him.
“If I’d stayed in Swirling, we’d have ended up enemies,” Crispin said tonelessly. He drained his drink and set the glass on the floor.
“Because of my sister? I’m not that possessive!”
“Your sister? Fumie?” Crispin made a dismissive noise.
“I thought you were in love with her!”
“Love, love, love.” Crispin stumbled to his feet. “Will you fucking well leave off talking about love. You always babble on about love, but I only ever wanted to be able to trust someone. And even when I thought I was in love with Rae, I didn’t trust her. Turns out I was right. Once a cultie, always a cultie. Matter of fact? Even my wife—I’ve never trusted any woman as much as I trusted you, Mick, dammit!” His words slurred. His eyes glowed wetly. “I trusted your judgment! And when you start spouting faggot bullshit about love, that means I can’t trust you, either, because anyone who believes in love as muc
h as you do has something wrong with him, and doesn’t have judgment worth the shit up his arse!”
Mickey’s vision blizzarded. He punched Crispin in the face. Pain splintered up his wrist. Crispin let out a sobbing roar and hauled off to punch him back, but Mickey whipped his tail around and dragged down his wrist, and Crispin’s clumsy left lowercut didn’t even connect. Mickey only had one hand, but he was quick enough with his tail to be able to defend himself while he pummeled Crispin’s face and upper body with his left fist. “I’m gonna fuck you up for life!” he bawled. Blood burst from Crispin’s nose and trickled from a split in his eyebrow. Thrown off-balance by his own lopsidedness, Mickey lost his balance, staggering forward, and Crispin retreated before him. Mickey pinned him in a corner of the bedroom and belabored him with clumsy roundhouse blows. Crispin’s head rattled on the paneling. “You could have had both of us,” Mickey howled. “Her and me. And you didn’t want either of us. What’s the matter with us?” The answer was painfully obvious to him even in his drunken rage, so he shouted instead, “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you?”
The left side of his head exploded with hard, bright fire. He nearly fell over and balanced his weight instinctively by flinging out his tail. Half-blind with pain, he reeled back and forced open wet eyes to see Crispin bracing himself with one hand against the wall, drawing a bead on Mickey with his Browning, sobbing, “I’ll shoot you, so help me I will! Leave off! Leave off!”
Crispin must have struck him with the butt of the pistol because Mickey didn’t feel dead. But at any instant now he could be. His head was suddenly clear and his whole body under control. It had always been like this at moments of mortal danger. He’d survived five years of active combat by existing in this state day and night. “Put the bloody thing down, it might go off by accident.” The muzzle of the pistol jerked spastically. Mickey was too afraid of Crispin’s ragged nerves to make a grab for it. He raised his hands slowly over his head.
Crispin’s mouth contorted into a wobbly O, and tears dripped down his cheeks. With a shock, Mickey realized that he’d never seen Crispin crying before. “I want her. And I want to stay alive.”
Red tears spilled from his bloodshot eyes.
“Is that too fucking much to ask?”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you don’t put down that gun, it will be too much to ask.” Mickey heard himself enunciating the words dispassionately. “No wonder you’re running for your life if this is the way you treat your friends.”
“You’re my best friend in the world. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Crispin shuddered convulsively. His right hand opened and the Browning fell with a soft thud to the carpet. “It all went wrong when I went to work for Yamauchi. Going respectable was what undid me. I thought I was ahead of the game, but I’m way, way behind. I’m out of step. And I won’t be able to catch up again until…I don’t even know what I want anymore…” His voice trailed off. He rubbed his eyes childishly with his fists.
Mickey had been terrified Crispin actually would shoot him. Momentarily he couldn’t breathe.
“Do you”—Crispin gasped, almost laughing—“do you make a habit of beating up your friends?”
“You’re my first,” Mickey said. He stooped forward, picked up the gun, and broke it open. The safety catch had been off and the sevenshot box magazine was full. “You’ve got a fucking death wish carrying this thing around like this.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Crispin mumbled. “You’re my best friend. It doesn’t make any sense.”
You’re right about that, Mickey thought. He himself was completely at a loss. He didn’t understand his own anger, which had been as potent as an apotheosis. It was nothing he’d experienced before. And he didn’t understand Crispin’s tears.
Crispin was slumping lower and lower against the wall. One of his eyes had swollen shut. The blood trickling from his nose crusted his lips and chin. His shirt would have to be thrown away—the second one of the day. And even like this, I still love him, Mickey thought with a feeling of Pyrrhic triumph.
Crispin pushed himself upright with a visible effort. “But I’m married,” he pleaded—as if he had read Mickey’s thoughts.
“Don’t give me that pap,” Mickey said tiredly, sick with disappointment. “You’re no more married than you want to be. You’d have gone downstairs and seduced my cousin in front of the servants if you’d thought she’d have you.”
Crispin swayed and muttered something unintelligible. He lurched toward the connecting door. Mickey heard him turn the key in the lock behind him: he clearly meant to spend what was left of the night in Mickey’s room.
I won’t do a crazy deed ’cause of a two-faced pal, Ain’t gwineta break mah heart ovab a no-’count gal Ise got the blues all ovab, the coal-black biting blues, Like a prowling tom-cat that’s got the low-down mews.
—Claude McKay
Feed the Famished Affections
2 Marout 1900 A.D.
Cype: Kherouge: the Abbatoir Fairgrounds
Getting drunk was the only way Crispin knew how to protect himself against Mr. Nakunatta’s exhibitionism—or at least to keep from remembering it. In the past it had worked like a charm. But after he fought with Mickey, not all the alcohol in the world could have kept away the nightmares. He awoke disoriented in the streaming gray light of midmorning, breathing hard as if he’d been running. His jaw ached. He could hardly open his right eye. When he drank from the water pitcher his lip split afresh, and he tasted blood. A disfigured ruffian scowled at him from the mirror. Compared to Mickey, he thought grimly, wine and Scotch were harmless vices. He cleaned up the damage, swearing aloud, and went into his own room to get a clean shirt. Mickey drowsed on his bed, shoes off, collar undone. “We aren’t going to make it to the matinee,” Crispin told him.
“Oh, my tail and whiskers,” Mickey moaned. “Go without me.”
Crispin shook his head. The thought of confronting his old nemesis on his own filled him with panic.
“I’m awake now.” Mickey yawned and sat up.
Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista had invited an assortment of local entrepreneurs to lunch. These included merchants with international aspirations, a fanatical tenement reformer, and an ex-SAF commander, an aviation enthusiast who lectured Crispin about his scheme (inspired by the example, he said portentously, of Governor Devi Yamauchi of Lamaroon) to build an airport outside Kherouge. Crispin hardly tasted his meal, sickened by his conviction that Sibelye-Enkhoupista had invited the commander for his benefit, with an eye to his own profit. What would happen when the old aristocrat found out—as he soon must—that Crispin was no longer either Yamauchi’s backdoor man, or involved in the construction of the Redeuiina Airport? Continental aristocrats hated nothing more than being played for patsies. By then, Crispin resolved anew, I’ll be far away.
“There must have been daemons about,” he said, to general laughter, when Mrs. Sibelye-Enkhoupista inquired as to the cause of his black eye and fat lip.
But it was Mickey who commanded the party’s attention when he let himself be cajoled into delivering an indictment of the methods Significance had used to foil his attempt to do business in Okimachi. His anecdotes were humorous, but they had the unmistakable bite of truth. By the time he concluded the tale with his flight to Cype, he had the whole company in stitches and loudly on his side-, Crispin thought he’d displayed amazingly poor judgment. On principle, he admired Mickey’s refusal to conceal his past—but still, better to tangle oneself up in a knot of lies than be decapitated by the two-edged blade of truth!
The guests left at twilight, and Crispin implied that he and Mickey were going to sample Kherouge’s less decorous pleasures. Their host warned them about the diseases carried by snailgirls and saw them off in a motor-taxi, his face wreathed in paternal smiles.
The Abbatoir Fairgrounds felt safer to Crispin at night. The darkness satisfied his longing for anonymity. Torches flared only around the main attractions at the fo
ur corners of the lot. The drizzle hadn’t deterred dense crowds, but there were fewer Kirekunis, fewer foreigners, and drybones. Crispin detected no scent that might be sharpgreen. (Deprived of half his vision, he was relying on his nose as an imperfect Mime-detector.) As he and Mickey wandered between the colored, blinking electric bulbs that garlanded the drug dealers’ booths, in the din of competing barrel organs and cheers from the populace packed under the gambling sharks’ awnings, he even felt a touch of the old buoyance, the complacence of pretending on his nights off to be a gull, contemptuously observing the real ones.
But there was no question about it, Smithrebel’s was no longer the Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show. Inside the big top, everyone over thirty took to the bleachers, while young couples and gangs of braves—many of them with their coats buttoned high to the neckfilled up the ringside seats. Mickey started to follow the younger set, but Crispin grabbed his arm. “No, I’m not making the same mistake as last time. I want to keep my options open.” Mickey shrugged. They climbed to the highest bleachers and settled down among housewives and asthmatic graybeards. Crispin found that by focusing on the familiar paraphernalia of the circus, he could recall the old days with palpable immediacy. The timeless, feckless aura of anticipation resided in the details, from the loud chewing and fingerlicking of the audience to the clowns working the aisles, from the food wrappers and betting slips scattered in the shadows to Saul Smithrebel’s red jacket, white hose, and top hat. (That answers that, anyway, Crispin thought; Saul’s dictatorial, megalomaniac personality would never allow him to work for anyone else, and if he was still ringmaster, he still owned Smithrebel’s and everyone in it.) But even from up here, he could see new, sagging folds in Saul’s face as the lime spotlight followed the bowlegged, troll-like figure from the red curtains to the ring center. Saul doffed his hat, acknowledging the applause, and Crispin shuddered. In order to find his nemesis, the man with the answers to the questions that had been plaguing him since he discovered living demogorgons in the Enclave, the answers that might just solve all his interconnection problems at one stroke, he knew he’d have to go through the Old Gentleman.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 22
