The Cypean band struck up a dissonance. Saul affected to survey the audience—a sellout crowd among whom Crispin couldn’t spot any seeds—and raised his megaphone. “We have a special show for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen!”
In the old days he would have said, Ladeezgentsankids! Crispin noticed that there were no children in the audience except for a few babies in the bleachers.
“The very best shrikoutanis in Cype—perhaps I should say in the world, for they are as yet undefeated—will demonstrate their supremacy against all comers tonight and for the remainder of our engagement here in Kherouge. I repeat, the Human Knives take on all comers. Ladies and gentlemen, have you brought your blades?” Pause. “Have you brought your courage?” Pause. Nervous giggles in the audience, and snicks as some of the young men on the edges of their seats drew knives and raised them silently over their heads, like the first shoots of a metal forest sprouting up through the air.
“I see there’s no shortage of challengers!” Saul yelled.
“He can’t see a damned thing,” Crispin told Mickey. “His eyesight was never good, and it looks as though it’s got worse; and even if it was perfect, he couldn’t see out of the spotlight. There must never be a shortage.”
“Half of Cype has a death wish,” Mickey said.
“So it’s time to reveal the latest threat to Kherouge’s pride. In the name of the Significant”—Saul gabbled the required invocation, almost swallowing it, a proof of opposition to Kirekuni rule that didn’t go unacknowledged by the crowd—“Ladies and gentlemen, the Human Knives!”
Cheers combined deafeningly with an energetic discord from the band as more lime glares came down and four men and three women strolled into the ring. They lined up in order of height. In a nod to circus tradition, they wore sequined leotards, each one a different hue of the rainbow. From head to foot they reflected light, and a glamor hazed them, making them difficult to look at. It was as if a real rainbow had fallen to earth and landed on its feet, alert, bellicose, ready to go down fighting. Saul galloped up and down the lineup, beaming, wiping sweat off his face with a red handkerchief.
“They’ve put themselves together professionally enough,” Crispin whispered. He had to keep talking to keep from being overwhelmed by nostalgia for the old Smithrebel’s, or worse, caught up in the strange theatrics of the new. “But I could teach them a thing or two about making entrances. What do they think they’re projecting, standing there like posts?”
Saul shouted, “Have you anything to say to the ladies and gentlemen of Kherouge, Knives?”
The burly man in violet sequins bounded forward as if he’d been awaiting permission.
“For the cowards,” he shouted, and drew a wooden knife. “For the true shrikoutanis.” Another knife, steel, and, Crispin guessed, razorsharp. “Are the people of Kherouge true shrikoutanis?”
The smallest woman wore red and, like all the others, she had her black hair knotted behind her neck. “Maybe they’re afraid to challenge you, Violet!” She cartwheeled forward and came up on her feet.
“Saul always did tend to take a clever concept too far,” Crispin whispered in disbelief.
“But I can’t imagine that among all the shrikoutanis of Kherouge, male and female, there isn’t one with the courage to face me.” She turned to the audience and her tone became derogatory. “If you are afraid of my blades, I’ll fight you with the twin sticks!”
“Blood Ruby!” Saul screamed.
And so it went. The shrikoutanis took turns goading the audience. Saul echoed them like a doting parent. At last the scattered voices of hecklers merged into a chorus of hatred which increased rapidly in volume. Near the ring, a dozen young men sprang to their feet. They collided in the aisle and fought for the privilege of being the first to reach the ring, where the Human Knives were idly engaging in one-on-one-demonstrations. The tension and the noise level increased. Even Crispin scooted forward to the edge of his seat, watching not the shrikoutanis, but the brawl.
A single young man broke free and leapt over the blocks. As he stumbled in the disorienting brilliance of the lime spots, an instant hush fell. The slender male Knife in green took him on with the blunt blade, toyed with him for twenty minutes, then laid him on his back with depressing ease. An interlude with clowns, music, and pastrysellers served to defuse the ugly mood resulting from the defeat. But it returned full force in the next act. In three simultaneous blunt-knife fights, the blue, yellow, and orange Knives each took on two challengers.
By the time the three Knives romped to easy victories, suffering no more than a few bruises in the process, the crowd was practically rioting. But Crispin was no longer in danger of being fascinated. He’d assumed at first that the challengers were seeds, but after watching the ringside fist fights—as big a draw as the action in the ring—he had to conclude they were merely Kherougese men and women spoiling for a fight. Or else they felt it would be dishonorable to miss any opportunity to defend their city’s pride, even if they had to pay for it. Michael Mystic the Magician proved to be the star of the next interlude. As a child Crispin had been in awe of him. As a teenager and apprentice handler, he’d realized that the magic of sleight of hand was a joke compared to the genuine, everyday magic of daemons, and commenced unfairly to despise the poor conjuror. Even more preposterously tricked out than in the old days, Michael produced doves from the sleeves of a Kherougese girl, and everyone around Crispin gasped with amazement. Once he would have despised them all for being taken in; now he felt a nervous, sad nostalgia for the days when every act had been a variation on Michael’s. “This is real circus,” he murmured, watching Michael turn the doves into colored veils. “Everything is rigged, and you know it’s all going to turn out all right: thrills without spills. But shrikouto isn’t circus. It’s got too much of an element of chance in it.” And I don’t know why I can’t handle it. “I feel like an anachronism,” he moaned. “Mick?”
Mickey was leaning back against the bulging side of the tent, arms folded, face pale. He’d been withdrawn, even morose, ever since they left the Sibelye-Enkhoupistas’.
Crispin asked sharply, “Are you going to be sick?”
“I already am. Sickened. What’s the attraction?” An old couple on Mickey’s other side, startled out of their involvement in Michael’s fiverings trick, frowned censoriously. Mickey leaned forward and spoke into Crispin’s ear. “It’s pure violence and nothing but violence! If they’re so desperate for it, why don’t they just start a beef in the streets? Or organize fights themselves and send out the word? Why do they comply in this—this exploitation of their basest passions? I don’t get it!”
The hot breath in Crispin’s ear gave him goose pimples. He forced himself to concentrate. “Well, for one thing, the Cypeans haven’t fought a war for hundreds of years, have they? They’re not patriotic. But if you’ve ever tried to do business with them, you know they’re obsessed with their own honor. Aristos and cattlemen alike. We think of that sort of individualism as a Ferupian trait, but it’s Cypean, too, from way back. This is where the tradition of dueling started, after all. How do a people like that manage not to get involved in any wars? Maybe the answer is shrikouto.”
“That’s too pat,” Mickey said fiercely.
“All right, I know, there’s got to be more to it.” Crispin hesitated. “Maybe the old saw is right. Maybe they…crave sensation. They have a love of flamboyance so deep they’ve institutionalized it. I mean, Kherouge is the only city I know of that sponsors theaters. And to me, that says the line between vice and virtue isn’t as clear here as it is in Ferupe and Kirekune. Maybe in the Cypean mind there is no vice, no virtue…only important things.” He shrugged. “You’ve got to admit, they have flash.”
And the shrikouto contests really did flash, literally; he hadn’t been able to help noticing that. Maybe it was just the sequins the Knives wore, and the colorful fancy dress affected by most of their challengers, but at times you could hardly see the duelists for the spa
rkling that surrounded them. Could there—Crispin barely dared to hope—be daemons involved? Could his nemesis—he barely dared to voice the possibility to himself—be somewhere backstage?
He forced himself not to wonder, not yet, and laughed. “It’s bloody, it’s exciting, and there are rules to keep it all in the arena where it belongs. What more would you want, if you were a Cypean?”
“It would never go over in Kirekune.”
“Nor in Ferupe. With Ferupian audiences, you’ve got to flatter them. If the performers came out spewing insults and challenges, they’d ask for their money back.”
“It reminds me of people gathering to see the Significant parade through the old city.” Mickey gestured at the ringside audience, who had applauded Michael Mystic’s bow dutifully, and now as the shrikoutanis filed back out were jumping on their feet, shouting abuse and mortal threats. Knives danced like grass in the wind. “I used to go with my friends when I was in school. We’d wave paper flags.” He glared down at the ring. The Human Knives were exchanging insults with the belligerent gang of would-be challengers who’d crowded to the edge of the ring. Crispin observed Mickey covertly. His face was impassive. The flat plane of the cheek; the small full lips; the black arch of the eyebrow: all his features were Rae’s, barely exaggerated into the masculine. Why, Crispin wondered for the umpteenth time, why didn’t I realize the first time I saw him that they must be related? He had connected them in his mind, and dismissed the resemblance as merely ethnic—back then, they were practically the only Kirekunis he’d ever seen. But maybe I acted on my instincts without knowing it. Maybe that’s why I took him up. Took him off Butch’s crew.
Maybe that’s why—
But he didn’t want to think about that either, that was the last thing he wanted to think about, but his mind was a morass of discrete apprehensions, and he wasn’t interested enough in the shrikouto to have lost himself in it even if he wanted to, and he longed for the show to be over. The blare of music and shouting was giving him an instant hangover, and the sour, sweaty reek hanging under the roof overpowered the scent of any Mimes in the audience, if Mimes there were. He suspected there weren’t. He suspected—he hoped—they had better taste than this. “Mick. Hi, Mick. Do you remember your father?”
“What on earth? No, I don’t. He left before Zouy was born.” He grimaced. “Did his bit to propagate the Significant race, felt he’d earned his leisure, and went off to enjoy it, leaving Saia and my uncle to deal with the consequences of his patriotism. Why?”
“Do you wish you’d known him?”
“By all accounts, he was a good-for-nothing. Saia thought I would’ve turned out differently if he’d been there. That hurt June—my uncle—no end: she used to imply it was his fault, my, my…”
Seeing Mickey struggle to get the word out, Crispin said without thinking, “Forget what I said last night. I didn’t mean it.”
“Listen, I am the way 1 am. I’ve heard that kind of thing before, and I’ll go on hearing it for the rest of my life. I don’t care if you meant it or not.” Then he seemed to relent. “I only minded, if you must know, because it was you.”
The housewives and graybeards screamed encouragement to their champions; the band punctuated the uproar with blasts of steel strings. Mickey’s eyes were remarkably steady, deep, warm pools of shadow whose peculiar capacity for expression Crispin had never noticed before. They forgave him. They offered him more than forgiveness.
“I was drunk,” he apologized.
“I was sozzled out of my fucking skull.”
They both laughed.
“Why were you interested in my father?” Mickey asked, and then, perceptively: “Or were you?”
Crispin shrugged. His impulse to confide his plan had given way to reluctance: the old, craven paranoia that whispered hold your cards to your chest * * * hold your tonque * * * but he knew it, this time, for an insidious form of selfishness. “We both grew up without one. But I think I knew mine.”
“Is he here now?”
“I haven’t seen him. It seems probable he’s been let go, or quit. Hardly any of the old-timers are here. He was a real old-timer: he was my mother’s best friend before I was born. He took an interest in me.”
“That’s more than most fathers do. But are you sure? Or are you just guessing?”
“Both. I was the freak lady’s freak baby—a lot of people took an interest in me. But he—my father—was always…” My best friend. We’re best friends, Crispie. Would I do anything to hurt you? Come here * * * “He taught me to handle daemons. Millsy—that’s what I called him, and it caught on with everyone else, but his real name was Gift Mills. He was a freak, too. And a pervert. An absolute bastard.” The old, queer, helpless outrage swelled in Crispin’s chest. He remembered that when he finally realized Millsy had been using him for his own purposes, he’d been angrier at himself for not knowing it sooner than he had been at Millsy. “He wasn’t capable of giving a damn about anything except his own sick obsessions.”
“You think that’s where you got it?”
Crispin looked sharply at Mickey—he hadn’t spoken in a joking tone. “He was a trickster. A natural. Born that way.”
“But you—”
“I wasn’t. Not until I went into the Wraithwaste. But he wanted me to be one so badly he half killed me trying to convince us both it was true.”
“Makes me glad my father didn’t stick around.”
“I’m nearly sure—no, I am sure.” Crispin stared at Saul, who was dancing around the seven fights that comprised this penultimate act, acting as the Knives’ cheerleader, giving the lights operator hell trying to keep up with him. Right before Saul fired Crispin, he’d been trying to tell him something. What could that have been, other than the secret he and no one else was privy to after all those years—that Crispin’s father hadn’t been Jim Kateralbin, deceased, fabled of many a story and song, all of them contradictory? “It has to have been Millsy. Nothing else makes sense.”
Mickey looked away, shaking his head. Crispin wondered if he’d done the right thing in confiding in him. Mickey was no longer the boy who’d hero-worshiped his captain, who’d sacrificed his QAF career and would probably have sacrificed his life for him. In those days, if Crispin hadn’t been able to count on anything else, he’d always known he could count on Mickey’s loyalty. But now Mickey had a checkered past all his own. He’d achieved Crispin’s own dubious definition of maturity by fucking his life up in fine style. He had hopes, fears, and responsibilities Crispin knew nothing of. The postvictory years had raised everyone’s cynicism threshold, and it seemed likely, if not certain, that nowadays Mickey was loyal to no one except himself. He’s learned to dissemble, Crispin thought with dread. What odds he’s learned to backs tab, too?
Mickey said, “Why do you want to confront him—your father—now? Is it just because the chance is too good to pass up? I should think you’d have other things on your mind.”
And Crispin was taken aback by the question he hadn’t wanted to ask himself, yet another question he couldn’t answer satisfactorily. He couldn’t voice his certainty that Mr. Nakunatta was behind everything, making it all come together, slotting Crispin and Mickey and Rae and everyone else in Kherouge into his fate machine like cogs that were independently useless. Last night, while he and Mickey were arguing about the Enclave, before Mickey had gone down to put Rae off and, on his return, got violent (and that was something else Crispin would never have expected of him), the flames had momentarily cleared and Crispin had gotten a glimpse of the arsonist at work, kneeling on the floor of his shop with his rear in the air, muttering peevishly, fiddling with wires and fuses and electrodes. Mr. Nakunatta hadn’t seen Crispin, but Crispin had seen him, and for the first time he’d known for certain what he had to do.
“It’s because Millsy knows,” he said, settling for the part of the truth that had already sunk its claws into him. “About—about what we saw at the Enclave. He’s the only other living trickste
r. I know he’s still alive. Bastards like him don’t die easily.”
Mickey looked up, locks of black hair sliding back from his cheeks. “But if he’s not here? I certainly haven’t seen hide nor hair of any daemons.”
“Daemons yes, hide nor hair no,” Crispin said. “No, I’m practically sure he’s not here.”
“Then how are you—”
“I’m going to ask him”—Crispin jabbed his thumb in the direction of the ring—“where he went. And if he won’t tell me, I’ll wring his fat, flabby neck. Human Knives indeed!” And they both looked down as Saul’s voice broke from the megaphone, announcing the last act—a showdown between the violet Knife and the only Kherougese challenger still on his feet—in a jargon that would have stumped any circusgoer, consisting as it did of all the adjectives ever used to describe violence, amounting to a sort of frantic modern poetry. “Hey,” Crispin said, feeling suddenly hopeful. “I think I might be starting to see the attraction.” He laughed. “We should have volunteered.”
“Catch me dead,” Mickey said, and butted Crispin’s head with his, almost fiercely. Crispin felt a surge of joy: he could still be sure of him. Mickey’s loyalties might lie elsewhere, he might have inner conflicts Crispin did not and never would know about, but against one force no one could assert rationality, and Crispin knew that because the same force had gained the right of entrance to his own body, after years of persistent knocking on the door and misidentification as a whim solely of the heart.
2 Marout 1900 A.D. 11:13 P.M.
Cype: Kherouge: the Abbatoir Fairgrounds
“It’s me.”
“Who?” Saul edged the door wider and squinted.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 23
