A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  Another circle. The rain whipped Crispin’s face. If he ought to be managing something, he couldn’t think what. The needles on the observation instruments spun wildly.

  Another circle. As the ailerons tilted Aloncietta steeply to starboard Crispin saw that both of the figures on the ground had fallen still. The hangar, the road like an endless piece of string with one strand fraying off to connect the square house to the narrative, the coastline bisecting the world into corrugated-iron desert and sheetaluminum sea. The clouds whipped over the wings like the tentacles of a gigantic, insubstantial man-o’-war.

  A camp of caravans suddenly Squawks and takes off.

  A ferris wheel bounds along the skyline Like a somersaulting giraffe.

  Roots and foundations, nails and screws, Nothing can hold fast.

  —Ted Hughes

  Book Nine

  GARGANTUANA

  The Lily-White Boys

  5 Marout 1900 A.D.

  Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): Linbe Province

  Crispin and Mickey flew blind for almost a day in the stolen KE-111, navigating by compass and the maps Crispin found in the gunner’s cockpit. Once the war was over, the ban on cartography had been lifted, and mapmakers had set up in business all over the continent. Iguchi must have been one of their best customers. Above the snowy ranges of cloud, the air was too thin to make speech practical. The sound of the wind, combined with the throbbing roar of the engine, numbed Crispin’s ears. Unlike a daemon, the internal-combustion engine never resigned itself to toil, never stopped complaining. When the sun sank in blood ahead of them, Mickey took the KE down through the damp and they flew on over the black desert. “Do you need to be spelled?” Crispin shouted into the speaking tube.

  “No,” Mickey answered after a long pause. “I’m holding up.”

  Taking him at his word, Crispin drifted into sleep. For once, his dreams were his own: against a background of slaughterhouses, to the tune of bovine screams, Rae said, “I haven’t any love to give you. They took it all.”

  “Who did? I’ll kill them.”

  The shadows around her eyes deepened. “Can I come with you?”

  “Don’t be silly: it’ll be far too dangerous.”

  Then he slipped into sliding, stratified hallucinations, and woke at last at dawn, to the grumble of the engine. When he peered blearily into the slipstream, the terrain below hadn’t changed. Desert, rock, scrub, an occasional bright profusion of flowers, and a line of trees that meant a stream. A herd of pinhead-sized goats scattered in alarm. They were over the diamondtina. Crispin scrubbed his eyes and multiplied their speed by the number of hours they’d been in the air. His harness prevented him from stretching; he couldn’t feel his feet. He was starving hungry. He glanced at the fuel gauge, then wrenched up the visor of his helmet and brought the speaking tube to his mouth.

  “Mick, we’d better set down.”

  “I know.” Mickey sounded exhausted.

  “We’re practically out of fuel. Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “How should I have done that? You were sleeping like the fucking dead.”

  Crispin bit back a retort. The needle wobbled in the red. “Look, just land! We’re not going to be able to fly all the way to Kingsburg, so let’s get rid of this damned New World machine here, where there’s no one around!” He pointed into the slipstream, forgetting Mickey could not see. “There, look, it’s as flat as any—”

  “Are you piloting this fucking bird or am I?” Mickey yelled, and simultaneously Crispin heard the tenor of the engine deepen.

  The landing was disastrous. Either the KE-111 hit concealed unevennesses in the apparently flat stretch of ground, or else the long hours of flight had dulled Mickey’s reflexes and made him forget the first lesson of aviation—that landings are the most dangerous maneuvers of all. With the third bounce, the little biplane lurched and nearly spun. Crispin hunkered down, protecting his head. A sickening lurch slung him forward and his forearms crunched into the instrument panel as the KE buried its nose in the ground. He was hanging at an angle. The horrible clashing of dislocated gears filled his head. He remembered the twin tanks of flammable fuel, the internal-combustion engine’s notorious tendency to explode. He tore himself loose of his harness, flung himself over the side of the cockpit, hit the lower wing, slid forward between the struts, and rolled to the ground, taking the impact on his shoulder. His long coat hampered him as he sprinted away from the plane. Behind, he heard Mickey’s footsteps. They stopped at a safe distance, on top of a rocky rise. Aloncietta’s nose propeller was feebly, noisily trying to turn. Broken blades flapped. “So much for Iguchi’s darling,” Crispin said.

  Mickey wrenched off his helmet and flung it down. “I don’t know what happened,” he moaned breathlessly. “I’ve only done this about a hundred times. They have a runway at Okimachi but not at Swirling—you’ve got to land on the road and taxi into a field—I’ve done it with passengers—”

  Mr. Nakunatta, Crispin thought. “Something could have been wrong with the landing gear. Iguchi didn’t exactly give us a chance to check it. And that rigger of his didn’t trust us; I wouldn’t put it past him to have—”

  With a soft whoomp, the KE-111 blew up. A few minutes later its second fuel tank burst, swelling the blaze to a fireball. The heat felt not unpleasant on Crispin’s cheeks: the dawn was damp and chilly on his back. He thought wistfully of the maps and the flight compasses. A thought struck him, and he patted his pockets until he reassured himself he still had Millsy’s letter and Cloud’s two hundred sen—the price the Founding Sister had paid him for leaving Rae behind. Can I come with you? she’d said. He’d made some inane innuendo, not taking her seriously for a moment. Cloud had made a spectacularly bad bargain: she’d paid Crispin for something he’d already given up.

  Mickey stared at the burning aircraft. The flames had spread to the ground shrubs, which smoldered sullenly, wet with dew. Crispin touched his arm. He knew Mickey was blaming himself. And quite likely it had been his fault: they were both airmen of an earlier age. No amount of practice could further develop the skills they’d learned within an operating system that forgave illimitable technical lapses, just so long as you had willpower and the mental equivalent of a silver tongue. “Where are we? Do you know?”

  “You had the maps.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to check the distance against them.”

  “There was a town a while back. A small one. Just a village, really. To the northwest.”

  Leaving the flaming wreck behind, they walked at right angles to the dawn and struck a road just as the sun rose through the mist. After another hour, following the road west, they met a goatherd. The babble of his flock nearly drowned out his greeting. Crispin asked him how close they were to Gilye—the nearest city, so far as he could figure from what he remembered of the maps. The goatherd frowned and said in a drawl Crispin comprehended only belatedly, “Queen, that Gilly be no town 1 ever hear of. The Dom; I thoughts you squires come from the Dom.”

  He was speaking Ferupian.

  Either Iguchi’s maps had been wrong by hundreds of miles, or the speedometer in the KE-111 hadn’t been working. They had crossed the border in the night.

  “Domenische!” Crispin cried.

  Mickey started and whisked his tail inside his overcoat.

  “So; but you squires baint wanting to go back to the Dom, not now you’re clear of her. Not-a-yet. They ain’t never needed no lizards to spill they blood for them, but now the mills is closed, they going crazy with theyselfs.” The elderly goatherd shook his head.

  “I was born in this province,” Crispin said, feeling ebullient. He tipped his face up to the misty sunlight. “It’s good to be home!”

  7 Marout 1900 A.D.

  Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): Linbe Province: Domeniscbe

  In less hectic times, Smithrebel’s had set up its tents in the pasture fields outside “the Dom,” and advertised special late-night performances so the millworkers coul
d attend after their shifts. Now those same fields had sprouted military encampments, like the biggest, most lavish circus in the world, except that there was no color anywhere except for the ubiquitous, garish Kirekuni flag. All the municipal buildings and most of the private residences in the center of town had been commandeered by the “Interim Governor-General of Linhe Province.” But all the houses in Domenische couldn’t have billeted the governor’s retinue of Disciples. Crispin estimated the sprawl along the western road at fifteen hundred troops. On the streets of the town, it was impossible to tell which uniformed bands were on patrol and which seeking leisure. These were no locally recruited, easily corrupted Disciplinarians: these were soldiers with fear in their eyes and scar tissue hampering their movements, infantrymen hardened by the bestial necessities of victory, Kirekunis all, not a conscript among them, although toadies cringed after them in strings. Again and again, Crispin and Mickey saw violence erupt. They themselves were interrogated nearly every time they failed to avoid a patrol. The Disciples questioned them inattentively, almost as a formality: they shoved them about and patted them down, and Crispin couldn’t imagine that the revolver strapped in the small of his back escaped detection, but they were inevitably sent about their business while the Disciples’ eyes quick-flickered about. The soldiers’ jumpiness told of that particular species of insanity induced by a protracted tour in hostile territory with no going home in sight. All of them carried sidearms, Kirekuni military revolvers, and officers carried submachine guns. They were less well armed than the raw Cypean boys in the Kherouge Disciplinarians, but they were probably far and away better shots.

  “Thank Significance I didn’t become a SAPper,” Mickey said after they had been questioned for the fourth time on the threshold of the shop where they’d bought a meal of flatbread and goatsmeat for a sentime (a song, in Kherouge terms) and devoured it standing up. The shopkeeper’s eyes had popped at the sight of hard currency, and he’d tried to sell them three times as much. “Poor devils. Can you imagine? Nine out of ten of them would probably rather be back in the trenches.”

  “In their heads they still are in the trenches,” Crispin said. He was furious with pain. The Disciple who threw him against the shopfront had wrenched his arm nearly out of its socket. “If they’d seen we paid with sen, they’d probably have shot us. If you hadn’t managed to keep your coat buttoned up, we’d probably be trying to explain ourselves to the governor-general his Significant self right now. Can’t you stuff it inside your trousers or something?”

  “Maybe I’ll emulate my cousin and become a double amputee,” Mickey said nastily. “Or maybe from now on we should avoid provincial capitals. I’d have you remember whose bright idea it was to come here.”

  The air reeked of intricately layered decay. Crispin had forgotten that aspect of Ferupian cities, whose citizens prided themselves on doing without foreign vulgarities such as municipal garbage collection.

  “It’s getting dark,” Mickey said in a different tone of voice.

  No light escaped from boarded-up windows, or from the closed doors bearing the blood-red jagged. In Kirekune that emblem represented the Chirokawa; here it represented submission. Domenische had once had a core bourgeoisie of mill owners who between them employed the rest of the population. Crispin remembered the wooden town houses on King Hathred Street being painted to look like stone—a typical provincial attempt to claim a Kingsburg pedigree. He liked the new mode of black walls and doors even less. The boarded-up windows, too, were painted black, which suggested ominously that even the Kirekuni governor-general couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal glass to see out of.

  The warren of nameless streets where the millworkers lived was dingier even than Crispin remembered. Many houses looked derelict. He couldn’t figure out why everything was so quiet until he realized that of course the demogorgon-powered mills had stopped two years ago, and since apparently no one had taken steps to install alternate sources of power, most of the workers must have left. He didn’t entertain for a minute Mickey’s suggestion that they spend the night in one of the deserted tenements. Who knew how or where the diehard residents of the Domenische slums whiled away their nights? How did Mickey think a secret royalist society would react to finding a Kirekuni and a Mime slumbering in their clubhouse?

  “You seem very optimistic on the subject of Ferupian resilience,” Mickey snarled.

  For several minutes they had been hearing Disciple boots and Disciple voices ringing down the alleys, shouting a single accented word over and over: “Curfew! Curfew!”

  “I’d have you remember I’ve been a member of a secret society,” Mickey said, “and I’ve been a Disciple, and frankly I’d rather risk the tender mercies of the former!”

  In desperation Crispin capitulated. As the Disciples’ torches flared around the corner, they ducked into a boarded-up tenement, only to find that it wasn’t deserted, but occupied by a young, ravenous-faced widow. She took advantage of their desperation to rent them her cellar for the night. The price she charged—which she obviously thought exorbitant—would have seemed even more of a steal if the cellar hadn’t also been occupied by a gang of murderous-looking urchins. Crispin and Mickey spent half an hour and two sen hashing out terms of occupancy: if the urchins didn’t attack them during the night, they’d be allowed to sleep on their own bedding.

  “Wouldn’t want to catch their bleeding fleas anyway,” Mickey grumbled in Kirekuni as he lay down on the earth floor and pillowed his head on his arm.

  “I guarantee you’ll have worse than fleas before we’re through,” Crispin said, swinging the candlestick he’d begged from the widow over Mickey’s head.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Crispin kicked him, not gently.

  “You broke my fucking ribs!”

  “For an ex-secret-society-Disciple you’re awfully naive,” Crispin hissed. The children were squabbling on the other side of the room. They didn’t bother him—after his encounter with the youngsters of the Enclave, these mercenary orphans seemed so normal he would have felt sorry for them if he’d had time to think about it. “D’you think I’m gonna go to sleep in here? D’you think I’m gonna let you go to sleep? Not on your life.” He passed Mickey his revolver. “This isn’t the plains of the Chadou.”

  “And neither,” Mickey said, sitting up, “am I your fucking sidekick anymore. And if you give me one more order, 1 may leave and take this with me and leave you in the unenviable situation of being the only man in this city with a small fortune in hard currency concealed in his underwear.”

  If Crispin had heard, he might have started worrying. But he’d already propped his back against the damp wall, balanced the candlestick on a joist so that it shed its uncertain yellow light over the letter on his knee, and absorbed himself in deciphering the rest of what Millsy had written.

  Excerpt of a letter from Professor G. Mills of Kingsburg, New Kirekune, to Mr. C. Kateralbin care of Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show, dated 13 Aout 1899, received by Saul Smithrebel mid-Sevambar 1899 in Gilye, delivered to Mr. C. Kateralbin early Marout 1900 in Kherouge.

  …as you see from my letterhead, I am now a don. “Thraziaow Chair Professor of Daemonology at Kingsburg University,” that is my new title: is it not impressive? They took it from a young scholar who had an honest interest in collating the technical literature of a field that was then enormously relevant, and gave it to an old trickster, which I suppose is appropriate, since I am now as redundant as the books and manuals in my predecessor’s archives. The University has Jew under-graduates left—most of them have been denounced as royalists, and sentenced accordingly—and certainty I have no students. Nor, I suspect, will I ever have. Thus, the only duty my new position has conferred on me is that of remembering how to read and write!

  (Not very well though, Crispin thought, squinting at the wonky characters.)

  My decision not to teach you to read and write was hopeful rather than rational. I hoped you would never be so far a
way from your loved ones that we would have to communicate through this unsatisfactory medium. And I hoped that if you remained deaf to the siren song of abstract power, as codified in ink and paper, you would not leave the source, you would spend your whole life drinking at the wellspring I showed you when I taught you to handle daemons.

  But now the wellspring has gone underground, and all handlers have had to seek some alternative means of keeping body and soul together: most of them, I am told, have become mechanics if they were lucky enough to find employment, day laborers if they were not. I cannot imagine you grubbing about with grease and spark plugs, or toiling for the meager compensation of a glass of ale and a pallet in a barn. And so I assume that if you are not dead, you have entered the strangely warped world of the literate.

  (Crispin thought: A long time ago, my dear old friend.)

  For me, it must be confessed, inhabiting this world, where affluence is synonymous with power, is scarcely different from being dead. Apart from occasional faculty meetings, I lead an existence that is quite humdrum. My colleagues are mostly newly tenured Kirekunis, zealous preachers of Significant morality who volunteered to be transferred herefrom their parent institutions in Kirekune. The Ferupian professors are frightened for their jobs, and depending on the politics of the day, their lives. I am too controversial for them to consider me as an acquaintance, let alone an ally. And my old friends have no time for he who was once their partisan.

  I hope, Crispin, that you have not developed a conscience—at least, not the sort that compels men to moral judgments, and their consequences Nobility and Bravery. For I have doomed myself, I am afraid, to spend my few remaining days chewing on the fruit of what I high-mindedly believed my nobility.