A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “Isn’t it a bit soon to talk about ending well?” Mickey said. “We’ve been here—let me see—six and a half hours. Count them.”

  “But we’re halfway to Kingsburg, Mick!” Crispin longed for him to share his mood of exuberance.

  “That’s no reason to start singing and dancing.”

  “You’re dancing, too, aren’t you? Better than I am!”

  “First time I’ve tried since this happened.” Mickey wiggled his stump. “Fucks up my balance.”

  “Doesn’t show,” Crispin said loyally—and truthfully. Mickey’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes melancholy. He wore a look of mingled resoluteness and regret that Crispin had seen often since they left Cype. Steam-packed bodies gave off heat like radiators in the crowded cafe. The smell of sex salted the air. The tin-pan din of the Likrekian steel band pulsed through Crispin’s body. “Can’t you just stop worrying for a while?” He gestured around. The steel drummer, in between passages, lifted one hand as if in acknowledgment. Lately, Crispin felt his cover as a Mime was falling apart somehow—more and more often, he was being taken for a half-breed Likrekian. He felt no nostalgia for the islands anymore. In fact, the mere presence of the Likrekian band cramped his style.

  “If I’m worrying,” Mickey said, “it’s about you.”

  “What, do you think I’m going native? No fear.” Mickey didn’t respond. Crispin insisted, rather unnerved, “Being Ferupian now is about having lived through the conquest. And while half the grown men in the heartlands were getting slaughtered, I was running pharmaceuticals to the coast, working for a Kirekuni! I couldn’t go native if I wanted to. I’m too guilty.”

  “So now you know what it’s like to be a traitor.”

  “But—” He couldn’t help it: he’d indicted himself, but now he had to defend himself. “The alternative’s always worse.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The alternative’s death.”

  “You can never be sure of that if you don’t stay to find out.”

  “Remember the Vichuisse fiasco? That time I would have stayed in the Raw and been court-martialed, if you hadn’t changed my mind for me. I’ve learned my lesson now, thank you. Getting well away before they get you, that’s called”—Crispin staggered against the wall—“that’s called staying ahead of the game!”

  Mickey gulped from the wine mug he gripped in a coil of his tail. His gaze danced about and rested on a group of Disciples at a table pushed against the wall. “But are we ahead? Only as far as we’re still alive. And coming to a place like this is just asking for it.”

  Crispin laughed exuberantly. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “In my book, that’s called having a death wish. We ought to stay out of sight.”

  “Mick, look where we are.” Crispin put down his glass and took Mickey’s hand in both of his. “No one here, not even the fucking blackcoats, cares what the hell we look like or what our business is just as long as we’ve got hard currency. In my opinion, postconquest Ferupe is a significant improvement on the old version. Now tell me this isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had in your life.”

  “As long as we’ve got hard currency,” Mickey muttered, and then he blurted: “Oh, yes, this is fun all right. What comes next? Do we seduce ourselves a brace of these lovely ladies and get the clap for our pains?”

  “Ahhh, no. Ahhh, no, Mick.” Crispin pulled him into the dance again, pulling him across the floor, smilingly excusing himself to the couples whose path they crossed. The cafe counter was two doors suspended by wires from the ceiling. “Two of ’37!” he bawled at the serving girl.

  “One thing Valdes seems on first acquaintance to lack is a House of Ecstasy,” Mickey said. “But with so many of my countrymen about, I’m sure someone’s filled the demand. Inside the HQ compound, perhaps. Shall we go look?”

  “You need another drink,” Crispin said, and thrust the brimming mug into his hand. As soon as Mickey had taken a swallow, Crispin pulled him back onto the dance floor. “And here we go. One, two, three! One, two, three!” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Likrekian drummer, the man who’d acknowledged him, wink and signal his bandmates. The tempo of the music slowed; the singer’s creamy voice became audible over the horns.

  Good-bye, Queen bless you, lover dear,

  I’m dying here on the Raw.

  From wounds received in action

  Trying to win this damnable war.

  I know we’ll meet again some day,

  In that land beyond the sky.

  Where you’ll always be in company

  With your brown-eyed soldier bo—

  “Cut the fucking royalist propaganda!” a Disciple shouted in Kirekuni, and hurled a mug at the singer’s head. The man ducked it neatly; the band picked up the pace again; Crispin’s face burned as he pulled Mickey closer. There weren’t half enough girls to go round—they were far from the only men dancing together. The crowd swirled densely. Nothing should have made them stand out. Except that once again, his disguise, consisting right now of an extravagant Western-style suit such as a Mime might wear, had been seen through. Mickey yielded. His former energy was gone; his tail tip dangled limply; he rested his face against Crispin’s neck and balanced his wine mug on Crispin’s shoulder. He sipped from it often. After two more refills, Crispin realized the band had packed up and the bar was emptying. A memory of caution made him tug Mickey outside. He was in a drunken haze. They stumbled arm in arm back to the traveler’s rest where they’d left their horses and cart. In a closet-sized, windowless room above the stables, that had come included with the price of Etta and Frankie’s stalls, where the warm darkness was alive with rats, Crispin let himself be seduced by Mickey, who pretended he was too drunk to know what he was doing. And he probably didn’t know, Crispin thought vaguely. As Mickey knelt before him, kissing his stomach and thighs and penis, he was weeping. The salt drops chilled quickly on Crispin’s skin, like saliva or semen. He shivered and dug his fingers into Mickey’s hair.

  28 Marout 1900 A.D.

  Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): Neufertilia Domain: the Seventeenth

  Mansion of the Glorious Dynasty: twenty-one days earlier

  Mickey knew he had to have a gun. While Crispin, the frustrated alcoholic, burrowed in the wine cellar, he searched every place he could imagine nervous culties hiding an arsenal. The Kirekuni Dynasty’s nonaggressive discipline of Waiting had been merely a smoke screen, which gave him hope; but at last, dusty and depressed, he concluded that the Ferupian branches of the cult had had the courage of their convictions. Nowhere in the mansion, or the outlying sheds and machine houses, did he find any weapon more lethal than a trowel. All the kitchen knives were gone. Either the Disciples, from whose approach the culties had fled two years ago, or locals from the village of Greenberith had rifled the master bedrooms.

  In the pantry he unearthed a sack of wormy corn. He took it to Etta and Frankie, whom he’d tethered outside the kitchen door. They stopped cropping the montebrecias and pushed their heads against his chest as he filled their nose bags. “Good chaps. Yum yum yum.” Their huge wet eyes, rough manes, and Turkish-slipper hooves appealed to the part of him that detested artifice. Although Crispin ridiculed him for it, he regularly curried their coats, secure in the knowledge that under his care their health had improved. Their last owner had treated them like machines. He wished he knew how to ride, so that they wouldn’t have to pull the heavy buckboard. Crispin couldn’t ride either, despite his years in the circus, the last bastion of the lost art of equitation. “Give me a pretty girl, and I’ll show you what I do know,” he’d said crudely.

  Weeds rioted from the damp soil of what Mickey guessed had been the kitchen garden. Fruit trees loomed in the twilight, gray arms dipping to the earth, budding hair standing on end. Near the door stood a lawn mower with its blades removed. Mickey looked up at the bleak face of the mansion, swaybacked roofs silhouetted against a pink sky, and sighed. In the course of his futile search of the attics, pi
cking his way between rows of moldy child-sized mattresses, he’d startled a flock of doves. They’d flurried so violently about his head, wings in motion razor-pinioned, that he thought the roof tiles littering the floor had come to life. They flapped noisily into the sky between sagging rafters.

  The world of geishas and foreigners seemed farther away than ever.

  In Kherouge, before he was arrested, Mickey had started to believe his problems weren’t insurmountable. By forcing him to flee Okimachi, Daisuke might actually have done him a favor. (It was even possible that in Mickey’s absence Daisuke had been made to take the rap for the death of Bernard Blythe-Frye. That would be poetic justice!) During his first promising conversation with Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista, he’d felt the universe of fashionable dresses, dressed-up faces, sex for money, and money for favors opening before him once more: a magical box, and purely by luck he’d tripped its catch again. But perhaps, after all, it hadn’t been luck, he’d thought as he mentally drafted letters to Rumika, Fumie, and Ashie. Perhaps it had been inevitable. Like calls to like; water flows to the low places; there is such a thing, after all, as destiny, even if one is destined merely to be a businessman.

  And that night and the next, circuses and ambushes notwith-standing, he nursed a secret conviction that it was all going to come right. Sibelye-Enkhoupista’s continued friendliness encouraged him to imagine that he’d made some progress in mastering the language of Greater Significance, which was just as international now, and as subject to spicy regional variations, as the language of lust in which he was already fluent.

  He couldn’t reconcile this absurd, fly-by-night trek through a pulverized foreign realm with the logical progression of his life.

  The reason, of course, was that once again he’d been yanked out of his own life into Crispin’s. This was Crispin’s quest, not his. He blamed himself every day for having fallen in with Crispin’s outrageous plot to steal the KE-111. After his arrest he’d believed that if he stayed in Kherouge he’d be in danger; now he saw that he’d just been accepting Crispin’s suggestions as truth. The force of old habit had blinded him to fact—namely, that Crispin had obviously conceived his scheme as a joint undertaking, and that if Mickey hadn’t agreed to come, it would have fallen apart at the seams.

  The same was increasingly true of their flight across Ferupe. Some weeks ago, with a sort of heady wonder, Mickey had realized Crispin needed him. These were Crispin’s daemons who reached out of the rubble to grasp their ankles, Crispin’s daemons who jeered invisibly from overhanging branches. And they were too much for anyone to contend with alone. Faced day after day with the counterintuitive inequalities of occupied Ferupe—the Disciple patrols whose jeeps you could hear coming for miles along the domain highways, the skeletons (some child-sized) piled in the one-room shop of a deserted village amid broken candy jars—Mickey could almost have believed Ferupe was still ruled by occult forces. The Kirekuni stereotype of the UDF as a wilderness where sallow barbarians had claimed squatters’ rights had never seemed more plausible.

  But he couldn’t back out.

  Not here, where Greater Significance would have him in moments!

  Not even though he suspected that Greater Significance had had nothing to do with his arrest in Kherouge. He didn’t believe Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista had, either.

  It would have been unthinkable, after all, for Jice to resist the Disciplinarians. He had his position to think of. It was Crispin who had stood by as they marched Mickey away. It was Crispin who, the very same evening, had arrived with a mysteriously obtained credit line, courtesy of the Enclave he’d sworn he would have no more contact with, and freed Mickey from an eternity of bad wine and card games, thereby ensuring his gratitude—and ensuring that Mickey would share his impulse to get out of Kherouge.

  Mickey couldn’t voice his suspicions even to himself. But neither could he trust Crispin anymore

  And that, above all, filled him with regret—that the dynamic of dependence between them had, like everything else in the heartlands, turned topsy-turvy.

  Inside the kitchen, something crashed to the floor. “Shit!” Crispin cried. He came out the back door, clutching an armload of bottles, sleeves rolled up. “Look here! The busy-lizzies didn’t get everything!”

  His grin, his handsome brown face, his corded forearms—his sheer physical presence plucked strings in Mickey’s heart, and he despised himself for it. He eyed the dusty, handwritten labels. “What on earth have you found?”

  Crispin waded past him, out into the garden. The weeds came to his knees. He uncorked a bottle and swigged. “Dandelion wine. Fucking scrumptious.”

  “I hope you’re joking.”

  “Did you find any grub?”

  “Nothing we’d honor with the name.” Mickey gestured at Etta and Frankie, still contentedly chomping in their nose bags.

  Overhead, a few stars had come out. Crispin brandished his bottle skyward. “What say we head down to the village? This is giving me an appetite. I fancy a real heartlands dinner. Rump steak medium rare, potatoes,” he chanted, “spinach or kale, brussels sprouts cooked in butter; bread to sop it up, oh, bread, glorious bread; and raisin pudding! With barley ale from start to finish!”

  “You’re about as likely to find that,” Mickey said, “as you are to get that lawn mower working and ride to Kingsburg on it.”

  Crispin looked at the rusted machine, which had been dismantled for the silver in the transformation engine. Then he looked at Mickey sadly. “Don’t be such a wet blanket. I’m only trying to cheer us up a bit.”

  Mickey hated him for his recklessness. Yet he still couldn’t plan to deceive him.

  He had his brainstorm on the spur of the moment, at three fifteen in the morning, after Crispin’s loud grumbling awakened him.

  They’d bivouacked in one of the master bedrooms on the second floor. In the resounding silence of the countryside, Mickey had slept deeply until Crispin engaged in a vocal dialogue with his nightmares. Knowing from experience it did no good to kick him, Mickey got up from the four-poster they shared and took refuge in an armchair with the springs showing, wrapping himself in curtains and placing his pocket watch on his knee in order to be able to tell Crispin tomorrow exacdy how long he’d been deprived of rest. But in his dazed state, the second hand sweeping around the dial hypnotized him. “Watch out,” Crispin cried, “watch out!”

  A voice murmured below the window, “Wotcha think they’re doing, having a party?”

  Shock! Mickey snapped wide-awake.

  “Stay put,” continued the voice. “I’ll see you skint if you let go of that rope.”

  Mickey dashed behind the four-poster and felt in the pockets of Crispin’s coat, which lay on the floor. All he could find was the variety of wooden cigarette boxes in which Crispin kept his money. Then he remembered Crispin surreptitiously placing the revolver under his pillow—Mickey hated that, and Crispin didn’t always do it, but tonight he had. Mickey stuck his hand under Crispin’s head. “Hey,” Crispin said, and sat up. He was always difficult to rouse. Sleepiness altered his personality entirely. Right now that might be a good thing.

  “Where’s your bloody pistol?”

  “What the hell’s wrong?”

  “Sssh!”

  “’Ere we go.” A face like a grimy peeled potato appeared beyond the railings of the decorative balcony outside the window. A body like a whole sack of potatoes followed. Clearly believing himself unobserved, the intruder hoisted himself over the railings and ran his hands stealthily up and down the frame of the window—one of the few that still had its glass.

  Crispin followed Mickey’s gaze. “Oh, hell.” He flung himself off the bed, landing without a sound, and loped across the filthy, motheaten carpet to the window, where he crouched, waiting. Holding his breath, Mickey detected an odd noise outside the bedroom door. Old houses didn’t settle in such a regular rhythm. Someone was creeping down the hall.

  Glass shattered.

  “I know you!”
Crispin roared. “You’re the arsehole who tried to sell me a rotten sirloin steak!” Mickey heard incoherent grunts from the intruder. “Sirloin my foot! That was dog’s meat if I’ve ever smelt it! What did you do, cut Rover’s throat when you saw me coming?”

  Before Mickey could decide whether to investigate the sound in the hall or help Crispin, the door burst open and a slim Ferupian with a face like a knife blade shot in. He skidded to a stop and glanced wildly about. “Boffo!” he cried, and headed for the window. Mickey flung himself to his feet and tackled him halfway across the room. The man twisted as he fell, fighting, trying to reach his dagger. “Didja get it?” he shouted. Mickey wrenched the man’s dagger out of its waist sheath and sent it spinning across the floor; then, on impulse, he wrapped his tail around the man’s neck, choking him. “Where is it? Did you—” The man stopped speaking and clawed at his throat. Mickey knew how he felt. He’d experienced the same panic on the Abbatoir Road in Kherouge.

  “Uh,” Boffo said on the other side of the room, and in a high, frightened voice, “Oh, no, sir, please no, please, I’ve seven kids, eight—”

  “What d’you think 1 am, a dupe?” Crispin shouted, and fired.

  He had it on him all along.

  Mickey’s victim was weakening.

  “What were you going to do, follow up daylight robbery with midnight burglary?” Crispin shouted, and fired again.

  That was when Mickey had his brainstorm. He pretended to lose his grip. The man felt his chance and twisted to his feet. He staggered for a moment, disoriented, then made a rush at Crispin and jumped on him from behind, weeping, screaming, “You’ve kilt my mate! You’ve kilt him, you barsted!”

  While they struggled, Mickey scuttled silently behind the bed and felt for the cigarette boxes scattered on the floor. One. He stuffed it in his waist band. But one only held ten sen in small-denomination coins, and although that would have bought two or three of what he wanted in Kherouge, he was probably going to have to deal with Disciples, and even if he took the patriotic line, he knew he’d be expected to fork over a small fortune in return for no questions asked. Two. Don’t get greedy. Three—