A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “Boffo,” the thin man was weeping, like a bird that only knows one song. “You’ve kilt him.” Rising to his feet, Mickey saw the villager kneeling on Crispin’s back, choking him, while Crispin kicked ever more weakly.

  Perfect.

  Mickey darted to the window and made a to-do of breaking the rest of the glass with his elbow. As if on cue, the third villager called from below, “What the fuck’s happening? Can I let go of this fucking rope now?”

  “Scram if you know what’s good for you,” Mickey shouted. He made sure the three cigarette boxes were secure in his waist, scanned the floor, and spotted Crispin’s revolver lying half under Boffo’s body. He swooped it up, then squeezed his eyes closed and fired at the thin man’s head.

  In the silence after the shattering bang he heard someone getting to his feet. He didn’t, couldn’t, open his eyes. Then Crispin’s hands closed on his shoulders and he shook him, sobbing between gritted teeth, “You could have killed me.” Mickey’s teeth rattled in his skull, and he didn’t know whether Crispin was blaming him for risking a shot at such close quarters, or thanking him for his forbearance.

  They left the mansion half an hour later. For once, Mickey felt Crispin’s insistence on precautions was justified. Greenberith was definitely an unfriendly place. Two days later they ran out of food again and ventured into a town named Salmesthwarth, where a small contingent of Disciples had made a building that appeared once to have been a music hall their base of operations. While Crispin went looking for trouble as usual, Mickey cut a slit in the back of his overcoat, flared his tail ostentatiously behind him, and set out to purchase his gun. He had his story rehearsed and ready. He carried the Karanda .44 he procured at all times after that; the night they went dancing at Valdes, when Crispin left his revolver at the stables, he had it in the inside of his coat. When he ripped off his clothes later to make love to his strangely yielding friend, he kicked the gun into the corner of the room so Crispin wouldn’t find out about it. For some reason he felt it was specifically important that Crispin not know they had equal firepower (if anything, the Karanda was a more dangerous weapon).

  What is your two-ob?

  Two, two, the lily-white boys

  All dressed up on green, oh-bo!

  One is one, and all alone

  And never more shall be so.

  —Traditional

  Out of Tune

  9 May 1900 A.D.

  Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): the Kingdom: a back road

  thirty miles from Kingsburg

  They hadn’t been traveling for more than an hour when, as if in answer to Mickey’s prayers, the stagecoach jolted into a deep pothole, the forward near corner crashed down, an avalanche of luggage buried the passengers, and everybody had to be helped out through the uppermost window (the white-haired lady wailing a duet with one of the horses). It became apparent that the front axle had cracked and one of the horses had broken a hind leg. “Three places,” the coachman said glumly. “Out of the way, Dunnell. Cover your eyes, ladies and gents, if you’re squeamish.” He walked up to the horse, keeping clear of its tossing hooves, and calmly shot it through the head. The white-haired lady screamed. A second later her daughter, a plumper, more beautiful version of her, screamed, too.

  “That wasn’t necessary, man,” Mickey said angrily. Just before the coachman pulled the trigger, the horse had glanced up at him with terror and trust in its whirlpool eye, and Mickey remembered Etta and Frankie regarding him with incomprehension as he thrust their halters at the young representative of the Valdean dairy to which he and Crispin had sold them. Gonna use ’em for riding only, sir, the boy had lied with a heavy face. Mickey’s heart had sunk even farther as he noticed that the boy had two cauliflower ears. Any employee who was beaten daily would take it out on the animals in his care. But there was no alternative. The Joy of Okimachi’s whistle tweeted in the distance, and Crispin tugged him away.

  “Wouldn’t have took us to the Burg in that condition, Your Lizard Highness,” the coachman said insolently.

  The dead horse lay like a collection of sticks. The other three stood in the traces, sides heaving, heads down.

  “Now if we all would like to wait there’ll be another coach along in an hour or so. Meantime, I’ll take one of these useless beasts, ride back to the post, and see if they can find a spare axle.” The coachman, a tall, cadaverous Ferupian in livery so preposterous he’d probably designed it himself, took care to speak courteously, but his hard, level gaze and the callousness with which he’d shot the horse made Mickey think he was an ex-infantryman. It served no purpose to contemplate the combination of craftiness and luck he must have had to escape the slaughter that wiped out 90 percent of the northern platoons.

  Even before he finished speaking, the passengers began to protest.

  Crispin elbowed Mickey, and muttered, “No fucking way am I waiting here with this lot.”

  “Nothing we can do, sirs and ladies!” The coachman turned his palms up, but somehow it looked more like a threat than a gesture of helplessness. “Dunnell here will set up roadblocks ’fore and ’hind, and maybe a couple of you muscular chaps would be kind enough to help him move this lot off the road.”

  The footman had soothed the three remaining horses. He unharnessed the biggest gelding, walked it to the back of the wrecked stagecoach, and saddled it with quiet efficience, patting its neck and murmuring to it.

  “I am expected in Kingsburg tonight,” a burly Ferupian said ominously. He wore a Western-style suit whose awful cut announced its domestic provenance.

  “If the next coach has room, sir, I’m sure your fellow passengers wouldn’t object to you taking the first available—”

  “That privilege belongs to the ladies, my good man. And for our collective inconvenience I believe refunds are in order.”

  “If you must blame someone for the inconvenience, sir, blame the lizard chancellor of roads. Ten, twelve stagecoaches down here every day, they oughter’ve asphalted it months ago.”

  The burly man coughed. “I’d have you know I’m employed under the chancellor. Our offices deserve better than ill-informed slander from the likes of you. The budget for country roads is minimal, thanks to the diversion of funds to the Railway Commission; if you were truly concerned for your horses’ safety, you would use the southern trunk road! It is a quicker route, and shorter.”

  The coachman’s face had darkened. “Wiv the fakkin’ traffic?” he grunted. “Pig’s portion blackcoat? An’ they charge you every five fakkin’ miles for passin’? I gotta turn a profit, chum, just like you lads in the offices!”

  Crispin whispered, “Now. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Mickey concurred. Neither of them had luggage; since selling the horsecart, they’d perfected the art of traveling light. They started to walk away down the road, between the tall hedges. Behind them, the voices of the coachman and the chancellor’s employee rose until it sounded as though blows were imminent. “Oh, Mr. Kateralbin! Mr. Achino!” the white-haired lady, Mrs. Tausseroy, fluted. Mickey heard her long stride approaching from behind.

  “Don’t turn around,” Crispin said.

  “I don’t think you ought to leave! I don’t believe it’s safe!”

  Mrs. Tausseroy and her daughter had been passengers on the Joy of Okimachi; like Mickey and Crispin, they’d chosen to disembark at Hausuisse and complete their journey by road, rather than cough up a 150-sen “river tax” no one on board had known about until Disciples boarded the steamship at Montelot. During the voyage Mrs. Tausseroy had become known as something of a raconteuse. She was forever telling stories about respectable female friends’ near escapes from the bandit gangs of ex-soldiers who terrorized the outskirts of Kingsburg. Mickey and Crispin hadn’t frequented the common areas, pre-ferring to keep to themselves, but from conversations at dinner, Mickey gathered that the bandits were of a uniformly priapic bent, and (since Mrs. Tausseroy’s friends had all survived with their virtue intact) uniformly incompetent. He b
elieved he and Crispin could handle any threat, now they were both armed. However, it struck him as they rounded the bend that their coachman was an ex-infantryman, too. Perhaps the wreck of the stagecoach had been planned. Perhaps even now, the coachman’s marauding friends lurked on either side of the road.

  He turned and looked back.

  Behind the tall hedges of fuchsia, hawthorns, and pussy willows clustered around tall birches like dogs around their masters. The birches’ buds danced in the morning sunlight. Mrs. Tausseroy rounded the curve, loping. When she saw Mickey and Crispin, she slowed to a ladylike totter—but it was too late. Ice gripped Mickey’s heart. Crispin had been right. And he, Mickey, ought to have started believing Crispin’s vaguely worded predictions of doom a long time ago.

  “We’ll be quite all right, madame,” he called to her.

  “Oh, but you must stay and amuse Emily and myself!” She didn’t sound out of breath. She carried a small handbag and her skirts billowed as she teetered artfully. “We shall be so dull! All the rest of the men are fighting! Do you know, Emily told me back at the staging post that she had decided you and Mr. Kateralbin were quite the most congenial gentlemen in the group from the Joy!”

  She was thirty feet away in the dappling sunlight, but even at that distance Mickey could see a smile playing over her wrinkled slash of a mouth. In conjunction with her pleading, hopeful tone, the voluptuous rapacity of that smile terrified him.

  “We had hoped to invite you to dine with us at our house in town! There is such a dearth of pleasant company in the capital these days!”

  “Cris,” Mickey said in a strangled voice.

  Crispin said, “Run.”

  The hedges surged past Mickey’s ears in a kaleidoscope of lurid flowers and sunlight and shade. His heart hammered. Twice he nearly twisted his ankle. Behind them he heard a single gunshot. He had no way of knowing if the shooter was the coachman, one of the passengers, or Mrs. Tausseroy: perhaps she’d shucked her high heels, perhaps she was even now gaining on them, skirts gathered in one arm, her long, long stride unhampered…Crispin flickered like a shadow, beside him and a little ahead. Just when he thought his blood was going to burst out of his body through his ears, Crispin swerved toward a gap in the fuchsia and jumped over a broken gate. They doubled back along the other side of the hedge, reached the far corner of the field, and flung themselves flat on the grass.

  Mickey’s pulse slowed as dew soaked through his clothes.

  Birds twittered cheerfully overhead.

  “All right, I’ll admit it,” he said, his face in daffodils. “You were right. I was wrong. You will never again hear the words ‘persecution fantasy’ from my lips. How does that sound?”

  “Cold comfort, in the circumstances.” Crispin chuckled breathlessly. “But I’ll take what I can get.”

  Anything I can give you, and you know it, Mickey thought, becalmed in a strange horror: Anything. Because it would seem, wouldn’t it, that both our lives depend on your judgment.

  After a moment Crispin said, “Do you know, in a way this is a relief. It was getting pretty bad sitting face-to-face with her in that stagecoach.”

  “You knew all along.”

  “I suspected.”

  Mickey couldn’t blame Crispin for not being more open with his suspicions. Time and again, he himself had warned him that he wasn’t going to take his paranoia seriously anymore. Burglars or no burglars, thanks to Etta and Frankie they’d made Valdes intact, after all, hadn’t they? And in Valdes Mickey had become convinced that the two of them together were invulnerable. “Is the daughter a—a—one of them, too, do you think?”

  “Em? Definitely. She’s not as good at the game as her mum—it was her who tipped me off. If it had just been Mrs. Tausseroy, now, I’d never have known.”

  “She’s a cool customer,” Mickey said, shuddering as he remembered the old Kingsburg lady bombarding Crispin with sugared, remorseless questions while they sat cramped knees to knees in the rattling stagecoach. Mickey had thought her merely tactless. I have you cornered at last, Mr. Kateralbin! Her cloying scent wafted toward them with every demure eyelash flutter. She and her daughter both wore heavy, floral perfume. I simply won’t allow you to plead shyness anymore!

  Crispin had risen to his feet. “I don’t think we’d better stick around here.” He stooped, laying his hand on Mickey’s shoulder. “Let’s try cutting west across the fields and see if we hit another road. If we’re lucky, we’ll meet a couple of riding beasts just begging to be separated from their owners.” His fingers roamed up the back of Mickey’s coat to his neck, caressing his nape just inside his fresh-starched collar. Mickey shuddered.

  “Aren’t you afraid of bandits bursting out of the woods?” he managed.

  “Like I said, I’ll take what I can get.”

  As they started along the perimeter of the field, eyes and ears peeled, the breeze wafting the scent of honeysuckle, Mickey experienced a recurrent, crazy urge to take Crispin’s hand. But each time, he remembered the monstrous implications of Crispin’s having been right about Mrs. Tausseroy, right about Emily, and in all probability right ever since Kherouge. They had been followed. They were still being followed. Awe prevented him from so much as glancing sidelong, for fear of seeing more strange knowledge written on Crispin’s face. He kept his eyes glued to the grass, the azure sky, the next stile.

  And after a while the inert, deliquescent glory of the morning subsumed his fears, transforming them slowly into an overpowering sense of displacement, an even deeper mistrustfulness.

  This was woodland, farmland gone fallow, tracks turned to rivers of weeds. This was fertility untrammeled, little streams buzzing with insects, a joyous, lawless collaboration between weather and season that was unknown in Kirekune where living things did annual, stoic battle with the elements. Here, the only living things in sight were songbirds and falcons high up—but who knew what Crispin saw in the tall grass, among the primroses on the banks of the streams? No matter what he said, this was his native land. And he was a trickster.

  At noon, they were tramping along a dirt road with weeds growing out of old jeep-tire tracks. It led north, at least for now. “Given,” Mickey said, breaking the silence, “that they’ve been onto us ever since Kherouge, why d’you think they didn’t make a move until they were about to lose us?”

  After a moment Crispin said, “I’ve got a theory. I did try to tell you on the steamer—”

  “—but I wouldn’t listen, I know, and I’ve said I’m sorry—”

  “—1 think they lost us after we left Kherouge.”

  The phrase hardly described that agonizing morning in the Iguchi Museum of Aviation, or the flight in the diesel-powered KE-111, whose tractability had reminded Mickey of the clandestine shuttle service he’d operated between Okimachi and Swirling (as easy as falling off a log!) and encouraged him to grow foolishly confident, overconfident. It was no use flagellating himself now.

  Crispin said morosely, “1 shouldn’t have purchased our passages so far in advance. 1 should have waited until the day she sailed.”

  “We were afraid there’d be nothing left, remember?”

  “At least I could have used different aliases!”

  You wanted to believe we were safe. Longing threaded through Mickey’s memories of their holiday-like sojourn in Valdes. Wine and anonymity had disarmed the reflexes of caution ingrained in them by the heartlands. They’d boarded the Joy of Okimachi with no regrets. I wanted to believe we were safe, too.

  “My theory is that the Tausseroy duo aren’t the same skunks who were after us in Kherouge. The first lot spread the word across the continent—they’ve probably been checking the registers of every ship out of every port in Ferupe—and when our names came up for the Joy of Okimachi, they put Emily and her mum on board. They couldn’t have attacked until we disembarked. I made bloody well sure of that.”

  Mickey had been driven up the wall by Crispin’s insistence that they always stay together, never go
on deck in the rain, and at night, double-lock the cabin door and rig a bolt for the porthole. He’d been afraid that such constant proximity would lead Crispin to find out about the Karanda. 44—but if Crispin thought there was anything odd about Mickey’s frequently locking himself in the latrine (where he hid the revolver at night, behind a board he’d worked loose), he didn’t say so. In the deep, chugging dark, he participated equably in Mickey’s tutorials in the ways of their bodies. But something was missing from what ought to have been the best sex Mickey had ever had, and he knew it was Crispin’s attention, which remained focused (save at the very moment of orgasm) on the locked door.

  “I thought maybe they just wanted me out of Kherouge. No such luck. They want my head on a stick. But now I’ve got them wondering why I’m going to Kingsburg, and 1 don’t think they intend to strike until they find out what I know that they don’t.”

  Mickey pitied Crispin’s grasping at straws, yet at the same time he was suffused with irritation. As usual, Crispin had forgotten that his wasn’t the only life on the line.

  He took a deep breath, and said, “Another thing I’ve been wondering. How did you know about the Tausseroys? How could you tell?”

  Crispin walked with his head down, hands in trouser pockets, stepping over clods and potholes as if he still wore his expensive imported shoes. He might have been walking down a city street, deep in thought. “I think it has to do with being a trickster.”

  “Oh, Significance,” Mickey exclaimed in despair.

  Crispin looked at him with surprise. “What?”

  “Go on.” He inhaled the heavy, warm green air.

  “Do you remember I asked you if you smelled anything, after we were introduced to them the first time?”

  “I told you, too much perfume. They smelled like pricey geishas. Do all Mimes douse themselves in attar of roses? That seems rather tacky, as well as pointless.”