A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “Comes of having a resident peerage. That’s more or less what they did.” Crispin’s eyes shone unnaturally bright. “In 1452 Ferupian, when…”

  “Not another history lesson,” Mickey interrupted. “Please!”

  After seeing the daemon towers, he’d glanced again at the neighboring palace and seen that its portico was actually a daemon crouching with its legs wide, its hands on its knees, its elbows jutting high, its foreshortened torso and head forming the porch roof. The sight left him shaken. Everything used to be something else—

  “I’m going in.” Crispin started toward the cloud castle; when Mickey caught up with him, he turned. “Look, don’t you come. That won’t do. Across the street, that’s the Stock Exchange. You should be able to hang about in there without anyone noticing. I think they even have concessions, a club or something. Go on. Wait for me.”

  Mickey couldn’t decide in time to argue whether he was relieved or furious. He stood wretchedly immobile as Crispin bounded up the broad steps, the picture of confidence. Without even saying goodbye!

  Crispin vanished under the scaffolding. Mickey whirled and strode into the street, and came within a hair of dying under the wheels of a Renault painted in all the colors of the German flag.

  Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,

  To the fisherman lost on the land.

  He stands alone at the door of bis home,

  With hut long-legged heart in bis hand.

  —Dylan Thomas

  Composers More Than Anyone

  10 Maia 1900 A.D. 10:10 A.M.

  Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): Kingsburg

  (“Ataramachi”): the Burg: the Comptroller’s Palace

  Millsy fidgeted with the gramophone discs in his lap as if he couldn’t relax in Crispin’s presence, as if Crispin presented a scarcely bearable affront to his sensibilities. When Crispin was first shown up to the apartment in the daemon steeple, Millsy hadn’t recognized him; and then, instead of greeting him with the delight Crispin had expected, he’d reacted with horror, dragging him in as if he must on no account be seen. He’s changed Jar more than I have, Crispin thought. Talk about freaks!

  The old trickster inhabited a leather chair the size of a small throne, his head poking out of a jumble of expensive furs and silver jewelry. His face had tautened over his bones. His beard had thinned to white stubble. Although he could be no more than fifty, he looked as if he’d been alive for a hundred years and dead for another hundred. A gramophone stood by his side: piano music burped out of its throat like a delicate regurgitation. What animal had it been to begin with? It wasn’t the first music machine Crispin had seen, but a sleeker model than those that had found their way into the homes of Redeuiina colonial ladies, with a coiled neck like a snake’s body, its mouth decorated with fangs. The tower room reeked of flowers. Baskets of potpourri cluttered every surface: an old-womanish foible magnified into a neurosis.

  Millsy seemed interested in Crispin’s doings only insofar as they related to their shared past. His questions were following an inexorable trajectory back through the years. Crispin sensed reserves of venom waiting to be unleashed. The old trickster’s hostility puzzled and frightened him. He hadn’t anticipated the risk that the main consequence of this visit would be to have his memories further soiled with retroactive disillusionment. Since he met Saul in Kherouge, his recollections of boyhood had lost much of their substance. He’d always pictured, and pitied, his younger self as a happy little circus freak, “the child that the wind and the earth had when they danced with each other,” as Anuei had taught him to say. In reality he’d been the bastard heir of the whole aerial and animal show. What else, as a child, had he got disastrously wrong?

  His subconscious belief in a cycle of happiness yet to be completed, which had underpinned his hope of discovering a new, adult version of the fabulous show, had become so tenuous it wavered on the verge of disintegrating. Whether Millsy knew it or not, he had the power to discredit the rest of Crispin’s memories. Crispin longed to divert him from the subject of the past, but if he angered him, he’d never be able to broach the subject he’d really come to discuss. And he couldn’t bear the thought that this, his last lead, might be a dead end. There’d been too many of those already.

  “Well, we could debate the ethics of collaboration until we were blue in the face and still not get anywhere,” he said finally, in desperation. “But I don’t see your point about your friends turning their backs on you. You seem to have done rather well for yourself, Professor! Here you are, after all, ensconced in the Comptroller’s Palace!”

  “I am not allowed to appear downstairs when Boone has guests,” Millsy mumbled into his beard. “And when does Boone not have guests? I am like a mad relative whom one gives grudging asylum in the attic because one cannot just turn him out on the street. They might as well have stuffed me with sawdust and put me in a glass case, Crispin. Thus I am trotted out on occasion, as a curio.”

  “Well, you could move to University Hill, couldn’t you?” Crispin forged on, trying to ignore the music from the gramophone, which was getting on his nerves. “Don’t most of the professors live up there?”

  “Do you think he would allow that?” Millsy cried. His whole body shook as if with an ague. It was a warning sign Crispin remembered with dismay. “Collaboration saved my life. But the price has proved to be not worth the paying! I think you must agree! For I see the price you have paid. You have grown ugly.” His face twisted in sudden hatred. “And you were such a beautiful baby…such a pretty little boy…”

  Crispin winced.

  “And as a youth no less handsome, may 1 be struck down if I lie.” Millsy looked as though he were about to weep. “Your brown curls in the wind, the sweet green wind! Ah, how I relished the rare occasions when you required my help to bandage a small cut, when you did not go running to that apelike trapeze artist Valenta…when you allowed me personally to clean engine oil from under your fingernails…when you were just a toddler, and if I was driving all night, you would ride with me in the truck cab to keep me company…”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Crispin tried to keep his voice even. “But anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about—”

  “So you will withhold even the meager pleasure I derive from my memories?” Millsy shouted, and scowled, eyes gleaming under his scant white brows. “I hardly think that fair!”

  “Let’s set the record straight, then. You were a pervert, and I was a kid without a clue: that was hardly fair, if you ask me! No hard feelings; it’s all in the past. But we’ve got to come to a consensus on the past before we can talk about the present.” Crispin forced himself to stop there. He was breathing hard.

  Millsy grimaced as if he had smelled something bad. “The present,” he mumbled. “What is there to talk of? Nothing is left of what we used to call power but the esoterica of gadgets and the superficial tactics of fear.” His twiggy, beringed fingers riffled through the stack of gramophone discs in his lap. “We flail amid the furniture of the circumscribed world of the senses, striving to connect, mistaking violence for effectiveness.” It was as if a different person spoke with his mouth—someone who could have been the trickster Crispin had known. “The strings, the whipcords, the nerves have all been cut; but since most of us never had those particular nerves stimulated anyway, we are unaware that reality has been redefined as futility.”

  Crispin started to speak—but as he did so, the gramophone stopped, and in the silence he heard a soft knocking.

  “Ah, Hikushi,” Millsy cried with a strange combination of triumph and relief. He stumbled up out of his chair, jewelry jangling, and flung open the door to admit a Kirekuni boy, spotty-faced, wearing the comptroller’s gaudy livery of all-over red and yellow zigzags. “My very own lizard prince. Is he not a jewel?” he bragged in Ferupian.

  Crispin rolled his eyes, unutterably frustrated.

  “The tail, however—mmm! I have heard it can be used to produce the most excit
ing sensations, but my little Hiku is new to the erotic arts, and uses all his appendages awkwardly. All in all, I would prefer a Ferupian boy. I have asked, but Boone will not give me one. Do you not think it mean of him?”

  Crispin was beyond being shocked: he understood that Millsy wasn’t being outrageous on purpose. Cut adrift from the demanding ethics of trickery, he’d lost his way in the romanticism of profanity that had always been his weakness. And to his own annoyance, Crispin found himself remembering the night in Valdes when Mickey had shown him the secret uses Kirekunis had for their tails. Exciting was an understatement. Fumie, Crispin’s first undamaged lizard lover, had employed none of her brother’s erotic bodycraft.

  Was that (he wondered masochistically) what Yleini had found to love in Yamauchi, her partner in that cold-blooded adultery of reptilian prolongation?

  “One beer, Hiku,” Millsy said in Kirekuni, “the imported sort if you please, and one cup of tea.”

  “Sure you don’t want your breakfast tray, Gift?”

  “Now, now, Hiku, not so familiar! We have a guest!” Millsy circled Hikushi like a cat slinking around its master. Then, in a change of role, he frowned and brushed his fingers down the boy’s cheeks, inspecting the tips as if for dust. “And you know I never eat breakfast. Nor will I, as long as Boone refuses to serve anything but these heavy English foods.”

  Hikushi withstood Millsy’s caresses stoically. “Gotcha,” he said, and escaped as soon as he could. Closing the door behind him, Millsy turned to Crispin and flashed a parody of his old smile, a startlingly wicked display of eyes and teeth and tongue. It lacked the old self-deprecating humor. It was a mere facial contortion, an automatic, ingrained reaction. Something else fought briefly to emerge, twitched at the corner of the wrinkled lips, then vanished.

  “Now! Should you like to sample Bach? Wagner? Liszt? Beethoven? Since Boone presented me with this wondrous toy, I have been able to indulge my fondness for music. I have, in fact, become something of a local authority on Western composers!” Millsy chortled as he shuffled through the discs beside the gramophone. “It is my sub-specialization! More Chopin? Handel? Perhaps not Strauss—he is something of an acquired taste!”

  “It’s all one to me,” Crispin said miserably.

  What happened to him to make him like this? That’s a stupid question—the victory, of course—but why? He has no allegiances left except to sensuality, no interests except self-interest. Just like all my other so-called friends (except Indela Mishime Akele Favis Kendris Belamis, if I’d only known then what I knew now)—Saul—Fumie—Yleini—

  —what happened to them? Just the long, slow disappointment of growing older?

  —even Mick, for crying out loud—

  Thinking of Mickey and Millsy in the same breath made him feel physically ill: the idea of Mickey aging into a wizened old pederast like Millsy was unbearable. He felt filthy with guilt. The only way he’d been able to show Mickey how much he valued his friendship was to give him what he wanted. But for some reason he had a feeling that making love to Mickey for the first time in Valdes, and again and again on the luxurious modern steamer with the risk of death by Mime hanging over the whole proceedings, had been the worst thing he could possibly have done. He wasn’t at all sure, as he would have been three years ago, that Mickey was waiting across the street in the Stock Exchange. Scarcely thinking, half-blind with paranoia, he got up and went to the window on the side of the room that bulged to follow the inside curve of the daemon’s torso. The steeple was so high up that he could see nothing but rioting stone roofs. And if he’s not there, if he’s decided to get out while the going’s good, it’ll be no one’s fault but mine because I can’t tell the difference between trust and* * *

  “I pray you will forgive me,” Mullsy said behind him, in that other tone.

  10 Main 1900 A.D. 10:45 A.M. Ferupe (“New Kirekune”):

  Kingsburg (“Ataramachi”): the Burg: the Stock Exchange

  Mickey had realized quickly that he couldn’t wait outside. Except for the Disciple sentries—who seemed to have less to do than anyone else in the Burg—no one loitered on the steps or under the portico of the Stock Exchange. The businessmen and diplomats seemed bent on proving through constant activity that they were indispensable. You scratch my back, and I’ll massage your production statistics, and we’ll pretend we’re in Okimachi, said the nervous, blustering chorus of lizard voices, their erect tails, the smart top hats lowered as if for the charge, the armloads of papers carried by clerks hurrying in each man’s wake. Mickey remembered the rampant poverty and disease in Xerenoche and the suburbs, the Kingsburgers’ virulent pride, the snobbishness of an ancient people, which was all they had left, breaking in corrosive waves against the wall of the Burg, and he wasn’t fooled. In the land of daemons, his people were still irrelevant. He was irrelevant.

  Ten years from now, Ferupe’s defeat might be consolidated, but right now she was down but not dead, a slippery-scaled beast up whose heaving flanks a Kirekuni had to keep scrambling to keep from falling off. Everyone seemed constantly on the verge of breaking into a run—as if they knew, but had agreed not to admit, that the stone daemons on the palaces were all alive, Scyllas who would scoop up and devour anyone who paused to fill his lungs with the sharp morning air and contemplate his predicament.

  Oh, my tail and whiskers, Mickey thought, and slid into the Stock Exchange.

  The sentries looked at him askance: he didn’t have a hat or a clerk. His longish hair alone marked him as disreputable. Who had he and Crispin been kidding, thinking they could pass themselves off as members of this elite? “The best disguise is none at all”—indeed! Desperation, Mickey knew all too well, enables one to convince oneself of the most preposterous unlikelihoods, and influenced by Crispin, he’d let himself believe he could walk anonymously into the beast’s very countinghouse, into its most jealously guarded shrine. But when Crispin vanished into the Comptroller’s Palace, he’d jettisoned Mickey, ruthlessly abandoning him to gravity. Bereft of even a vicarious sense of purpose, Mickey could no longer convince himself of his invulnera-bility. He was alone in this hive of affluence, a wasp grub with cold feet stranded among worker bees and honey gluttons to whom idleness itself was sufficient cause for suspicion.

  He allowed the buzzing tide of collaboration to sweep him up several flights of stairs, and found himself at the entrance of the trading floor. Serried ranks of desks humped into the dim distance. The hall resounded with the automatic fire of abacuses. Peaked windows gave the advantage of sunlight to the paper-shufflers on the perimeter; in the center they made do with electric lightbulbs suspended on thirty-foot cords from the arched ceiling. The heat from these, combined with the heat of human bodies sweating fear and greed from every pore, washed over Mickey in a steamy, metallic wave every time someone brushed out past him. The corridor smelled of old paper and old books. It was a depressing scent that he knew from experience to be ineradicable. Even after Achino-uchi had been charred by the Fire of 1212, his uncle June’s old library had still smelled like that: musty books, with an undernote of burnt hair. No matter which geisha he assigned to the room, the clients complained he’d tried to fob them off with an unimaginative old crone. It had been frustrating because the library was one of the least damaged rooms in the house—as if the flames had been content to devour June’s books and the shelves, leaving the walls alone. But Mickey had made shift. He’d come up with an alternate boudoir. Then he’d obviated every makeshift boudoir in the new city, and obviated what had been lost, too, by building the new Achino-uchi. He’d been the first to transcend disaster, to shake off the soot and step forth with a smile plastered on his face, presenting first one cheek and then the other to be slapped. In hindsight it had been an unbelievably stupid move. In fact, taking his past into account, it had been the equivalent of cruising in over the occupied Raw with QAF colors flying. Yet still, better to fail spectacularly than languish in obscurity, living off your savings: and the thought of his acc
omplishment still brought tears to his eyes. In terms of architecture, he hadn’t failed. He’d realized his dream of a winged, majestic palace of sensuality. And within a month of the Grand Opening he’d seen his way to paying off his loans. But then Daisuke had placed a slippered foot on his neck and ground his face into the muck of the past, and he hadn’t been able to lift a finger—except to take out more loans, and more, in a vain attempt to stave off bankruptcy, until the moneylenders learned the cause of his reversal of fortune and regretted they could not extend him any more credit. He expected that by now—it was too much to hope that Greater Significance had let up just because he’d gone missing—Rumika had had to call a halt, plead stone-brokeness, shut the doors, and let the geishas go.

  Or, of course, something much worse could have happened.

  Mickey wasn’t about to underestimate Their vengefulness when thwarted. Because he’d underestimated Them at first. He’d banked—stupidly—on Their losing interest in him, or relenting. Acquaintances old and new had told him, quite openly, that they weren’t going to reopen their businesses until they saw how things went with him. And when his postulated profit margin vanished inside Greater Significance’s fist, it surprised no one except him. And why did it still rankle? Why couldn’t he seem to get over the unfairness of it?

  Hovering just outside the doors of the trading floor, his ears ringing with the din of voices and abacuses, the injustice nearly brought tears to his eyes. Had things gone differently, he’d have had a place at one of these desks, one of the good ones in the sunlight. He’d earned it, Significance knew! He’d paid in the precious coin of illusion. And yet, half a world away from the massive urban manor house that was the sole proof of his entitlement, he hadn’t so much as a hat on his head! That’s what comes of gambling everything on real estate!