The Forty-Eighth Mansion stood at the lowest end of Summit Street, the steep, thronged parade that led ultimately to the palace. It stood slightly isolated from the buildings around it, square and massive, like a sea stack. It had once been an art gallery run by the Banrankis, a philanthropic noble family. Back then (Fumia said—Mickey had never taken notice in those days) the doors had been guarded by liveried sentries: while ostensibly open to anyone who wanted to improve their aesthetic sensibilities, the building had in reality only been used by the circle of artistes who threw openings and orgies on alternate weekends, and in between treated the place as a studio-campground. But now there wasn’t a flash of Banranki livery in sight, and a stream of people in dull robes trailed up the steps. The Akilas were late and so admittance wasn’t immediate: as they plowed across the intersection, Mickey saw gaggles of culties congregating under the portico. Every now and then they would vanish inside with a sudden whisking motion, as if they were being inhaled by a giant crouching inside, his back hunched under the roof, his mouth to the doors. The roof of the portico was a statue of the late Tashikaro Significant, His portly body supported at every extremity by columns. Mickey closed his eyes, rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet as an all-too-familiar malaise crept over him, exacerbated by the aftereffects of the nizhny. The babble of the intersection rose like steam, as if the sun were combusting somehow with the crowds in the parade, infusing the air with sparkling determination. The Significant; reach the Significant! Didn’t make it yesterday or the day before, but today, surely—one doesn’t come all the way from Niximako and then give up! Sometimes, Mickey knew, the crush outside the palace gates farther up the hill got so tight that people were actually squeezed to death. And at sunset the Disciples expelled from the old city anyone without the wits or guts to hide, forcing them to start the pilgrimage over again next morning. Some bullheaded souls kept trying for months, their pockets emptying into the coffers of the new city’s merchants and hoteliers, until they finally gained an audience. Others gave up almost immediately. But right now a good few hours remained until sunset, and everyone climbing the parade was glistening with hope and patriotism and even goodwill toward each other, the younger aspirants helping the ancients along, a few singing anthems.
Usually a native Okimakoan surveying this scene experienced two emotions: a sense of worldly superiority and an inchoate urge to make money. But watching from the steps of the Forty-Eighth Mansion, Mickey just felt numb and a little ashamed. What was he doing here, not a mile from the palace, waiting his turn to kiss up to some wealthy religious charlatan? Just because his mother desired him to do so? His duty was to the Significant! What kind of a man was he?
A deserter, that was what. A traitor to two armies. A countryless fugitive above whose neck an invisible ax hung poised.
The stump of his right arm ached, as if his body were ensuring that he got the point.
Culties crowded into the shade around the family group. As usual, Saia was vivacious, greeting those devotees she knew, whispering archly with them about the others. Her voice, that same voice that had soothed Mickey through childhood, grated unbearably on his ears. Soon several of the pious gathered in the porch began to look either uncomfortable or indignant; Mickey knew that the overdressed aspirants would return in impeccable sackcloth, and the ragged ones would not return at all. Significant knew why they were here in the first place! The boy standing next to Mickey, who’d just now slipped away down the steps, had almost certainly been Dead, and half-starved. Perhaps he’d hoped to share in the Dynasty’s widely rumored wealth. How naive! Crispin, of all people, had told Mickey that since the conversion of the Significant Himself—the Dynasty’s biggest stroke of good fortune ever—the cult was becoming more and more of an elite social club. Genuine religious enthusiasts like Saia were already a minority.
Yet still Mickey guessed his mother, with her mania for exclusiveness, must be one of the most effective instruments of the Dynasty’s unofficial asset-review committee.
He thought wistfully of Crispin flying his exalted paper airplanes in the sunshine of the Haverhurst, chatting with his audience on one level while his mind was operating in overdrive on another, affecting a broken accent, making the daemons fandango around anyone who threw bills into his cap, making everyone laugh. Some people didn’t have a care in the world!
A blast of cool air from the yawning doors hit his face. As the culties shoved to get inside, the ushers rushed the heavy stone slabs together again, buffeting one or two back out. A dark passage led into the heart of the building. Blank spaces between the twisted bronze ribs that curved hooplike overhead testified to the Dynasty’s scrupulous removal of all reminders that the Mansion had once been dedicated to the worship of material objects. Outside the central hall they had to wait again in the rustling dark. Now they could hear the singing: deafening. To Mickey the voices seemed to emanate from the walls, the floor, even the culties around him. It was a hymn to the Ferupian Queen, rendered in four-part harmony, set to one of those tunes you can’t help humming for hours after you hear it. He had to admit they sounded good. However, no bunch of socialites could be this tuneful; he thought cynically that the Prince probably paid professionals to dress up in homespun and keep the Children of the Dynasty on the note.
Their final access to the hall was akin to the experience of emerging from a tunnel into a night garden planted with mushrooms. A sickly glow, diffused from a blue daemon glare hanging like a moon at the far end of the hall, shone pallid on the upturned faces of the culties, like clusters of fungi rooted in the dark, canted as one toward the single source of light: Prince Yatsifari, a small figure standing right in front of the daemon glare on his throne of heaped-up artwork and sculpture, one foot planted on the head of a larger-than-life Venus, the other on a ten-foot stack of nomadic-romance masterpieces over which asphalt had been poured, gluing them solid. From his hand dangled a megaphone. He looked like a commander surveying the infantry on exhibition day. Mickey felt ill. He longed to be elsewhere. The squat, wrinkled brown stems, the small ivory caps, the mouths clacking out the praises of a dying foreign queen. His doubts of their sincerity seemed absurd. They were all fanatics, and if they weren’t, if it was all a monstrous feint, and they were gathered here for more sinister reasons, that was worse, because the simple fact was that he was looking at a representative sample of the new power behind the Significant Throne.
Fumia nudged him and rolled her eyes, then made as if to take his shoulder and whisper in his ear. He wrenched away.
16 Joie 1896 A.D. Okimako: the new city
Outside twilight had fallen, and in the house it was correspondingly dim, though the air was still warm. Crispin and Fumia had encountered each other in the gallery above the anteroom. Fumia fluttered a feather fan. Its breeze moved the side locks that fell in front of her shoulders. “Are you and my brother still lovers?”
Crispin had returned from the Haverhurst early and spent an hour splashing water over his head and changing into one of his new Kirekuni sleeveless-tunic-and-baggy-pants outfits. The Akilas were giving a dinner party, and since, not expecting an invitation, he hadn’t been quick enough off the mark to decline, he wanted to make a good impression on the assorted brothel owners and bourgeoisie. He also felt obscurely pressured to compensate for Mickey, who would not, of course, be a guest.
“Curiosity is a vice, I know,” she said. “But I am not without vices.”
He shook his head, wondering what to say. Ashie and Zouy were over in Akila-uza, dressing for dinner while the gay-girls readied themselves for their evening appointments. The sisters would trail back home after the gay-girls who were going on house calls left in a giggling, veiled, scented bevy to meet their clients’ rickeys at the bottom of the street, before the first patrons arrived. Ashie and Zouy would be down at the mouth and snappish and kitted out in unsuitable accessories and false eyelashes. Both of them seemed to get along better with the gay-girls than they did with their
few outside friends. Crispin supposed it was a good thing—healthier, certainly, than if they’d been snobs—but if they were his sisters he would be more careful. One had to wonder (in light of the exotic, emphatic makeup both of them wore even during the day, and the way they pressed their noses to the windows at night, commenting on the various men knocking on the door of Akila-uza) whether they wished in their heart of hearts that they, too, were next door, languorously awaiting the best and worst the night could bring. If he’d been Mickey, he would have done something about getting them married. But of course Mickey was in no position to join in new-city social life. Every day he was in danger of being recognized and arrested. No wonder he told no one where he spent his nights.
And Fumia had other things on her mind, too. Poor Fumia! The more Crispin observed her, the more he was in awe of the responsibilities she’d assumed when her mother became religious. When he returned from the Haverhurst this afternoon, hot and tired, she’d been sighing over her guest list at the kitchen table while the hired cooks flustered around her. Now, less than an hour later, she was a vision in pink and red satin and feathers. Her hair streamed down her back, with matching feathers knotted in it here and there. She must have done it all herself—unlike Ashie and Zouy, she didn’t court her employees for friends.
She could have been Crispin’s age instead of three years older. She could have been eighteen.
He realized his gaze was wandering. He looked into the black ovals above the pinions of the fan. “Yozi and I never were lovers.”
“No? Is that so?”
“We’re friends; he saved my life, and later I saved his. That’s why I’m here. He’s been staunch and generous to me, as you’ve all been.” Lying now, smiling: “I can see where he learned his good form.”
“Can you?” She turned and walked to the railing, looking down into the anteroom, where no gas brackets had been lit. The dinner party was to be held next door in the brothel. She rested one hand on the rail and held the fan out into empty air, examining it at arm’s length. The cooks’ rapid-fire chatter came faintly amid a rattling of pans from the kitchen. “Is that so?” she said, looking back at him. “Why did you allow us all to assume otherwise, then?”
Crispin shrugged. “Ask Mi—Yozi.”
He himself hadn’t intended to deceive anyone. When he realized, early on, why he and Mickey were granted such a lot of privacy, and why the family always expected them to know each other’s movements, he had wanted to laugh, while wondering how he could have been so stupid as not to guess before. The girls knew their brother’s proclivities; of course they would assume...No doubt Crispin or Mickey could have cleared up the misunderstanding by dropping a few hints, but Mickey had his reasons for not doing so, and Crispin—much as he resented having been thrust into such a sticky situation—hadn’t wanted to say anything which might damage Mickey’s credibility in the eyes of his family. Bad enough that Crispin was (presumably) the catalyst for Mickey’s nocturnal wanderings, those unexplained truancies from which he would return at dawn, dazed from drugs, with noxious scents clinging to his clothing (bits of which were often missing—what was he getting up to?). Crispin couldn’t now become the Akilas’ informer. He couldn’t go behind Mickey’s back. He owed him more than a facile betrayal.
And apart from all questions of loyalty, he felt that getting involved with the Akilas would be dangerous on a purely personal level. It was plain weird having this haven of good taste to return to every night. It muted the immediacies of living on the street and on his wits. He was going through the movements but not feeling the rub. The softness of this life might easily absorb the blow (coming. coming soon) that ought to shatter the mystery. Suppose his hard times in Valestock had been cushioned by the hospitality of wealthy friends? Circumstances would never have forced him to seek the Wraithwaste, and in all likelihood he would never have stumbled even as close as he had now to the reality behind the visions. He could just picture the way in which, implacable as the hallucinations were, they would have encroached further and further on his daily life until he ended up going quietly loony on the daemon industry’s highway to respectability.
And now here he was, not even on the highway but in the cloud castle at the other end, and exactly as per his worst-case scenario, the good life wasn’t suppressing his visions, it was nourishing them. In the month since his arrival in Okimako, his dreams had become ever more regular, harrowing, and repetitive. Night after night, he searched through the burning city, wandering the now-familiar streets, only to wake without finding the unknown person he was looking for. In the morning he would be as exhausted and sweaty as if it had all really happened. And during the day, the flames plagued him, popping out from under the cobblestones and people’s feet like puffs of dust.
Only when he was working in the Haverhurst did the world empty to the point of normality. He shuddered to think where he might be without his new daemons. He had stashed them in the bedroom when he came in, but they were with him still, a hum of white noise dulling the senses. Indela. Mishime. Akele. Favis. Kendris. Belamis. The syllables were a formula for control. He repeated them inside his head and the mental interference increased. The sea-green walls swam queasily in his vision.
“I didn’t ask Yoz why he didn’t tell us. I asked you.” Fumia closed her fan with a snap and stared at him, nose wrinkling. “And what is that thing that you always call him? Oh, never fear, I don’t speak a word of Ferupian. But I can tell you’re not calling him by his name.”
“Mick.” He shrugged. “We used to call him Mickey.”
“Meekee?”
“Yes. He chose it for himself when he, ah, joined up. I suppose it was too much trouble having a name none of the boys could pronounce.”
“Do you know what miki means?” She jiggled her fan back and forth, visibly flustered. “It is a term—a very crude and specialized term—for a whore.”
“You’re joking!”
“Why would he call himself that?”
Crispin waved his hands. It was too awful to contemplate. “I suppose he thought it was a joke. Knowing him, he probably did.”
“The kind of joke one plays on others, not on oneself!” The wallpaper was the dim color of pressed leaves, and in her pink-and-red finery, she seemed like a rose so fresh that there was still blood on the petals. Crispin couldn’t tell her that it was exactly like Mickey to play that kind of joke on himself. Bitter hilarity was right up his alley, and he was terrible at recognizing dead ends. Fumia’s eyes glistened. She was about to cry. He had never been able to stand it when girls cried. It filled him with an incomprehensible terror. He wanted to take her in his arms. “Don’t, dear! You’ll spoil your makeup.”
As soon as the words were out he realized that he had bridged a vast gap of intimacy between them. Flames were licking out from under the hem of her dress, at floor level. Akele, Belamis, Favis—
“You’re right, of course.” She gasped, blotting the corners of her eyes with her fingertips. Then—like a shock—she was speaking of Mickey again. “But of course I saw immediately that there was something wrong with him! Something apart from his poor arm. I was never able to talk to him after we grew up, and now of course, after all these years, it would only make things worse if I tried, but I thought, fool that I am, that he had you—that you were helping him with whatever it was—but I should not have used that as an excuse to myself without making sure I was right. It was my responsibility to make sure long ago.”
“Things are as they are, Fumia—” He wanted to squeeze her so tightly that bruises sprang out on those narrow white shoulders. He wanted to kiss every trace of color off her lips and remove the silly feathers from her hair. He stripped her naked with his eyes, not even bothering to hide it, not capable of hiding it.
She saw and shuddered. Her voice came out harsh. “And now it’s too late! What can I do?”
“Don’t talk about too late. Too late doesn’t even come into it.” It was too late long ago. “And anyw
ay, Mickey’s a survivor. He’s got smarts to spare. He’ll be all right.” He was so distracted he knew he was massacring the Kirekuni idioms. The only thing that held him back was Mickey, the invisible, tragic figure between them. Faintly from next door came the noise of the knocker.
And then Fumia was hurrying downstairs, shrilling over her shoulder: “They’re here! Come meet them, Crispin! They’re here! Mother! Ash! Zou!”
The dinner party was the farthest thing from Crispin’s mind. He leaned on the railing, breathing hard.
Blessed Queen, it had been so long since he’d felt like that—
But slowly, as he listened to the voices and laughter, a pride-salvaging thought, as bitter as truth, came to him. Of course, just as there was no heart in a flower, there was no kindness in Kirekuni women. Fumia, like the rest of them, was facade through and through, strength and beauty and an absence of compassion. Once again, he’d been saved by circumstances. He started downstairs, gathering himself.
Children, leave the string alone/
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes...
—Robert Graves
Be Patient. Your Future
16 Joie 1896 A.D. 2:12 A.M. (3:12 A.M. in western Ferupe).
The Salzeim Parallel
Butch and his crews were stuck in the Wraithwaste. So were the other survivors of the QAF’s northern squadrons. They had been there over two weeks.
“The great thing will be to be the first to claim credit,” Commandant David Burns said, drawing deeply on his pipe. “It doesn’t matter whether the generals really are negotiating for peace or whether they’ve just paused for breath, so to speak. It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good, Keynes, and someone will have to get the credit for whatever bit of good comes out of this mess. Why shouldn’t it be us? I ask you.”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 14
