The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Because I have no boots to put on!’

  So off she ran to her grandmother’s chest

  And she brought him some boots of the very very best—

  And the soldier put them on!”

  The singer was underground.

  Stealthily, scarcely breathing, she crept to the nearest door—a door around which she now saw a narrow nimbus of orange. Her heart tripped as the song ended in applause and clinking and laughter; her palms sweated the way they had in Valestock, when the managing director of the Old Linny music hall tapped her to go on as an understudy.

  Master Player Authrond wouldn’t have dreamed of wasting her as an understudy. She was his harlot, his evil stepmother, his jealous older sister, his femme fatale, and his ice queen.

  In road repertoire, each company made its own rules. And Master Player Authrond liked women. So in his productions, as never in the music hall, women went on stage flagrantly, regularly, playing their own sex. Sometimes it was a draw, sometimes a turnoff. But the troupe had turned enough of a profit in Thares (where they were much resented by the Wraith torch singers and third-rate comedians who usually entertained the troops), to pay their way back through the Wraithwaste, to Thavondon. Rae went with them. She saw nothing of the petrified pines, saw no daemons fluttering against the sky or jeering from high branches. She slept twenty hours a day in the back of a truck. The grumble of the wheels soothed away her memories.

  In Naftha, the audiences loved her Maeve, and Authrond made her sign a contract. And early the next year in Dominische, near Cype, he saw fit to acknowledge that in addition to rehearsing and performing she’d been putting together her own costumes, and most of the other players’, ever since Mrs. Furstchen, the troupe’s original costumier, elected to stay in Joiburg with the stinking-rich owner of a chain of pig farms. He announced that henceforth she would receive a salary.

  “It seems as though we shall be able to remain partners, my dear, even into the distant future when you will unfortunately-but-inevitably lose your looks.” He stood over her where she perched on the running board of the scenery-and-props truck, letting out the Faerie Godmother’s blue dress for Mario Esquivez. Mario usually played comic-relief-dunces-and-bit-parts but would be standing in tonight for Hildy Bonnuiche, crones-witches-and-mothers-in-law; Hildy’d come down with the itching chills Ferupians often got in the desert. “A mistress not just of the boards, but of the needle!”

  Rae gave him Empress Livia’s slow, scathing glance. “And of pompous theater managers,” she said, loud enough for Annette, who was declaiming nearby, to hear, and reaching up, she wrapped her fingers around his shoulder and pulled him down and bit his neck, not gently. He tasted of daemons—all the men, even the Master Player, were also truck drivers—and of turpentine.

  Annette was seventeen (by this time Rae was twenty) and blond, and jealous.

  Cinderella, Rapunzel, the Goose Girl, Juliet, Cordelia, and Pigmayette notwithstanding, it wasn’t until Kherouge that Rae found out Annette was also sleeping with Master Player Authrond.

  After the obligatory scene with him, voices raised so loud the whole shantytown could probably hear, she stormed off the lot, making for the city.

  How could she have been so blind? They would all be laughing at her—probably had been laughing, behind her back, for months! The sleazy, self-righteous, dishonorable bastard! When the bitch runs off with some fat-pocketed gull, I hope Tommy challenges him to a duel and loses—she’d heard that duels, with daemon guns, were par for the course in Cype—not that he ever would challenge anyone: too much the coward, he’s slicker than his hair oil...

  I can never go back, never!

  But when she entered the city, self-pity gave way to tremulous despair. It was Kherouge itself that had got inside her defenses, she thought blurrily. A thing that never happened anymore. Quiet overgrown streets where mansions lurked in live-oak grottoes; tiny parks teeming with boys brainwashing topiary; markets equally teeming, equally quiet (except when fights ignited in seconds from whispers to weapons—Rae never saw a body, but she saw the blood, new and old, footprinted into the ground, proving the rumors of duels correct); boulevards where people darted through the traffic like waterskaters on a river of sludge; mazes of flat-windowed tenements where no one sat on the stoops, and no children played. (She had no way of knowing then that the silence would last only as long as the siesta. If she’d come into Kherouge two hours earlier or later, the course of her life might have run very differently.)

  She folded her arms around herself and wished for eyes in the back of her head. Her dress, a tight-bodiced thing of pink rayon glamour bought in Gilye, stuck to her back and chafed her underarms as she walked. Inside her skirt, her money pocket banged pendulumlike against her thigh. Ever since she started getting a salary she’d been keeping her savings on her person; you couldn’t trust the other players an inch when it came to cold sterling. “Frank’s poodles ran off with it, and we couldn’t find them no matter how we searched; they came back later with bits of metal stuck in their teeth,” they would say, straight-faced, and improvise a story whose sheer implausibility proved their guilt, but from which they wouldn’t budge.

  No, Rae knew how to look after herself. And she wasn’t even close to panic. At any time she could ask directions to the nearest market, hotel, public house, even the nearest theater, and once there, she would get whatever she decided she wanted, because she could pay for it. Money didn’t just open doors. It etched out a whole new map of the world. Her back was by no means against the wall. She was free to return to the troupe, never to return to the troupe, or, even better, to stay in the city a few days and return when she was good and ready, after Authrond had realized how much he needed her.

  All she had to do was find someone to ask her way of.

  All she had to do was find someone.

  She was on the verge of trying to retrace her steps when on her right, the terraced block ended and she saw three houses, close together, set back a little from the road: odd because unlike all the other edifices in Kherouge, they weren’t built of red brick but of big, blocky stones which seemed to be dry-laid, no mortar, no timbering, no ornamentation. And though each house stood four stories tall and ten windows wide, from an angle she could see that they were no deeper than a single not-very-big room. Like monumental mah-jongg tiles arranged in a square. Through the gates between the two street-facing houses she could see the other sides of this square, or courtyard. Like prison walls inside which people lived. Window boxes on the sills, a few early pansies.

  She realized another reason why the wall-houses were odd: they had no doors!

  Just the gates.

  A shudder ran up her spine. This was the stuff that ghostly romances were written of. Inside no doubt a dark aristocrat brooded, a spider in his web. The stage play scripted itself in her mind: SCENE: night. Gates. Enter GIRL from stage right, obviously lost. Threatening music. A lupine CHARMER with sideburns sidles out of the gates, closing them behind him with a clang. He wears a cape (black, line the inside with red flannel, sequins would be nice but she’d have to budget the costumes with an eye to letting Camberwell splurge on the scenery for the interior); he is dressed for a night of tormented wandering. Without seeing the GIRL, who watches in horror, the CHARMER begins to sing.

  But Rae was no earthly good at lyrics, that was Kenneth Harper’s specialty, and the only song that came into her head was the hit number from Vulvetta.

  “‘Charley, Charley, get the cart!

  Help me with my bags, I’m late!’

  But as she slumped into the shade

  There to await him, our fair maid

  Cried out and sobbed, ‘I am unmade!

  I’m great with child: how love has played

  Me for a fool! Now I’m prostrate

  Prostrate before my jailer, Fate!’”

  For all the comedy in the role, Rae had found that Vulvetta’s hysterical odyssey touched too many nerves. Playing the haplessly sexy hero
ine had been one long ordeal, and she had as good as forced Annette to take over the role.

  She shook her head at her own stupidity, walked up to the gates, and pressed her face between the bars. Sunlight baked on an empty courtyard. A nave with a peaked roof stood out from the left-hand side of the square. Shadows moved behind its windows. She heard choruses accompanied by a piano or organ. Not singing really, chanting.

  In sacred stillness we Wait, oh, Queen, for your gift of transcendence; we Wait for the freedom of nothingness; when the last days are upon us, rain down your cool rain on us!

  But that was from long ago.

  Black paint flaked off the bars onto her palms. Unexpectedly, her weight made the gates swing inward. She stumbled.

  “Welcome,” said a girl who sat against the wall, in the shade, chewing a cinnamon stick. Her black dress lay swirled around her thighs. Long brown legs tapered to sandals with high wooden platforms. “I like your head ornament,” the girl said. “It’s pretty.”

  Rae touched the silver-and-red-glass diadem she wore on her forehead. Her Queenshead amulet had been kept in Chressamo as “evidence.” Authrond had bought the diadem for her to wear when they did Evigene, and afterward said it was a gift.

  “Thank you, I like it, too,” Rae said prudently.

  “You wouldn’t mind dreadfully if I asked you to take it off, would you? Before you come inside, that is. The Royals get restive when there’s silver around.” The girl’s gaze traveled Rae’s body. “Your bracelets and anklet—”

  “Gold,” Rae said. She had started shuddering again, and now found herself unable to stop. It was as if the three or four steps she’d taken into the courtyard had provoked a physical reaction. She felt a presence behind her, her back itched, but she refused to bridle in front of this girl who appeared to think Rae had been invited here.

  “That’s all right then.” The girl got to her feet and held out her hand. When Rae took it, the girl pulled her into a hug—natural, friendly, not overbearing—and kissed one cheek, then the other. Standing away, she said, “I’m Breeze. Sit down and talk to me until prayers are over.” She jerked her thumb at the nave. “Would you like a cinnamon stick? Or a piece of candy? Lunch isn’t until two.”

  Later Rae was guided in placing all her silver jewelry, and the silver coins out of her money pocket (which Breeze was chastised for not having found) in the stone basin carved out of the wall of the central streetfront house. A plaque bore the legend FOR THE NEEDY. “It all evens out in the end,” Breeze said in response to Rae’s doubts. “Keeps the neighbors sweet, one way or another, which is the point of charity, isn’t it? Though so often purposeful philanthropy has the opposite effect. I think our method is the best—passive giving. That way if they don’t benefit, it’s their own fault. They can’t accuse us of favoritism.”

  Later still, Rae was shown the garden behind the courtyard: a life-size hill mounting almost as high as the surrounding rooftops, covered with plants that were all edible, beautiful, or both. Gravel paths zigzagged up to the sundial on top. Hedge labyrinths plotted with herbs and flowers ringed the hill’s foot. The whole thing seemed far too large to fit in the middle of the tenement block. But the windowless brick walls loomed all around like cliffs.

  Above the roofs, above the jutting sundial, the stars had come out. Fireflies drifted in the gloaming around the lavender bushes.

  At midnight (just when Rae was beginning to think, reluctantly, about saying thank you and being on her way) she was introduced to the Royals.

  And utterly captivated, the archetypal fly in a funnel web, she learned that the giving around which the Patriotic Sisters’ way of life centered had nothing to do with passiveness. As her joints weakened and her head rang, her initial fear drained away, leaving clarity, and she saw that for the first time (since the trickster women introduced her to communion with daemons? since she made love to Crispin? since she sat by her mother’s deathbed?) she was engaging in an act of unadulterated altruism. Tentacles shimmied half-visible in the darkness, claws scrabbled on the stone flags of the tunnel. Breeze whispered that there were fifteen of them roaming freely through the underground labyrinth. Scaly haunches glittered in the light of a lantern high on the wall. Breeze was gone. Rae could hear the Royal’s quick, rasping, hungry breath. Its erect penis bounced like a stiff leather baton over her shoe as it rubbed its head lovingly against her stomach. Drops of semen grew cold on her ankle. It said: CONGRATULATIONS, HERE WE ARE AGAIN!

  Breeze came upstairs looking, as always, like the cat that had had the cream. She was the picture of innocence. The terrible thing was that she was innocent; her coyness misled; she’d never had any cream, of any sort. She shifted Annabedette into the arm with which she was holding Jonajonny, swaying to balance the weight of the two children, and seized the three sheets of paper Rain had just covered with her personal operetta. She glanced cursorily at it and smiled at Rain. “Feeling better! I’m so glad! In your condition you’ve just got to be careful!”

  “A lie-down was all I needed.” Rain wrenched herself out of her torpor and reached for the letter. Breeze moved it out of reach. “Breeze, can I have it?”

  “What’ve you been up to!” Gamely clutching the babies, Breeze whirled around and around, her high-heeled sandals clattering. “Writing back to that person who sent you that letter? Rain, you’re going to have to tell me about this mysterious family of yours. You know we’re not supposed to have any outside contact.” It was characteristic of Breeze to trot out such maxims with an utter lack of irony. “Let’s see what you’ve been gossiping about! Did you tell about the dog that got in the dairy?”

  But Jonajonny, his spidery blue hand clamping the edge of the paper, had beaten Breeze to it. “ ‘Dear Cousin Yozitaro,’ ” he read in his shrill little voice, “ ‘On receipt of your so-kind letter I feel compelled, at the very least, to answer your question: How did I end up in Cype? It is a complex story, to be sure. But perhaps as a man, and one who has seen the war firsthand, you will be able to in—intoo—intuitively grasp the circumstances my poor words strive to convey, and not utterly despise me, but understand that a great many of the choices I have made have not been mine, but those of my perse—persecutors, Women tend to turn things around and blame one for one’s own hard—”

  “Give it to me!” Rae stumbled to her feet, snatched Jonajonny and the letter, and separated them. Her cheeks burned.

  Breeze’s eyes twinkled. “That’s not very nice of you, love!”

  “I didn’t mean you!”

  “Of course not,” Breeze said with heavy-handed sarcasm.

  Rae sank back onto her bed, holding Jonajonny. Her heart lurched as she recognized the twinkle in Breeze’s eyes for tears. “Oh, tell it to the Royals, Breeze, you know you’re my dearest friend,” she said helplessly. The swirls of heavy red embroidery on the bedspread heaved like the surface of a pit of lava. Jonajonny removed his thumb from his mouth and wriggled out of her lap.

  “Mother was writing to a man!” he announced, finally having figured out what he himself had read.

  “Eeeeeee!” screamed Annabedette in agreement.

  “Shut up, brat!” Breeze jogged her daughter higher on her hip and stood between Rain and the window. She flashed a grin, then began to sway, belly dancing, using the little girl as a prop. “A man...” she sang, swinging her hair luxuriously from side to side. “A man...”

  “Why do you need to write to other people?” Jonajonny asked. “You could come and talk to me anytime you wanted, Mother. You never come talk to me.”

  He wore nothing except a little black overall. He sat in a horrifyingly adult pose, ankles crossed, hands on knees, his face doleful as that of any toddler who feels unloved. “Could I read it anyhow? Please could I read it?”

  “A man! (Don’t let him, Rain... ) A man named Yo-zi-ta-ro!”

  Rae clutched the letter to her chest, beleaguered.

  “EeeAAAAH! Down, Mummy, down!”

  “Is he her cousin? Or is
he her lover? Rain has a lov-er...”

  “I don’t think it’s good for you to be writing things, Mummy.” Jonajonny’s face puckered earnestly. “Not now you’re going to have another baby. You’ve got to be careful in your state,”

  “All right, I won’t send it! I won’t send it!” Rain screamed, rolling backward just as Jonajonny, physician-serious, leaned forward to poke her belly. She jumped to her feet. The room dizzied around her as if she were inside a marble, one of the ones with colored swirls, rolling down a hill. She held the letter out for Breeze to see and ripped it across, all three sheets. Breeze’s hand fumbled eagerly over hers and Annabedette’s tiny fingers grabbed for pieces, too, joining in the fun. Give! Give! Give give give! Breeze burst into relieved laughter and Rain forced herself to join in. They threw open the window and tossed the pieces of the letter into the street, a poor excuse for a spring snowfall. “No!” screamed Jonajonny, and hurled himself at the window, too late. He scrabbled for stray scraps on the floor, gasping like an asthmatic. The Royals’ children, all high-strung, cried easily but had no tears; until new mothers learned better they often thought their babies were in pain, when in fact the offspring had just been momentarily overwhelmed by some small misery of life—a mouse dead on the doorstep, the failure of a project to build a house with twigs, the withering of a picked flower, a bird’s cry on an autumn morning—those every-day foretastes of death whose poignance they seemed to feel acutely from a very young age.

  “It was so pretty,” Jonajonny sobbed, patting frantically under the bed, but this was such a constant refrain of his that Rain ignored him. An ominous presentiment overpowered her. She scarcely knew she’d reached for Breeze’s hand until her fingers, straying up the thin soft arm, touched a new scab, confirming what she should have seen the instant Breeze came upstairs. Breeze had just given communion. Sometimes one went to commune with the Royals when it wasn’t the hour: when one felt attenuated by daily life, when one felt the need to perceive all over again the difference between sun-time and the real. A good, patriotic habit, it could lead to self-destruction—but the Sisters watched each other to prevent such downward spirals from starting.