She felt trapped in a bubble of glass shattered on the inside. The presence that clung about Breeze was like a living cloak, and as naturally as a child reaching for its mother it extended tendrils toward Rain, too, and settled slowly about her, wrong and yet familiar. It bore the reek of the basements under the courtyard where the Royals lived, the scent of the fungi high under the ceilings which even broom handles could not reach, that smell inextricably associated with the promise of fulfillment. But its aftertaste (like the aftertaste of covert, hurried sex in a dorm full of sleeping women) was despair.
Rain hugged Breeze, wrapping her arms around the startled woman and the baby Annabedette. In Chressamo she’d lost her faith in the concept of the end of the world; pain had convinced her that the only definition of apocalypse was the physical destruction of the individual. But now she believed again. She didn’t know why. It was a combination of her cousin’s tender, newsy, pessimistic letter and the telltale signs of Breeze’s self-destructive tendency. She couldn’t lose Breeze. If she lost her, she’d be as badly off as her cousin—children notwithstanding: the children weren’t human, whatever they thought. Annabedette, who like Jonajonny was a syndrome of the world’s terminal illness, plucked at Rain’s hair. She remembered that living in Waiting was living without hope, in the shadow of the death of everything. You could use what euphemisms you liked but it came to the same thing, didn’t it? The new girls were right. Apotheosis, metamorphosis, disembodiment, transcendence: death. And that death seemed so close now, prefigured in the glittering air, the thick hazy sunlight, the scent that clung to Breeze, that Rain felt herself starting to cry. Breeze touched her cheeks in horror. That just made her worse. She had never used to be like this but she had got so emotional these days. So weak.
And the little pretty one, Little Stupid, went on staring into the glass whirlpool in the saucer, spinning the apple, and seeing all the world she had never seen before, floating there before her in the saucer, brighter than leaves in sunlight.
—Arthur Ransome
Sacrament
8 Marout 1897 A.D. The Likreky: Lamaroon: Redeuiina
The wedding took place on a blustery Marout Sammesday at the registration office in the Yard. A crowd of Lamaroons in party clothes had gathered outside the dreary little building. Five couples were scheduled to be married that afternoon, but the Redeuiinans didn’t confine their congratulations to their own friends and relatives. As Crispin and Yleini’s escort jostled them up to the door, strangers showered them with hugs, tossed handfuls of chicken corn over their heads, and slapped them between the shoulder blades for good luck. In the waiting room on the second floor, Crispin inspected Yleini’s shoulders. She winced when he prodded her, but he couldn’t see any bruises on her delicately netted skin.
He leaned back with a shudder and watched her pick bits of corn out of her cleavage. Her dress had cost him the best part of his savings, but he would have paid twice as much to stop her from accepting Madame Jionna Yamaxi’s offer of the loan of her wedding dress. The hag! His Yleini wasn’t getting married in any out-of-date Sjintang designer creation!
You look a vision,” he told her for the seventeenth time, and she smiled tremulously. Red silk whispered as she cuddled into his arm. The sharp corners of the ring box in his pocket dug into his thigh. Gold, he’d got gold; silver would have looked beautiful against her skin but like all Lamaroons, whether or not they were tricksters, she had an instinctive dislike of the “handler’s metal.”
The bridegroom on Crispin’s right nudged him. A skinny boy of perhaps sixteen, he was holding out a bottle of champagne. “Sip and pass, man!”
Crispin grinned, raised the bottle, and said loudly, quieting the whispers of the other three couples, “A toast!”
“To us,” Yleini murmured.
Crispin squeezed her. A ray of winter sunlight came in the high window and caught the bottle, making it glow like a topaz. “To peace.” He couldn’t find the right words in Lamaroon to express what he meant.
The other couples looked slightly shocked at his reference to the war, but murmured obediently, “To peace.” Crispin swigged deep and long; he almost choked when he realized he wasn’t drinking champagne, but something revoltingly sour. Wiping his mouth, he passed the bottle to Yleini.
“To love,” she whispered, lifting it to her lips. The horrible drink was almost gone, shared with inexplicable reverence among all the couples, when the inner door opened. A man and wife emerged, looking stunned. It was Crispin and Yleini’s turn.
“What was in that bottle anyway?” he whispered to her as they sat on tiny hard chairs in the office, listening like schoolchildren in class to the bored Kirekuni registrar reciting the laws that would shortly bind them body and soul.
She twinkled. She had already recovered her ebullience. No profundity could affect her for long. “Diiam.”
“In other words?”
“Fermented monkey’s urine. Oh, my love! Your face! It’s traditional.” She started, hearing her name. “Yes! Yes, I do!”
“Monsieur Kateralbin?”
The world ground to a halt as Crispin struggled to make his lips form the words.
For Yleini, the reception afterward was the high point of the whole process. For him, it had been that moment in the grubby little office when he realized for the first time what he was getting into, looked at it with open eyes, and accepted it. After that, nothing could touch him, he was reeling. But Yleini had been looking forward to the reception afterward for weeks. Crispin had scraped together the rest of his savings and rented the Fishermen’s Guild hall for the occasion. He’d diffidently invited his coworkers from the docks—those he found most congenial—and was disconcerted to discover that every one of them had come, even those he’d thought his enemies. Maybe they’d just come to freeload, but their well-wishes seemed utterly sincere.
Beiin—now there was a genuine, unashamed freeloader. You almost had to admire him for his brazenness. He must have learned the date of the wedding through the Yard creepers; arriving promptly for the banquet, he grabbed the role of party conjuror, performing tricks for a circle of applauding drunks. Many of the audience had daemons flickering in and out of existence at their shoulders, and were clearly eager for their turn in the limelight. The poor bastard’s actually collecting coins in a soup tureen! Well, at least someone’s making a profit off this mess, Crispin thought. He turned and moved none too steadily back toward the bar that had been set up in a corner of the hall. A sea of dark faces parted, mouthing congratulations, shaking his hand, twisting his arm—at this rate he was going to be black-and-blue. He understood now why Yleini, far from accepting his suggestion that they just take her relatives out to a nice restaurant, had insisted on renting the hall—and then quadrupling his reluctant estimates of the amount of food and drink they would need. People he had never seen before far outnumbered those he had. Were they all her acquaintances? Or had she planned for gate-crashers?
Bride, diva, hostess, and birthday girl all in one, she circulated through the reception like a bright red butterfly. Happiness radiated off her. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to her since they pulled up in their rented rickey to the roar of the assembled celebrants. Her cheeks and forehead reflected the lights like oiled metal.
“Way for the bridegroom,” people shouted, grinning.
He wanted to get stumbling drunk.
“Put some heart into you for tonight!”
Yleini’s mother had taken it on herself to officiate at the bar. A stout old lady who looked like a bolt of fabric that was coming undone in her traditional checktooth wraps, she upended bottles with a will. There was as much liquor slopping about on the floor as there was in the cups she thrust into people’s faces. “Evening, Ma’m Scaame,” Crispin yelled, resting his elbows on the counter.
“Son-in-law my!” She embraced him, hugely. The lip of the counter dug into his stomach. Bottles clinked, and wooden cups rattled to the floor as he extricated himself.
&n
bsp; “What me get you, eh?”
“Some more of that excellent sake... It’s gone? Whatever you have left, then!”
“Aaah, you drink down liquor like dem city boys!” She guffawed, grinning with her ravaged teeth, closed his hand on the cup and sent him back into the crowd. Staggering, he reflected blurrily how odd it was that only Mme. Scaame, out of the host of upcountry relatives Yleini claimed, had put in an appearance. She had arrived three days ago in a jolting, rattletrap cart pulled not by oxen but by boys whose feet were as hard as hooves, who might have been cousins of some kind, or just hirees. They were more like animals than young human beings: they didn’t talk, or demonstrate any curiosity at all about Redeuiina. Day and night they slept sprawled like a litter of puppies, taking up a whole flight of the stairs outside Crispin and Yleini’s room. Crispin had offered the bed to Mme. Scaame, but she declined. Curling up on the bare floor in her wraps, careless of discomfort, she grunted noisily in her sleep. But anxiety and excitement would have prevented Crispin from getting to sleep, anyhow. In making all the arrangements for the wedding, he was never sure he hadn’t forgotten something. Wasn’t the bride’s family supposed to take care of all this? he wondered. He’d never paid any attention to weddings before, but he was sure that was how it was done. Yet up until the day itself, Yleini was absorbed in the sentimental turmoil of ending her period of service at the Yamaxis’; when she came home she prattled only of the presents the staff and family had given her that day. It was almost as if she were unconscious of the need for arrangements—as if Crispin had only to snap his fingers for them to become man and wife. He had thought so, too, until he started encountering the officials of the colonial government. If he’d known what a mire there would be to wade through to get to that little office, he would have considered long and hard before starting!
Mme. Scaame took herself off daily for purposes unknown. Crispin had seen her in the Yard a couple of times: she sailed through the mart like a yellow-and-orange-checkered kite, sticking out like a sore thumb not just because of her clothing but because of something about her face—her skin seemed scalier than the city dwellers’, if that were possible, her flesh more solid. Carved ridges buried her features, and when she smiled her teeth were like pegs.
Crispin saw Yleini swinging round and round on the arm of the Yamaxis’ senior manservant, laughing deliriously. The encircling onlookers clapped and stamped their feet. There wasn’t a piano or even a lo-lute in sight. Barbarous! After a few seconds Crispin found the rhythm of the clapping, but he was too drunk to do more than sway from side to side. Typical, an onlooker at my own wedding!
Next week they were going, just the two of them, with Madame Scaame and her boys, to the mountains. It’ll be a real honeymoon, Yleini had assured him. They’ll give us as much peace and quiet as we want. We’re going for the scenery, really. I want you to see the forests. Where I grew up. Where your ancestors came from. Where everyone’s ancestors came from. By the time we get there it’ll be hot. That’s how islands weather is, my love—it’s almost summer now, just a few more days. You don’t believe me now, but you’ll see.
The hassles of preparation for the wedding had sickened him of the city and the colonials. He’d let her sell him on the idea.
The skin all over his body shrank, tightening. Two big snake-dragons appeared in the air above Yleini and her partner; Crispin saw Beiin on the opposite side of the circle. The genius player grinned feverishly, obviously drunk. He waved his hands in the exaggerated gestures of an animal trainer as the two daemons jerked and contorted themselves in a mockery of the dance. People laughed and shouted. Crispin sneezed.
More daemons, smaller ones belonging to other tricksters, were popping out of the air like stars, their scales glittering in the gaslight. The pace of the clapping picked up. Yleini’s hair wilted down from its chignon into a black, spiky corona as she high-stepped.
Crispin folded his arms, frowning.
There was a trick he’d perfected in the era of nightmares that countered real life as effectively now as it had phantasmagorical flames then. Without conscious effort, he found himself in a dripping green forest. Sunshine fell in blinding dapples through the tree cover. Hanging flowers caressed his face, and birds hooted hollowly from overhead. Yleini was walking beside him. Her hand moved in his, a soft reminder of her love. The wet grass caressed their ankles; the air flowed easily into their lungs, sweet and clean and free of occult additives.
It takes a sacrament to keep
Any man and woman together:
Birds of a forgivable feather
Always flock and buck together.
—George Barker
Tom Tiddler’s Land
Marout 1897 A.D. The Likreky: Lamaroon: the foothills
Crossing the coastal farmlands took less than a day. As soon as the ground started rising, Crispin began to have doubts, and soon they nagged at him day and night. He tried hard to attribute them to the unfamiliar landscape, not to the company in which he was traveling. After all, the only other time he’d been in a forest this heavy on flora and fauna and low on humanity had been on his nightmare trek through the Wraithwaste. What more natural than that his subconscious should form unpleasant associations with the Lamaroon interior? Moreover, the jungles were as distasteful as the Waste had been, in their own way. For all Yleini’s talk of summer, the weather was still cold; when it wasn’t actually raining, the wind blew showers down from the trees. The road, though passable, was so crazed with potholes that walking appealed far more than riding in the lurching cart, to which Mme. Scaame nonetheless stuck. The broad-leaved, frequently rubbery trees (rubber had been another Likreky export until Eo Ioria took over) supported a noisy and highly visible animal community: when you weren’t ducking to avoid a flight of lizard-birds, you were watching ground monkeys dart across the road, or one of the boys kneeling to take aim with bow and arrow at a great black squirrel. Big ungainly birds landed constantly on the topmost branches, dislodging deluges onto the road. Huge, clumsy slugs and snails dropped from these same branches apparently at random, to squish crunchily under the wheels of the cart, or ooze into the crevices of belongings to lie in wait for unwary fingers. Sometimes they plopped straight down the back of your neck.
On one count only, the forest satisfied Crispin’s high hopes for it. The abundance of animal life seemed to point to an absence, or at least a paucity, of daemons. Where, then, did the poachers find their prey? he wondered for a time, before deciding not to look the gift horse in the mouth.
The only time he ever sensed that telltale spinal prickle was when they creaked past one of the offshoot tracks into the trees, which would have been invisible but for the totems that marked them. From rakish poles swung skulls (human or animal?), and cages of bone in which sat frowsty talking birds. “Beware my masters!” they would scream in Lamaroon, or, more frivolously: “Go way! Jungle Rules!” Immune to these warnings—or aware of other, graver dangers attendant on camping in the wild—Mme. Scaame would announce every evening that they were going to break their journey in a totem diin, as the villages were called.
In a sequence which quickly took on the inevitability of routine, the cart-boys would melt away between the huts while, in the fire pavilion at the center of the stockade, Yleini and her mother regaled the villagers with news of Redeuiina, and Crispin trotted out evermore-perfunctory answers to the questions about “foreign” (Yleini, proud of his Ferupian origins, wouldn’t let him pass as a Redeuiinan half-breed). He found it amusing and creepy how avid the feathered villagers were for news of the continent. Mme. Scaame notwithstanding, he’d expected them all to be ape-men—as prideful as they were stupid. But at least as translated by Yleini, their inquiries had penetration and self-effacing wit.
All the same, he soon grew impatient with the damp and cold, impatient with the meat-heavy jungle cuisine, impatient with the diin children’s stares. How quickly, in Redeuiina, he’d got used to anonymity! Worst of all was having to make love to
Yleini in a damp, leather-walled but with his mother-in-law snoring lustily on the other side of the room. He couldn’t keep his hands off Yleini, but afterward, while she slept, he would go out and take short, pointless strolls around the compound. The stars glittered through gaps in the clouds—the same stars that shone on Redeuiina, the Raw, and on ruined Okimako. Here they were framed by the trees that pressed close outside the stockade.
Hairless puppies scampered between the huts, bright-eyed and sleepless, as if the diin children had reverted into the animals that even during the day they resembled. The jungle beyond the fence sang a hymn to nature in a thousand unorchestrated keys.
Crispin gnawed his fingers, testing the calluses to make sure they hadn’t softened. He’d only taken two weeks off from his job, and it had already been one week; how much longer until they reached the Scaame diin? Imperceptibly this “honeymoon” had changed from a pleasure to be savored into an obligation to be fulfilled. How short could they cut their stay with the Scaames? If Crispin stayed away from his job much longer than he’d said he would, the harbormaster wouldn’t hesitate to replace him. He’d only got the position in the first place through Hasp Jiharzii’s connections. The Parrot Girl’s skipper was seldom in Redeuiina anymore—and in any case, Crispin knew already that pride would prevent him from importuning him. Was the alternative the black ships, and a return to the Raw under the far more chancy designation of screamer fodder, leaving Yleini a “black widow,” as Lamaroons, with grim humor, called the forsaken sweethearts of conscripts? News of the war had been less in recent months, but apocryphal when it did come. Crispin would rather anything than a second go-round in the military’s revolving door. Next time it would slam shut on his fingers—as had happened to Mickey—or on parts more vulnerable.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 36
