Come reclaim your rings! I KNOW you still have them, Gift. And you would not have kept them, would you, if you did not anticipate that someday you would be coming back?
Millsy could almost hear Boone laughing his rich, fruity chuckle. He stretched his hands ahead of him and looked at the rings. He was wearing all ten, stacked together indiscriminately in no pattern listed in the court indexes, simply because they all contained at least a little silver. But the coincidence, now as when he first read the letter, seemed too perfect—it felt like the work of the thing people called Fate. He waded around the back of the big top, past the daemon generator, and climbed the steps folded out of the side of Sunflower 1, swinging his arms like someone running underwater. As he fell through the door, the raw jamb caught and tore his sleeve, Saul had had this second entrance knocked in recently. An escape route? Did he fear being cornered in his lair? That was Cypean thinking!
Tiny, dirty windows scarcely admitted the twilight to the ringmaster’s sanctum. But not even shadows could obfuscate the clutter that decades of jouncing over bumpy roads had shaken to the floor, leaving the shelves bare of everything except dust. In the corners, on the desk and the chairs, papers, folders, and scrolls drifted in heaps like autumn in a financier’s office. A troll-like figure sat hunched behind the desk, stripped to his undershirt, chewing the end of a pencil and squinting at a map. Millsy closed the door loudly, cutting off most of the light.
Saul raised his head, stretched his arms high, displaying clumps of clotted gray underarm hair, and demanded in his high voice: “What is it now? Who’s there?”
His eyesight, Millsy knew, had deteriorated. Working in the dark was his way of pretending to everyone and to himself that it was better than ever.
“It is I,” Millsy said, and winced to hear himself. “I’m afraid I come with news that is as distasteful to me as—I presume to fear, I presume to fear—it will be to you.” He fumbled with his beard, and muttered, “May I be seated?”
Saul leapt forward in a toadlike bounce and swept papers off a chair. Bounce, and he was back behind his desk, pencil held high, as if ready to jot down whatever Millsy might say; but as Millsy settled himself on the hard wooden seat, and started, “You recall the letter I received in Leizyle,” the ringmaster interrupted him, babbling frenziedly.
“You haven’t seen Cynthia about, have you?” (The younger and prettier of the two female Human Knives.) “She was not well—an upset stomach—there appears to be a satisfactory crowd developing, and I do hope the shrikoutanis will be able to perform at full strength. They are what people come to see, you know! The advance papering is the secret. Julio is worth every penny he extorts from me! People love a mystery, and when the word goes out that ours are extraordinary shrikoutanis, possessed of power over life and death, they decide they must see for themselves. They do not want to know the key to the mystery, thank Queen, for blood ampoules are not exactly a state secret—they just want to witness a marvel. And they spread the word, and by the time we come around again, in a year, we have turned into a legend! Which is just what Smithrebel’s should be! But a legend cannot afford to disappoint, and Cynthia is forever getting sick, poor creature, she is too fragile to perform every night, I am thinking about hiring second-tier shrikoutanis as understudies...”
As you may gather, I have expanded my duties as Comptroller of the Waterworks. This was not so much a personal choice as it was a capitulation. The hour of the aristocracy—and indeed the monarchy—is over, and they themselves seem to recognize it, although of course among their number there are still shrewd realistic leaders, and these are the men and women (most of whom, as I say, you know, though I dare not name names) with whom you will be working should you respond to my plea. But the obsolescence of the aristocracy as a species has been proved by their failure to avert Ferupe’s downfall or even predict it.
The Crowd had followed Millsy inside. They filled the tiny office to overflowing, playing at passing ghostlike straight through the windows and walls, chasing each other under the desk, peering at all the documents on view and (he knew) absorbing the contents word for word. They would parrot details of the circus’s finances and itineraries back to him later in phrases jumbled together alliteratively, allophonically, or at random. They never left his side except to hunt—and then they went in shifts. He had to escape. He stared at the knotted, beringed hands on his knees.
I am embarrassed to remember—as you will, too—how I was once infatuated with the myth of Ferupe as a coalition held together by a vitality radiating from the center, and the myth of that center as invulnerable. For when pressure was applied, the center crumbled like a sugar egg trodden underfoot.
Saul continued: “I have cause to suspect Joanna”—one of the exotic dancers, a Ferupian, here exotic indeed—“of keeping her tips. But I have not decided what I should do. Advise me, Millsy, eh? Should I confront her? Spy on her at work?” Saul laughed creakingly, as if satisfied that he had distracted Millsy from his purpose, and fumbled on the desk for a cigarette. “You would not find that assignment particularly appetizing, I know, but there are many who would! Shall I gratify them? If Jojo found out, there’d be a tempest though, eh?”
I was in love with my proximity to the center, to Her, but now I am forced to use that proximity as best I can for the good of the United Domains. And salvation lies only in compromise. We can no longer afford idealism or even patriotism. Do you understand?
Gift, you are the only man we know who has had contact with them.
Millsy looked up. “Saul, I apologize. I realize you are preoccupied. Yet you cannot have failed to notice”—he had it, an outs—“that my shows have become, of late, too dangerous to justify their aesthetic appeal—”
Saul shook his head and lit his cigarette. “I suppose you mean the torch routines; I insist that you keep them. The public adores the frisson. A Ferupian audience might, it is true, be too nervous to appreciate what you are doing; but here... !” He exhaled slowly, as if the smoke were a tribute to the Cypean people and their love of thrills. “If that’s all, why then your fears are unjustified. I have never quibbled with your magical muse, and I am not about to start now, when she has finally found her audience. And you know we are always prepared for the eventuality of fire. Howard-the-lights’ glares pose a far realer risk than your pyrotechnics.”
You journeyed to their country. You met with their leaders. We called you a dreamer, we laughed at you and thought you foolhardy for going to Kirekune and even more foolhardy for coming back empty-handed. For our inconsiderateness I now tender, on all of our behalf, my earnest apologies. You were the bravest of us
None of it meant anything, not Saul’s praise or Boone’s, yet Millsy found himself trembling violently. He muttered, “I have to—I have to go—”
“Pardon?” The crimson tip of Saul’s cigarette hung motionless in the shadows.
“You remember the letter, Saul; you must, you commented on it! You know where it came from—the same place I did! Well, it’s as I suspected. Thirty years, and now they want—they want me back. I have to go. I have no choice,” he lied, and terrified, not knowing what came next, because he didn’t know Saul any longer, he watched the ringmaster rest his elbows on the desk and lean forward over his clasped hands with the apologetic expression that had once made his tight-fisted, iron-handed approach to running the circus so much easier to take. All the nuances of the ringmaster’s personality had subsided now into weariness alternated with frenetic animation. But this was the old Saul, and his lips had parted as if regretfully to veto Millsy’s departure, remind him of the terms of his contract, exercise the authority that he had a perfect right to, and Millsy shook like a leaf: hoping, dreading.
Gift, you were the only one who dared to challenge our collective delusion of security. You are the only one who can act now as our advisor. For we also face opposition from within the court itself! Our old friends, Gift! If I dared to name names, you would be as saddened as I!
&
nbsp; And so the crux of this hurried epistle
Saul started and, like an afterthought, reached behind him for the red jacket draped over the back of the chair and tugged it on. He moved slowly, as if his shoulders pained him. A drop of water rolled down his thin cheek. He had turned half-away, but Millsy saw the drop tremble on the stubbled chin and splash on the desk. One; then another.
We need you.
But for all Saul knew, Millsy could have been lying, it could have been that he’d decided to elope with Piete, the more interesting Human Knife, and half the circus’s funds, and Saul wasn’t even questioning him. And that was because (now that Green Sam the cook had died, one of the elephant-training Philpotts brothers had been gored by a tusker, and the other had left show business to marry a schoolteacher) Millsy was the only person left in the circus whom Saul trusted. And Saul must have long since anticipated losing him, too.
But let me be honest. It is not really ‘we.’ It is NEVER ‘we’—it is ‘I.’ I need your help, my friend. Because I think you understand, as Charthreron and I do
we must have REAL PEACE not the eyes-on-top-of-our-heads armed immobility we were living with for decades even before the war broke out—
we must have cooperation
you will be reimbursed for your passage, of course, I can offer no less, and I wish I could offer more, but I dare not enclose funds of any kind—I scarcely dare to sign my
Boone had been right not to enclose any money; by the time Millsy got the letter, the envelope had been clumsily resealed with several different colors of wax by as many postmen and self-appointed censors.
Saul hadn’t yet moved. He sat frozen, one arm half in the sleeve of his jacket, a tear trembling on his chin.
and so I am reduced to appealing to your sense of duty and to the memory of a time when you needed me as desperately as I need you now, to your appreciation of the nature of friendship, which has a great deal in common with the nature of PATRIOTISM, and even with the nature of DAEMON HANDLING, does it not? Be true to what YOU know is true. Come. I remain your friend, THE COMPTROLL
“I have to go,” Millsy repeated, and rose in a carillon of silver, thinking how long it would take him to walk to Zhisye-on-Sea, fighting his way through the Crowd, disoriented by their adulation.
Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
The other gold
—Traditional
A String Across A Gulf
6 Avril 1897 A.D. Lamaroon: Redeuiina: the Yard
It had taken Crispin and Yleini a week to walk from Scaamediin to Redeuiina—less time than it had taken to make the journey in the other direction with Mme. Scaame and her boy-drawn cart. The jungle hissed, trilled, and hooted on both sides of the road. They avoided the totem villages. At night they bivouacked on the forest floor. Nothing harmed them, perhaps because Crispin insisted on camping by running water, where the daemons congregated most thickly, where the tapirs, jaguars, tigers, and other beasts of prey wouldn’t come unless they had to drink. Even then the animals wouldn’t linger long in the clouds of daemons buzzing around them like monstrous flies, eager to suck their blood. Not long enough to catch the scent of human meat. The daemons, with frightening cunning, left Crispin and Yleini alone, too. They get more satisfaction out of playing with me than they would out of killing me, Crispin thought. Lying next to the sleeping Yleini, he listened for the beasts, the flesh-and-blood ones. Pad, pad, pad; quick-scrabbling claws overhead; the blunder-noise of a wild pig trampling through the undergrowth. But these reassuring sounds of normality—how the world had turned inside out!—scarcely served to distract him from the tintinnabulation in his head, in his blood, all around him.
On leaving Scaamediin he’d realized that Vo’s pessimism had been prophetic. The jungle had filled up with daemons, big and little, snake-bat and humanoid and four-legged. It felt as if the world ought to break, shattering into writhing things, at any sudden movement. Hot and damp in the valleys, hot and breezy on the forested hilltops, the air felt like toffee: if you strained against it, breasting it like a swimmer, it gave, albeit unwillingly; but if you struck it, it snapped. Should snap! Had to snap! Wouldn’t snap! Whenever he was alone Crispin punched trees, kicked the ground, banged his head on his knees, not so much deliberately to provoke the daemons as to get at his own tension. When the air didn’t react at all, he felt cheated and frustrated. The totem poles at the edges of the road shimmied like belly dancers; the tracks to the diins looked ominously overgrown, and Crispin heard nothing from the direction of the stockades.
Yleini didn’t ask why they weren’t visiting any of their former hosts. Since the night he persuaded her to return to Redeuiina, she hadn’t asked any questions. She couldn’t feel the daemons in the air. But he imagined that the overpopulated air was having a subconscious effect on her, wearing down her perceptions, subduing her usual ebullience.
Or maybe (probably) it was he who had subdued her. He was afraid to try and remember the things he’d said to her the night Vo had taken him into the daze fields. He’d been maddened...he had been mad.
Vo—who, through surviving the pain Crispin had seen written on his son’s body, had gained an immutable knowledge of daemonry (the same knowledge that Beiin had translated into loony apocalophecy, the same knowledge Millsy had sought hopelessly all his life)—had opened Crispin’s eyes not to another world, but to the interconnection of this one. Everything he saw that day he’d known already—the war had taught it to him, his harum-scarum flight across the Ochadou Plains with Mickey had taught it to him, Elektheris and Uemiel had taught it to him, and Akele Indele Mishime Belamis Favis Kendris had taught it to him, not in the Haverhurst, but by dying. But until Vo confirmed it, he’d been denying it, the way he’d denied his visions. The visions had been the cosmic arsonist’s first maneuver. A feint, from which he’d pulled back, leaving himself in thin air, unshielded. By disillusioning him, the arsonist, that cackling fatester, had got inside his guard and delivered the coup de grace: this slow perception of inevitable evil. No matter where you went, you couldn’t escape.
Ribbons, lace, button boots, fresh fish, marzipan, candied fruits, romances, a new bonnet a new house a new life, he’d promised Yleini, incapable of acknowledging that all she needed she already had.
Their reconciliation was no more than a mutual giving up, a seeking of refuge in familiar jokes that no longer seemed funny, in bodily contact that no longer brought them close.
When they left, two miserable nights later, she seemed determined to show everyone in the village how her husband had browbeaten her. She walked bowed under the basket she carried on her back, her face shielded by a scarf. The smiles of the men and women wishing them safe-journey seemed hammed-up and hammered-on like the grins painted on Punch and Judy puppets. It was all he could do to wave cheerily as the daze fields closed in on either side of the road. The Elders had taken their decision to return to Redeuiina much better than Crispin had expected. Thinking about it, they’d had to like it or lump it: they couldn’t tell a man what to do with his own wife. The closest they’d come to expressing disapproval had been to decree that when the Scaame men came to Redeuiina with the daze harvest in a month’s time, they would look Crispin and Yleini up. By that time, it was implied, Crispin and Yleini would have an address, and it had better be in a respectable neighborhood, and Crispin didn’t doubt every fixture of their putative residence from the antimacassars to the cleanliness of the cookpots would be duly noted and reported back. He felt confident that he and Yleini would both be far from Lamaroon by the time Maia rolled around.
But once they reached Redeuiina, two predictable obstacles arose in his path.
Money.
And his wife.
“Can’t do nothing for you, m’lad,” the harbormaster of the East Pier said when Crispin went to inquire about getting his job back. “New Colony Rules. Last ship from Sjintang brought a passel of veterans, took a good three duz of ourn, and t
hey said if a position open, and a veteran want it, he get it, mhm, he get it. So he got your job.” The harbormaster pointed to a Kirekuni youth, incongruous-looking in the black jeans that were all any of the dockworkers wore in the hot weather, struggling to keep up with his mates as they flung sacks of grain from the hold of a ship, to the wharf, to waiting trucks. The boy’s sweaty ribs shone like white bones. “He ain’t got half the strength of t’other lads...half your strength even. But he got the papers to prove he was honorable-discharged from the Disciples. And how’m I s’posed to know you was coming back? Thought you’d went native.” He laughed.
The Colony import-tax Rules were, Crispin knew, the harbormaster’s bread and butter. His grumbling about the Kirekunis was a mere hobby; probably he’d been rewarded with incentives for hiring this veteran and the dozen or so others Crispin had seen toiling among his ex-mates. Next to those lanky, dazed-looking wights, Eddie Chisholm with his sun-bleached hair and Makio and Riko, the half-breed twins, seemed—well—positively Lamaroon.
“Kid’s a handler, too,” the harbormaster said dotingly. “Still ain’t got the hang of our Likreky daemons, they’m a bit wilder than what he’s used to, but he’s my man for putting in the time to learn. He’s my man for coming through that ‘orrible war in one piece. Ain’t none of ourn come back yet, but they do say we’re gonna win, and that right soon; chance could be we’ll be seeing them all waving off the rail of the next black ship coming in. Chance could be you won’t never have to go!” The harbormaster laughed contemptuously. He knew what Crispin was afraid of.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 40
