“I’d go if I had to,” Crispin said instantly. He just stopped himself from adding: I did before.
But it looked as though he wouldn’t have to.
Redeuiina had filled up with Kirekuni soldiers. Too many: the city couldn’t absorb them all. They no longer wore their black Disciples’ uniforms, but you couldn’t confuse them with the colonials who had resided in the city for years, not if you’d been a soldier yourself. The dullness in their eyes was the unmistakable stamp of the Raw. Some were delinquents from the logging crews in the southern Waste. Some had seized their chance and deserted in Ferupe, after the Kirekuni forces overwhelmed the Thrazen Parallel and swept down the war route toward Naftha. Some had simply been let go from the SAPpers or from the navy, which was slowly being dismantled, having scuttled its Ferupian counterpart in port. Before Crispin’s resentment got the better of him, he’d even talked to a couple of jittery airmen who said their Flights had been decommissioned.
The Significant Air Force was no more!
It was apparently no longer needed.
Did Mickey know, Crispin wondered, that the noose had been lifted from his neck? He was no longer at risk of being tried as a deserter. A career soldier, “Ash” would now be free to pursue another career—in Swirling or Okimako or wherever the family had ended up. But looking at the veterans’ faces, their general air of being defunct, Crispin didn’t fancy Mickey’s chances if he tried to capitalize on that part of his past.
The war was over, some of the veterans said. Nearly over, corrected others—they haven’t ratted the palefaces out of the capital yet. Well, they will have before you know it, the boys in the north were always the hardest, so leave off nitting, snarled others.
Hip hip hurray and three cheers for the Lizard Significant! Crispin thought tiredly.
His war had ended so long ago. For almost a year his thoughts of the QAF had been tainted with the same bitterness, the taint of defeat, that he might otherwise have felt for the first time on learning Ferupe’s ignominious fate. But all he’d been able to summon when defeat really came had been a pang of worry over what had happened to Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show. He’d wasted a few hours, and earned several tragic looks from Yleini, drawing inaccurate maps of Ferupe on the wall with charcoal, trying to work out where the circus would have been when the Kirekunis broke through. Finally he gave up. It had been too long.
A bad business.
Daemons flowed daily into Redeuiina’s streets, besieging the back doors of eateries, swarming the carcasses of dogs and cats and the occasional human (visible! transparent claws—the glassy planes of wings—how is it that people don’t see?), thickening the air at ground level to the point where only when Crispin was upstairs did he remember what breathing was supposed to feel like.
A bad business!
He stood in the sunlight outside the harbormaster’s booth halfway along the East Pier. Banners flew from the peaked roof: the Kirekuni flag, yellow with a jagged red lightning bolt meant to represent the Chirowa, and the obviated Lamaroon flag, green with a fancifully scowling daemon head. Inside, the old charwoman Mademoiselle Delicie was cooking the harbormaster’s lunch on a portable gas burner. The scent of stew drifted out of the window that faced across the bay. East Pier gossip said that on rainy days, the harbormaster sat at that window putting the evil eye on the booth of his archrival, the harbormaster of the West Pier.
“And any chance, m’lad, with your skills, can’t see how you’ll have a hard time getting set up in a position long afore the ships come back,” the harbormaster said, slapping Crispin jovially on the back. He was a tall, obese man, shaped (like Vo Scaame) along the lines of a spinning top: one could imagine him whirling around and around with his little arms crossed over his chest, zigzagging across the bay to wreak havoc on his rival’s shipping. But where Vo’s fat made him look as solid as a juggernaut, the harbormaster’s jiggled as if he had balloons trapped under his clothes.
Crispin took a deep breath and made a decision. “I was wondering, sir, if you’ve seen Hasp Jiharzii—”
“Ah, of the Parrot Girl?”
“She’s berthed down the end, isn’t she?”
The harbormaster clasped his hands together in ecstasy. “Jiharzii! Your good friend and mine! He is my man for bringing me a case of Kirekuni wine every time he goes to Sjintang; and he never accepts a sigil!”
“Yeah, d’you see him about much? Or Beiin Sugothelezii—you know: the Myrhhean genius player?”
As quickly as it had flared up, the harbormaster’s enthusiasm for Jiharzii died. He shook his head, his attention fixed on a Myrhhean sloop that was maneuvering, to the accompaniment of shouts, into a nearby berth. “Not since the Parrot Girl returned from the land of the redskins. Neither of them.” He made a movement toward the knot of urchins at the edge of the pier who were exhorting the sloop’s daemons with catcalls.
“The land of the redskins?”
“lstuh Kuchaybookuh-ra,” the harbormaster said in a terrible accent, and turned, glowering. “Now, then, m’lad—”
Crispin got the hint.
He’d spent his days since making inquiries, awaiting with mingled dread and hope the news that the tide of the war had either turned again, or reached high water. But there didn’t seem to be a single job available in Redeuiina, not for a handler nor for a laborer. Not at any rate for a half-breed without connections. Two months ago he’d had his chance, he’d had his foot on the ladder, and he’d blown it, all for love!
There seemed something noble in that relinquishment, no matter how humiliatingly it had ended.
But he couldn’t fool himself there was anything noble in the further relinquishment looming. He’d once viewed it as a last resort. Now it looked like his only alternative. He pleaded with his conscience, reasoning that you could give everything up for love and still hold your head high, but only a fool would give everything up for a circular scrap of gold. His conscience wasn’t buying it. But slowly his options were being whittled down, and his conscience would have to like it or lump it, because no scruple or sacrament could change the fact that Yleini was the worst symptom of his all-round failure to gather up the strands of the life he’d thrown away for the sake of that scrap of gold.
As he entered the Yard, returning from the final round of inquiries that had proved decisive, returning from the silent shit-bombed streets of Redeuiina’s poorest suburb Dai Keuire, he slowed his pace, half-consciously putting off the confrontation by stopping at every pathetic little tinker’s display; buying nuts, sweets, or fruit juice whenever a whiff blew across his nostrils; spending small change with abandon, even though by this time (what with the way Yleini spent as much as he gave her), the coins in his pockets were all he had left in the world.
All he had left in the world was her. And she’d changed.
She’d remained uncharacteristically quiet for the whole journey. He’d expected things to improve once they got to Redeuiina—a city that, after all, she knew well, a friendly bustling little city standing in absolute contrast to the threats of the jungle. But she looked around at the tall redbrick buildings of the Yard as if they were marvels of nature. As if she’d never seen such things. Even after they laid claim to their dusty, fusty lodgings once more (disappointing their landlady, who’d been going to partition the room across and let each half for twice the price) she continued aloof. She made no attempt whatsoever to reclaim her job with the Yamaxis or to look for a new one. She hadn’t let him make love to her since they’d left Scaamediin. It was as if, now she’d decided he was unsatisfactory, she was punishing him by withholding her favors.
The day they got back she’d set about airing the mattress, changing the sheets, and stitching a new coverlet. She swept, dusted, and stocked the shelves with necessities. Then she lapsed without transition into what seemed the final phase of housewifery—blowsy wanderings from room to room in her nightie, afternoon cups of coffee with their neighbors in the Yard (mostly stocky, serene w
omen of her mother’s generation), hours spent in dim rooms, muttering before the altars of perfectly ordinary babies. When Crispin went to look for her in the neighbors’ apartments, with their clutter of children and their reek of cookery, all the faces turned toward him as one, as if he were a daemon materialized. Er...I’ve come for my wife...
Like as not he wouldn’t see her among the others until she stood up; like as not she’d been laughing and chatting with the rest when he came in, the way she never did with him anymore; like as not she’d been lap-holding a baby, kissing its little diamond-networked face. Oo’s a treasure then? Oo’s Auntie’s own little mischiefmonger?
They could have a baby of their own, if that was what she wanted!
He felt as if he’d uprooted her like a flower and now saw her adapting stoically to the wrong soil and the wrong weather, her petals thickening and joining into a pod, a hip, a fruit of concealment.
He smelled meat pies and made determinedly for the vendor. “I’ll have one. No, two.” That was the end now, only about five sigils left, all in copper. He meandered along devouring the meat pies, lost in thought. The hot chunks of mutton scalded his mouth.
But her exile was surely imaginary. It was a sentence she’d passed on herself. I can’t ever go home again, she whispered. Even If they come looking for me, I can’t ever see any of them again.
Why?
Because of the shame.
(Tragedy queen!) The shame of what?
Of having gone wrong and been wrong.
It’s not as if you’re the first girl who’s ever gone wrong, as you say—and anyhow, how do you think that makes me feel?
But to such reasoning she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, respond.
Something struck Crispin’s shoulder, and cushiony breasts caught him in the chest: he’d been jostled against a woman, hard, without apology. “Sorry!” Whirling, he saw them, far down the street already—and the anger came then, he wanted to dash after those sleek heads poised atop the narrow pale-draped shoulders and slice off their cheekily bobbing tails. “Watch where you’re bloody going!” Crispin shouted at the top of his lungs in Okimako dialect, and had the satisfaction of seeing two of the Kirekunis stiffen in place and the greenest spin around.
Nearby Lamaroons laughed approvingly.
Daemons swirled itchily around him, attracted to his bloodlust. He forced himself to calm down.
A bad business!
The meat pies knocked together like rocks in his stomach. Reaching their building, he braced his shoulders and took a breath. Yleini hadn’t gone out, for once: she crouched on the bed with her nose in the pages of a romance. The one initiative she’d taken when they returned was to visit Mme. Yamaxi. The governor’s wife had given her a bag full of books—frothy fictions that surely did her mind no good. When Crispin entered she sat up with guilty haste.
“Is something more wrong than usual?” Feeling suddenly foolish, Crispin turned away and unpocketed his frivolous purchases onto the table.
“Is that marzipan?” she said in a flat voice.
“Catch.”
She reached too late and missed. The sweetmeat hit the window and slipped down behind the bed. She made no move to recover it. “A man came here. Not half an hour ago. Looking for you.”
“Mmm. I thought the only men who ever came here were one or another of your clique of lovers; and I never supposed you’d feel guilty enough to tell me about any of them.”
“He was a Lamaroon. He had a lot of rotten teeth. His clothes looked foreign. Crispin, what have you done now?”
“What have you done? Don’t Jungle Rules state that a man is held responsible for his wife’s misdemeanors?”
She balled up her fist and punched the window. The glass shivered. “Stop it! Stop it! He left this! He said it was a matter of the utmost importance. To you.” She threw a scrap of plywood at him. It fell to the floor. Crispin stared down at it. He’d known who the visitor was as soon as Yleini described him. Silently, he cursed Jiharzii for his preemptive audacity—but his heart leapt as he picked up the fragment of wood.
“ ‘Jiharzii Shipping Ltd., c/o the Gubernatorial Residence, 15 Significant Arms Way, Upper Redeuiina, Lamaroon.’ Didn’t know he’d incorporated... That’s the Yamaxis’ address.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Then didn’t you recognize—him?”
She shrugged hopelessly. “I didn’t let him see I knew the address. I’ve seen him before at the governor’s, I know, but I don’t know what he came here for; I still don’t.”
“Good for you,” Crispin said absently, staring, trying to read her face. The daylight shadowed harsh planes in her cheeks. She turned away.
“News travels fast,” he said with a sigh. “I was in Dai Keuire today. There’s a drug den there—well, they call it a club; I call it the Genius Players Mission because that’s what it is, a charitable society for genius players down on their—”
“What were you doing in Dai Keuire?”
“I’m trying to tell you, if you don’t mind. I got wind—well, a hunch—Beiin had got himself in some sort of trouble. Beiin Sugothelezii... you remember him... well, it doesn’t matter. He was a friend of mine. The fellow at the mission told me he hadn’t been in Lamaroon for months. He thought he might’ve gone back to Myrhhe. But then I asked around the patrons, you know, not the regulars but the types the cat dragged in; most of them would sic their daemons on you as soon as look at you. But one of them told me she’d heard Beiin had—had killed himself. In Izte Kchebuk’ ara.”
“ ‘She’?”
“A Ferupian trickster woman. Lots of them about. I don’t think they really know what to do with themselves anymore, now they’ve been driven out of the Waste.”
“Are they pretty?”
Crispin shrugged, pretending not to notice Yleini’s jealousy at the same time as he secretly exulted in it. “Most of them were in the Ferupian military. You can’t tell ‘em from the men. Anyhow, I said, What happened? and she said she’d just come from Izte, herself, and she’d heard there that some Lamaroon trickster named Beiin had immolated himself in the souk in Dumanna’ah. Immolated—that means that his own daemons devoured him alive. She said she’d not seen it herself, but someone who had said they’d never seen anything like it. So many daemons. It was like a castle of fighting vultures in the middle of the market, in late morning, and all the Dumanna’ah layabouts and purdah-boys and the poor women who were doing their marketing just standing there, standing back, gaping.” Crispin shivered, picturing it all over again. He stuffed the fragment of wood in his pocket. “Maybe Jiharzii will be able to tell me what really happened.”
“Jiharzii?”
“The man who came here.”
“I don’t understand what he has to do with your friend killing himself in foreign. I mean, it’s a terrible shame and all that, but!” Her voice was brittle. Crispin felt suddenly exhausted looking at her. As the sun dropped from its noontime peak, its light slanted in the window onto her skirts and the pages of the book. The scrunched, bunched masses of characters seemed to melt into black blobs and drip off the paper. The woodcut illustration of two lizards looking soulfully into each other’s eyes writhed and grew into the outline of a snake-bat that stretched, yawned, and made as if to get up off the page.
“Jiharzii and Beiin were shipmates, and so was I.” Crispin sat down on the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. “Again, two possibilities,” he said to the floor. “Either the skipper heard about me making inquiries at the mission, and figured he’d better catch me before I started spreading rumors about his ship; or else the timing is a coincidence, and he’s been meaning to look me up ever since he got back to Redeuiina, and only just found out where I was living. If that’s so, it means he doesn’t know if I know Beiin’s dead, and doesn’t care. But in either case, taken together it all—ah—rather brings us to the crunch.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...Yleini—” He looked
up. “I have an irresistible urge to put my head in your lap.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“I don’t expect you’ve washed your dress since the last baby piddled on you, anyhow.” He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“What do they want of you?”
“Fuck knows, darling.”
“Don’t swear! You must know, or you wouldn’t be bothering to talk to me.”
Ouch! Laughter welled up without emerging. He and she knew each other so well, and yet all that knowledge didn’t help them to understand each other. “Genius players have had a hard time of it since the war’s been on,” he said. “That’s why the really excellent ones, like your cousin Vo, don’t choose to leave the jungle. To city folk, we’re no more trustworthy than thieves, no more use than loitering conjurors.”
“Oh, don’t be so self-pitying,” Yleini said. “It’s your fault and no one else’s you can’t even get on the cakewalk.”
“Well, my sweet, I think our luck has turned. Beiin’s death, you see, has if nothing else created a job opening.”
“You, fill in for a genius player?” Yleini scoffed. “Hah!”
No, I’m not a real genius player, Crispin thought, and I don’t doubt it’s been the saving of me. I had no idea at the time how lucky I was to lose them, Akele Indela Belamis Mishime Favis Kendris. If I’d kept them it would have been like taking home a gang of urchins who would’ve got up in the night and handed the keys out the window to the Crowd.
“That’s exactly the point. Jiharzii never wanted to hire me as a genius player, if my guess is right, but as an interpreter of Ferupian and a handler of daemons rolled into one. No one wants a genius player these days, and Beiin...Beiin couldn’t stomach working as anything but. He would take handling jobs, he had to eat, but he wasn’t a hypocrite...he was a fellow, you know, who seemed pretty much on the ball, even if he did have grandiose ideas—a fellow who should have lived to become an eccentric, if anyone ever should...And then—boom—” Crispin let himself fall backward onto the bed. Crunch went the mattress. “He goes around the twist and the next thing you know he’s had himself eaten alive in a foreign country. He must have accreted so many daemons—on purpose, at first—that eventually he couldn’t control the fringes of his retinue, couldn’t stop it getting bigger and bigger and messier and messier, like this massive chattering party that just wouldn’t end. Until finally he lost his sense of self. Not that he had much of a sense of self to begin with, but taking him and his four daemons as a conglomerate, they knew who and what they were. They knew themselves and loved themselves—it was like a five-way marriage. The catch would have been, of course, that he—they—couldn’t assimilate the newcomers as fast as they were gate-crashing. So the whole aggregate sort of spontaneously combusted.” Crispin couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He rolled on his side, yearning for her.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 41
