The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  EVER, PART ONE: THE WAR IN THE WASTE

  FELICITY SAVAGE

  Crispin is a "circus baby," born in a caravan, working as a daemon handler and aerialist... until an accident on the high wire casts him out into a world even stranger that the circus that nurtured him.

  Crispin falls headlong into the arms of Rae, an orphan girl of equally exotic origins. And soars in daemon-powered biplanes over the wastelands of the Raw, joining the awesome battle between Ferupe's slow-dying Queen and her adversary, the Lizard Significant.

  Part One of the EVER trilogy.

  Digital Edition by Knights Hill Publishing

  Originally Published by Harper Prism, a Division of Harper Collins Publishers

  Copyright 1997 by Felicity Savage

  eBook Published by Felicity Savage, 2011

  Copyright 2011 by Felicity Savage

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be sued or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Book One: The Immediary of Inevitable Sorrows

  A Filthy Thing

  Keep Your Heart from Foolish Fears

  A Caricature of Infinity

  A Fragile Heaven

  Book Two: The Catch

  The Open Air of the World

  The Lagoon

  The Ugliest Shop of All

  Slide

  Book Three: The Trap

  Prophet and Priest

  A Fortunate Fellow

  The Farthest Darkness

  Secret Signs

  Daemons!

  The Heart of Light

  Say the Words!

  Undone

  Nothing about Us

  A Picture of Heartbreak

  Book Four: Flight

  Tumult in the Clouds

  Not Everyone Dies on the Battlefield

  Supposed 2 Feel Nothing

  Glory

  Civil Virtue

  The Shadow of the Waxwing

  Here’s the Real Truth, Kid

  Base Treacherous World

  From the Author

  Preview: EVER, PART TWO: THE DAEMON IN THE MACHINE

  Book Five: The Fall

  A Handful of Dust

  The Lower Air

  Book One: The Immediary of Inevitable Sorrows

  A Filthy Thing

  1876 A.D. Ferupe: Greenslope Domain

  The circus convoy rumbled along at thirty miles an hour: the daemons were really kicking in tonight. Inside Daisy 3, one of the big trucks whose body had been honeycombed with partitions to make living quarters, Anuei sat ungracefully on her sembhui mat. It was the only genuine relic of Lamaroon she had managed to preserve for this long. Her birdcages swung from the ceiling, linnets and nightingales silent under their cloths. She was knitting a sweater for Crispin and keeping an eye on him at the same time. He scrambled on a pile of the boxed props she didn’t allow him ever to look at, trying to press his eye to the crack through which he’d be able to see the back of Roddy Colbey’s head and the road between the dark, rolling fields ahead. During the day, Roddy was Fred the Fearless, a tiger trainer; at night, he was a reasonably expert truck driver. Crispin banged his head on the board ceiling as the truck jounced, let out one cry, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

  He wore nothing except a shirt filthy with snot and what else Anuei didn’t like to think. It didn’t matter that his little penis bobbled in full view; he was only three, and the night air was warm. But before the end of the year, Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show would enter the northern domains, where winter was one long swirl of whiteness and spring was a hillside or two covered with eyebright. By then Anuei wanted her son to have a wardrobe that wouldn’t shame a squire’s child. The circus’s itinerary was so long, six full years between shows at the capital, that all Crispin had known in his short life were the plains of the east and these fertile, balmy hills of the heartlands. Saul Smithrebel said that this time, he’d timed the itinerary so that they’d make their swing through the northern domains during what passed for summer there. But it was already spring and they were not yet north of the capital. Anuei had twenty-five years of experience with Saul’s timing. Miserable man! she thought. He frets to get to our next stop, and then all he wants is to get the show over with and move out! I’d wager my last penny that every day when he sees the sun rise, the first thing he thinks is, “My hat and coattails, we’re late, save the Queen!”

  Earlier in the day they had shown a farming town called Amisbottom. (What a name for a town, no lilt, not like Eirhazii or Faiina or Redeuiina. Oh, Redeuiina, where it’s always summer, and I was young and thin and wore hibiscus in my hair! A pang of loss, the taste of sea-salt, memories of an ocean so blue that even the drops she splashed at her friends were turquoise... .)

  As the circus rolled in along the main street of Amisbottom, sweeping carts and wagons aside, patchwork-coated clowns tumbling ahead of the parade, the band screaming its siren song, the lions in their open-sided truck and the elephants plodding behind, Anuei had known it was going to be a good show. Of course the respectable citizens were muttering behind their lace curtains. But out of sight was out of mind. And the lower classes, by contrast, were unashamedly visible. Scruffy street urchins trotting along behind the trucks. Farmers in town for the day showing their rotted teeth in laughter as the clowns plucked live birds out of the children’s ears.

  A good show.

  In the east and west, circuses were seen so rarely that they carried no stigma. Here in the more populous domains of the heartlands, where the map was freckled with towns, everyone knew a circus was scarcely better than a music hall. The audiences were composed solely of the lower classes. But the lower classes of Amisbottom seemed far happier than they had any right to be. And happy people generally had coin in their pockets. Clink! Clink!

  Anuei found the idea of saving her earnings—as her friend Gift “Mills the Magificent” did—ridiculous. She spent them on things that made Crispin laugh. Cypean lanterns, lollipops, paper dolls. She would have been happy to stay for two days, maybe more, in Amisbottom. Even Saul had known it would be a good show: he’d grinned as he sat in his paper-flower-covered throne on top of the first truck in the parade. Anuei believed that these were the best moments of his life, the rare triumphs of a ragtag general.

  But the grin hadn’t lasted long. Almost before Anuei finished with her last patron, the show was over and the roustabouts were dismantling her black top over her head.

  Twenty-five years of this. Never slowing down.

  She was forty-one, and she would spend the rest of her life with Smithrebel’s. Sometimes she wondered how long that life would be; sometimes she didn’t care.

  If it weren’t for Crispin... ! She didn’t know why she’d waited so long to have a baby. What had she been afraid of? Should’ve gotten pregnant twenty years ago. Spawned a whole gang of little half-breeds. Blown up to the size of a baby elephant.

  She cocked her ear at a knock on the planking partition. Not Millsy, he’d come right in; and only one other visitor ever came to her quarters—unless one of her Amisbottom patrons had somehow managed to conceal himself in the convoy, and was now emerging to confess his undying love! She expelled a long sigh as she got to her feet. “Must shed just a little, just a little of this weight,” she whispered as she unhooked the door curtain. Saul came in, sliding his feet and jerking his head ab
out—like a crow, she always thought. A scavenger. He did not even look at her, but took up his stance in the middle of the tiny room, eyeing Crispin as if he thought the child might be good to eat. Beads tinkled as the curtain slid closed.

  Anuei yanked up her skirts—she wore ordinary Ferupian clothing when she wasn’t “on”—and slapped the mountainous, dimpled expanse of flesh as black as five-thousand-year-old oak. “Hey up, Saul, I’m going to lose some weight!” she said, silently cursing the soft-accented timidity of her voice.

  “What, the Balloon Lady relinquish her rotundity? I forbid it!” Saul said pompously. “Skinny women are not female. They are Kirekunis.” He chuckled at his own joke and squinted at Crispin, who balanced precariously on the rail from which swung the vast “Lamaroon” gowns Anuei wore for her patrons, picking wood lice out of the juddering partition. “Always climbing!” Saul said. “I tell you he is going to be an aerialist!”

  “And I tell you,” Anuei said, “the men of our race grow to be giants! He’ll be six-foot-five by the time he’s fifteen! More’n three heads taller than the tallest aerialist I ever saw. Millsy says he’s not meant for the circus at all.” Millsy was a truck driver, and also a daemon trickster who filled in between the elephants and the aerial ballet. In the scheme of Smithrebel’s, he was so far down the pecking order that he was practically ignored, but he was one of the few people in the circus who took a real, human interest in Anuei and her son.

  “Gift Mills spouts more hot steam than a kettle!” Saul said. “Don’t believe a word he tells you, my angel.”

  Anuei looked at her son. His pudgy little hands were intent on their task. Anuei felt a pang of desperate sorrow: he didn’t yet know he was a half-breed.

  Annoyed at her inattentiveness, Saul tapped one foot in its meticulously shined shoe. “I expected to find you abed,” he remarked.

  “You don’t remember Lamaroon, do you,” she said sadly.

  She had been fifteen when she met Saul. He had been eighteen. He was making a sight-seeing tour of the islands of the Pacific Ocean—his father, the then-owner of Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show, heir to five centuries of circus life, had sent him to learn something of the rest of the world. For the young Saul, Ferupe, with its vast territories spreading from the frozen north to the equatorial savannah which bordered Izte Kchebuk’ara, had been enough world and more; he had refused to sail to the Americas, and he had stubbornly refused to have his mind changed by anything he saw in the islands. His itching, jumping eagerness to get back to the circus infected Anuei. She could not believe it when he offered to take her with him.

  At fifteen everyone is prone to thinking they have fallen in love. But Anuei wondered, later, why she had never seen what her friends and family told her: that the short, maggot-pale tourist in his absurd black top hat could not hold a candle to the men of Redeuiina who flirted with her every day. Island men wore nothing but char-dyed pantaloons, so it looked as if they were balancing naked on the decks of the fishing boats. Dusty black gods with grins like double rows of cowries. But back then, Anuei knew only that she had heard stories of husbands drinking too much and bashing their wives’ faces in. She had not yet learned the lesson of the circus: appearances are everything. So young, she placed no value on sheer physical beauty, on the positive impact of having that beauty come home to you every day. But of course, back then she had been beautiful herself.

  She had been a valued addition to Smithrebel’s Fabulous Show. But Crispin was even more valuable. A circus baby, he could be taught skills that no hiree could ever learn to the satisfaction of the born-and-bred performers. And a freak to boot! Saul prided himself on having one of everything. Among the roustabouts numbered a Green Eye from the Mim, a Red Nomad from Izte Kchebuk’ara, and a tiny, sallow, truck driver named Kiquat who supposedly came from deep within the snowlands. There was a man who called himself The Cultie, who did an epileptic trance dance to fill in between the lions and the high-wire acts, though Anuei very much doubted any apocalyptic cult would recognize him as a member. Saul even employed a couple of Kirekunis, though Queen only knew what they had done at home to have to live as exiles in a nation that was locked in war with theirs. They were tall men with glossy hair tied back from their faces, dead white skin, and long tails. They wore the brightest-colored clothes they could find and spoke Ferupian liquidly, adding vowels to the ends of words.

  Then there was her. And Crispin.

  She drew the line at including him in her act, as Saul wanted. But she couldn’t stop people from staring as he toddled around the circus lot. When he learned to talk properly, she would teach him a comeback to spout when people asked him what he was: a precocious, improbable little speech (“I’m the child that the wind and the earth had when they danced with each other”) that would make them laugh and forget. And she’d have to devise a last name for him. She hadn’t given that thought yet. All she knew was, he wasn’t going to go through life with a Lamaroon surname, let alone one as unpronounceable as Eixeiizeli.

  “My beauty. Even when you are silent, I revel in your proximity.” With the half-apologetic grin that meant he was now going to flirt, Saul bent, clamped his hands on her thighs, and hefted her into the air. He bounced her slowly up and down, smiling with pleasure, letting her long hair waft across his face. His arms shook visibly, but that was only because he wasn’t very strong. Like all Lamaroons, Anuei weighed no more than a Ferupian child. Her patrons never seemed to get over the fact that although she was too voluptuous for them to put their arms around, and her face bore evidence of her age, her stomach didn’t droop, and her bosom was as pert as a young Ferupian girl’s. Crispin was lighter than a Ferupian child his age—but nothing like her,

  At least my baby will have half his heritage. Heir to five centuries of the circus—even if he is illegitimate. But if you, Saul, tell him before I’m ready for him to know—she stared impassively down at her lover—I will break your scrawny pigeon legs, little man. Smithrebel or no Smithrebel. Crunch.

  Although

  There’s not a man can report

  Evil of this place,

  The man and the woman. bring

  Hither, to our disgrace,

  A noisy, filthy thing.

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Dolls”

  Keep Your Heart From Foolish Fears

  1876 A.D. / 1192nd Year of the Lizard. Kirekune, Okimako

  Saia Akila wiped sweaty hair off her forehead and squinted at her sister. Saonna’s black eyes were flat, distant. She held her baby against her shoulder, stroking its little back hard, as if she were trying to rub off a stain. Yet Saia knew the child was less present in its mother’s mind at that moment than the amulet of the Glorious Dynasty around Saonna’s neck. She caressed it constantly.

  Saonna might as well be in Ferupe already. It had been pointless for Saia to come all the way out here just to say good-bye. She had had to hold Yozitaro between her knees while the cart jounced interminably through the smothering dust of the Sayonoshima Road. She had been squashed between her sister and brother-in-law, breathing Saonna’s soapy scent one minute and Vashisune’s perspiration the next, trying unsuccessfully to avoid his elbows as he manipulated the traces. He slouched now on the front seat of the canvas-covered cart drawn up at the side of the road, floating his whip over the backs of the big, stupid draybeasts. He did not look at Saonna and Saia. She always felt a vacuum between the couple, a void of love—even though they had made so much of their passion for each other that everyone else had got tired of it. Maybe that vacuity was common to all culties—it certainly hadn’t been in Saonna from the beginning—a symptom of their pretentious commitment to the Ferupian Queen.

  Vashi was an initiate preacher in the Cult of the Glorious Dynasty, and proud as a tomcat. Saia despised him.

  And the road was as busy as one would expect in late autumn. Everyone was rushing to get in or out of Okimako before the weather changed. Carts, chariots, and rickeys drawn variously by draybeasts, mules, horse
s, pakamels, and bicycles vied with the new, noisy motor-chariots and an occasional black-painted Disciple tank for space on the paved “trunk strip” that ran down the center of the broad, packed-earth road. Out here, beyond the old city walls, beyond the new city walls, the misnamed “City of the Dead” spread nobody knew how many leagues into the plain. One supposed that at some point in history the City of the Dead had not been there; but Saia could not imagine when. It was so festered. Here, the road had no real borders, only a direction. Paupers’ shacks, clustering together like soap bubbles, encroached on it only gingerly. Whenever the Disciples rumbled out of Okimako, the tanks came twenty abreast, spikes whickering around on their treads, and anything that was in their way suffered.

  The soi-disant “leisured” Dead shunned the Sayonoshima Road. Their tall, ill-proportioned houses clustered along the river far away, red and white and yellow columns dimly visible through the haze. They had been upstarts for longer than anyone remembered; Saia could not imagine that they would ever not be upstarts. When they came into the new city with their baskets on their arms, noses twitching under the brims of their too-fashionable hats, she could tell what they were without even looking. Even the girls laughed at Dead men. They took their money, though: never sneeze at gold was the first lesson Saia had taught each of her girls. Keep it warm and cozy, and it’ll multiply, like baby rats.

  “Sao,” boomed Vashi over the hullabaloo of drivers’ voices and the clatter of wheels. “Sao, let’s go.”

  For the first time, Saonna looked straight at Saia. Her gaze was like a blast of cold air. Saia gripped Yozi’s hand so tightly that he squeaked. Docile little darling. He was sucking the tip of his tail.

  “Tell June I promise we’ll send word,” Saonna said vaguely. “All right? Give him me and Vashi and Rae’s love.”

  “I don’t know how you expect to reach Ferupe in that thing,” Saia said. “It’s not a fit conveyance. It looks like something a Dead peddler would cart his wares to the new city gates in.” Since Saonna’s conversion to the ascetic Dynasty, Saia had found it increasingly embarrassing to be seen in public with her. Strangers thought Saonna was her servant, and it was impossible for Saia to explain. A lady never explains anything: that was another of the lessons she taught her girls. And this explanation would have been professional suicide. The Dynasty and its imitator cults, like the flamboyant Easterners, were self-declared enemies of the Lizard Significant: the only reason they weren’t hounded out of existence was because the Disciples didn’t take them seriously.