The most rabid ones always took themselves off into Ferupe, anyway.
As Saonna was doing.
That made-over brown dress wasn’t fit garb for her! She said that the pauperish dress code of the Dynasty enforced absolute equality among its members. She loudly condemned her own family for their “vulgar show of affluence.” Saia would have none of it. In Okimako, showing who you were was a necessity not just for personal pleasure, but physical safety. She didn’t know what roots the Dynasty’s ascetism really sprang from, and she didn’t want to. Only she couldn’t help thinking it was strange that their dogma was near-identical to that of the Easterners, who dressed like harlequins and made nuisances of themselves in the streets until they had to scatter for fear of the Disciples.
On the other hand, she’d seen Saonna’s leader, her Prince, or whatever they called him—and he wasn’t wearing dull brown.
She could not refrain from speaking her mind. And in the corner of her eye quivered a drop of hope. Maybe—maybe—
“If that thing doesn’t fall to pieces under you, you’ll be luckier than I ever was,” she said. “And, Sao, I wish you’d tell me how much money you have with you! What if you have to buy a new conveyance? What if one of you is sick, and you have to stay at an inn? What if—”
“It’s not as if we’re the first to have gone to Ferupe, Sayi!” Saonna’s eyes crinkled as she turned to smile at Vashi. Saia felt cheated. Switching her tail, she stared at the cart.
Barely room under the canvas for two to stand up.
“Significant! What if you reach the pass in the middle of winter?”
“We’ll be crossing the plains all winter,” Saonna said patiently. “We’ll reach the snows next spring, just at the end of the blizzard season. And the pass isn’t dangerous, anyway. Thousands of people go by the northern route—even before there was a war, it was the only way to bypass the Raw Marches and the Daemon Waste. So of course it’s well traveled.”
Vashi says, Vashi says, Saia thought. The unspoken tag on each of Saonna’s sentences.
If it wasn’t for Vashi. He had drawn Saonna into the Cult of the Dynasty of the Glorious Decamillennium, he had planted in her this desire to journey to Ferupe, where their cult originated, where a goddess ruled the land. Neither of them seemed to care that Kirekune and Ferupe were at war! Saonna would not even acknowledge the dangers that she must be exposed to as a Kirekuni woman traveling in the hostile East! She seemed to think that all Ferupe belonged to the Dynasty, and that it would receive her with open arms. She had been full of plans for her “pilgrimage” so long Saia could hardly remember what the old Saonna had been like.
Ever since Saonna’s conversion, Saia and their brother June had been running the Akila family business on their own. When Saia first confronted Saonna with not pulling her weight, Sao insisted she had never had a head for business, anyway. Saia could not deny that. But Sao had once had a real knack for dealing with the girls when they nourished grievances.
Love blinds the eye. (Better to believe Saonna really was in love.) And if blindness ran in the family, Saonna was probably about as perspicacious as a blind dung-pig! Hari... Saia thought, as she always did.
Yozi whined, as if he could feel his mother’s sudden distress. Saia scooped him into her arms, and desperately played her trump card. “What about Rae? Don’t you care what happens to her? She’s barely a year old! Much too young for a journey like this!”
Saonna had been shifting her feet, curling her tail around her ankles, as if she felt she had to wait for Saia’s permission to make the final break. But when she focused on Saia, her eyes registered irritation. “Nothing is going to happen to her! Why should it? Vashi and I know the journey will be hard, but we’re both committed to looking after her. It’s not as if she’s replaceable.”
She curved her fingers around the sleek, scaly little tail that projected from under the baby’s summer dress. Rae had got her strange, meaningless name because Sao and Vashi thought it sounded Ferupian.
“She’s a child of the Dynasty.”
“Yes, poor midget,” Saia said.
“Oh, by the Lizard!” Saonna’s brows knitted. “You’re just jealous because I’m happy. But I tell you, it was the Dynasty that brought Vashi and me together. It’s the only way. If you would just seek it out, you’d discover your true identity and stop pining after Harame! I promise you!”
Saia blinked, stunned. Not just because Saonna could speak of Hari and the Dynasty in the same breath, but because she spoke of him without rancor, using his full name, as if he had been somebody she knew only vaguely, in passing.
Didn’t she remember? During that terrible time, the thing that saved Saia’s sanity—beside Yozi and his sisters, of course—had been sitting up at night with Saonna, crying in the candlelit kitchen, vilifying Hari and his fancy slut and his ancestors back to the nth generation. Flushed with indignation, Saonna had alternated between bursting into sympathetic tears and offering sisterly advice on tracking him down and ruining him.
Saia stared blearily at her dry-eyed sister. “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about what your joyous union will be like after you’ve lived in a three ells by three space with him for a year.”
Yozi snuggled in her arms like a baby, sucking her earlobe. He was too big for that. She lashed him gently with the tip of her tail.
“But we’re not just married,” Saonna said. “We’re joined in Waiting. That’s the beauty of it. Everything else—even love—loses importance when you contemplate the end of the Dynasty! It harmonizes all disparities! You don’t believe me, Sayi, but if you’d just—”
“We’ve been over this,” Saia said evenly.
“Now, Sao,” Vashi called.
Saonna spun around on her toes, lips parted. Saia hugged Yozi tightly, sinking her chin into the top of his head, as her sister hurried to the cart, her chastely long skirt sweeping the dust, tail held high—pulling everything Saia cherished after her on a string. The end of the string was anchored in Saia’s heart. What would happen to her when that doubtful cart bore the little family into the frozen north, and then, unimaginably, into Ferupe? Would she break in pieces?
She knew perfectly well what would happen. Slowly, stealthily, Saonna’s absence would camouflage itself. It had happened with her mother and her father. It had happened with her older brother Kitsune who died at eighteen, a Disciple in the service of the Lizard Significant. It had even happened with Hari. You eat and you sleep and you pee and shit and you deal with business. And the sun shines, and the Disciples parade the streets on historic days.
“Is Aunt Sao leaving, Mama?” Yozi said softly. “When is she coming back?” His wet little lips felt like the kiss of a lover.
“Never, dear.”
The cart diminished into the distance, one brown-clad hump among hundreds wrangling slowly north. A convoy of Disciple troop carriers rolled past. The weight of them on the road shook Saia’s bones.
“Don’t want to walk,” Yozi said when she started to put him down.
“Oh, you lazy thing. I’ll carry you then.” He giggled with glee. Quickly, she added: “Only for a little.”
Monkeylike, he wriggled around onto her back. “Giddy-up, Mama!”
“Mind your manners, Yozi!” Then, when he squeaked an apology: “My little black-haired dove.”
She began to trudge back the way they had come, walking beside the road.
Better suffer the dust than risk getting in among the paupers’ shacks. The cart drivers and rickeymen looked at her strangely—a woman alone with a child—but that was because she was dressed so much better than the kind of woman who did walk alone beside the Sayonoshima Road. Her neatly coiffed hair, the tattoos on her tail, her red dress with the yellow satin flounces. Even in her frozen grief, she could take pleasure in the rich swish of the cloth, could derive comfort from the weight of her money pocket bumping her leg inside her skirt. These things as good as guaranteed her safety inside the walls, where the name
of her business was her password into a web of friends the size of the new city. Flaunting her affluence (even during the year after Kit’s death, when they were barely scraping by) had extracted her, in the past, from a number of unpleasant situations. Even the most unscrupulous in the new city tended to take the practical view, the long view, when it came to the question of whether to rape, rob, abduct, or not. If you were hated badly enough, you would be killed. So you just had to try not to make enemies. Money could extract you from all other situations.
The old city was another kettle of fish. In the old city, it didn’t matter how rich you were. An old maxim: where you are determines who you are. Unwary night wanderers faced long odds against getting out alive. During the day, the steep streets thronged with sightseers from the provinces, and the hordes of Okimakotes who came to prey on them; but when night fell the place emptied out faster than an overturned chamber pot. Even provincials knew that getting in the way of the Disciples—or worse, their Significant masters—was a one-way ticket to nowhere.
And the City of the Dead danced to another tune yet, one that no one in the city proper really understood. Certainly not Saia. She wouldn’t toss a coin in the air for her chances here once night fell.
In a blurred way, walking was easing her pain. She never wanted to stop. But she could not get all the way home on foot. She had cut it too fine. Already the sun swam redly among the spikes and spires prickling the back of the huge slain beast ahead of her.
Okimako was not built on a hill. Okimako was the hill. At its highest point, the Significant Palace at the top of the old city, the Orange River ran in a tunnel buried under a thousand feet of solid architecture.
The limbs of the beast stretched out toward Saia, curling imperceptibly around her. Its rusty red scales sparkled with a thousand points of light.
She could smell something fetid cooking nearby. Yozi was drifting off to sleep, a patch of child-drool soaking wet into her shoulder. There was a pain in her chest, as sharp and tender as that time she’d shattered a rib.
Can’t have this, she told herself. Home. It’ll be all right once I get home. That young miss June hired couldn’t get supper on her own if you threatened her with beheading.
She stepped into the road and lifted her arm to hail a rickey. A man with the elegant logo of the Comashi Concern stenciled on his vehicle pedaled, careening, across traffic, nearly destroying himself under the wheels of a horse-drawn gas tanker, and screeched to a breathless halt five paces away. She walked toward him.
Mother; keep your eyes from tears
Keep your heart from foolish fears
Keep your lips from dull complaining
Lest the baby thinks it’s raining.
—M. C. Bartlett, Baby’s Skies
A Caricature of Infinity
1879 A.D. Ferupe: Kingsburg
Gift “Mills the Magnificent” bent to peer into the tiny mirror hooked on the wall of the men’s quarters in the truck named Hollyhock 7. His fingers trembled as he wrapped a lace cravat around his neck. It had been years since he had done this. Ten years, to be precise. He was uncomfortably aware that ten years on the road with Smithrebel’s had aged him immensely: at least in terms of appearance, he had reached the age at which style becomes a mere tautology. He looked as ridiculous as Sam Kithriss had; but at least Sam had had power to make up for it. Ten years ago, Millsy had cast aside his chance to inherit Sam’s rings.
For ten years he had not written to any of them—until a week ago, to say he was coming. They must have thought him dead. He had been unforgivably rude.
And yet he couldn’t not go back. Just to see. In the few hours since they had entered the suburbs of Kingsburg, the familiar restiveness had crept over him. Last time he’d been able to resist; but not now. Indeed, he was getting old.
“Goin’ out?” a blurry voice said. Bru Wilcox lay in one of the lowest bunks of the men’s quarters, caterpillar-wrapped in a blanket despite the heat of the Kingsburg summer. “Swear, Millsy, you’re the most obscure fellow around. Show’s in two hours.”
“I have already told Mr. Saul I will not be taking part tonight,” Millsy said, tugging at his lace. “Or tomorrow night, or next week.”
Bru let out a low whistle. “What’d he say? This’s Kingsburg, man.”
“Precisely.” Millsy had a horror of letting slip any crumb of information about his past, but punctiliousness compelled him to face Bru and explain, gesturing as extravagantly as if he were in ring center. “When I signed my contract, Smithrebel and I reached an understanding regarding Kingsburg. For six years of touring I would be his; when we reached the capital I could, if I wanted, take two weeks off. Of course it would be no good if everybody did it, but Mr. Smithrebel is an understanding and generous employer, and he realizes that I have certain needs.” Bru’s lip curled. Millsy hastily changed the subject. “Is your leg still bothering you?”
“Should be out with the rest of them. Whoopin’ it up. Bloody pain in the ass.” Bru slapped his blanket-shrouded limb, then winced. A war cripple, invalided home from the Teilsche Parallel, his only visible handicap was a rolling walk. According to him, he had blown his pension the first week after he got home, so that he now had to work to keep mind and body together.
Millsy, who had seen the Teilsche Parallel firsthand, wondered whether Bru had ever gotten his discharge—or whether he had taken his survival into his own hands. Many, if not most, so-called “invalids” were in fact deserters. Real invalids sat in their parents’ houses, drooling. Men like Bru were regularly found guilty and incarcerated for unpatriotic behavior; but Millsy did not think that fair of the policemen, many of whom, after all, had joined the white-coats to avoid being recruited by the army. No one should be compelled to endure the ground front for a term of ten years. He had known men, and women, who had fallen in love with the war, and opted to stay on, and on, and on, until they were sent home in pieces. Perhaps they were even the majority. But whether you hated it or loved it, the conflict was still an atrocity.
In fact, it was a worse atrocity than most people knew, Millsy thought. After a hundred years, the population accepted war as a permanent evil, and resented the inconveniences of levies and forced recruitment no more than they resented the vagaries of wind and storm. But Millsy knew that in the last ten or so years the situation had become critical. Somehow—either through a religio-mystical connection such as culties rambled about, or through the understandable stress of impending defeat—the war was killing the Queen.
And Lithrea the Second was the last, the very last daughter of a dynasty which had held Ferupe stable for almost nineteen hundred years.
Like all who had spent time in the court, Millsy knew that although Ferupe was the most powerful empire east of Sinoa, it rested upside down, on its peak, and the Queen was that peak. And she was crumbling. Some of those who saw the awful truth of her decline with their own eyes lost their faith in life. Some redoubled their patriotic zeal. And a few, starting quite early in the war, had transposed the threat of the end of the dynasty into a strange doctrine of apocalypse and nothingness. All his life Millsy had watched—bemused and increasingly worried—as these slandermongers gained followers and imitators all across Ferupe. Cults were even in Cype and Kirekune. He’d seen them for himself. And since he knew their rants were based on some truth—the impending end of the Dynasty—he could not despise them, as most did.
It would have been suicidal for the court to confirm the royal illness in public. Officially, the cults had to be beneath the Queen’s notice. So the disgust of the righteous citizen for the culties’ excesses was encouraged, subtly, wherever possible. If Millsy had still been at court, he would have been intriguing against them himself. But he was a coward.
You are unworthy even to speak her name, he thought disgustedly, looking into the mirror. Lithrea Mathrelia Lithrelia, Queen of men!
As a young man he had worshiped her more devoutly than any other courtier. Each day, awaking, he had spoken her name a
loud.
But he had not been a courtier for a decade, and what good could he do her now? Wasn’t he returning only to solace his own heart with—pray—a sight of her? He was just a truck driver now. A midway magician. His sleight of hand wouldn’t cure her illness. A daemon handler, member of the most royal of professions, and yes, a trickster (and that was his vocation if you liked, as diplomacy had never been). He had no daemon big enough to make an honorable gift.
“You old fool,” he muttered to the mirror.
“What’s that?” Bru Wilcox said loudly.
Millsy flung out his hands, nearly knocking over a precarious pile of razors. “What do you think?” He was attired in knee boots, baggy silk trousers, and a long tunic which was the smartest he had, though it had gone out of style ten years ago. All of his fingers sparkled with rings that signified the status he had once had at court. He had had difficulties remembering which ring went on which finger. He hoped he had them right.
“Not bad,” Bru said. “Wouldn’t fancy loaning me them boots tomorrow, would you?”
“Mmm.” Millsy stretched out his hands toward the windows in the side of the truck, watching them shake. He was only thirty-six, yet the face in the mirror, with its hollow cheeks and ragged gray hair, could pass for sixty. He had once been tall and lean; now he was stooped and skeletal. That was what tricking daemons did to you. The combination of wrinkled skin and expensive regalia made him look like one of the scholars of Kingsburg University, at whom he and his friends had used to snigger when they tottered past with their spectacles falling off. Youth, the most cherished possession of a courtier, had been the price he paid for his freedom from the court. And he knew he had been lucky to get free at all. If not for Boone—there was a man he must see, if he got a chance—
The War in the Waste Page 2