The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  “Like it or stick it up your ass,” he had said finally to Herve.

  Herve and Elise had chosen to like it. But hot-tempered sour-tongued southerners that they were, they’d never managed to forgive him for choosing to be better with daemons than he was on the flying trapezes. He could insist until he turned blue in the face that when he’d joined the troupe, he’d been young enough to have become reasonably good at anything; that Smithrebel’s couldn’t afford for any adult to have less than two skills. But those were excuses, not explanations. Solely on the strength of his half-Lamaroon resistance to gravity, an advantage which far outweighed the drawback of his height, he could have become one of the best catchers in Ferupe. He could have been a mainstay of the Valenta troupe, instead of just a permanent adjunct. Perhaps, with his skill and Prettie’s, the act could even have lifted out of Smithrebel’s into the orbit of one of the really big circuses. A whole life spent sweating in the limelights.

  But by the time he was sixteen, he was driving trucks, and it was too late. Every time he was late for a rehearsal, or showed signs of sleepiness—the curse of the daemon handler—Herve lashed out more bitterly than before. Gradually, the empathy necessary for a risk-free performance trickled away.

  Thank the Queen—he thought now—Elise and Herve had found another boy to train. Fergus Philpotts, son of George, the elephant handler, and his wife. Fergus might not be a Lamaroon, but he was a circus baby. Pretty soon, Crispin knew, he himself would be relegated to back-up catcher and then phased out.

  It sounded wonderful on the face of it; but it could easily turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to him. While it had seemed that Crispin would fit neatly in with the Valentas, the Old Gentleman had left him pretty much alone. But now... He must know what was in the air; what did he have in mind for Crispin this time around? There wasn’t a chance in hell he would let him just drive trucks. Smithrebel’s invasion of the truck cab last night had been like the recurrence of a childhood disease of which you can’t remember the symptoms, only the pain. Crispin had wanted to slouch in his seat and smoke and tip the ashes on the floor of the cab, spit out the window, sing dirty songs, shout that he wasn’t having any of it, not this time. But he had only nodded and clenched his fists tighter around the wheel. Yes sir. No sir.

  And he was worried about what Prettie might do when she was faced with the cessation of their working partnership. That had been over years ago. But the way she looked at him had never changed.

  She and the Old Gentleman seemed to be boxing Crispin in, one on either side, pressing close, closer. He could refuse Prettie all right—that was horribly easy—but for obvious reasons, he could not refuse to take a new job, even though the Old Gentleman was likely to assign him heavy labor and long hours.

  On the other hand, if he was honest with himself, he really did not know how much longer he could keep on like this. For four years he had been driving all night, every night, rehearsing every morning, and performing once, sometimes twice an evening. He was twenty years old. He needed some free time. He needed time to think. That was all there was to it.

  Tired ... The deep blue vistas of dreams were shedding their nighttime disguises of transparency, creeping up around him.

  He hoped he wasn’t swaying on his feet. When you are six feet eight and look as if you can move a mountain, you’d better not let anyone see otherwise.

  Millsy grabbed his arm. “Ware, my friend.”

  The shambling figure of Donald Lloyd was coming across the field, dodging the roustabouts hauling rolls of canvas with a nimbleness that belied his long-limbed awkwardness.

  Donald was the only clown in Smithrebel’s whose bumbling ring-center persona did not change when he came back out through the red curtains. He had been badly affected by his years in the army. He never talked about them, or about his desertion, though unlike many, he freely admitted he had deserted. Had he been clownish all his life, and stumbled into his second profession by a happy accident? Or had he been a different person, a tolerable person, and changed after he took up clowning? One had to be careful of that.

  “I thought I was dead,” he shrilled as he drew up to Millsy and Crispin, staring at them in terror from under his hair. Crispin gazed stonily down at him. “She was groaning and wobbling every time I fucking downshifted! You gotta have a look at her, Cris.”

  “I got stuff to do.” Crispin glanced across the lot. Lee and George Philpotts, the elephant-training brothers, were coaxing their animals out of Speedwell 11 to help raise the poles of the big top. Crispin had no responsibility for the elephants, but he was supposed to assist with the labor.

  “I’m not getting behind the wheel tonight if you don’t. Come on. One of you.”

  Millsy shrugged. He was like an empty overcoat hanging on a hanger, shivering as the truck swung around the bends. Movement without motivation. A human mannequin. Mills the Magnificent, who claimed to be the only male in six domains who could handle uncaged daemons. He was too young to have gray hair, and he talked like a quack doctor. He was unmarried. Once or twice Crispin had wondered, with a prickle of discomfort, if Millsy liked it that way—but he always dismissed the possibility. There were no men like that in Smithrebel’s, except for Shuffling Will the high-wire performer, and everybody knew about him.

  “S’pose I’d better check it out,” he said. “Go on, then, Donald.”

  The big top, half up now, quaking as the elephants pulled at the ropes, covered most of the field, a vaguely octagonal expanse of grubby white canvas. The smaller black tops of the sideshows were scattered on the far side of the field in a haphazard midway. Anuei had performed her act, which Crispin had never, ever seen—he’d obeyed her request not to sneak in, because she’d never begged him for anything else—in one of those little stuffy tents.

  The trucks resembled a circular stockade of children’s blocks. The big top would abut onto the gap between Tulip 5 and Hollyhock 7, so that the performers could pass from the enclosure to the red curtains without being seen. All the tailgates were down. The panels of the menagerie trucks, Speedwell 11 and Pink 12, had been removed to let the cats, apes, and elephants smell fresh air. They were setting up a racket: couldn’t wait for their cages to be set up on the grass. The sight of the flaking swirls of blue and yellow that covered the trucks, and their red silhouettes of dancing people, most of them cut comically in half where the shutters of the living quarters’ windows were raised, always put the metallic taste of homesickness into Crispin’s mouth.

  Which was stupid, because he was home.

  He set his toolbelt down on the squelching dead leaves and propped the gigantic, warped wooden hood of Lily 6 on its rods. Donald, for once, was right. The whole vehicle shuddered gently.

  “Hold up,” he shouted to the roustabouts who were unloading ring lino from the back of the truck. “Stand clear.”

  He gulped damp air into his lungs and ducked into the hot, reeking interior. As a handler, he could feel the stink of the daemon, a powerful, localized source of tension. It stung his nostrils and eyes. He wiped water away. “You stupid hog, Donald! Cotton candy for a brain. Poor old lady.” He straightened up, took another breath of fresh air, and bent to gather hammer and pliers out of his toolbox. A daemon handler had two skills: the purely mechanical, which was just knowing the ins and outs of the transformation engines that power trucks, generators, and all the other machines that human ingenuity had devised to exploit daemons; and the daemonological. The interesting bit. Not dangerous, per se, for a celled daemon was a defanged daemon. And yet...

  Taking a firm grip on the vibrating edge of the hood, Crispin slid back the hatch in the top of the cell anchored in the middle of the engine. The entire body of the truck jounced upward, and then sank on its wheels. Crispin held on. His bones shook.

  Two thousand pounds’ worth of fury glared up at him. The face pressed against the silver mesh under the hatch was just like a human child’s, except that it was bright green. A silver collar gleamed,
pinched cruelly tight around the daemon’s neck, trapping most of her mane of black hair. She sat in the three-by-three-foot oak housing with her knees drawn up to her nose, her arms by her sides. The cage was too small to allow her to change position. Her lips moved as if she wanted to speak.

  “Now, now,” Crispin muttered. “Ugly little bitch, aren’t you? Come on, calm down, soulless whore you are.”

  She seemed properly angry. Nothing wrong there. Starved to the point of madness, not misery. A fine balance. Supposedly, you could eke a powerful daemon out for fifty years with the right care and feeding, but Crispin had never heard of one that had lasted that long. Millsy asserted that captivity killed daemons. Crispin agreed. If you were cooped up in a cell too small to stand up or lie down in, and the touch of the walls irritated you beyond pain, driving you mad with the urge to escape, so that you pushed and pushed and pushed—just as you had been trained to do... .

  Lily 6 shook as though she were going to fall apart any minute.

  Whispering obscenities, Crispin tapped the sides of the cell with the hammer. Probably a loose join. Daemons could not stand oak, so that was what must be used for the cells, and every crack must be sealed with an alloy containing at least 70 percent silver. The catch, of course, was that silver is infuriatingly weak. He had just located the loose place, and was fishing in a pocket for silver nails, when someone wrapped a hand around his arm.

  Concentration shattered. Black bubbles danced in front of his eyes. Swearing, he dived into the engine cavity to retrieve his hammer, and the daemon shot a tentacle of power out through the loose join and sent fierce shivers up and down his spine as his fingers closed around the handle. The lip of the engine cavity caught him in the stomach. He heard a faint shout and knew that Lily 6 was standing on her port wheels, her center of gravity tipping dangerously high.

  Every last kink in his hair straightened on end as he banged the vital nail in.

  A squelching thud shook the earth as the big truck dropped back onto all eighteen wheels. The daemon shuddered with misery.

  Crispin slammed the hatch closed, hooked it shut, and spun around to see if the person who had wrecked a nice straightforward fixit was still in the vicinity. That lash had hurt. He would lambast—

  Prettie Valenta stood in the muck, her head bowed, wringing her hands. Her little body was sheathed in one of the long pink dresses he’d once liked so much on her. “I’m sorry!” she said before he could speak. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you were... ”

  Why else would I have my head in the guts of a tractor, girl? What do you want?

  But it was his own fault, and he knew it. Can’t you get it through your thick skull, Crispin, that just because it’s there for the taking doesn’t mean it comes free? He had only made that mistake a few times, but the last had been very recent. He shook his head in anger.

  She was smiling hopefully.

  “You know never to interrupt me when I’m working with a daemon.”

  “But. I—I have to tell you.” She wasn’t smiling anymore. “Last night—Father finally decided to tell us what he’s been thinking. He says—oh, Crispin, he says Fergus is ready to perform. He’s gotten good enough to catch me. Father wants to put him in the ring on alternate nights, and then permanently.”

  “Good,” Crispin said. “Maybe I’ll finally have time to give all of these old ladies a once-over.” He flung his arm out to embrace the semicircle of trucks. “Queen knows they’ve been waiting for, it long enough!”

  Prettie’s eyes glimmered like raindrops. She was so predictable! Crispin felt as if he would fly apart. He looked away from her, up into the sky. The dawn had given way to another misty, motionless winter morning, weeping clouds. He rubbed his back. It ached.

  Hadn’t he all the appearance of a man living in the open air of the world, indifferent to small considerations, caring only for truth and knowledge and... to... find at least some happiness in the search?

  —Henry James

  The Lagoon

  Crispin stood on the catcher’s platform, halfway between the ring floor and the craze of rigging under the roof of the big top. Howard-the-lights, suspended in his high cradle, had all his glares turned on Prettie as she climbed artistically up the ladder to the flyer’s platform thirty feet away, where Elise stood waiting to handle the bars for her. Crispin himself was in shadow; it was unlikely that anyone was looking at him. He wiped sweat off his face with a blue-sequined forearm. Herve stood behind him, fidgeting like one of Millsy’s daemons when it was out of sorts. Crispin guessed that after they went off, Herve was planning to tell him about his demotion—he must not know that Prettie had let the cat out of the bag. Ugly little despot though he was, the Valenta patriarch couldn’t be looking forward to that interview.

  There had been a period of about two years when Herve had been the closest thing to a father Crispin had. A few vestiges of that relationship lingered. Crispin wasn’t looking forward to the interview either.

  Unsmiling white faces clustered below in the darkness. Elise had finished her turn, to the scattered clapping of sixty or seventy people, perhaps half a hundred of them smelly, blond-headed Apple Hills natives, the rest “seeds.” Seeding was a technique that worked better in large towns, where everyone did not know each other by sight, Here, the audience wasn’t taking well to being jollied along by strangers whose effort to dress like locals had resulted in some really bizarre outfits. Crispin suspected the crofters didn’t really understand the circus: they were still trying to figure out what they had forked over their coin (or chicken, or fruit, or cheese) for. Unlike more sophisticated folk, they saw entertainment for nothing other than what it was, an elaborate method of scamming you out of your money.

  But Prettie never noticed whether she had an audience or not. She was that rare creature, a circus artist who performed for the sheer love of it. She hoisted herself onto the top of her tower and flung her arms wide, her expression radiant.

  But she was studiously not looking across the gap at Crispin.

  As she swung out into the air to do her solo routine, her limbs coiling bonelessly around the ropes of her trapeze, his suspicions were confirmed. She wasn’t really on. No prizes for guessing why. As a performer, she had a tendency to go wild, depending on luck and instinct rather than on concentration—tonight, she appeared to be flirting with the very concept of balance itself, constantly on the verge of making a fatal mistake. The audience couldn’t look away, of course, though from the little screams and gasps coming from below, most of them were not so much fascinated as they were genuinely petrified.

  Queen damn it! Crispin thought, clenching his teeth. He was the one who had to compensate for her lack of finesse. He was the one who had to ensure her safety. And she wasn’t making it any easier.

  She caught a rope, twined a foot in it, let the trapeze dart away to Elise’s waiting hands and cast herself into a spin, head down, one hand on her heart, the other stretched out.

  Eye contact.

  Crispin stiffened.

  Eye contact.

  Her spin slowed.

  Eye contact.

  He felt unprofessional heat rising in his face as he swooped out to join her. Don’t think about it. Jackknife. Flipping around the bar of the catcher’s trapeze, he locked his knees on the padded supports, arching his back to get up speed.

  She was building back-and-forth momentum. Wait. Wait. Now! At the highest point of her swing, she let go of the rope and soared toward him, her body arched like a fish’s. Somebody in the audience screamed. Behind her the rope vanished into the roof. In her blue-feathered leotard, she looked lighter than a bird. Inch for inch, Crispin weighed even less; but no one would have guessed it. Effortlessly, he caught her wrists and lifted her, twisting her bodily around so that they were suspended face-to-face. Momentum carried them across to the flyer’s platform, down, then up to the catcher’s platform, so high that Crispin could have grabbed the railing. Candy-dank air swished past their ears; lime glare
s sizzled in silence. The audience ought to be clapping at this point—Smithrebel’s seeds were making a valiant effort to start a hand of applause—but the poor locals were likely too frightened to make a sound.

  One of her feet lost its hold. She promptly let go with the other, so that she curved away from him, like a branch splitting off from a tree trunk. Crispin tightened his grip. “In the name of the Queen, concentrate!” he muttered.

  She radiated at him. Close up, it was a horrifying sight. Her heavy paint made her look thirty, and half-witted.

  Until the finale of the act, nothing went too badly wrong. Herve had once been a catcher, and although now he couldn’t swing head down for long without getting dizzy, for the last few routines he liked to join Crispin and Prettie in the air. It was an opportunity for Prettie to show off her flying skills, more than anything else; as she somersaulted between her father and her ex-lover, the limelights followed her like avid admirers. These routines were far less difficult for Crispin. Standard catching, nothing fancy.

  Maybe he relaxed too soon. Maybe that was what happened.

  But later that night, when he tried, sweating and shaking, to remember what he had done wrong, he could come up with nothing but the facts.

  It happened when the act was nearly over, just as he reached the far point of his swing and swooped down again toward the center of the ring, his hands stretched out to Prettie, who was somersaulting toward him, dangerously off course. The big top exploded in flames. Sweat broke out all over his body. The scent of unfamiliar things burning filled his nose. It was a wonder he didn’t lose his knee-lock on the trapeze. The animals—the audience—the trappings! Everything in a circus is flammable, even rain-soaked. Danger! Danger!