The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Crispin took a bite of eggs. “Crispin Kateralbin. And Miss Chester said your name was—”

  “Rae.”

  “Rae... ”

  “Clothwri—” Then she stopped, and shrugged. “Rae nothing in particular.”

  “Then what am I to call you?”

  “Why not just Rae?”

  All right, whatever!

  After a minute, stirring her tea, Rae said, “So what did Rutridge say to you?”

  He called me a worthless sap, an insult to his profession, a satanic instrument of the apocalyptic cults, and other things that would have made me laugh if he hadn’t been so deadly serious.

  But Crispin could not repeat the language Rutridge had used, even though Rae herself had a foul mouth. Besides, he did not believe Rutridge had meant to insult him. The man was simply so battered in his soul that he no longer had a thought to spare for courtesy or consideration. Long years of daemon handling could do that—Millsy had often implied—especially if a man was without boon companions.

  “He told me a lot of things,” Crispin said. “I didn’t get a chance to say I was looking for a job. As soon as he noticed me, he started railing about his own problems. Apparently his wife drinks, and he has to support her habit.”

  The men at the next table were eavesdropping attentively. Rae threw them a poisonous look. Then she turned back to Crispin with a smile. “Yes, that’s right. We all know about Mrs. Rutridge at the Linny. And he does tend to go on, and nobody lets themselves get buttonholed any more. So he’s starved for an audience.”

  Crispin put down his fork. “He didn’t understand a thing I was trying to tell him! That music hall really has possibilities. He’s not an innovator, he just puts his old daemon through its paces; but with that mechanism up there, you could do fantastic things! You could combine the colors, you could make designs on a backdrop—I’m on thin ice here, but I expect you could even write in lights—”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of that.”

  “I bet you could even get the fine folks down there to see something like that!”

  “I wouldn’t count on—”

  “I told him it wouldn’t cost anything to revamp the sequences; you’d probably even save money by cutting a couple of those crap acts you have out there now and putting on light shows instead. I told him I’d do it for room and board—”

  “Look, I can see you’re not from around here—”

  Crispin drew a breath.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean it that way.” She stretched out a hand as if to touch his cheek, as the trucker from Galashire had done, sitting at this very table or one of the ones next to it, but before the movement was half-completed she drew back. Crispin had in that split second prepared himself for the brush of her fingers. As he watched her hand drop as if in slow motion back to the tabletop, he had to restrain himself from catching it up.

  There was a moment of silence, and then Rae said anxiously, “If it comes to that, I’m not from around here myself.”

  “I didn’t think you were.” Crispin favored her with a smile. “I feel as if I ought to apologize for Rutridge. And me! But I—”

  “No need,” Crispin said. “Let’s play confessions. Where do you come from? Until a little while ago I was with a circus. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show.”

  He had tried her with it to see how she would react—like testing a sore muscle—but she only nodded. Her long, pale, perfectly sculpted face was serious.

  “Miss Henley told me you’d only been at the old Linny a year,” Crispin said.

  Without warning, her face crumpled. She sipped her tea distractedly. “Oh, don’t ask me!”

  “Why? Are you ashamed of your background? Can’t be much more of an embarrassment than mine.”

  She took a gulp of her tea. Then she fiddled with the buttons of her dress. She was flushing. “Come on,” Crispin wheedled. Taking the hand that lay on the table, he looked into her eyes. “Whatever it is—”

  “Oh, yes it can be more of an embarrassment!” she said miserably. But she did not take her hand away. Her palm was soft and hot. He could feel the pulse in her wrist. “Do you want me to lie?”

  “If you can make it really, really good... ” He stroked her wrist gently with his thumb.

  She jerked away and sat upright. The men at the next table turned away, disappointed. Crispin saw her throat move inside the buttoned trumpet of her collar. “Please. No. Let’s talk about you.”

  “We have been.”

  “Oh, don’t go all masculine on me! I thought you weren’t that way—that’s why I came—”

  Crispin could not help laughing out loud. “Then you’re a lot more naive than you look!”

  After a second, she smiled hesitantly and took a ladylike sip of his chicory coffee; her mouth twisted, but she put the mug down quickly as if she hoped he wouldn’t notice. When she saw him watching with interest, she broke down in giggles and hid her face in her hands. “Oh, my!”

  “Quite all right,” Crispin said, with as much of a bow as he could manage from a sitting position. “It’ll make it taste even sweeter.” He took a deep breath. He felt oddly exhilarated. It was a sensation he had never experienced before—except maybe, if he wasn’t deceiving himself, with Prettie, back in the early days, when they used to talk about flying...

  Rae didn’t look so much like poor, dead Prettie any more. She was older, sadder, more worldly. If she was a flyer, Crispin thought, she would practice for hours a day to get every last little movement down right. But she’d never make a flyer. She was far too tall, and she had too good a figure. He did not try to continue the conversation. Slowly, she grew nervous.

  “Daemon handling seems to mean a lot to you,” she said at last. “That is, it means a lot to almost every man in this town. But you’re different, you don’t have a job! Do you want to tell me why? Or is it something else I wouldn’t understand?”

  Crispin laughed. This time, he had to wipe his eyes with the edge of his sleeve. “Rae, if you haven’t joined the trickster women by the age of what, twenty... ”

  “Eighteen.”

  “You look older.”

  “I know.”

  “Then there’s no way I could make you understand. Do you know that’s the first time any female has ever asked me about daemons! Blessed Queen. Most girls couldn’t care less—even around here, with all their dads and brothers in the business. Even though, without daemons, they wouldn’t have gaslights, water, cloth for their dresses, gold for their jewelry, there wouldn’t be any trucks, so there’d be no trade, for Queen’s sake you’d have to eat apples all year round!” He was getting carried away. He laughed, and filled his mouth with eggs.

  Rae was looking at him with interest. “Daemons are in everything, aren’t they? I’ve always thought that. Ever since I was a kid—the garden of my—house—was full of them. But nobody here cares.”

  “Then think how much less they care in the rest of the country! It’s absolutely bloody scandalous.”

  “Yes.” She paused. “Still, for me it’s neither really here nor there. All I ever wanted to do was design costumes. Gorgeous costumes.”

  He nearly laughed until he saw the look in her eyes.

  “But I don’t have a hope of ever getting to be wardrobe designer at the Old Linny. Madame Fourrière works us like dogs.”

  “You’ve been in music hall all your life, I suppose.”

  “I worked my way across half of Ferupe with a traveling fairday act. The Fattest Man In The World—and he really was! I got so tired of sewing on buttons... ”

  She had been with a traveling act. And she had found a permanent job. Crispin felt his face getting hot. “So what’s the difference between town fairs and the circus? No offense, Rae, but no one in the circus I come from would be caught dead in a music hall! And yet”— he banged his fork on the table—“and yet I’d be willing to bet my last farthing I couldn’t get a job sweeping the damn floors at you
r damn Old Linny! What’s the catch? Can you tell me what is the catch?”

  “Oh, Queen,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand. Instantly he disliked himself for playing on her sympathy. No matter how genuine either of their feelings, it was a cadge. He pulled away. “Mr. Kateralbin, I know how you feel. I—”

  The bouncer stood over them. Crispin gave him a slow, stony look. “Finished?” The man gestured to their empty plates. “You’ll ‘ave to leave. We’re closin’. Police rules, you know.”

  “But look at all these people,” Rae said childishly.

  The bouncer snapped his fingers. “You stay, you pay.”

  Crispin rose to his feet, picked up his knapsack, and took Rae’s arm. Sometimes it was pleasant to tower over other men. He took a joy in the fear that fleeted across the bouncer’s face. “As a matter of fact we were just leaving.” He pulled Rae against his side, pleased that she was so beautiful, her face luminous as a candle flame in the gloom. “We have business elsewhere.”

  The bouncer’s silent fury and frustration followed them like a miasma up the stairs, mixed with the sharp smell of newly hammered metal coming through the wall from the tinware shop.

  “Wouldn’t sweep their damn floors,” Crispin muttered.

  “I wouldn’t want you to,” Rae said.

  Crispin escorted her back to her lodging, which were on Main Street, in the attic of a lodging house beside an armorer’s shop. Again, they did not speak a word as they walked; but the tension was gone, replaced by a comfortable silence.

  Rae put her key in the door of the lodging house, and turned. “Will you be at the Old Linny tomorrow night?”

  The question hung in the air.

  “Maybe,” Crispin said, although he did not intend it. “You never can tell. Go on, now. Go to bed.”

  Crooked teeth flashed. She turned and ran quietly up the stairs, her dress swirling around her boots. Crispin caught the door and closed it gently behind her.

  Then he turned and walked off down Main Street toward Cranzelow, the daemonmonger’s corner, toward his hard cold nest in the doorway.

  Head pillowed on his knapsack, he fell asleep almost instantly—and was wakened not by the nightmares which he could not recall, could never recall, but by the sound of running feet and voices, and the clanging of a bell, and—nightmare—no, reality—oh, Queen—the crackle of flames.

  I can’t abear a Butcher;

  I can’t abide his meat;

  The ugliest shop of all is his,

  The ugliest in the street;

  Bakers’ are warm, cobblers’ dark,

  Chemists’ burn watery lights;

  But oh, the sawdust butcher’s shop,

  That ugliest of sights!

  —Walter de la Mare

  Slide

  The disturbance was coming from Main Street. Crispin thought about going back to sleep. In this town they probably called the fire brigade when something spilled on the kitchen range.

  But in the small hours of the morning? No. It had to be a real fire. Queen—in this damp, it couldn’t even be that!

  He sat up.

  When it had been raining for months, a fire couldn’t start unless it got a lot of help. The police of Valestock weren’t stupid enough that they would fail to figure that out. Arson! A real turnup for the books. If Constable Carthower and his colleagues weren’t already infesting the streets, they would be soon. Crispin stood, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, and was about to put distance between himself and Main Street when a thought struck him.

  Rae.

  Every muscle in his body went rigid.

  “You’ve got a death wish, Kateralbin,” he said aloud, and spun and loped in the direction of the fire.

  As he slid along Draper toward Main Street, his worst suspicions were confirmed. The arsonist had known what he was doing: the blaze had evidently started in the armorer’s shop. Crispin couldn’t tell whether the barrels of daemons in the back of the shop had gone up yet, though small explosions, irregularly spaced, sent the firemen staggering back from the flames, their boots skidding on the glass that had fallen from the windowpanes. Puffs of black smoke lifted into the night. Neither sand nor water hoses seemed to be having much effect: the fire had already spread to the lower floors of the lodging houses on either side of the armorer’s. A crowd of escapees huddled in the shadows on the other side of the street. More were being carried or dragged down the stairs, shrouded in wet blankets. Crispin could not see Rae anywhere.

  Three white-coats stood behind the firemen’s rumbling daemon pump, guarding a second huddle of refugees. Crispin pressed deeper into the shadows.

  Carthower was shifting from foot to foot, worrying his lower lip. Coward, Crispin thought with hatred. Then he saw that the refugees—five or six men, so badly burned that their clothes hung in singed rags—were chained with their arms behind their backs, faces outward, in a painfully tight circle. They were singing. The sound was barely distinguishable over the noise of the fire and the pump; the words were impossible to make out. Crispin couldn’t even hear the tallest policeman shouting “Shut up!”, though when he struck one of the prisoners an open-handed blow across the mouth, the implication became clear.

  Crispin blinked, and flitted across Draper Street to join the larger crowd of refugees. The inhabitants of nearby houses were pouring out, some gathering to scream unhelpfully at the firemen and policemen, some mingling with the blanket-wrapped, shivering refugees, searching for relatives, neighbors, friends. Crispin moved through the crowd, unobtrusively examining sooty faces, until he saw Rae.

  She was standing alone in front of a dress shop a little way down the street. Flames danced luridly in the window behind her. Her face was pink with heat. She still wore the violet dress, with a man’s coat over it: a tough, waterproofed affair bunched in by a drawstring at the hem. Her hair was coming down around her face in silky strands.

  He touched her arm. In the circumstances, it didn’t seem at all unusual that she sagged against him. Anyone else would have done, he thought as he held her carefully close. And why hadn’t anyone else come to offer her refuge from the night and the destruction? Heartless. They were all without heart.

  “What happened?” he said in her ear.

  She was shivering. “Oh, Queen! I’m so glad you’re here! I can hardly believe it. I don’t know what happened. Yes, I do. Culties—culties set it in the armorer’s. They probably planned to burn themselves to death. Anticipation of the End Of Humanity. That’s what they call it when they do something like this. They’ll kill themselves now, first chance they get, because they got rescued before they could burn to death.”

  “Didn’t know there was much of that around here,” Crispin said, though he was remembering what Millsy had told him to the contrary.

  “Yes, Apocalypists. They live outside town. Nobody pays any attention—I could have told them—Apocalypists have no class, absolutely no class.” She laughed, with a note of hysteria. “They’ll blame the Dynasty, because it’s the best known cult, but only Apocalypists would do something like this. They haven’t had any revelations—they just steal other people’s ideas. They’re pathetic. That’s why they pull stunts like this. They’re afraid to wait for the end of the Dynasty, so they think they’ll cheat death by killing themselves—they’re crazy, they’re fucked up—”

  “It’s all right,” Crispin said, although it wasn’t. “All right. Stay calm.”

  His only firsthand experience of culties was the “Royal Dance Troupe” of Smithrebel’s, who swore up and down that they were charlatans. Real culties didn’t visit the circus. Of course everybody knew they were nihilists, and a disgrace, and ought to be outlawed—but if you thought about it, the only crime against society of which they were actually accused—the buying up of tracts of land for monstrous prices—seemed quite innocuous. And that was just as much the fault of whoever owned the land in the first place.

  But if this was the kind of thing that went on, in t
he night, in isolated towns...

  If it was a dry season, half of Main Street would be in flames right now. Crispin understood why a town would not want to have the news of such vulnerability noised about.

  . “But they’ve got them all now!” he murmured. “Do you want to get a better look?”

  “No!—Yes—”

  As they eased through the crowd, there was a tremendous boom. Redness flared almost to white; heat hit them like a wall. People cried out.

  Cautiously, Crispin took his fingers away from his eyes.

  The daemons had gone up. The armorer’s was a fireball, burning with the white brilliance of a glare. Flames licked out of the top windows of the house where Rae had lived. The firemen and policemen were pulling back, wheeling their equipment, chivvying the manacled culties along with them. As they were kicked away from the flames, the men tipped back their heads, singing. “What! Ho! Blow a kiss! To the birds of the apo-ca-lypse!”

  One of them jerked his chin at Crispin and Rae in a beckoning gesture. A grin studded with black teeth split his stubbly beard. He looked as though he were laughing. “I see you, sister!” he shouted through his companions’ song. Rae froze.

  “Pay no attention,” Crispin muttered, “come on, we’ll go—”

  Within a minute all six culties had changed their tune. This time they shouted the words so loudly they were audible even over the din of the fire.

  “It was late last night / When the flames broke out / And downstairs ran my lady-o / Her brothers dear / Did await her there / With a kiss, and a Bonnie Bonnie Biscay Oh!”

  Rae screamed. All three policemen turned toward her and Crispin. Carthower’s eyes narrowed.

  “She did it,” the first man shouted, and all six took up the chords. “She did it! She did it!”

  The policemen ignored them. Heads together, they were staring at Crispin and Rae. Carthower gestured emphatically; Crispin could guess what he was saying. Why had he been such a fool as to come anywhere near the police a second time?

  “She did it! She did it!”