The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  “You’re hurting me,” Rae sobbed, and Crispin realized he was gripping her wrist.

  “Sorry.” He relaxed his grip. “But I think we’re going to have to run for it.”

  And as Carthower launched himself on a winding path through the crowd, randomly starting and stopping as if he were playing a game of Red Light, Green Light with Crispin, as if he thought Crispin did not see him approaching, it started to rain again. The noise of the skies hitting the fire was that of water being poured onto a piping-hot griddle the size of the big top. Even the townsfolk’s screams of gladness could scarcely be heard. The culties put their heads back and gnashed their teeth, shaking chained wrists. Crispin dragged Rae away down a side street. The rain was so loud that he couldn’t tell whether or not they were being pursued. Their boots skidded on the wet cobbles. Once they fell, in a tangle of wet limbs. Crispin dragged her to her feet. “Can’t you go any faster?” he shouted.

  “No,” she gasped. “You’re killing me! Leave me behind!”

  Suddenly his assumption that she was coming with him struck him as ludicrous, even frightening. Had her proximity worked on him somehow? That was what the cleverest kind of daemon did when they were trying to get you to fall asleep at the wheel. He stared into her face. She looked wretched with fear; her hair clung in black snakes to her cheeks. The rain trickled off her onto his hands. His instincts screamed at him to go, get out, leave her. “I can’t leave you! Come on!”

  She sobbed. “You have to go, they’ll catch you. They’ll pin the whole thing on you.”

  “Queen, I know what to do,” he muttered, and pulled her protesting around, in the direction of Slimey’s, where the bartenders were probably even now stuffing padding under the upstairs door to stop the joint from flooding.

  In this end of town, the windows of the houses were dark. It seemed nobody had noticed Main Street going up in flames. Rain slopped off the roofs and gurgled along in the gutters. The eighteen-wheeler was still parked outside Slimey’s. Crispin closed his eyes for a moment as they slowed to a walk. A long-haul cross-country rig with the Wesson & Sons logo on her grille (he recognized the monogram as you might a face), sixty feet from fender to fender, over Lovoshire regulation weight for unarticulated vehicles. That was why she had not been parked in the depots outside Valestock. Bringing her into the streets made even less sense, but rules were rules, after all.

  The tires came up to his waist. His mouth watered at the thought of the traction in those finger-deep treads. Fantastic for hills. No good for winding roads; but she’d be able to hit sixty miles an hour on the straight.

  Smithrebel’s had had a Wesson & Sons for the animals when Crispin was a child, but it had turned out not to be economical. They’d switched to Boltons. The Wesson daemon was so large it gobbled food like there was no tomorrow. His heart quickened at the very thought.

  “Stand guard.” Leaving Rae facing the door of Slimey’s, he went to crouch by the front grille.

  Daemon price tags increased exponentially according to the size of the beast. And daemons that came from the Wraithwaste, instead of the smaller forests scattered throughout the rest of the country, where commercially owned trickster women captured tiny, short-lived daemons by the dozen, were dearer yet. Wraithwaste daemons were commoner now than they had been when Crispin was little; but because the demands of industry were increasing even faster, and factory owners bought as many as their daemonbrokers could get them, trucking companies had to pay top dollar to get their fingers in the Wraithwaste pie. The daemon in the Wesson & Sons was an ancient, strong beast, top of the line. He could feel its aura emanating out through the grille at him. A wave of shivery heat. Like standing over a pit of embers.

  “I know you’re in there, you loathly spotty creature! You sweet road-eater. Do you hear me?”

  Heat caressed his cheeks, dried the rain on his eyelashes. He rested his forehead on the wooden fender.

  Anger. Pain. Must get away will get away will push and push and push and push as soon as I see the least little opening through which it is just possible I might be able to escape; hunger. Fury. Hunger. Fury. Hunger.

  He flexed his fingers and stood up. He walked back around the truck to where Rae was standing. “You’re coming then, are you?” He squinted at the door to see whether there was an alarm.

  “I suppose you plan to take—to take this.” She gestured at the monstrous length of the truck. “You know that’s a jailing offense. At least.”

  There was no alarm mechanism that he could see. “Not taking it. Borrowing it.”

  “I don’t suppose you plan to bring it back!”

  “That constable’s got it in for me. If I don’t get out of here, it’ll be a jailing offense. It can’t get much worse.”

  “No,” she said with an odd little catch of her breath, “it can’t. Everything I owned was in that room. Granted it wasn’t much.”

  He couldn’t leave her to her destitution. On the other hand, there was nothing more irritating than women who felt they had been coerced into doing something against their will—they would rub it in your face twenty-four hours a day.

  He jumped up onto the lowest step, balanced there wrestling with the door for a minute, and then slid into the cab, throwing his knapsack in ahead of him.

  She heard him cursing as he fiddled with the controls of the truck. Her eyes were prickling. Inside her head she heard the fire bells ringing again, and knew: It’s happening. Just as I always used to fear. They have found out where I am. They’ve come to punish me.

  She was drenched through and through. She did not have a penny in the world. She still had her job but nowhere to live, and would she be any unhappier if she went on the road again, in the company of the first person she had met in months who did not seem to hate her?

  She couldn’t find it in herself to fear the man. Caution didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing. She caught hold of the rearview mirror and pulled herself up onto the lowest step: not difficult because she was taller than most men, as well as limber from filling in for the boys who performed at the Old Linny. The man leaned over and pushed the door open with his fingertips. She clambered in and settled into the nest of blankets that covered the hard wooden seat. For a moment, as he did not look at her or speak, she wanted to scramble back down, out of the cab, away, but then she saw he was concentrating, like Madame Fourrière concentrated when she was thinking about a new costume, like Rae herself often had to concentrate on not thinking about home, and the truck snarled alive beneath them. She choked a scream. Her teeth rattled.

  A grin transformed the man’s face. With one of his huge dark hands he gripped the wheel, with the other a cable that went straight down, vibrating, into the dashboard. It was wrapped so tight around his fist that it cut into the flesh. “Now now, my darling,” he was whispering, “come on my shit-eating lovely, my lipsmacker of miles... ”

  The whole great vehicle seemed to rear back, and with a plunge, they took the corner of Mandall and Applewater at a good twenty miles an hour. Behind them, someone was shouting. They did not slow down.

  The rain splattered on the windshield. With a surge of delight, Rae realized that they were making for the western road.

  When a woman take the blues,

  She tuck her head and cry.

  Bat when a man catch the blues,

  He grab his shoes and slide.

  —Quoted by Shirley Williams

  Book Three: The Trap

  Prophet and Priest

  Fessiery 1895 A.D. Lovoshire: Western Route 2

  Darkness, and the rumble of the wheels. The dynamo headlights of the big rig cast cones of yellow light over the gravel road. In the fog, Crispin could not see more than twenty yards ahead.

  As flatlands gave way to forest, he slipped into the familiar half-trance of travel. His instincts responded to each dip in the road, letting his mind drift free. His body, physically linked to the daemon via the whipcord, tingled in a state of mild arousal,
tempering languor with excitement and a tinge of self-satisfaction.

  Exhilarating to know that in two months he hadn’t lost the knack. Over daemons, at least, he could still triumph. This one was bigger and more wayward than any he had driven before: its owners, whom he remembered seeing in Slimey’s, were muscular giants, taller than him, and there had been at least two of them. He suspected they were not particularly good handlers. The Wraithwaste daemon responded poorly to the steering, and it kept trying to slack off speed. But he had it pinned down now, doing his bidding.

  Easy. Easy as falling asleep.

  Millsy would have been blown over backwards.

  “Mmm, yeah,” Crispin whispered. Keeping his eyes on the road, he fished out a cigarette and lit it one-handed.

  The trees peeled away into the darkness on either side of the road. The rain had stopped and it was a still, foggy night.

  He exhaled slowly. He had stolen a truck. Stolen it. This would put him on the wrong side of the white-coats for a good long time. “Borrowing... !” He had known he was sealing his fate the moment he jimmied the door of the cab.

  The settled life was exactly what it had seemed from the outside. And that was the awful thing. It had never been any use for him to try to fit in. Now he knew what it would take, and that he didn’t have it. Worse: no matter how much money he had, he would never have been able to do as he liked. The expropriated society of elephants, clowns, aerialists, and foreigners was the only world in which he belonged at all.

  A shudder of loneliness turned the marrow of his bones to air. He pressed his foot down on the clutch, shifting up into sixth. The smooth clicking of gears and the daemon’s shudder of protest made him smile. Escape seemed to be the thing he was best at. A dubious distinction!

  He had forgotten the girl asleep beside him on the seat.

  Rae woke to the cold, gray light of late afternoon, with a bad taste in her mouth and a cramp in her neck. For a minute she wanted to go back to sleep, as she had done several times already; then she realized the truck had stopped. She rubbed her eyes, shivering as she untangled herself from the inadequate blankets. “Where—where are we?”

  Crispin sat behind the wheel, as immobile as the music hall’s Living Statues, whose specialty was not to move no matter what the audience threw at them.

  She started to speak again and then thought better of it. She had had ample opportunity to examine his profile while the miles rumbled away—she had not liked to break his concentration, even when he slumped and muttered to himself, and she wondered, frozen with fear, what on earth could be keeping the truck on the road? But his face still fascinated her, to the point that it forbade questions. When she first met him she had thought he was a darkie, but now she wasn’t sure. That aquiline nose. The high forehead. The prominent lips. He wasn’t black, but sort of yellow-brown. His eyelashes were even longer and thicker than Rae’s own.

  Right now the eyelashes rested on the cheeks. The head drooped lower and lower on the chest. One of the massive hands fumbled almost vaguely with the cord that led down into the dash. Had he fallen asleep?

  She touched his shoulder.

  A mistake! Oh, oh, Queen! She felt his whole body tense, then relax, and he expelled a long, slow breath. “Bloody useless daemon!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He turned to her, opened his eyes, and for a moment his forehead rumpled as if he was trying to remember who she was. “The daemon’s acting up. It’s hungry.”

  She knew less than nothing about daemons. “Isn’t there anything to give it?”

  “In the circus we used to feed ours on chicken, salt pork, even bread scraps. But boys like the ones who own this shit feed their daemons on little tiny other daemons. Splinterons, is what they’re called. Better performance, but the gorgons get used to it and then they won’t eat anything else, they’ll starve first. If there was any, they’d be here.” He slapped the middle of the seat. “Holding cell. But it’s empty. Look.” He lifted up the seat and slid back the wooden hatch underneath. “Nothing! They must’ve been planning to load up in Valestock.”

  “What’s that?” Rae could see something glimmering deep inside the wooden box.

  Crispin bent to peer in. “What? Oh, that. How can you—A tiddler. Wonder if I could—” His hand slid stealthily as a snake down into the cell. Rae watched him cup his fingers around something that looked almost like a toy soldier, except that it was luminescent blue, and naked, and wriggled on the palm of his hand—

  And then was nothing.

  She shivered, feeling something pass like an intangible wind through her, out of the cab.

  He shook his hand as if it had been burned. “Wouldn’t even have whetted this pampered motherfucker’s—‘scuse my Kirekuni—wouldn’t even have whetted its appetite.” Using his other hand, he slid the hatch closed and let the seat bang down on top of it. “Used to getting all the eats it wants. Should never let a daemon get used to having its own way. Otherwise, it’ll choose to stop, just stop, and nothing short of a trickster can make it go again.”

  Rae scowled. Outside the windows of the cab, trees rubbed wetly together, massed like patchy brown-and-green costumes hanging from the clouds. Ahead, the road was no more than a gap in the forest.

  Crispin shook himself and smiled lopsidedly at her. “Cheer up! We’ll just have to go on shanks’ mare.”

  “You haven’t told me where we are going,” she said, with an effort at a coquettish laugh.

  “That’s because I don’t know, do I?”

  “Oh.” She felt an almost physical longing for her little room on the fifth floor of the lodging house: her mirror, her pallet, the curtain behind which her dresses hung: all burnt now, black dust the engraving of the Queen and the bowlegged dressing table she’d bought for a song. How she had tried to anchor herself in the real world. And she had been punished.

  Crispin said reluctantly, “If you want me to escort you back to Valestock, I will. That’s the least I can do in fact. I shouldn’t have brought you this far.”

  “It’s all right,” she said forlornly. “I don’t have anything left. Nowhere to go.”

  She waited for him to respond. He would have to look after her, of course. One of the strictest rules of the road was that men cared for women, no matter what. But it seemed vitally important to know if he was pleased with the prospect. When he didn’t speak, she tried the laugh again and said, “Well, then—where are we?”

  “Somewhere on the western road. Not that it’s been a road for quite a while. More of a rut.” A trace of satisfaction crept into his voice. “I’d say we could give Valestock seventy or eighty miles right now.”

  Oh, by the Queen!

  She sat still, biting her fingers, trying to keep the tears from her eyes.

  Once, maybe, she would have forgotten herself and begged him to take her deeper into the forest. West! To Kirekune! But last night’s craziness had abandoned her.

  “Mmm. I’m hungry, too.” He slouched back in the seat. “You?”

  She could not answer. She was crying. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. Stress—loss—hunger—all of those, triggering something else. Don’t—oh, please don’t—let him see—

  Kirekune!

  Ferupe had killed both her parents. They had not lived to see the end of the Dynasty. After Saonna died, Rae had felt herself called to reclaim the heritage her parents had forsaken. She had lain awake at night, heart beating fast, planning her glorious mission into the west. At the age of eleven she ran away from the Seventeenth Mansion. It wasn’t long before she fell in with a company of patriotic playactors; they’d treated her badly but she’d been lucky, she knew now, that they had found her before someone worse did. For years she wandered, switching from one lot of travelers to another whenever the first lot headed south. She crossed half of Ferupe, tending northward, drawn to the snowy pass Saonna had described, and the vision of that glittering city where she might belong.

  But adult comprehension l
ed her to realize that because of what she’d done to herself, even if she made it across the pass where her father had died, she would be just another freak. And anyway she was not free to go. Despite everything, she was still a child of the Dynasty. Her upbringing bound her to Ferupe. The knowledge of transcendence returned to her fantasy-dazzled mind like a razor-pinioned bird returning to a glade. The bird settled on a bough, bending it nearly to the ground. It clacked its iron feathers and sang to her, an eerie tune in a minor key.

  She gave up trying to get to the northern pass and signed on with Tom, The World’s Fattest Man, Music Hall Prodigy. Wherever the show went, she went, without a backward glance. And once again, she cried at night, because she knew that she alone, out of all the ignorant illiterate Ferupians around her, was burdened with knowledge.

  By the time she reached Valestock, she wanted only to settle down, to find a measure of happiness before transcendence wiped all such things from the face of the world. She knew it made her weak and materialistic, but she couldn’t help it. The deep west was the last place she wanted to settle down in; but it was in Valestock that she was offered a real job. Making actual costumes for the stage, with Madame Fourrière.

  She had said good-bye to The World’s Fattest Man and by the time she realized her mistake, it was too late. Her life in the Dynasty and in traveling shows had sheltered her from the real world to a degree that she did not appreciate at the time. Getting enough to eat had never been a problem on the road: a pretty young girl could, if hunger pinched badly enough, always sit herself on someone’s lap and share his dinner in return for allowing him to fondle her. Men tended to give you food anyway, in the same way they would give a pet dog scraps. It was what they expected to get in return that became the problem. One realized the value of one’s virtue very quickly. Protecting it had been a full-time job for Rae, on top of her other duties. She had quickly developed her own brand of coquetry.

  But shortly before Valestock, she had reached the age where her refusal to be bedded was an actual insult to the men around her. None of them even thought of marrying her; she wouldn’t have taken them if they had; and she wasn’t going to find anybody else as long as she kept traveling.