So she stopped.
What she did not know was that in Valestock, society had many different layers, like a sandwich cake. When she took a job at the Old Linny, she buried herself at the very bottom, in the crumbs. And no one was there to help her up. On River Street, one was either a married woman or a never-to-be-married woman; there was no in-between ground, much as Rae tried to create it. She did not see why she could not step smoothly into the part of young lady, alone in the world, but quite respectable, and oh so marriageable! So, in the face of her landlady’s clear disapproval, and aware that she was being charged a special “entertainer’s rate”—she knew what that meant: a whore’s rate—she rented rooms on Main Street. Doll and the other girls at the Old Linny hated her for it. Didn’t they understand that all she wanted was a good name? She wept in secret, and hated them back. By the time she realized that, in fact, they understood her snobbishness better than she did, she had ruined her chances of being accepted among them.
After that, what could one do but wear the gown they had given her?
She started taking up with men deliberately. It was easy to heat them to boiling point, have them quivering at her feet, and then let them fall on their faces for the other girls to pick up. And it made her feel, briefly, powerful. Although she knew that they would all hate her, every one, if she let them find out her secret.
She wanted someone who wouldn’t hate her. She wanted a husband, an income, a house—or even just rented rooms—she wanted in-laws who would help a young couple get on their feet.
But she had finally come to face the fact that working for Madame Fourrière would not help her find any of these things. Madame was a genius, exiled from the Kingsburg Ballet because of a vendetta on the part of the principal ballerina—so she said. The costumes that she and Molly, the other assistant, codesigned were magical. But Madame Fourrière and Molly used Rae like a slave. She would stand among the racks of clothes at night, when she should have been mending, fingering the sateens and velvets, breathing in the smell of camphor and old sweat. It was the only time she got to handle the clothes.
Scurrying through the stinking corridors of the Old Linny late at night, quiet as a house mouse so that the maintenance men would not hear, she wished for her tail back, so that she could flick it gracefully, perfecting the picture. And when she peered out of her mousehole, the future was bleak. She could remain in Valestock, or she could go on the road again. Either way, she had not enough years remaining to grow old. Her “affectations” would never become manageable “eccentricities.” The saddest thing in the world was that she would not have anyone to hold her when death started spreading from the capital. She would die young, and she would die alone.
Maybe it was this sensation of black-glass pincers closing on her, closing, closing, that had prompted her to ask the man that question she had never asked anyone before: Will I see you tomorrow?
She had not known that he would take her west. The possibility of getting to Kirekune this way, through the Wraithwaste, through the war, terrified her. But last night in the truckers’ eatery, she had not even been thinking about Kirekune. She had liked Crispin for a reason she did not understand—the very opposite of physical, to put it one way. She had thought, Maybe—maybe—
And then the fire.
She saw with sudden terror that he had seen the wetness on her cheeks. His face wrinkled. He put an arm around her shoulders and patted her. The asexuality of the touch was like a slap. She found herself crying harder.
“Girl! By the Queen—Look, if you want to go home, tell me.”
“I don’t think you understand,” she said, sobbing. “I have no home. All I have in the world is the clothes on my back.”
“But if you keep on crying, I won’t know what to think! I’ll think you want to go back to Valestock. And I know I said I’d take you, but to be quite honest, I think we’d both get arrested!”
“Anywhere but Valestock,” she said at last, when she had herself under control. Her voice quavered. She despised herself for it. “It’s—it’s up to you!”
“Anywhere but Valestock.” Crispin rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, well, I have a few ideas. The way I see it, we’ve burned our bridges behind us; there’s really only one place to... no. No, no. I won’t tell you yet. I’ve got to think about it for a while. But I promise everything’s going to be okay.” He grinned. His smile was almost as good as a fire, warming her. Not a raging fire (smoke creeping under her ill-fitting door, the reek of burning oil: PANIC PANIC PANIC) but a comforting hearth-fire.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She admitted she was.
“I’m going to go see what’s in the trailer. The back wheels aren’t coming down heavily, so if there’s a load, it’s really light. But you never know.”
“I’ll go look,” she said, suddenly needing to get clear of him for a minute, and, kicking her feet free of the blankets, she wrestled with the door handle and jumped to the ground. It was much farther down than she remembered from last night. Luckily, the mud flung aside by the truck was soft.
“But, oh,” she whispered, picking herself up, “oh, my best dress!”
She was gone before he could stop her. He sagged back. The daylight scratched his sore eyes. He rolled down the window, rested his elbows on the edge, put his chin on his hands, and closed his eyes. The drips from the trees on his head were cool and regularly paced.
Sleep took him from the inside outward, suffusing his body with a warm heaviness that made him not want to move ever again. He hadn’t experienced this degree of exhaustion since mornings in Smithrebel’s, when he would sit in the cab of whatever rig he’d been driving, sleeping yet at the same time listening to the familiar sounds that told him the big top was about to go up and it was time for him to stir about.
“Empty boxes,” Rae’s voice said from below.
He opened his eyes. She was standing under the window of the cab, looking up. Beautiful, yes beautiful, even covered with mud and soot, her eyes puffy from crying. (Please, Queen, let her not make a habit of it!) She was smiling waterily. Her arms were filled with an assortment of little wooden boxes which he recognized as transport cells for daemons.
That night he lay on his back beside a tower of cartons that he had erected in the middle of the trailer to give her some privacy. Outside, a light rain was falling. He could hear her turning restlessly on the other side of the stacked boxes. So she couldn’t sleep either.
A heavy meal of bread and cheese sat uncomfortably in his stomach. Living by one’s wits seemed to be a quagmire into which one sank deeper not through inertia, but through struggling. Ransacking the truck for edibles, he and Rae had discovered only carton upon carton of daemon cells: “Product of Fewman and Fewman, Valestock, Lovoshire Domain,” she had read on them (confirming Crispin’s guess that she was far better educated than she had a right to be), but no daemons inside with which Crispin might have placated the rebellious gorgon. And nothing humans could eat, either. But Crispin still had that pound note in his pocket, and he said to her, “There’ve got to be people around here we can buy food from. Come on.”
Oh, the naiveté of the morning.
Sure enough, walking back along the road, they had come to a set of little turnoffs into the woods, just wide enough for, say, an oxcart. They chose one at random. As they followed it the forests gave way to many little apple orchards separated by unruly hedges. “Oh, how lovely,” Rae said, clasping her hands to her breast. “I was beginning to think we’d left civilization behind altogether.”
Most of the trees were bare, but one large orchard was planted with a different species. Heavy, glossy, white apples bowed down the branches. Five or six dark-haired boys, wrapped against the cold in shapeless layers of rags, moved slowly from tree to tree, pulling a great wheeled basket with them. When they saw Crispin and Rae, they gaped.
“Eh,” shouted the boy at the bottom of the ladder, after a minute. “Traders?”
“We’re loo
king for your parents,” Crispin called across the orchard. “Where d’you live?”
After a minute, the child jerked his chin in the direction they were going. “ ‘Tisn’t much farther.”
“I’m so hungry,” Rae whispered to Crispin. She stepped onto the grass and closed her hand around a low-hanging apple. “May I?” she called out.
One of the children seemed agitated, and pulled his brother’s smock. The brother shook his head and wrenched away. “Go on, lady!” he said, then bent his head and said to the smaller child, his rough voice carrying clearly between the trees, “Go youse, tell Mam traders coming.”
The little boy trotted off, looking fearfully over his shoulder.
Crispin watched Rae eating her apple as they continued down the path. From time to time, she picked threads of dark hair from between her lips. Something about the shape of those long, long thin fingers—the boniness, the sallow hue of the knuckles—reminded him of something ... something ...
The road opened onto an earthen clearing in the trees, bisected by a broad, muddy stream. On either side of the ford clustered log houses and outbuildings on low stilts. Hollyhocks grew tangledy around the feet of the stilts. Geese, hobbled pigs, and small children wandered along the stream. The women appearing in the doorways looked unfriendly.
Crispin squared his shoulders and marched up to the nearest woman, conscious of Rae lingering behind him, her apple core concealed in her hand.
Oh, Queen.
In the turpentine-smelling darkness of the trailer, he sighed.
What a disaster!
Rae was breathing deeply, peacefully now.
He had started off on the wrong foot by offering the women money. It was no good. They recognized the pound note, but they would have none of it. And, of course, it would be of little use to them, seventy miles from Valestock. Over and over, they had stubbornly repeated that the traders always brought barter goods; where were the barter goods?
“We have some nice little boxes,” Rae ventured timidly.
“Shush,” Crispin whispered. The women wanted knives, tanning chemicals, rennet, cloth, thread. They would have no use for wooden boxes with slogans on.
And then the women’s voices became suspicious. It was the wrong time of year for traders, anyway. What was Crispin doing here? Did he have a truck? Where was it? He would have to talk with their men. The men were off in the wildwood, hunting. He could come back at night.
It was then that Crispin realized he had made a mistake. He took Rae’s hand, and they backed away, smiling apologies. Crispin watched the tiny glassless windows of the house for movement. Eyes showed in the darkness, and his heart quickened, but it was only a toddler pressing his nose to the sill.
When they were out of sight around a curve, he grabbed Rae’s hand and doubled back into the woods. Rae said, “What?” but he dragged her along.
“I’m not going to take that shit. You’ll see.”
The sogginess of the earth enabled them to move soundlessly. When they had circled back within sound of the hamlet, they scrambled up a tree to wait. Rae complained in whispers about the state of her dress. “I haven’t another—”
Crispin grinned and twitched the sleeve of her man’s coat. She was clinging to a slightly lower branch. Her face, foreshortened, looked childishly young. “I’ll cut down one of my shirts for you. Should reach your ankles. You’ll be proper.” When her face fell, he laughed softly. For a moment she looked hurt, then she saw the joke, and joined in.
Night fell slowly, almost imperceptibly. The bark of the tree had a musty, bready odor. Crispin leaned his cheek on the trunk and fought tiredness, listening to the hamlet settle down for the night, geese being chased into their house, pigs into theirs, children being put to sleep.
When the occasional song of birds stopped, yellow spots of light appeared through the trees—candles in the windows of the huts. The stream burbled on in the night, talking of loneliness and constant motion. Rae fell into a doze, clinging on her branch. When the last candle had been extinguished, Crispin woke her.
They approached the hamlet with as much stealth as if they were tracking a daemon. Once, back before Crispin was handling, the daemon of Hollyhock 9 had somehow escaped its cell. Collared but not celled: that was the most dangerous sort of daemon of all. It had fled like a whirlwind between the tents. Luckily, the circus was only just setting up, and there were no townies on the lot. Gibbering, it stunned every living thing in its path, desperate to escape the silver collar which kept it from dematerializing. It had not intelligence enough to scrape the silver against a sharp edge, or to dash out into the desert. Millsy took command calmly and naturally. It wasn’t his daemon—his were uncollared—but he was Smithrebel’s authority on all things occult. He sent everyone into cover, and then produced a five-foot-square piece of silver lame from his sack and hid between two blacktops. (Twelve-year-old Crispin goggled from a nearby truck.) Two of Millsy’s own daemons materialized, dressed in their little sweaters and breeches, and ran after the escaped one, herding it like a runaway bull, driving it eventually into the gap. Then Millsy simply dropped the lame over it, anchoring it to the ground.
It had been that incident that pushed Crispin toward Millsy for the second time. Calm bravery in the face of danger was a side of Millsy he had not seen before, an aspect of daemon handling he had not really known about. He was twelve. Anuei had been dead two months, and he had been apprenticed to the Valentas for a year.
It had all been circumstances, the way it ended up, hadn’t it? If the daemon hadn’t escaped, Crispin might not have become a handler. If he hadn’t been a handler, he could have become a better aerialist, and Prettie would not be dead. Looking back at his childhood, he sometimes thought he could have been good at nearly anything; unfortunately, Millsy’s flattery had seemed more agreeable than Herve’s system of punishment and discipline, and so it had been handling.
Not that he would give up daemons for the world.
Slipping through the wet woods with Rae’s hand in his, he thought that he should have been more than one person. In order to accommodate all the conflicting impulses and abilities and weaknesses that came of being a half-breed, he should have been a whole set of tall brown brothers and sisters.
But his father had died. Joe Kateralbin. The man Anuei had told him so many stories about.
They slid quietly into the clearing. Not a soul stirred in the darkened houses as Crispin pulled Rae toward the little outbuilding he had earlier marked out as the pantry-storehouse for the huts on this side of the stream. It did not take long for them to slide the bolt back, fill one sack with loaves and another with cheeses and dried fruit, and tiptoe out again. They couldn’t hear a sound over the rippling song of the brook. But his skin crawled as if with worms, and until they got well away into the orchards he expected to feel dogs barking and voices behind him. He even fantasized the crack of a gun, and a starved daemon hitting between his shoulder blades. Except for the truck—which had felt as though it wanted to be his—he had never stolen anything before.
When they reached the road proper, he saw Rae’s face gray and stretched in the moonlight that filtered through the clouds. She was gnawing on a hunk of cheese.
“Here.” Suddenly ashamed of himself, he nudged her. “Give us some.”
Sitting on tarpaulins in the half-empty trailer, they shared the food in silence. Rae’s hands moved languidly, and her eyes were unfocused, as if she were thinking about something else altogether. Strangely enough, she did not seem bothered in the least by their crime.
For the umpteenth time, he turned on his side, trying to get comfortable. He had given her both the blankets. He pictured her curled in a snug ball, breathing deeply.
The circus existed outside conventional law. To settled folk, Crispin had never been more than an untrustworthy darky. What was so wrong with finally fulfilling their expectations?
Moral compromise glimmered very near. On either side of the way he would have to w
alk—he could see the way clearly in the darkness, a jeweled aisle like a peep show floating in the air—people mouthed and danced silently. Some he recognized, and some he didn’t. Daemons curved in and out around all of their feet.
He turned over, and the picture vanished. It wasn’t doing him any good to lie here worrying!
Rae sighed in her sleep.
The clarity of that vision had unnerved him more than he cared to think about. He could not lie here any longer. Damned if he wouldn’t—damned if he wouldn’t—
He uncurled to his feet and stepped around the partition. “Rae?” he whispered. “Are you asleep?”
No answer. He bent down and touched the blanket-shrouded figure. Her hair spilled like black oil, tributaries diverging over the lanolin-slick wool. She did not move.
Damned if he wouldn’t—
He knelt and touched her hair, smoothing it back from her temple. Her eyelashes cast a dark shadow on her cheek and the side of her nose. Her mouth twitched. She was sleeping soundly.
He brushed her lips with his own. No response. But already the fire was starting. Want fueled need. Need to lie beside her, to embrace every inch of her. Not to take her, but just to touch her. And Queen, how he needed to feel her soft hands touching him, caressing him with the ardor Prettie had never seemed to realize was possible. For Prettie, passivity had been the height of compliance. It had taken a southern prostitute to awaken Crispin to the delights that lovemaking could, and should, hold. And Rae wasn’t a whore, she was a townie, and Crispin was convinced that at some point in the past, she had been gentry. It lent her an allure that made the prospect of getting into bed with her absolutely irresistible.
He was shivering. He kissed her again, a little bit harder. This time he wasn’t imagining it, her breathing did check. And her mouth held his for a moment. He rested his elbow on the blanket, then lay down, still kissing her. Her eyelashes didn’t move, but she turned slightly onto her back, opening her arms. When he slid under the blanket, and found her clothed in long underwear under her petticoat, her kisses became sweeter, deeper. Her hands came up and held his: she allowed him to touch her breasts, but not any lower.
The War in the Waste Page 15