The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  But it wasn’t Crispin’s fault!

  Crispin! Oh, Crispin! He had knocked over a laden table, and his arm was bleeding freely. The barmaids had retreated to the far wall of the place, and they were passing a beer bottle among themselves, commenting on the fight. Orpaan’s lungs had seized up as they did when he was too frightened even to call his daemons. Amanse! Fremis! Sueras!

  Had Crispin not stumbled through the roof... But the jolt to his and Jacithrew’s life had jolted Jacithrew’s addled brains, too. The old mania had taken him, the mania which had made him an outcast within their village, humored but despised. Jacithrew meant The Old Man Who Wants To Be A Soldier. He was so named because it was his obsession to be able to fly. The night Crispin came, he had sat cackling by the fire until dawn, and the next morning, to Orpaan’s horror, he had started work on the flying machine again.

  The villagers had feared the soldiers, but not taken their threats seriously. At the water festival a man had dressed up as a soldier and people pelted him with pine cones.

  Then the forest-clearing troops came, and nobody laughed any more.

  With a scream Orpaan broke away from Rae and ran outside.

  The sun was shining brilliantly. A group of children were shooting ball bearings for marbles in the dust. Orpaan dashed across the street and around a daemon tank with enormous, chain-ringed wheels. They shouted at him and scrambled to their feet. He knew he had knocked the game apart; he hoped they weren’t angry. Across the street, a soldier came out of the tavern. “Kid! Where the fuck did ‘e go?”

  “Hide me,” Orpaan begged the biggest boy, who was lanky and pinched-faced, dressed like the others in ragged shorts. His skin was so tanned—or so dirty—it was nearly black. Like the others, he smelled of sweat and filth. “They’re killing my Dadda!” A mist of transparent bubbles rose and fell in front of his eyes. He felt as though he were going to faint.

  The boy looked down at Orpaan. “You ain’t got no Dadda,” he said contemptuously. “No one ain’t got no Dadda.”

  Scrupulously truthful, nearly in tears, Orpaan said, “Well, he isn’t really my Dadda, but he tends after me. And they’re hurting him. My Mama’s there, but she can’t do anything! Please, please—”

  “T’ain’t your Mama, is it?” a girl said with a giggle. She pointed at the door of the tavern where Rae stood with her hands over her mouth, trying to see between the soldiers in front of her. “She white as paper!”

  “Pretty lady,” said another girl.

  “Well, she’s Kirekuni.” Orpaan fell over himself trying to explain. Why didn’t they understand the emergency? He wanted to flee back into the tavern, try and pull the soldiers off Crispin by main force, but he had started this, and now he had to finish it. He sensed that the children would turn nasty faster than you might spin a knife in the air. “She’s not really my Mama either but she—”

  “Kirekuni!” two or three girls sang. Their hair fell to their knees in knotted masses. Even through his fright and dizziness Orpaan understood that they were singing softly so that the soldiers should not hear. “Long-tail rat-ass bone-face lady! Mouse-lady! Lizard-lady! Kire-cunt cunt cunt!”

  Orpaan let out a sob, and tried to steady his voice. “I have daemons! Shut up ‘bout my Mama, or you’ll get it!”

  “He has daemons.”

  “Sure he has daemons.”

  “You don’t come out of the Waste, you come from Bennett’s Shadowtown, you all fronting,” said the littlest boy spitefully. “No guts.”

  “Show us them then, you baby prick,” said the tallest boy. Orpaan felt a sting on the back of his neck, and knew someone had shied a ball bearing at him. He didn’t turn around. “All right!” There was another sting, on his leg. “Amanse,” he added softly, frowning as he drew the daemon toward him. The three had not followed at his heels, the way they usually did: they were hovering invisibly in the middle of the street, raising little puffs of dust as they snapped up the lizards that scuttled there. “Amanse. Amanse.”

  Eight feet of green-furred muscle slid out of the air. “Special convoy!” she shouted shrilly. “Troop 170 Dragon to SP13! Eddie Brickett’s gone south, haven’t you heard?”

  The kids yelled in disbelief. Amanse interpreted this as a threat to Orpaan, and dug both hands into the tall boy’s arm, twisting with her nails until she had ripped away a chunk of flesh. Meanwhile, she rubbed her bottom against Orpaan’s middle in greeting. The tall boy screamed and backed away until he fell against the tank. His arm was gouting blood. Two of the girls rushed to him. Orpaan screamed, too, in horror. “Amanse! It’s not my fault, it’s not my—”

  Someone growled in anger, and Orpaan was borne forward into the dirt. “Armaments 54 secure and present, sir!” Amanse shrieked, and Orpaan heard her teeth meeting with a crunch in human flesh, and the weight came off Orpaan’s back for a minute, but then returned with a thud, winding him. Something crunched in his chest. His forehead banged rock.

  The soldiers had handcuffed Crispin and they were frog-marching him out of the tavern, but the beast would not go quietly. It snarled at the sergeant and wrenched out of its captors’ grip, out into the sunlight. Momentarily blinded, it shook its head and made a noise of fury. Even the sun was its enemy. Fight, fight, fight!

  Orpaan lay unmoving on the other side of the street, blood on his skull and torso,

  The beast rushed out of Crispin as quickly as a fire’s heat when a door is opened.

  A troop of soldiers leaned against a truck fifty yards away. Bright eyes watched from the windows of a half-charred house. Small brown hands gripped the windowsills. Crispin heard the children commenting on his stupidity.

  The soldiers jostled up on either side of him, but he dashed away from them, across the street. “Orpie!” No response. Crispin dropped to his knees beside the small, inert body. His inability to free his hands frustrated him beyond words. Like a dog lapping water, he bent and laid his cheek on Orpaan’s back. He tasted blood. It was bitter, and still warm.

  The child was dead. The brilliance of the sun dissolved into diamonds. Crispin shouted. The caterpillars of the tank in front of him gleamed like a mosaic, an unreadable message encoded in the lost language of objects from whatever power had allowed a child to be killed this way. There was no explanation for the blood pooling sticky and black in the dust. No explanation for the blood on Crispin’s fingers and lips. No explanation for the vast, metal-scored sapphire of the sky. No explanation for the handcuffs biting into his wrists or the soldiers yanking him to his feet.

  He twisted against them with growing desperation. Must make amends to Orpaan, must avenge him, but what could he do, what could he do? Half an hour ago there had been Rae, and with her beside him he could have done anything, but they had taken her away, Queen knew to where, Queen knew whether he would ever see her again! The small dark face, half-pressed into the dust, had no expression on it. Orpaan’s life had been too short and too much scarred by violence to have been happy. But recently—recently, despite the direness of their circumstances—Crispin had often thought he glimpsed a look of peace on the child’s face. If that were true, all the efforts Crispin had made on Orpaan’s behalf, which Rae had sometimes intimated to him were pointless, would have been worthwhile. But now he would never know.

  From within the house came the sound of children’s laughter, wild and merry, and something struck Crispin on the cheek. A ball bearing. It bounced into the middle of the road. Crispin roared and pulled free of the soldiers, who were so startled they actually let go, and plunged toward the house. Inside, feet thudded up creaking stairs. “You little bastards! I’ll get you! Yeah, run, go on, you can’t get away—”

  The soldiers had him again, seven of them shoving all around him, and this time they made no attempt to avoid injuring him. It was all he could do not to shriek as they pulled his hands up behind his back and kicked his ankles with steel-tipped boots. Finally the epauletted officer intervened. “That’ll be all,” he said in his dry voice. �
�We want him able to walk. Intelligence has enough on their hands without sending an ambulance to Pilkinson’s Shadowtown for an arrest of no consequence like this one.”

  “I’ll give you no consequence,” Crispin snarled. But the beast would not come back. The sergeant laughed and strode off. Crispin was pushed after him. Unutterably weary, he let his head drop between his shoulders and his eyes go out of focus, until a buffet of cold wind alerted him to the fact that they had come out from between the houses. He looked up.

  It was the first real sight he had had of the Raw. The sky dwarfed everything on the ground. It was the hugest sky he’d ever seen, and the cleanest.

  In the south, the sky was white-hot and creamy. In the north, a clear sunny day came maybe once every ten years. In the east, appropriately enough considering the general temperament of the people there, the heavens were pure brass. Only in the heart of Ferupe (remember that glorious summer) had Crispin seen skies like this. A dome of pure lapis lazuli, unmarred by a single cumulus. Only the silver sky beetles in hot pursuit of each other, and burning streaks of red and yellow and blue and green arcing up from the horizon to catch them. They tracked their fiery dance across the inside of his head as he looked from the sky to the man-made badlands below. The landscape was cluttered with various buildings—abandoned settlements? military bases? and a pale brown road wound out into the hilly plain. There was no telling how far the desuetude spread. But the sharp gray shadows of mountains on the horizon looked no taller than the first joint of Crispin’s index finger. The plain must be at least two hundred miles across.

  Nothing moved out among the burnt-out buildings. There were dryland cypresses and baobabs. A few pines. Juniper and eyebright crawled at Crispin’s feet, and creepers hazed the outlines of the rocks and ruins.

  Could the fauna be as sparse as the greenery? If so, he had reached heaven.

  Since he, Rae, and Orpaan came out of the last straggling bit of the woods into Pilkinson’s Shadowtown, the throb of too many daemons had mercifully faded. Although the occult world was quiet, the mundane wasn’t. The wind sighed and moaned over the bare desert with an insistency which spoke of never ever letting up.

  The soldiers pulled Crispin toward a jeep which was idling on the road into the plain and pushed him under the tarp roof. Two of them got in after him and made him sit down with his back to the cab. The other five reached in to cuff him a few times for good luck, then moved off down the road toward Shadowtown.

  “Bet you liked having me helpless, huh?” Crispin shouted after them, maddened by the punches. “Bet there’s a shitload else you’d like to do to me—cowards!”

  One private turned and spat, but none of the others paid any attention. The soldier on Crispin’s left, a fat gingery fellow, slapped him on the side of the head. Through the dinning in his ears he heard the epauletted officer getting into the front of the jeep, speaking to the driver. Then the daemon whined in protest, and the jeep jolted into motion.

  The naked land peeled away on either side of the road. Crispin felt sick: it was going backwards.

  There was a crack between the tarp that covered the back of the jeep and the cabin. He tipped his head back. The metal lip dug into the back of his neck. High in the sky, a plane swung and dived. Another came after it, and there was the faint stammer of gunfire.

  His heart pounded in his throat. The taste of spring embittered the wind.

  Nothing about us except our neediness is, in this life, permanent.

  —C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

  A Picture of Heartbreak

  28 Avril 1893 A.D. The Raw: the Lovoshire Parallel:

  Chressamo Intelligence HQ

  Crispin sat with his eyes closed on the edge of a cot which was so low that his knees came up to his ears. The cell was about seven feet by seven, with one barred window. It was high up in the tower named Chressamo. Crispin had spent hours watching jeeps and tanks rattle across the Raw, and craning his neck to watch the airplanes overhead. This morning, when he saw nine Kirekuni biplanes fire-strafe a Ferupian tower about two miles off, he realized why the holding cells for prisoners were in the top of the tower, which common sense would label the most prestigious bit; why the troops and staff of Chressamo lived underground. Even from two miles off, he could see the fire ripping through that other tower. But the Kirekunis had time for only one pass before they had to peel off into the sky to meet a group of avenging Ferupian monoplanes. The whole swarm wrangled off into the blueness, very small and not appearing at all deadly.

  But Crispin had no stomach for watching the sky anymore. Last night he had had a dream—well, not a dream. A hallucination. And he knew now how he had come to let Prettie Valenta fall to her death in the center of the ring of Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show, three months ago on a rainy Jevanary night. Right in the middle of an otherwise ordinary performance, he had been grabbed in the teeth of a vision and plomped down in another moment of his life. To be precise, the moment when humanity was coming to an end.

  Not surprising, perhaps, as that was likely to be the single biggest event in Crispin’s life—and everyone else’s, too. Not surprising that supernatural phenomena should orbit around it.

  Rae was right after all, he thought dully. Her and her tall tales.

  No one knows exactly what shape the apocalypse will come in. All that has been revealed to us is that it will come.

  But I know, Crispin thought. Talk about revelations.

  Why me?

  We are to die by fire.

  The fires which devoured the anthill-city were the fires of the apocalypse. And Crispin had been there. He hadn’t just dreamt it. He had been there, corporeal and solid—and in far better health than he was now, as if in the interval he had lived a relatively luxurious life. His hair had been cut so short the winter air chilled his scalp. His boots had skidded on the refuse in the street. His nostrils had stung with the smoke wafting on the wind. Terrified Kirekunis had shoved past, bumping heedlessly into him.

  This time it had been much realer, a continuous experience uninterrupted by shifts in time and place. (Now he could remember the first vision just as well as the second. He marveled at the skill with which he’d blanked it out of his consciousness for three months.)

  Last night he had been searching for the stranger he had so briefly met the first time around. That time, Crispin had failed to recognize the stranger; now he had to try to find him all over again. It was like looking for a gold coin in a mountain of sawdust, but he had no choice: he had to keep going. These were the fires, started by man or mystery, which would consume humanity, if not the entire world. And Crispin’s only hope lay in finding the stranger whom he hunted in vain through the shouting crowds, behind overturned bazaar stalls, inside deserted houses, up narrow, twisting streets at the top of which the orange glow lurked. He knew he would recognize his quarry if and when he saw him, though he could not picture the man’s face.

  But the Kirekunis fleeing the city with their children and their useless valuables all looked the same. Many of them clutched amulets shaped like a woman’s head, such as Rae had carried, as if they believed lumps of silver would ward off the flames; none of them paid Crispin any attention, except to glance at him in confusion when he pushed past them in the wrong direction, toward the fire.

  He had come to a high street. It was empty. The air resounded with a rushing roar like a high wind. On both sides of the steep river of cobbles, narrow elaborate wedding cakes of buildings rose into the orange night. At the top of the hill the glow shone brightly, and he could actually feel the heat on his face. He was sweating, from the climb, from fear, from excitement. He was almost on his quarry.

  What did he have to do to him when he found him? he wondered fleetingly. Was the stranger the personification of the apocalypse—was Crispin being given a chance to avert a future disaster by killing him? Or was he the one who must be saved at all costs, if there was to be any hope after the fires died down?

  Crispin
had not the least idea.

  And the minute he thought to question his search, rainbow bubbles rose in front of his eyes and numbness rushed through his limbs, so that walking became as difficult as wading through water.

  But before the rainbows completely obscured the street, Crispin glimpsed him against the light at the top of the hill.

  He was a black silhouette. His clothes, unlike those of the Kirekunis, clung to his frame, making him look thinner than any human being should or could be. His shoulders were stooped. He had a tail.

  And then the whole thing slipped away.

  It dived like a fish, seeking to vanish without trace beneath the waters of memory. But he caught its slimy fin with his fingernails. As he lay breathing hard, with dawn’s gray light growing in the room, it came swimming back to him. With it came the first vision. Both were so vivid, even in memory, that at times, as he relived them, the dawn in the window grew orange.

  With a certainty greater than any he had ever felt, he knew they had not been dreams. Slowly he extracted the facts from the images. The former were few.

  In a certain number of years—before he was very much older—he would find himself in a city in Kirekune, looking for someone who might or might not have some power to turn aside the fires of the end of the world.

  If he ever met Rae again, how she would rub it in! How she would sneer—and then kiss him—

  But he wouldn’t mind, because he loved her—

  But now his guess that he was unlikely ever to see her again was confirmed. She had not been anywhere in the vision.

  He sat sweating, staring at the metal tray on the floor with its untouched plate of mush and mug of chicory coffee.

  Why had the fires been orange? That was the color of ordinary fire. When spontaneous daemon combustion occurred, the flames were whitish blue, and all-devouring, though they gave off comparatively little heat. Crispin had once seen a truck careen off the road with incandescent flames bursting from the cabin windows, its driver flinging himself out, burnt so badly that he died within the hour. The hulk stood at rest in the field by the side of the Eastern Trunk Road, while every other trucker who happened by stopped to gawk. As its wooden frame was consumed, yellow flames adulterated the white.