The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Butch looked after the pair as they passed into the dark. Crispin looked at Butch. “You know this place better than I do. Where’re we going?”

  “To hell in a handbasket,” Butch said. “Fringetown’s crawling with half-breed kids. Lots of them are already grown-up, and they can pass. David Burns is one... ” He looked at Crispin, not too drunk for instant contrition. “You know what I mean.”

  “I meant where are we going,” Crispin said.

  Butch stopped walking and stared up at the moon. “My driver’s gonna collect me at dawn. I wasn’t thinking... Jeep’s parked back at HQ, but I don’t know where Waller’s at.” He tore his gaze from the white half shell in the sky and looked around the shadowed lane. “Around here somewhere, if I know him... ”

  Crispin had no inclination to turn back to HQ. He started walking again. Butch followed, stumbling. Crispin steadied him and found that Butch needed the support; if Crispin let go, he would fall over. Butch’s heart was beating wildly. His breath seemed not so much labored as absentminded—as if at any moment he might forget to inhale. Crispin wrapped his arm around his back. The other’s body was as hot as the outside of a daemon cell after a five-hour flight. “We’d better sit down for a bit.” Crispin pulled him toward an outside staircase that zigzagged up the front of a two-story building.

  “What, here, are you crazy? They’d have us in five minutest”

  “They?”

  “It’s after curfew, nobrain. You think just because there’s soldiers, there aren’t cat burglars and pickpockets and knife boys and suchlike scum, too?” Butch spat.

  Crispin hadn’t thought. The exclusive society of pilots had deconditioned him to towns; but Cerelon was just as much a town as it was an army base—more the former, if anything. He adjusted their course so that they were walking in the shadows of the eaves. After a couple of minutes, warily surveying the side streets, he said, “Butch. What do you think of Emthraze?”

  They turned a corner, passing a windowless building from within which came the notes of an accordion.

  “He’s all right.”

  “That it?”

  Butch turned his face toward Crispin. His breath reeked. “Course not! A man’s a man, isn’t he? Course Sade’s got his thing, just like everyone else! But, Cris, I dunno—”

  “Dunno—”

  “Him and Burns and Salemantle... and I dunno who else. Lennox maybe. Though I can’t credit it. I can’t understand it. I don’t know why they won’t just leave me out of it.” Butch shook his head in anger. “I joined up to fly, by the Queen, not to play at conspiracies like some damned courtier!” He paused. “I was presented at court once, did I ever tell you that, Cris? Dad presented me. I didn’t hardly dare to look at her. It was June—”

  “What year?”

  “Queen, who can remember? I was eleven. No, ten, it was the year Cassie was born. My fifth sister. Squires’ wives have so many babies, Cris, more than commoners ever do. I’ve always thought that’s weird. Maybe it’s so there’ll be enough officers if they keep on enlarging the army the way they’re doing... I’m twenty-five. That means it was ‘81.”

  “I was there, too,” Crispin said, laughing.

  “At court?”

  “No, in the suburbs with the circus. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show. Running around half-dressed—do you remember how hot the summer was in Kingsburg that year?—riding an elephant in a little Eo Ioriel getup in spec!” Crispin shook his head.

  In the moonlight, Butch smiled. “I hated court! It was supposed to be a special treat that Dad was taking me along... he had to go and pay the copper taxes every year, but he usually took Edward, my oldest brother. The shit I had to wear was so stiff with rhinestones and embroidery I could hardly move. Had to kneel to everyone we saw. My knees hurt for weeks. Black-and-blue!”

  “I don’t suppose your dad ever took you to the circus.”

  “Queen, no! He’d sooner have taken me to an opium den. Or the music hall.”

  My girl worked in the music hall, Crispin almost said, and then remembered he had to lie to Butch. A wave of sadness passed over him. As if sensing it, Butch squeezed his arm with his elbow and said frankly, “Nostalgia’s a bitch, huh?”

  A crowd of people surged out of a doorway ahead of them, laughing and talking, and crossed the road to vanish as quickly as they had appeared. A sweet breath of incense hung for a moment on the rank air.

  Butch squinted up at the sign, its colors muted in moonlight. “Look out for the Dancing Pig... that’s Waller’s spiritual home, that is!” As he spoke, he squeezed Crispin’s arm again, affectionately.

  Crispin thought, Butch, I—

  Butch, you’re drunk, drunk!

  He shook his head, trying to clear it.

  “Was the circus an amazing place?” Butch asked.

  “What do you mean, amazing?”

  “Sometimes I wish I’d been you. Where have I ever gone? One nasty, cold corner of Dewisson. Kingsburg. Training camp. And the fucking Raw. Growing up in the circus... that must’ve been something else.”

  “Wasn’t all that. We went hungry. And we lived in the backs of trucks. And we worked like dogs. I was trained for the ring, and then as soon as I got bigger the ringmaster started me on heavy labor, and thank the Queen if I’d never had the chance to learn daemon handling I’d still be doing that. Killing myself to show people a good time.”

  “But you’ve been everywhere. The south, the heartlands, the east, the west, the north, the cities! I never even thought about seeing other places before I met you.” He paused. “Too late now. Been thinking a lot lately about what I’ve missed... but it’s too late now.”

  The night swirled like liquid around them. In the distance, over the grumble of the city, they could hear screamers shrilling. The flames had never been farther away; Crispin was completely rooted in the instant; and yet the awareness of death hanging over his head filled him with dread of the next instant, and the next. Adrenaline pounded through his body. His heart beat in a lumbering rhythm he could almost hear. “Daniel. I appreciate your confidence in me.”

  “Friends to the end,” Butch said, and put his other arm around Crispin. It would have been an embrace except that they were both facing the empty street. For a fraction of a second everything mutated, eddying, and the street was the pathway of Crispin’s vision, lined with strange people in foreign clothes. The air coruscated. And who was that grinning as he vanished into an alley? But almost immediately Crispin was back in Cerelon. A woman started hoarsely to sing in a second-story room. Crispin sought Butch’s hand and gripped it clumsily.

  “I thought you’d changed,” he said.

  “You’re the one that’s changed,” Butch said seriously.

  “Bullshit,” Crispin said, laughing, and pulled away. The sign over the nearest door bore rude script: the dancing bore. He couldn’t stop laughing. When Butch saw the sign he joined in, too. “Betcha this is your Waller’s hideaway!”

  “It better be; I’m far too drunk to drive a daemon,” Butch said grimly, and they entered a bar misty with smoke, lit by daemon glares shaded with red cloth, packed with tables over which brown and white faces hung close together, smiling and sweating; but Waller was not among them; and as the patrons noticed Crispin and Butch’s captains’ bars (for everyone in Cerelon could read decorations, even if they couldn’t read books) and fell silent, they left, and found their way with some difficulty and a great many accusations of stupidity back to the QAF HQ, where they located Butch’s jeep and requisitioned a disapproving sentry to drive them to Air Base XV, five miles outside Cerelon. This he did with an appalling lack of control over the daemon, several times nearly overturning the jeep in potholes. When they reached XV it was 4:20 A.M. by Crispin’s pocket watch. The night patrol had returned and the dawn patrol taken off an hour ago. Apart from the noise of the wind over the Raw, all was silent. They kept their voices down as they slunk toward Butch’s quarters. Crispin did not want to be seen by an
y night-shift groundsmen: the plan had been for him to stay in town with Lennox. They entered the captain’s office. The blackout shutters had been pulled and everything was dark.

  When they lay down to sleep after a substantial nightcap, Crispin realized just how drunk he was. Too drunk. Butch’s quarters were pitch-black. Crispin felt weightless, disoriented, as though he were lying on the top of the carousel Smithrebel’s had had when he was a child and it was spinning; he could hear the chiming national anthem it played, and yet his limbs were so heavy he couldn’t move. A leg lying across him, an arm under his neck. He was fully clothed except for his boots, and yet he felt cold. He wriggled closer against the warm body beside him. The person sighed and wrapped arms around him. Some impulse made Crispin turn his head to see the face on the pillow. Pale skin over jutting bones... thin-lipped mouth... it was Butch, of course. His friend. He had never had such a friend.

  For an instant his head cleared, but the dizziness reclaimed him and he shifted closer to Butch, seeking warmth, the embrace, the safety of two-ness. Butch sighed again—asleep or not?—and hugged him so close that their faces touched and their legs entwined.

  Friendship. This was all new.

  Crispin had grown to manhood in the society of older men and women. There had been no boys his age in Smithrebel’s. And except for that one summer when he was fifteen, he had never known any local kids. Never had a friend before. Never. He wanted to tell Butch that, what he hadn’t been able to say earlier, when they were in Cerelon, but his mind was not working well enough, so he kissed him instead. He meant it as a cheek kiss but somehow it ended up a mouth kiss. And then came something he hadn’t felt in months: but it wasn’t urgent, it was only pleasurable... and Butch was kissing him back.

  Crispin’s eyes fluttered closed.

  Lips. Tongues. Warm and brandy-flavored. The strange familiarity of the male mouth.

  Hands. Hands and mouths on skin that had never before seemed desirable.

  Try as he might, afterward, torturing himself with the effort, he could not remember at what point he drifted asleep.

  The next day, the captains, commandants, mistresses of the screamer factories, Sublieutenant-Marshal Duncan, and Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson of the Salzeim Parallel sat in the briefing room in QAF HQ. A dogfight was going on overhead. The city lay quiet, cowering. It would have been bad form to so much as glance out a window; the officers and trickster women kept their faces stony as they strained to hear Thraxsson’s voice over the noise. All the men were nursing hangovers. The women seemed more alert, but they did not speak. Two had a truculent, militant demeanor; the other looked browbeaten and rested her head on her hand. She wore the trickster woman’s traditional brown wool, where her companions wore feminine versions of QAF uniform.

  The briefing was merely a formality; the offensive and the defensive would continue along the same lines as before. Except in terms of success or failure, which were not the concerns of this meeting, it made no difference that three of the officers at the table were new. Next month one or two more would have changed.

  Crispin scribbled a few details of Thraxsson’s strategy on the flyleaf of a pamphlet containing exhortations to glory by the Queen, which he was supposed to read to his men. (Most of them were illiterate, as he had been.) He would receive a more comprehensive transcript from the shorthand clerk later. Butch, sitting on the other side of the table, would not meet his eyes. It was the first sign Crispin had received from him that the events of the night before could not simply be a forgotten indiscretion. Of course neither of them had said a word that morning. Treating the whole thing as a drunk dream, Crispin had more or less succeeded in putting it out of his mind. But the part of him that remembered was furious with Butch for acting so oddly. Did he want everyone to know?

  But after the briefing, when the officers lit cigarettes and mingled around the table, Butch behaved quite normally, though he still would not look directly at Crispin. He even went so far as to introduce Crispin to Captain Burns.

  “Delighted,” Burns said, his dark eyes level. Now that Crispin knew he was a Wraith half-breed, it was impossible to miss, although one could have taken him for a southerner, or a dark-haired easterner who had not been long out of the sun. He was in his late twenties. “I’m looking forward to flying with you, Captain. I like the four-shift plan. It means each of us will get a chance to see how the others operates.”

  “You and I are flying patrol together next week,” Crispin said. “Unless there’s an emergency in the meantime.”

  “Knock wood.” Burns’s voice was deep and carrying. He actually turned and rapped the briefing table with his knuckles, as if calling a meeting to attention. The conversation quieted.

  To ease the awkward moment, Crispin said, “How long have you been in the parallel, Burns?”

  “David, call me David. Long as I’ve been flying. Eleven years—twelve this summer.”

  Crispin whistled. Burns’s face crinkled in a grin. “Pure luck.”

  “I need some of the good kind! Come out to XXI when you’re free and we’ll discuss it over a beer or two,” Crispin invited him.

  “Mmm, XXI!” Burns said in his loud voice. “I was stuck in that shithole for a year and a half! It was my first assignment.” He chuckled. “I’ll visit, but I won’t stay. I wish you the best of luck, Captain, because you’re gonna need the Queen’s intervention if you ever want to get out of there alive!”

  Vichuisse was standing not five feet away, arms folded, watching them with an unreadable expression. Crispin made a horrified face at Burns.

  “Yeah!” Burns went on, seemingly oblivious. “Sarehole! That base is right in the line of flight from one of the biggest Kirekuni air bases on the front to Cerelon. They used to fire-strafe us just for fun. We’d always be scrambling!”

  “That hasn’t happened to me yet, but—”

  “Must be because we’ve got a bunch of ace captains in our sector this year. You, me, Sade, Butch, and Alan Eastre was the very best of us, Queen keep his soul—we’re holding ‘em off.” Burns winked. Crispin nearly choked. The older man knew exactly what he was doing. “Because it’s certainly not due to the quality of our command, think you? I haven’t received a communiqué that made sense in weeks. And I know who Alan was flying with when he went down. The hierarchy these days... appalling! When a war drags on and on and on, the bureaucracy can get away with slack. They know they can drag their feet, the real men will carry them.”

  Vichuisse walked away, his steps measured, clicking.

  “No offense, Lieutenant-Marshal, I’m sure,” Burns added wickedly, pulling a face in the direction of Thraxsson, who was chatting with Lennox, Figueroa, Hawthorne, and the trickster women on the far side of the briefing room.

  “Captain, I hope your luck is good.” Crispin shook his head. “You’re pushing it.”

  And the smile vanished from Burns’s face, and Crispin remembered what Emthraze had said last night, that Burns was on fire. He could believe that now. He decided to trust the. Wraith-blooded captain.

  “I hate him,” he murmured, jerking his head in the direction Vichuisse had gone. “I owe him everything—I came up from the ranks, did you know that? From rigger. He boosted me. And I hate him. You’ll probably think I’m an ungrateful sod—but, Queen’s body, I don’t need him anymore!” He shook his head, unable to put his distaste for Vichuisse into words. Right now he wanted to be flying. He wanted wind roaring past his ears and a KE-122 in his sights. He couldn’t bear another minute of this sticky crisscrossing web of plot and counterplot.

  “None of us need him,” Burns said. “I came up from the ranks, too, and every promotion I’ve gained, I’ve had to fight men like him for it. I’ll take you up on that offer of hospitality. In a week or two, when I have space to breathe. They’re coming at us like gnats out at XVII right now.” He made warding-off gestures as if he were evading the Kirekunis where he stood. “And I’m gonna have to oversee Alan’s squadron, too, until they dec
ide which of his lieutenants to promote... None of us need a millstone around our necks.”

  And then the smile was back, for Commandant Figueroa had moved up to them with two captains from his sector.

  Early that afternoon, Crispin flew solo back to Sarehole. Among other things, he considered Burns. He was dubious about the captain’s revolutionary talk—surely Vichuisse could not be that much worse a commandant than Elliott had been, or than Lennox, Figueroa, or Hawthorne? But all the same, Crispin liked Burns. He was clearly all there. Which was more than could be said for a lot of the fellows Crispin had met last night. Crispin had not trusted Emthraze or Duncan—or for that matter, Butch, the first time they met—the way he had instinctively trusted Burns. And since Butch was acting so strangely now...

  The Raw scrolled past beneath Princess Anuei’s wings, moving as fast as a bolt of camouflage fabric unrolled down a hill. The daemon responded with gratifying sensitivity to the whipcord. It was a young, strong beast, and before coming to Sarehole Crispin had fed it personally, handpicking the healthiest splinterons from the seething barrels in the storerooms. Now he no longer had time for that, but he’d put the fear of the Queen into the riggers, and they seemed to be doing a good job. He ought to trade Princess Anuei for a Cerdres or a Killer Bee, a machine that suited his dignity, but he was putting it off—this kite was his. He’d rebuilt her in the scrap hangar of Pilkinson’s Air Base II. Of course she’d been refurbished countless times since then, but she was still Princess Anuei. One Anuei had brought him into the world; it would be fitting for another Anuei to accompany him out of it.