The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  “Call me Crispin. As if propriety hasn’t been breached just about as thoroughly as it can be, this afternoon.”

  “Yes! But that’s what I mean! You’re so different from him... Even in a matter like this you’re straightforward. When I first came here, I thought all Ferupians were such bastions of honor! I thought they did from their hearts what we do because we’re ordered to. Then I realized the truth. And I thought, there has to be someone who really is like that, who embodies grace and selflessness and bravery and all the rest of it, what they praise in the anthems. But I never met him until you joined Eighty Squadron. Do you remember when you wouldn’t flog me because you knew it wasn’t fair? I thought, this man is the real thing. I couldn’t believe my luck when you traded me with Captain Keynes.”

  He’s a boy, Crispin thought, gazing at the pale, excited face. He was twenty-three, the same age as Crispin, but right now he did not look it. A boy, hero-worshiping someone who once did him a good turn. That night outside Vichuisse’s quarters... Crispin had forgotten all about the flogging until this moment. “Don’t be ridiculous, Pilot,” he said coldly. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What’s the other half, then?”

  “Nothing that would improve your pretty picture of me.”

  “But I don’t really know anything about you, Captain,” Mickey said. “I’m just going on what I’ve seen. See... I think you’re going to crash and burn. If you want to know the honest truth, I don’t like the sound of this thing we’ve got ourselves into. Burns... Emthraze... Keynes... Lennox... Duncan... and all their men... why must you be the one who actually does it?”

  “Think about it.”

  “Well, I’m all for exing Vichuisse, but you’re the one in the pilot’s seat! And I think you’re going to hit turbulence, but I can’t say whether it’ll be good or bad... I don’t want to speculate, either. I just wanted to tell you that I’ll be at your back when it happens.”

  Crispin had never had a worse hex laid on him. Paralyzed, he felt his luck oozing away from him, beading out of his skin like sweat, dripping to the ground. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, rubbing away the premonition, and when he looked at Mickey before the other had time to rearrange his features, he saw that revealed on the Kirekuni’s face which he had hoped not to see.

  Mickey would have Crispin’s back two days from now, then, even if something went horribly wrong, which pray the Queen...

  Such a depressing explanation for his enthusiasm. But was there ever any other explanation? Crispin wondered in a fit of gloom. Or did all human interactions reduce eventually to that one viscous back-and-forth tide?

  A cough and a shuffle outside the door alerted him to the silence inside the room. He and Mickey had been closeted in here far too long. And after Vichuisse’s visit, the men probably already suspected something was afoot! “At ease, Mick,” he said, and clearing his throat, called to the groundsman outside the door: “Come in, damn your eyes, don’t stand outside eavesdropping like a bloody Shadow! Come in!”

  “Captain Burns to see you, sir,” the night-shift man said as he opened the door.

  Crispin saw the unspoken Again in the man’s face. He blew out his breath and spared Mickey a quick smile. “Tell him I’m waiting to receive him... and have our suppers sent from the mess, with three plates. Oh, what the hell, tell them to whip up something a bit better than usual. Have them go through stores. This is going to be an all-nighter.”

  Twenty-four hours later, he was in the Officers’ Club at the once-a-month get-together. He had no more liking for these civilized orgies of booze and hypocrisy than he had had before he ever attended one. The gatherings were meant to reinforce amity among the captains and commandants, but everyone deplored them as a waste of time, even though they attended religiously. Crispin usually just flew in to Cerelon the next morning for the briefing meetings. But tonight, in light of the secret drama which was to unfold the day after tomorrow, he had to be at the club.

  No one except the conspirators themselves was supposed to know about the plot. Crispin had come to see whether, in fact, they did.

  But all seemed as usual. Smoke and talk filled the clubroom. Cocktails were consumed faster than beer at a public flogging in Kingsburg. Burns was at his suavest; Emthraze sat in a corner, exchanging secret smiles with his vodka; Vichuisse was giving his all to anyone with an iota of compassion; Butch was doing the rounds to a warm reception. Crispin wondered if he was imagining that since Butch and he had stopped being friends, both of them had become more popular with the rest of the officers. The first time they had both attended one of these gatherings—on what Crispin thought of as that terrible night—Butch’s efforts to ingratiate himself with their colleagues had been largely spurned. Now he was the life of the party. Had he been networking behind Crispin’s back? One thing was certain, he was uproariously drunk. When he performed a Dewisson song-and-dance number on top of a coffee table, heels clacking like out-of-sync castanets, Crispin wanted to sink into the floor.

  But this was not possible, even metaphorically. Despite his efforts to keep a low profile, one officer after another claimed his attention, pressing drinks on him, smiling toothily, regaling him with meaningless good wishes. Crispin watched their eyes. Were those flashes of complicity—or merely the wet gleam of drunkenness?

  “Good job on One-thirty, Kateralbin! Keep it up!”

  “Glad to see you in town at last. We thought you’d kicked the bucket!”

  “Where’s your sidekick, Captain? The Kirekuni, I mean! Ha!”

  Their hearty, double-edged jocularity convinced Crispin that a good many of them knew more than they ought. He shot a vengeful glance at Burns, who was holding court in another corner, as if he already possessed the commandancy that would surely be his within the week. Burns looked up. Their gazes met across the crowded room. Crispin frowned at him. What the hell?

  Burns mouthed something that looked like Don’t worry—and then the crowd surged between them, blocking Crispin’s view.

  Furiously, Crispin plunked his drink down on the arm of someone’s chair. How dare Burns? The occupant of the armchair shifted and knocked the drink onto the carpet. Neither he nor Crispin bothered with apologies. The Shadow maids would clean up a hundred such accidents before dawn. How dare he? Crispin stared in the Wraith-blooded captain’s direction as if by the sheer magnetism of his gaze he could force Burns to look at him again. But the water-dripping obelisk stood in the way. It glowed like a column of light, like the answer to all questions, casting those answers in little bright undecipherable fragments on men’s faces and on the backs of their jackets.

  Crispin had not had any sleep the night before. He, Burns, and Mickey had talked until dawn, when Crispin and Mickey were scheduled to fly, and Burns departed in a mist of good humor. The fatigue was getting to him. He’d leave soon, go to the room he’d commandeered in HQ, and sleep, blessedly alone—

  “Cris!” It was Butch, flanked by a bevy of captains. “How are you? Haven’t seen you in years!”

  He held a cocktail with a little wooden monkey perching on the rim of the glass. His face was flushed from the exertions of his dance routine, his lips wet, his jacket buttoned askew. A horrible chord twanged in Crispin’s gut. He wanted to pretend nothing had ever happened to drive them apart; but Butch had blundered so badly at first, in ignoring Crispin, that now, no matter how friendly he acted, it would be impossible to revise the past. “You’re not a particularly appealing sight when you’re drunk, my friend,” Crispin said wryly.

  “I’m stone raving sober! And I’m about to get even soberer!” The rest laughed appreciatively. “We’re gonna make an excursion, Cris. Discover ‘the dark beauty inherent in the night’!” More laughter. “Ask you if you wanted to come!”

  “Underage Shadow girls may be your cup of tea, they aren’t mine,” Crispin said. His own rudeness astonished him. “And your actions led me to believe they weren’t yours, either.”

  Every
body grinned. There were too many jokes made daily on that topic for them not to know what was meant. Butch’s eyes clouded briefly as the jab hit home, and then opened wide. He was going to choose not to get it. “Ah, yes, my poor, beloved Katerina! But, Cris, she’s five hundred miles away and happily married, too; I daresay she won’t be offended! Nor will your Miss Duckworth! Or was it Clothworth? Duckwright? Do come.”

  “Clothwright,” Crispin said. He felt his patience about to snap. “As if it mattered.”

  “He’s had a drop,” one of Butch’s followers said. “Let’s go, Keynes. Leave him.”

  “Hot-shot ace, my ass.”

  “Shut up.” Butch turned to them. “And fuck off, why don’t you?”

  They laughed. Apparently even when Butch cursed at them he could do no wrong. “I’ll catch up with you outside. Be just a minute. Grab my coat, will you?”

  And they moved off and Crispin and Butch were momentarily isolated among the loud eddies of the gathering. In that instant the mask of joviality melted off Butch’s face, revealing distress. “Cris! When it goes off—I wanted to talk to you, tell you—”

  “Tell me what?” Crispin said bad-temperedly. The realization that he had misjudged Butch’s degree of inebriation made him feel even worse than before, and therefore crankier. He despised Butch. He missed him.

  “Not here! Can’t tell you here!”

  “And I’m Queen-damned well not coming with you to some sleazy Shadow brothel!”

  Butch cast a desperate look around, as if expecting inspiration to spring from the air. “You, me, and Vee on the thirtieth, two crews each, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Word is they’re gonna revise the composition tomorrow. Burns got Duncan to throw his weight about a bit. He—Burns—is in and I’m out.”

  “Frankly, I’d rather have Burns than you at my back, anyway,” Crispin said. “And I’m gonna find this all out tomorrow, right? So—”

  Butch moaned. His gaze darted over the crowd, the air, the ceiling, everywhere except Crispin’s face. “All right, all right! It was me who badgered Duncan! Burns was pissed as all hell.”

  Whatever Butch was trying to communicate was getting less comprehensible by the minute. Crispin sighed. “Go away! You’ve said your piece.”

  “You—I—oh, all right. I just wanted to say good-bye, that’s all!” Butch rooted in one pocket after another. “Shit!” With an air of desperation, he pulled the monkey decoration off the rim of his glass and thrust it into Crispin’s hand. “Here. I want you to keep this. It’s a bit of nothing, I know, but it comes from me, I want you to remember that. Please. All right?”

  “All right!” Crispin said bemusedly, pocketing the monkey, thinking that Butch must have meant to bring some good-luck charm for Crispin to take on the fateful mission. It was quite sweet of him. Or else—

  “Hey, screw her brains out for me. Okay? I’d come if I weren’t so tired.”

  “You would bloody well not, and I wouldn’t either,” Butch said, giving Crispin a look of disgust. “You think I do this shit because I enjoy it? It’s public relations, boyo, pure PR.” And then he was gone, swaggering with perfectly faked tipsiness through the crowd to his cronies, who were hailing him loudly from the door, waving his greatcoat at him like a flag.

  Left alone, Crispin took the monkey out again and looked at it. It was carved of some dark brown hardwood and it had long legs, realistically crafted so that it could cling to the rim of a glass as if that were a tree branch. It had a skinny curled tail. Its face wore an almost human expression. Funny, he’d seen these little trinkets a hundred times but never noticed the workmanship that went into them. What craftsman in what far-off domain—or faraway country—had carved this little “bit of nothing” all unaware that it would end up on the war front in someone’s martini?

  What I should really have liked to do was to travel to Cype, Lamaroon, Eo Ioria... If there had not been a war...

  Crispin did not move from his corner, but he found himself exchanging identical phrases of small talk with an unending parade of faces. Everyone of any importance, all the way up to the lieutenant-marshal himself, was seeking him out. What on earth did they all want from him? The only possibility he could come up with was that those in the know—which seemed to be just about everyone except Vichuisse himself, who was still bumping and buzzing against the walls on the other side of the room, getting no more attention than a half-dead bluebottle—those in the know had chosen him to be the next commandant, not Burns, and that they were subtly congratulating him on it. But that was not possible.

  On the other hand, Burns was angry about something. When Crispin exchanged the rote pleasantries with him, the Wraith-blooded captain’s evil expression belied his tone. He mentioned Butch several times, needlessly. Crispin gathered the two conspirators had had a falling out.

  Faces. Pink, flushed faces. White, sweating faces. White scalps showing through close-shaved fair hair. One slightly darker face, belonging to Burns, who actually looked good in the military buzz cut, since his head was shaped as beautifully as if it had been turned on a lathe. One luxuriant shock of pepper and salt, neatly parted on the side—that belonged to Thraxsson, whose rank permitted him to forgo the buzz cut. What was Thraxsson doing here, anyway? He almost never attended these gatherings. Maybe that was why the crowd was so lively.

  In the midst of the noise Crispin felt horribly alone. He hadn’t intended to get drunk, but somehow, by taking polite sips of each of the drinks people handed him, he had become so inebriated that his mind had stopped working properly. Finally he gave himself up to the flow of the night. An endless string of affirmatives.

  Faces—

  I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

  By the false azure in the windowpane;

  I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

  Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  Here’s the Real Truth, Kid

  30 Avril 1896 A.D. The Raw: Cerelon’s Air Base XXI

  The morning of the thirtieth dawned bright and clear. When Crispin stepped outside he realized it was the first real day of summer. The air was absolutely still; the sun had already bleached the sky. The only sound was the sharp tan-tara of the bugle floating from somewhere near the barracks, where the talented pilot who regularly performed the reveille was ornamenting it with trills and minor notes. It was a perfect day for flying.

  An unsuitable day for murder. Everything would be visible for miles.

  Don’t hex yourself, Crispin thought, and he rapped his knuckles against the wall of the mess. A splinter caught in his skin, drawing a bead of blood.

  At 9:35 he gave a pep talk to his crew and to Jones’s. At 9:45 everyone scrambled for their kites with perfectly choreographed haste. Crispin admired the way they followed each other onto the runway at precise intervals, taking off far enough apart for safety, yet close enough that not a fraction of a minute was wasted. How much they’d improved! Jimenez would not have known them.

  Crispin himself took off at the very end of the queue. The wind whipped past the cockpit as Princess Anuei gained speed. The bellowing of the daemon sounded like music in his ears—full of energy, sharp like trumpets, deep as a double bass. Then the kite lifted, and Toeleris’s roar died to a purr. Helmeted and goggled, Crispin took a brief look down. It never failed to amaze him how unassuming Sarehole appeared from the air. Just a handful of wooden dice without spots thrown down on the vast flatness of the Raw. No trees to shade the base; only the threadlike stream from which the ground crews drew water, some two hundred feet away. No one would ever guess that fifty men lived and worked here day in and day out. The buildings looked deserted. Perhaps that was why the base had thus far, in Crispin’s tenure, escaped the ground-strafing of which Burns had warned him—the lizards thought it was deserted now.

  Or maybe they simply had better things to attend to.

  Crispin gave the signal for his crews to form one la
rge wedge, with himself at its leading tip. They headed south. The warm gale exhilarated him. His hands were perfectly steady on stick and whipcord. Several miles to the east, they sighted the wedge of aircraft spearheaded by the silver Cerdres 500, and farther off, the identically sized wedge which could only be Burns and his men. The plan was for them all to converge over the Ferupian front, ten miles to the south. Then they would make for their target—the Kirekuni infantry which scouts said had been massing for days opposite the spot where the strafing of an ammo dump had weakened the Queen’s lines. It was in the middle of the battle which was sure to ensue, as soon as a Kirekuni patrol got wind of them, that Crispin planned to act.

  10:56 A.M.

  The child that the wind and the earth had when they danced

  But eleven years earlier, when he watched his mother die (although he had not known that was what was happening), he had not acted. He had knelt frozen behind the curtain among Anuel’s prohibited props, caught between the instinct which told him to scream and the fear of betraying his presence in the black top, where his mother had forbidden him ever to set foot on pain of “the worst beating you ever had from the biggest roughneck in this circus and break my heart, too.”

  Joie 1885 A.D.

  Ferupe: Linhe Domain: Gilye City

  Breaking Anuei’s heart was the only childhood nightmare that still frightened Crispin, now he was training on the flying trapezes and growing an inch a week. Anuei’s regular threats had not lost their power, but gained it, if anything, now that he felt himself maturing beyond the ability to obey her. She hated the fact that he was training with the Valentas, but he couldn’t give it up just for her. And here in the hot dry east, the smell of Millsy’s uncollared daemons pervaded the circus lot like dust, and he could not help scanning the crowds who trickled past the ticket booth, looking for his father’s relatives.

  And Anuei was saying, “No! No!” and she was struggling, “Don’t!” in the middle of the act in which she had engaged with her customer. Crispin knew what they were doing, but he had never seen it done like this, and he wanted to be sick. And Anuei was crying weakly, “Stop, it hurts!” and then something in Lamaroon, and then she was still. And after an obscenely long time the little tanned easterner pulled away from her and scrambled around the tent like a huge, desperate spider, picking up this, putting down that, checking her pulse, whimpering, and finally seizing on what he must have seen as the only possible solution—but Crispin didn’t understand that, nor would he ever understand, for in later years he would not allow himself even to remember those moments when he crouched, a terrified pair of eyes and ears, hearing (uncomprehending) the first crackle of flame, seeing the bright flower in Anuei’s long hair, and not being able to move.