A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “It’s not as if we knew her anyway,” Crispin said. “Had you ever met her? I hadn’t.”

  “How on earth could I have?” Mickey’s throat closed with anger. Had Crispin forgotten where he’d been for the past three years? He swallowed, and said vindictively (knowing by now—how could he not?—how Crispin felt about his cousin): “Rae mentioned Breeze often in her letters. I gathered they were lovers. Perhaps only good friends, but one becomes familiar with certain figures of speech when one is in a similar position oneself.”

  To his disappointment Crispin just nodded, squinting ahead. “Probably. Probably you’re right.”

  The stones came through the soles of the shoes Mickey had bought to go with his new black suit (English-style, with narrow lapels). Up ahead, in the confusion of black feathers and ribbons surrounding the oxcart, Rae threw herself about in loud paroxysms, dipping and swinging her arms with the best of them. She seemed able to turn her grief off and on at will. No telling what she really felt. Perhaps there was something in that stereotype of the reserved, unfathomable Cypean. Mickey had trouble remembering that his cousin wasn’t in fact a Cypean.

  “And anyway,” Crispin said abruptly, “the Sisters aren’t paying for this. Are they hell! They’d have buried her in the paupers’ ground without even waiting for the rain to stop. Goes with their philosophy. I’ve been given to understand—”

  “By Rae? Where was I?”

  “I don’t know where you were at the time, you were getting chatted up by the Domenische branch of the family, I think; they’re as enamored of Kirekunis as everyone else is, but I’d watch my back if I were you. Anyway, apparently someone notified the family of Breeze’s death, and they set up a fuss. Took matters into their own hands. Arranged a spectacular send-off. But none of the Sisters knew why the plans had got so elaborate. Until this morning. They didn’t even know Breeze was a—” Crispin glanced sideways to see if any of the aristocrats were listening. “A what d’you call ‘em—”

  “An Enkhoupista.”

  “That’s it. Rae said Breeze had a horrible childhood. Brothers who beat her up, a mother who ignored her, a father who just wanted to marry her off. Rae always assumed she’d grown up poor.”

  Mickey didn’t answer. Despite all his life having heard stories of the small-fry nobility’s most embarrassing foibles, and seeing them himself on occasion, he would have assumed the same thing.

  Crispin said, “Well, she ended up marrying herself off, didn’t she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cult. They consecrate themselves to their own idea of Royalty. It’s just like marriage—of the most repressive sort. Except the Sisters keep their husbands locked up in the basement.” Crispin made an amused noise.

  “Husbands? Basement?”

  “Or to be precise, consorts in the dungeon.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Mickey gritted. Rae’s letters hadn’t hinted that their idea of Royalty was anything more than that—an idea.

  “Yes, well, I didn’t hear about it from Rae, you can be sure. Rumors. Apparently their Royals are really monsters of some sort. One escaped once, and terrorized half of Kherouge before it got shot. Of course, one used to hear worse about the cults in the old days, when they were everywhere, and nine-tenths of it was rabble-rousing garbage, but all the same I’m very curious…” Crispin stopped walking and talking at the same time. Everyone ahead of them had stopped, too. Peering around the closed ranks of Enkhoupistas, Mickey saw the able-bodied members of the procession scrambling single file down into the gully whose lip the road touched before executing another hairpin bend. Black hair lifted in the wind as black hats were removed around a new-looking tomb halfway down the slope. Up on the road, the Sisters wrestled with the oxcart boys for the privilege of lifting Breeze’s coffin off the plinth, and the crowd gathering around the tomb parted to make way for the stonemason.

  “Looks like a choice spot,” Mickey said. “High and dry. She won’t get soggy when the rain comes back.”

  Crispin gave him a look of disgust and pushed his way into the bottleneck of Cypeans waiting to go over the cliff.

  Seeing Crispin again had stirred up emotions that Mickey had believed himself to have outgrown. He had been forced, for example, to reconsider the possibility that there existed such a thing as love. His multifaceted attraction to Crispin wasn’t an obsession, for obsession perishes once deprived of its object, the way Mickey’s need of Gaise had mercifully perished once Gaise had been left behind in Okimachi—and although Mickey had lived without Crispin for three and a half eventful years, he hadn’t managed to forget him. And now it all came rushing back. He felt like a man given, on the verge of death, an injection that sensitized him to the physical world gushing and stinking and whispering around him, the world through which he’d moved like a sleepwalker for three and a half years, experiencing sensual pleasure only by force of will, only when he remembered to. Crispin’s company was a pleasure against which his only defense was denial.

  The fact that Crispin’s emotions were otherwise engaged was an anguish he’d forgotten.

  That first afternoon he hadn’t had the gall to approach the sunburnt man in the New World overcoat. Hard on the heels of recognition had come doubt. How could it possibly be Crispin? Not inconceivable, perhaps, that the eddies of fortune had brought him to Kherouge—but to this very wharf, on the very day the Phoxefire Dancer put in? The conflict between inconceivability and reality left Mickey paralyzed.

  And then Crispin saw him and his face lit up with joy and he shoved his way through the crowd and hugged him. Mickey held awkwardly on to his suitcase. Crispin kissed him on both cheeks. “Significance! Queen! Jesus Christ!” Crispin shouted blithely in three languages. He continued in Kirekuni: “Mick! I can’t believe it! Even now you’re here I still can’t believe it! Just rest your mind, you’re safe now, you’ve come to the right place! Yeah!”

  He held Mickey off by the shoulders. His eyes glowed with sincerity and a certain hunger.

  “Right enough!”

  Mickey felt something in the pit of his stomach catch fire, and, agonized, knew it for the old slow burn.

  “Better believe it!” Crispin yelled.

  Mickey shrugged, making Crispin drop his hands. He cleared his throat, but even so his voice came out an octave higher than normal. “I’m here to visit my cousin. I’ve never met her, but you don’t match up to any of my expectations.” He heard a fancyboy’s outraged whine, he heard the voice of the young, head-over-heels-in-lust airman. He writhed inside and tried to smile, but he had no control over himself. “You, of all people!”

  “Rae—Rain, as she’s calling herself now—asked me to meet you. She couldn’t get away.” Crispin smiled and swung into conversation, circumnavigating all the questions Mickey was dying to ask. Crispin sang Kherouge’s praises. He said it was already a city of the twentieth century. The Cypeans might not have anything to sell except themselves, but they were doing a damn good job of it. He’d heard rumors of an American oil company buying rights to prospect in the desert. He seemed to have heard a great many rumors—so many in fact that Mickey smelled the all-too-familiar reek of official sources, and wondered if one of the thousand things Crispin wasn’t saying was that in their time apart he, too, had been inveigled into the service of Significance. Like a black octopus, Significance had coiled around all Oceania, working the tentacles of its bureaucracy into every crevice, feeding from every cash source—and Crispin had certainly had access to one of those sources recently, judging from the way he was dressed. He used to walk like a soldier. Now he strode along with the purposeful confidence of a self-made man. His effortlessly flowing small talk, too, was new, and Mickey couldn’t help being reminded of people who tried to sell you something. They walked into the city, in the rain, and even as the familiar voice oiled his ears and soothed his heart, Mickey knew he’d demolished their chances of starting over. He knew Crispin knew it, too. Furious with himself, he could reply only in
monosyllables.

  “Where—where are you staying?” he managed at last.

  “In Ghixtown. Near here.” They were bumping their way through the late-afternoon rush, making slow progress along a concourse noisy with pedestrians and motors. Crispin had got somewhat jumpy: as he talked he kept flicking glances left, right, and over his shoulder. “I’m afraid Rae’s situation is rather complex. She’s not even supposed to know you, let alone have invited you to stay.”

  “I’m aware of her situation. I invited myself, I’m afraid, but I’m not going to impose on her.” Mickey felt resentful: how did Crispin come to know as much about his cousin as he did? It was as if the illadvised persistence with which he’d cherished Crispin’s memory had given the real Crispin access to the best-kept secrets of Mickey’s heart. Stiffly, he said, “I wasn’t even expecting her to meet me. I had planned to find lodgings and call on her tomorrow, or the next day.”

  “That would have been a world-class mistake!” Crispin tried to hold his umbrella over them both, but it wasn’t big enough, and raindrops fell down Mickey’s neck. They were both taller than the average Cypean, and other people’s umbrella spokes constantly bumped their shoulders. “You’d have blown her cover sky-high. She won’t even let me come see her. I’ve never even met her kids.”

  “I don’t see why you should have. You’re no relation to them or to her.” Mickey could no longer suppress his indignation at the way Crispin had trespassed on his family all over again. “What are you to her, anyway? How do you know her?”

  “Oh, hell…it’s such a tangle of coincidences. Although not really coincidences; it was just Ferupe, when you come down to it. Ferupian circumstances tended to throw a certain kind of people together, and we were all three a certain kind of person—undesirables, if you want to call it that…” Crispin sounded distracted. “Don’t you remember? I tried like hell to avoid you in 80 Squadron, and you ended up being the truest friend I—”

  He yanked Mickey sideways. Mickey stumbled, excused himself to someone he didn’t see, and plunged after Crispin down a side street. Crispin grabbed his wrist. They ran. Crispin dropped his umbrella and left it. Mickey’s suitcase banged against his legs. Even in the confusion he thrilled to the heat of Crispin’s fingers gripping his wrist.

  “Spotted someone I didn’t want to spot me,” Crispin muttered. “Oh, shit.” His lips were pulled rigidly back from his teeth and the whites of his eyes showed—gone the suave impostor, gone the self-made salesman. He was terrified. Mickey didn’t think he’d ever seen Crispin terrified before, not even when they were in the act of deserting from the QAF. He was so impressed that he asked no questions as they slowed down. They walked as fast as possible without making themselves obvious, weaving in and out of shops and alleys and side streets until Crispin finally dodged inside a door they’d passed three times already. It had been locked, but Crispin had the key out and ready. Mickey took in a tiny foyer and an unstaffed desk, then hurried after Crispin, who was halfway up a flight of stairs carpeted in a geometric pattern that looked Izte Kchebuk’ aran.

  “Only been staying here since this morning,” Crispin hissed as he unlocked a door at the end of the second-floor hallway. “Sssh! Place is run by deep southerners, for their own mostly, and they don’t like noise or fuss, which I’m afraid I’d wholly inadvertently bring down on their heads before long, so I’m planning on moving tomorrow…” He ushered Mickey inside a small room with plain but sturdy-looking furnishings and turned to face him. The beautiful carpet had flowed into the room with them, and they were both dripping on it. “You could stay here, or you could lodge with me. Two lodge cheaper than one, although that’s not an issue for me, and from the looks of you”—his mouth quirked as he eyed Mickey’s pigskin suitcase, whose understated excellence belied Mickey’s travelworn clothing—“it doesn’t look as though it’s an issue for you, either. If I’m wrong, and you need to save cash, I recommend this place, but if you don’t like the looks of it, I’ll direct you somewhere higher on the price scale. Kirekuni-owned even, if you want.”

  Mickey put down his suitcase. He wrung out the tails of his tunicvest. For the first time since he had arrived, he felt as though he was getting his footing. “What do you know, Kateralbin. Still on the run after all these years.”

  Crispin opened his mouth as if to retort. Then he smiled sheepishly. He groped behind him for the single, hard chair and sat down. He flapped a hand at the bed, indicating that Mickey should sit, too.

  Mickey squatted by his suitcase and began taking out dry clothes. The pigskin was wonderfully waterproofed. “Who wants to bust your ass this time around? I hope it isn’t the same bunch that wants mine. Although considering how, ah, interconnected the continent is these days, I have a nasty suspicion it probably is.”

  “Let’s let that be for now,” Crispin said. His voice sounded dull, despairing. “I’ll tell you how I came to know Rae. Been keeping things back, I’m afraid. But a man’s got to trust someone, sometime.”

  “True enough.” Mickey just stopped himself from saying, I trusted you once—and you let me down.

  “Draw your own conclusions.”

  And it sounded to Mickey as if Crispin were asking for another chance, so he kept quiet while Crispin told the convoluted but ultimately pathetic story of “the love of his life,” which branched into the parallel story of his marriage to a Lamaroon girl, although it got harder for Mickey to say nothing as the details came out, all the details of Rae’s early life, too, which she had kept from him throughout their correspondence with a degree of feminine wiliness he’d never suspected her of possessing. Listening, he began to feel as though he’d crossed the continent only to be betrayed by his nearest and dearest all over again.

  But that didn’t stop him from taking Crispin up when the latter diffidently repeated his suggestion that they share lodgings. It didn’t stop him putting up day in and day out, uncomplaining, with the absurd precautions against being spied on that Crispin refused to justify.

  1 Marout 1900 A.D. 2:00 P.M.

  On the Mountain of Bones, the stocky Sister Cloud led a prayer service. The Sisters responded at the top of their lungs, tears running down their faces. The Enkhoupistas obviously didn’t know the words, but mumbled along for the sake of form. Even as the last notes of the chant died away, someone shouted from the top of the cliff, “Refreshments!”

  The entire party—Sisters as well as aristocrats—crowded back up onto the mountainside.

  A buffet had been set up on the open stretch of rock above the road. Clearly, the Enkhoupistas felt they had tolerated the Sisters’ running the show long enough. The sun shone thinly, hot only when Mickey joined the throng around the buffet tables, where bodies blocked the wind. An Enkhoupista with a black apron tied over her mourning gown heaped his plate with salty cold cuts, colorful pickles, and bubbly flat bread, the latter a Ferupian staple he hadn’t eaten in years. He remarked pleasantly, in Ferupian, what a pity it was that one had to come to a funeral to get a really good meal; she smiled, not understanding, and gave him a flute of champagne. Her fingers were soft and cold. The pastries appeared to be all gone; he didn’t care. He’d lost his sweet tooth, and usually had so little appetite that he was surprised to find himself tucking into the cold cuts and flat bread with gusto, oblivious to the hum of conversation around him, entranced by the nostalgic flavors.

  “I said, don’t you like pickles?” Rae inquired at his elbow. His heart sank. He hadn’t yet managed to feel at ease with her: Crispin seemed to know a very different Rae from the timid, hidebound girl Mickey had constructed from her correspondence. She hadn’t been deceitful per se, but disturbingly canny, telling him everything about her life that didn’t matter, and nothing that did. At the same time she had permitted him to pour his heart out on paper unrebuked. He hated being at that kind of a disadvantage. He smiled at her.

  “I’m a little leery.” He poked at bright yellow slices. “I’m not familiar enough with Cypean cuisine to kn
ow what these are.”

  “Yes, traditional food is difficult to find in Ghixtown these days.” She stole a morsel of flat bread from his plate and popped it into her mouth. “I suppose this reminds you of your days in the air force.”

  How had she known? “Except that the flat bread we got on the front lines was usually so stale you could use it to patch your boots.”

  “Really? Crispin says it wasn’t a bad life. He says trained pilots were practically irreplaceable toward the end of the war, so they kept you well fed.”

  “Well, Crispin was a captain; and when we had any food at all, the officers got first crack at it. And as well, when you’ve got a cupboard stocked with brandy and wine, I don’t suppose you notice what you’re eating quite so much.”

  She chuckled. “Probably not.” Then her tone changed. “Does Crispin still drink too much?”

  “That would depend on what you think too much.”

  “He doesn’t drink at all when he’s around me. He knows I don’t like it. But I wish he wouldn’t cater to me.”

  Mickey didn’t know how to reply.

  “Then again, drink isn’t an unredeemed evil.” Her gaze drifted away over Mickey’s shoulder. He resisted the urge to turn and see what she was looking at; he knew it was nothing, for her eyes, as black as Fumie’s, glittered treacherously. “A little beer can be just the thing for a weak stomach. Many—many times—I wished I could get her to take some.”

  How could I have been so inconsiderate? Mickey touched her arm. “I can’t express how sorry I am.”

  She bowed her head for a moment. Then she straightened up and said in a harsh, distant growl, “Your sympathy is inappropriate, for Breeze is to be envied rather than pitied, she has escaped sun-time, she is in the Royal embrace.” She added softly, “But your condolences are appreciated anyway. Her real name was Philomena…did you know that? I didn’t. I feel as if I didn’t know anything about her.”