I helped to broker the terms of Kingsburg’s surrender to the Significant army. Some say that without my intervention, the city would have been razed. Others say I bartered the entire aristocracy for an archivist’s post at the University. I urge you only to remember that by the time I was permitted to communicate with Governor-General Kuroi, our late, lamented Queen had passed away, and our situation within the walls was desperate in the extreme. They gave me carte blanche. The bargaining process bore no resemblance to those first, unsuccessful negotiations with Significance I conducted in my youth. It is not for me to say whether I succeeded this time. Indeed, as I mentioned, I am no longer privy to the thoughts of those who pass judgment on such things. But it still amazes me, no matter what, that I am persona non grata within the titled circle whose continued influence I secured!
(No wonder, Crispin thought, considering how badly you probably fucked it up! His mind boggled at the thought of all of Ferupe bound by the terms of a surrender negotiated by Millsy. Of all people! That the “titled circle” had, even in desperate circumstances, put their fate in the hand of a wizened, pederastic trickster beggared rational explanation. Unless Millsy was lying. It wouldn’t be the first time.)
And so, as you may already have inferred, I am lonely. That is not the only reason I want you to come. I would not ask you to travel across the continent just to bring sunshine into an old man’s life. But I will not deny that that is the reason closest to my heart. I think of you, often, Crispin. I castigate myself for my nearsightedness in the matter of your education; I comfort myself with the memory that at least when you went out into the world, you were no mere acrobat, but a skilled practitioner of an art that was then in demand.
(Recalling his failure to find work in Lovoshire, Crispin thought bitterly: And look how far it got me.)
(It occurred to him only later that if he hadn’t been a daemon handler, he would have been sent straight from Chressamo into the infantry.)
I will always congratulate myself on sensing your inner lustfulness when others did not, and showing you the source of gratification, when they would have turned you into an athlete or a clown. On the day when you bade me farewell in the Apple Hills, I was proud of you. Now that passion has given way to internal combustion, I have had to discard the standards to which I once held myself. I no longer have standards. But unlike me, you are not too old to have started over, reoriented yourself within the postdaemonic universal definition of power. Probably you do not need my help anymore, nor want it; but if you are in afield that habitually benefits from Kirekuni sponsorship, perhaps I could once again be of aid. As far as I know I am still in good standing with the lizards. For you, I would call in all my favors. I would like to see you.
Like to see you—that does not begin to describe the yearning that daily confuses my heart, and nightly torments me with dreams…
Crispin dropped the letter as if it had become a snake in his hand. When he managed to suppress his loathing, he reread the “passion and internal combustion” paragraph. The letter was so full of double meanings, and Millsy’s handwriting so bad, that he couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if Millsy was trying to lure him to Kingsburg with the offer of introductions to key players in the occupying government.
Suppose he’d received the letter when Millsy wrote it, in late summer last year? He would have told Yamauchi. It would have been just the two of them in the library of the governor’s mansion, facing each other across a tiny table laid with silver chopsticks, white linen, and the leavings of a gastronomic wet dream. The windows would be open on the warm night and the whispering garden. Most days, the governor dined with his associates in the government, with foreign investors and touring officials. On the rare days he wasn’t engaged, he would invite Crispin to supper under the pretense of spending a quiet evening at home, and learn the news of the diins and networks. Sometimes Crispin thought this was the real reason he’d been pulled off the coastal circuit: their leisurely meals were the Little Governor’s only opportunity to discuss at length the business he truly loved. Mrs. Yamauchi was never present. She had her own true loves to cultivate. And against his will, Crispin enjoyed the suppers, too. Yamauchi’s unabashed enthusiasm was a welcome relief from the deceit and dissembling that filled his days. And it was impossible not to savor the irony of apportioning death sentences and six-figure sums while sipping imported liquor in that ambience of luxury.
After the third or fourth Goldschlager, Yamauchi’s eyes would grow moist with fatherly affection as he counseled Crispin on his marital trials. By way of advice, he would relate anecdotes of his own connubial tragedy. Yamauchi was the only man in Redeuiina who paid no attention to gossip and (Crispin believed) hadn’t been indoctrinated with Yleini’s side of the story: he was also the only person in whom Crispin could bear to confide. The Little Governor often professed feelings of paternal responsibility for the young couple. Since Yleini had been his housemaid, Crispin was practically his son-in-law as well as his protégé.
But all the time he was sleeping with her…!
The Little Governor’s adulterous gall surpassed even the standards of Redeuiina expatriate society.
What are they doing now? Has she moved in with them? Has he allowed her to stay in our house, like a kept mistress?
Crispin couldn’t bear to dwell on it. Instead, he imagined telling Yamauchi about Millsy’s claim to be acquainted with the Kingsburg arm of Significance. The slash of a mouth would have opened. The eyes would have shrunk to black pinholes. The manicured hands would have reached for a cigar and lopped its end off as if it were Tomichi Minami’s head. Of course you must go! It is an unparalleled opportunity. Crispin could imagine the delight in Yamauchi’s voice, that always looked like insincerity when it showed on his face. Why, if we could reach an agreement with Kingsburg, we could extend distribution farther north than we have ever been able to, and put the heartlands operators out of business! Their product is inferior anyway; it’s just a matter of whose hands are in whose pockets. Does your friend know Governor-General Kuroi? I have heard it said he is a candidate for Significance. If you could somehow gain his support, we could thumb our noses at Okimachi!
Crispin’s throat spasmed. He crumpled the letter and thrust it into the envelope. On the other side of the room the urchins were still quarreling about the division of the two sen. Their voices had grown soft, sleepy.
Mickey sat against the wall with his knees drawn up under his coat, his head bowed. As the candle guttered brighter for a moment, Crispin saw he had the tip of his tail in his mouth. He was sucking it in his sleep as a child sucks his thumb.
Slowly unfolding the letter for the third time, aching with guilt, Crispin thought: An unparalleled opportunity…
Yamauchi could call the Mimes off.
If I can persuade him I’m worth the trouble.
Oh, please Queen, don’t let me be too proud to take Millsy for all he’s got.
“Mick,” Crispin whispered too softly to wake him, “you’ve saved my skin more than once—and all I’ve ever done is get us into scrapes and half kill us both getting us out I can’t make up for it, it’s too late now, but…”
For you I’d call in all my favors.
He pinched out the candle and lay down. The damp of the earth entered his bones. He felt old, arthritic, and miserable. From somewhere on the other side of town came a faint fusillade of gunfire.
The next morning he and Mickey left Domenische, riding with a seller of tinware, cheeses, and coal in a rickety truck drawn by a pair of dray horses hitched to the fender. The tinker’s route lay along the eastern road on whose broad back Crispin had been born, twenty-six years earlier, in a moving truck. The next stop was a village with no Disciples in evidence, where Crispin and Mickey bought a horsecart of their own. Internal-combustion engines weren’t to be had for love or money. Nor was news of the capital. Horror stories of oppression by the “new policemen” who’d made themselves at home in Linhe were two a penny, but the locals seemed unaware t
hat the Disciples weren’t just a new manifestation of Kingsburg law. They had no conception that they no longer lived in Ferupe, but New Kirekune. Yet—like everyone else in the country, as Crispin was soon to discover—they’d developed a healthy appetite for sen, the only coin that bought anything worth having, the only currency in which bribes were accepted. “Cloud will never know how much her generosity means to us, at these exchange rates,” Mickey said blithely.
Their journey through Leondizon, Neufertilia, and the now plumless Plum Valley Domain felt, in comparison to their dramatic fell swoop across the Ferupian border, like an interminable detour. They had to work so hard to avoid Disciple outposts, and simultaneously keep their scrawny nags in grain, that although they caught no further whiff of Mimes, Crispin hardly felt it was a respite. Anyway, he thought dourly, it’s entirely possible they could be tailing us, biding their time, waiting to see where we’re going. He couldn’t assume he’d only presented a danger when he was in Kherouge, that there’d been something in that city they hadn’t wanted him to learn or find. Because even though the Mimes might appear to have lost interest, Mr. Nakunatta certainly hadn’t. Crispin’s own nightmares—on which Mickey delivered daily bulletins—attested to that.
As they penetrated deeper into the heartlands, they confronted the hateful panoramas of salted fields. Crispin had worried that on returning to Ferupe, he would feel some sort of a blood bond to the land Saul, his father, loved (or at least professed, in exile, to love) so much. But Saul and he had both spent crucial years out of touch. The parts of Ferupe where Crispin’s jobs for Yamauchi had taken him—the port cities forced into a vile renascence by the Disciples, the coastal hamlets that knew nothing of the war but hearsay—didn’t hint at the devastation left even two years after the Significant army cut its swath through the center of the UDF. The plight of the people filled him with equal parts disgust and pity—but none of the guilt he’d expected to feel over having gone AWOL during his country’s darkest hour.
He and Mickey could no longer avoid the villages if they wanted to keep themselves and their horses fed. The countryside was empty, fallow or blackened, and the network of rural roads on which Ferupe had once prided itself had gone to pot. Two years after, once-thriving market towns still teemed with the hungry and the desperate. The sheer numbers of refugees and opportunists camouflaged the deleterious effects of martial law. But Crispin reminded himself that that didn’t mean the danger was any less.
Got to keep my guard up. Can they disguise themselves as Kirekunis? Can they fake having tails? Who the hell knows?
In early April they reached Valdes, a town on the Thaulziel River. The horses neighed in fright at the cheery tootling of steam whistles. Crispin gaped, then laughed out loud, at the spectacle of retrofitted Slow Expresses plying up and down, their gigantic screws shredding the water.
18 Avril 1900 A.D. Ferupe (“New Kirekune”)
Plum Valley Domain: Valdes-on-Tbaulziel
The history of Valdes was the history of wine, and also of Ferupian-Kirekuni trade, whose fluctuations reverberated nowhere else with such cruel immediacy. There had been vineyards in the vales along the Thaulziel ever since the Ferupian oligarchy seized control of the heartland and replaced subsistence farming with the tenantry system. Yet as the reputation of “Wineland” vintages spread, prices went up, and beer and ale replaced them as the drink of the local workingman. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became the fashion among Kirekuni cosmopolites to imitate Ferupian customs: they took up wine, and since the lower classes eternally emulate their employers, the Kirekuni market soon grew to the point where the Ferupian heartlands depended for a significant fraction of their income on this one export. It was a precarious position. Within a year after the war broke out, Kirekune had banned all imports from Ferupe. Naftha and Leondze, the ports at the mouths of the Thaulziel and Zielne through which all exports to the south passed, had diversified their trade connections enough that they crumbled only slowly. Valdes’s economy fell apart overnight. Eventually, when it became evident that the war wasn’t ending anytime soon, King Ethrew and the Lizard Significant made covert compromises—having had a symbiotic relationship since time immemorial, they couldn’t do without each other for long—and since their advisors deemed wine a neutral commodity as far as the war was concerned, a small export quota was reestablished.
But the heartlands squires had had their fingers burned, and expertly combining business with patriotism, most of them switched to growing hops for the domestic market. Law allowed distilleries to be established only in the Kingsburg area; the Thaulziel’s viability as a commercial waterway was limited to linking the heartlands with the southern coast. Hops, like everything else grown in “the fruit basket of Ferupe,” went north in trucks. Valdes’s river trade dwindled for seventy years. A handful of vintners stayed in business, grimly filling the export quota, but the whispers of “collaborator” and “lizard” discouraged them one by one. In 1896, Valdes depended on the few diehards who persisted, and on wine, just as heavily as it had in 1796. It also depended—like every trade town in the domains—on daemonpowered transportation. And when, in Avril of 1896, every daemon in the continent died in its cell, the daemon barges were disabled as speedily as the fleets of juggernauts. The hops rotted in the fields; the cases of wine grew dusty in the warehouses.
But then the conquering tide of Disciples washed across Ferupe. Situated on the river that, in the wretched months before Significance organized shipments of diesel engines to its conquering armies, could carry SAPpers south far more quickly than they could march on foot, Valdes was the obvious headquarters for the thousands-strong force designated to subdue Plum Valley, Neufertilia, Greenslope, and Goldwater.
Thus the merchants of Valdes had the last laugh. Their relationship with the Kirekuni appetite for Ferupian wine had always been one of dependence. There had never been any economic buffers. Now there was no longer even the buffer of distance. “Hard currency cafes” sprang up on every corner. It was just another way of saying “Disciples welcome here.” And whenever they were off duty, the Disciples went—with the blessing of the Governor-General of Wineland, Neufertilia, et cetera, who reckoned that the inevitability of brawls didn’t offset the advantageous effects of cheap booze on his troops’ morale.
The rare and ancient vintages stockpiled for decades flew out of the cafes. How could the Disciples resist? It was like getting venison for the price of catsmeat. Soon the governor-general himself had the bright idea of appropriating a few of the steamships he’d been sent to use as troop carriers; he started his own business, Chieko Fine Wine Exports. The squires, well and truly subdued by now, replanted their vineyards with unpatriotic alacrity. Little by little, Significant army sen made its way into the locals’ pockets. People started whispering that the fall of Kingsburg was the best thing to happen to Valdes since the invention of the winepress.
Thus, two years later, the proliferation of steamships on the river.
And thus the Hornet’s Heaven, steel bands three nights a week, where Crispin and Mickey went on the night of their arrival in Valdes, having left their horsecart at a pay-per-night stable and sallied forth with the express purpose of getting drunk.
The crowd consisted mostly of Disciples and Ferupian girls. Crispin whirled Mickey across the floor, his heart light and his footwork graceful enough to pass in this company. The dry sauvignon sold at Hornet’s by the mug had done the job of convincing him that Valdes was the best decision they’d made since they went on the lam. He looked forward to seeing what other wonders it could work. He’d already decided, in private, to sell the horsecart—the poor dobbins were done for anyway—and go north by passenger steamer. The first thing that had caught his eye on entering Valdes was an advertisement for berths on the Joy of Okimachi, bound for Kingsburg. Apparently there was no limit to the potential of New World inventions: first the internal-combustion engine that could take a KE-111 from Kherouge to Ferupe in less than twenty hour
s; now the steamship that could forge upriver through the Hausuisse rapids! Historically, no daemon-ship skipper had ever been able to make that haul without bursting his gorgons’ hearts. But historic impossibilities were toppling like a line of dominoes.
“Where are the local fellows?” he shouted in Mickey’s ear. “D’you think they’re intimidated by the competition?”
“I heard one out of every two men over the age of fifteen was massacred when the Disciples took over,” Mickey said, unsmiling. He danced with force and precision. “Those who hadn’t already been drafted and massacred on the Raw, that is.”
“Then it must be open season on these buxom belles. Maybe I’ll stay here a while.” Crispin laughed, and then said before Mickey could miscontrue him, “No, here’s my proposition. Let’s go north on the river.”
“I thought there were rather a lot of mountains in the way. And what about Etta and Frankie?”
Crispin remembered that Mickey had grown foolishly fond of the horses.
“I wouldn’t be half-surprised if we couldn’t take them, too,” he said knowingly. “Sniff around the docks tomorrow, shall we? Money no object!”
“You always start shouting out details of your personal finances when you get drunk,” Mickey said in Kirekuni. “Isn’t it about time you learned?”
Crispin maneuvered him over to the ledge where they’d left their drinks. “If you’re still harking back to that night—”
“When you got dipso on fifty-year-old dandelion wine you found in the cellar, and flashed your cigarette boxes of hard currency down the village—”
“Listen, I potted them, didn’t I?”
“After they’d chucked the money out the window to their friends.”
“Only a few dozen sen. All’s well that ends well.”
Hornet’s cracked china mugs weren’t exactly the aesthetic equivalents of wineglasses, but that didn’t affect the taste of the wine.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 29