“Why did you double over like that then?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.” Crispin felt around Mickey’s back. There, the skin was smooth, except for a few cuts on the ribs. “You’ve done yourself some serious damage, Pilot.” Dawn was fast diluting the darkness. Crispin guided him into the deepest shadows and set him against a wall. Mickey trembled and Crispin put his arms around him again. The eaves hung low over them, black and solid, not flaming. The alley smelled of piss. “I’m surprised you aren’t worse off. I saw what some of that lot were doing to each other.”
“I can’t stand for any of them to touch me,” Mickey muttered.
“All the same, a couple of those slices look pretty bad. We’ll have to get them seen to. Your family doesn’t have to know.”
“Nobody except you. You’re the only person I ever wanted.”
Oh, shit, Crispin thought.
“I just want you. I just want you.”
Crispin wanted to laugh. Then a sense of fatalism came over him and he caressed Mickey’s hot thin back, using both hands now, stroking up to the shoulder blades and down to the lean buttocks. Mickey convulsed again, this time shuddering, and raised his head. There was an instant when Crispin could have turned away, but then Mickey was kissing him, kissing him so hard that Crispin’s head cracked back against the wooden wall; but he scarcely noticed because it was too much of a sensual onslaught to bear, the strangeness of the thin lips and the burning wet tongue. He was fully conscious of what was happening, fully in possession of all his faculties, but that was just the trouble, because he’d seldom tasted anything as good as the tired sweetness of nizhny in Mickey’s mouth, and he didn’t want to let go, couldn’t have let go even if he wanted because Mickey was clutching him so close. He felt immensely weary and at the same time aroused. Mickey’s erection pressed into his thigh as the Kirekuni’s single, thin hand roamed beneath his tunic. Eyes closed, Crispin found himself picturing Mickey naked. What would they do if that ever came to pass? He had no idea. Oh, Queen, now he was really aroused. This was wrong, wrong, wrong: he knew it as surely as he’d known that the Easterners’ safe house was dangerous. He still didn’t know the full extent of the danger lurking there, and he didn’t know what would happen if he went to bed with Mickey, but he knew it would seal their fates. He looked down at the bristly head. Mickey was licking his neck. Queen, why was that so erotic? Then Mickey made a movement that could have been an attempt to sink down on his knees.
The wrong feeling exploded, shrilling, and Crispin could no longer ignore it. He lifted Mickey up. It was agony to push away that heat. But as soon as he’d done it a marvelous calm engulfed him. He shook himself all over, like a wet dog, and breathed deeply. “I can’t,” he said, more harshly than he’d meant to. “It’s not right. I’m sorry. I started it. I shouldn’t have.”
“Damn right you shouldn’t have,” Mickey said. He took a deep breath and drove his fingers through his hair. His eyes were closed and for a fraction of a moment his expression was unguarded. In that split second, in the pinkish gray predawn light, Crispin witnessed despair for the first time since that day when he was twelve, when as he fought to get near the smoldering tent in which his mother lay dead, kicking at the roustabouts who restrained him, he saw for an instant the face of the man standing on the far side of the ashes.
3 Aout 1896 A.D. 6:17 A.M. Okimako: the new city
After Fumia went to bed she’d stayed awake for longer than usual, pretending to herself that she was interested in the memoirs she was reading. Finally, amused by her own deviousness, and less amused by the queasy palpitations in her stomach, she’d drifted to sleep. Now, in the back of her mind, she was aware of daylight seeping under the door and the distant thunder of the city coming to life. Her city. Her beloved city. She ought to pull away. She had business to take care of. Decorators, seamstresses, accounts, social calls, interviews; the Disciple-related grievances, inevitable these days, which started trickling in as soon as the gay-girls had completed their toilettes; the latest installment in that odd correspondence which Saia had begun and then lost interest in, which now had to be either continued or tactfully concluded; the new carpeting for the lobby had to be ordered, as did a full wardrobe for M’selle Luka, the westerner she’d hired to replace poor Minnie; and everything had to be somehow fitted in around the trek to the Forty-Eighth Mansion that Saia had managed to establish as a daily event, which ate up two precious hours of the day. Fumia would have to bully Ashie into becoming their mother’s regular chaperone—either that or she’d have to mount a renewed, subtler attack on Saia’s piety. It was becoming impossibly inconvenient and what was it leading to?
But it could wait, it could all wait.
She was overwhelmingly aware of him. His slightly rancid breath: he’d been up all night. His nakedness pressed full-length against her body. His tongue thrusting into her mouth, his fingers, rough and hard and no doubt unwashed, searching down between her legs and then digging into her as if he wanted to force his whole hand inside, in an erotic foretaste of what was to come. He smelled of smoke and perspiration. He hadn’t even taken time to wash before he crawled into bed beside her. Some women might have been repulsed, but she found it flattering. She spread her knees, taking the weight of his body on top of her (and he was surprisingly light). Before he could enter her she stopped him. “Where did you go last night? I couldn’t sleep for wondering.”
“Did you expect me?” He grinned. “I was out.”
“With my brother?”
“Yes.”
She wasn’t about to pry into their lives. Crispin would tell her anything he wanted her to know, and she had no particular desire, anyhow, to know more of him than she did at this moment. He tried to kiss her again, but she put her finger to the tip of his nose, stopping him. “I heard you’ve been invited to perform at the Significant’s salon today.”
“Summoned to perform is more like it, and I’m something like the twentieth performer scheduled for... how did you find out?”
“I had to buy a daemon for the glare in the office. It was ridiculously expensive. I am considering getting one of those new electric lights.” More obligations, more things to deal with. “The daemonmonger told me.”
“You went to the Haverhurst alone?”
“Samone was my escort”
“So now the whole house knows.”
“Why weren’t you going to tell us?”
He shrugged guiltily.
“Were you afraid we’d be impressed?” She saw that she had struck home. She smiled. “Don’t worry.” She stretched up and kissed him. “This summer has been very long. I don’t think anyone is quite that starry-eyed anymore.”
“So I’ve gathered,” he said with ferocity that seemed uncalled-for.
She didn’t want to know.
“A more realistic worry would have been that my mother would repudiate you for it. But I will see that she doesn’t find out.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that.” He sounded relieved, yet he was no longer gazing into her eyes. He looked as though he were seeing pictures inside his head—and he’d gone soft. She reached down and massaged him, using the technique she reserved for lovers she liked as opposed to those she hoped to do business with. His body spasmed. “Oh—Fumia—”
He entered her. Her body’s automatic reaction boiled away her mind, freeing her from the necessity for thought. All she knew was that she wanted him deeper, deeper, so deep in fact that he filled her all the way to the edges and left no room for anything else.
He was far from the best lover she’d had—surprising, since she’d assumed, perhaps naively, that all soldiers were experienced. But then again, her standards were ridiculously high, she’d been told so often enough by both men and women—the former usually in a sulk because they believed for some reason that they didn’t measure up, the latter with grudging admiration. Her women friends both envied her and looked down on her: her life gave her opportu
nities for experimentation they would never have, but at the same time her very freedom degraded her in their eyes. Only her sisters understood that her promiscuity wasn’t so much a privilege as a necessity. The business of doing business in Okimako required it of her, as it had required it of her mother before her. It had little to do with the fact that she ran a brothel—although admittedly, that meant she moved in different circles from, say, a dressmaker. It had more to do with the simple fact that she was a woman. And even Ashie and Zouy didn’t know just how high the double standard was—they didn’t know that they were only half siblings. Fumia knew because one drunken night at the kitchen table, Saia had confessed in tears that she had only slept with her husband a few times, and she was fairly sure Harame hadn’t fathered any of her children, even the eldest.
Fumia didn’t want Ashie and Zouy to follow her down the road along which she had so blindly trotted after their mother. But over the last year, as the younger girls matured, she’d come to realize it was unrealistic to expect to protect them without making them resent her. And she would rather anything than that they resented her. There was danger of that even in something as small as her taking Crispin Kateralbin as her lover. She’d appeased them by confiding that he wasn’t all that skillful; that they each ought to have an older, kinder man, not a boy, to initiate them. But the truth was that Crispin had another kind of experience none of them could even begin to imagine. Experience of war, travel, daemons, and repeated brushes with death: experience occult in comparison with her own finicking worldly life, experience which had bound him to her little brother Yozi in a friendship she still couldn’t bring herself to condone, knowing as she did Yozi’s way of stumbling headlong into catastrophes wherever they could possibly be found. Crispin was a walking catastrophe, the latest of Yozi’s mistakes. Or at least, that had been the sisters’ first impression of him. But now Fumia thought it was just that he bore the marks of so many catastrophes. It lent him a glamour over and above his exotic good looks. And his sheer enthusiasm for life, undiminished by the roads he had traveled, made him all the more adorable.
She remembered she wasn’t supposed to be thinking.
She opened her eyes.
His temples dripped with sweat. She saw he was prolonging it just for her, and with a pang of love, she focused all her senses downward. Her body heated and tensed as quickly as she’d trained it to. They liked you to genuinely enjoy it—there was an urgency that simply couldn’t be faked, and she was feeling it now. Her mind blanked. She was on the edge—she was coming—Queen—and again—and again. Hazily recalling that the younger girls were asleep on the other side of the wall, she shut her teeth on her moans.
She knew he was about to ejaculate when his thrusts grew suddenly shorter and fiercer. He was looking somewhere beyond the head of the bed, past her.
“I need you,” she said to him with her eyes open.
That was being in jail to me. I wasn’t happy at all on the streets. Nobody could say they saw me as happy.”
When I spoke to you a year ago, you said that if you ended up in jail, your spirit would die. You sound like you’re saying the opposite now.
—Tupac Shakur / Kevin Powell
Fingers May Be Burned
3 Aout 1896 A.D. 7:34 P.M. Okimako: the old city: the palace
Crispin wasn’t on. The poor lighting, the roar of talk, the atmosphere as of a giant disorderly cocktail party. Everything was distracting him from making this show the superlative performance he’d wanted it to be. But did it matter? No one was really watching. The jaded nobles and new-city socialites standing around were paying slightly more attention to his show than they had to that of his predecessor, a sword-swallower—that was gratifying; but they had all, of course, come here primarily to kiss ass and flatter ego and make connections, not to be entertained.
More depressing was the fact that the Significant Himself couldn’t have watched if He’d wanted to. His dais-couch was a good twenty yards away, half-hidden by a forest of pillars and ambassadors.
A change of faint silvery bells rang nearby. Crispin had been warned to listen for it. It meant the end was near. He dragged his mind into focus. This show had been uniquely draining: he’d designed his routines for the open air, of course, and had had to adjust them continuously to accommodate the unexpectedly low ceiling. He couldn’t allow the daemons to fly too far out over the crowd, either—Queen only knew what would happen if some fathead tried to reach up and touch them! Luridly he envisioned himself decapitated in a gutter. Seconds later he heard gasps and laughter. Glancing up, he saw that the starburst the daemons were forming in the air had metamorphosed into a disembodied head, tongue lolling.
He winced and mentally yanked Indele, Favis, and the rest back into line. The last routine was a fountain that would turn into a tree that would turn into an image of the Ruling Significant, which he’d taught the daemons earlier, after studying the statues that were to be found everywhere in the city. A tall portly Kirekuni in court regalia, a generic portrait of nobility identifiable by the coronetted head. It would be visible from all over the salon—perhaps even from the besieged dais. As “leaves” detached themselves from the sprouting crest of the tree, drifting in slow motion down in front of the nearest bystanders, he heard scattered ooohs; and grinning, feeling for the first time that he had an audience, he conjured the image of the Significant in his mind’s eye. It replicated above his head, fifteen feet high in lines of colored light. He held it a moment, revolving it, making it twirl its tail and smile and wave, then opened his arms and took a bow to indicate that the performance was over. He anticipated a smattering of applause.
Nothing.
He allowed the Significant to disintegrate into a formless swarm of rainbows.
Nothing.
Puzzled, he narrowed his eyes at the crowd. The mental white noise of communion was ebbing, leaving him feeling cold and empty and as if he’d just sleepwalked through a year of his life. He’d learned to ignore the sensation—he knew it was far from baseless, but it would be short-lived. The onlookers had all turned away. And was it his imagination or had the hum of chatter become suddenly louder? A glass smashed on the stone floor; after a moment of hush, the voices resumed, frenetically pitched.
Crispin was too exhausted to worry. He commanded the daemons to dematerialize. Akele, Belamis, Favis, Kendris, Mishime, and Indela descended invisibly around him. He nearly staggered from the onslaught of their enthusiasm. They’d come to love performing: once they were in the air they never wanted to stop. It was the first indication he had had that their minds were any more developed than those of cockroaches.
He sternly compelled them to rematerialize, one by one, and directed them into their cage. They wanted to clamber up his arms and roost in his hair, and sometimes they even tried to get inside his clothing. Delicate dragonflylike creatures though they were, they had no fear of breaking their wings because they were uncollared and could become bodiless at will. The silver change rang again. He picked up the cage and moved into the crowd. Although he was an obvious misfit in this extravagantly dressed gathering, no one looked at him. The daemons sent waves of longing and disgruntlement up his arm to his mind, fuzzing him up to about the same degree as four consecutive whiskeys, but he wasn’t imagining that people were purposefully turning their backs on him. Backs covered with expensive fur and silk and satin, backs bared by plunging dresses, backs in shapeless burlap garments. He wasn’t just being ignored, he was being shunned.
Daemon-induced paranoia! But he’d broken communion; it should have worn off by now... He headed for the hollow pillar by whose inner staircase the hired entertainment gained access to the salon. Belowstairs it would be hushed if not exactly peaceful, he’d have a glass of brandy. But the jointed door in the pillar stood ajar, and in it loomed the specter of Tsuhachi, the burly juggler who was the Significance’s liaison with outside hirees. “1 was told you were reliable!” he growled as Crispin came close enough to hear. “You can forg
et about your honorarium, you young beetle!”
“What did I do?”
“Blatant anti-Dynasty propaganda?” Tsuhachi gestured at the socialites behind Crispin. “That’s what they took it for, whether you intended it or not. And if you didn’t, you’d better come up with another explanation, and it had better be damned plausible.”
“Look, let me just get downstairs,” Crispin said. “I can hardly hear myself think.” He stepped forward. The big Kirekuni blocked the entrance to the pillar.
“Find your own way out. It’s your problem from here on. You’re not coming back into my jurisdiction.”
But although his words were hostile, his voice was oddly uncertain. His gaze rested on the big silver cage in Crispin’s hand. Crispin realized he could probably force his way into the pillar and all the way down the stairs to the dressing rooms and practice rooms and offices, from one of which Tsuhachi dispensed performers’ honorariums, just by swinging the cage in front of him. But even the most indirect show of force would only make things worse. “Yes, it is your problem! You hired me. You’re supposed to pay me. It’s your responsibility to at least tell me what’s wrong.”
“All the damned Disciples’ fault,” Tsuhachi mumbled. Still blocking the entrance to the pillar, he glowered. “What do they know about entertainers? I keep telling them I need my own talent scouts, I keep telling them. Just what I ought to have expected of a Lamaroon, is what it is.”
Crispin bit back a retort and wheeled away. As he plunged into the crowd he started to feel afraid. He’d known he shouldn’t have come here—him, a foreigner who was bound to get something wrong. He didn’t need Tsuhachi’s honorarium: fifty sigils was chicken feed compared to his earnings in the Haverhurst. But he’d felt somehow that coming here might help him figure out what was going on in Okimako, might help him locate the secret axis of danger about which the city revolved simultaneously with the city of his dreams, the two now locking together, now passing through each other; the safe house on Rainbow Road was one pole of that axis, and he needed to find the other one. But he’d forgotten the all-important rule of finding things out, which is never to draw attention to yourself. Whoever said that entertainers make good spies never tried it! he thought rather wildly, ducking a lady’s ostrich-feather fan—it was almost as big as its owner.
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