She picked up her pipe, blew a few notes, and then played the theme I had heard in my dreams.
“Well,” she looked directly at me. “What now?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You made me an ilel and sent me to that poor silly man,” a few more notes of the theme, “and told me to be obedient to Kaila…”
I never did. It was someone else. Don’t blame me. The Other Person …
“…and he won’t court that poor lovely lady and Kaila has begun to like me and I think I like him and they talk all the time and I can sing and dance and make faces and be good to him and that doesn’t bring peace at all and I don’t know what to do next and anyway what about Kaila?”
Gee, kid, don’t ask me.
She played the Kaila and Lenrau themes, mixing them up in an ill-fitting combination.
She sat up and made a face at me, disgusted.
Then she played the Lenrau and B’Mella themes and they didn’t fit either. She pounded the rock with her little fist.
“It’s all your fault. I’m only an ilel, not a princess or a politician or even a scholar like poor dear Kaila.” She grinned and played his theme. By itself it was wonderful. “Isn’t he cute? What am I supposed to do about him? I mean, I’m not afraid of him … or anything like that…”
She frowned, turned deadly serious, and knelt reverently on the slab. “I can’t deceive you. I’m terrified of him. He’s not going to hurt me or anything gross like that…” She paused as though that were an absurd notion. “I mean, he totally respects me. But…”
She grinned.
“I don’t like it when he looks at me like I’m a silly little girl, but I’m scared when he looks at me like I’m a woman. I’m not a woman yet, am I? I’m only a poor little ilel. I’m not old enough to drag him into my bed, am I?”
She was trying to manipulate me now.
“So what should I do? Like I know you want me to shove those two silly people together, but it isn’t working very well, is it? And what’s wrong with the Master anyway? Where does he go when his eyes glaze that way? I don’t know.”
She struggled to her feet and donned her red-and-white-striped bikini-type undergarments, as though more modesty was required for further conversation with God.
“Well?” she persisted when she was comfortably stretched out on the rock again.
DO WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO. I was playing the role of the Great Improviser or Master Model Fitter with a vengeance.
She sighed, “I know that. And I’ll do it, really I will, except that it’s hard being an ilel with such silly people. Anyway, you don’t mind if I complain occasionally, do you?” She smiled a wheedlingly attractive smile. “Just a little bit? I know you don’t!” She played my theme again and giggled when she was finished. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
What can I tell you?
SING AND DANCE AND MAKE PEOPLE SMILE AND LAUGH AND BE HAPPY, I typed in. THAT’S WHAT PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE FOR.
She considered me shrewdly, or rather she looked at the sky above her where the port between our worlds seemed to be located. “Are you always that way?”
AN IMPERTINENT QUESTION, YOUNG WOMAN.
“I know, but are you?”
AS LONG AS THERE ARE ILELS TO AMUSE ME.
She rolled over on her stomach and pounded the rock as she laughed.
I’d said the right words, I guess.
She put her gown back on, frolicked through the forest, playing with the birds and picking flowers, and ran the last hundred yards to the Duke’s pavilion.
Inside he was staring glumly at the sky. She kissed him and threw the garland she had made on the run around his neck.
“Happy today, noble Lord and Master?”
“As long as there are ilels to amuse me,” he replied with a brave smile.
That freaked her out completely.
In a way the conversation I didn’t have with Ranora was as decisive a turning point as my meddling in the marriage of ’Vau and ’Rasia the night before. I knew that this was not just a game and not just a story and that I was not merely a game player and a storyteller. Something totally weird was happening. People, most notably Ranora, were confusing me with Someone Else.
And I seemed, temporarily, to be playing that Someone Else’s game; and it wasn’t Nathan’s either.
And I was beginning to love it.
Next stop was Malvau’s.
He was fully dressed for his walk to the central pavilion. His wife, looking disheveled and abandoned, was still asleep. He paused above her, glanced down proudly, kissed her lips, and fondled her lightly. She opened her eyes, smiled warmly, and embraced him. Only after he had left did she shake her head in confusion, as though she were trying to drive away sleep and figure out what the hell had happened.
The clergy’s secret meeting cave was empty save for the conference table and the brazier.
ELIMINATE FURNITURE, I ordered.
A couple of rocks fell out of the wall and smashed the table and the brazier. Nice going.
Up in the mountains the renegade warriors were shivering despite the sunlight and lifting rocks off the wreckage of their cannon. I thought I’d have some more fun with them.
BREAK CANON.
IDO NOT …
I cut it off. CANNON.
The round tube cracked neatly in half. One half of it rolled off the braces on which it still rested and smashed into several more pieces. Larry, Curly, and Moe sat around the wreckage of their toy and wept as they shook in the cold. I actually felt kind of sorry for them. Nonetheless it served them right.
I was handing out justice with a fair and even hand, wasn’t I?
Then to B’Mella’s chamber where the dark Duchess was poring over several stacks of paper, marking them with a strange scrawl which was, I presume, her signature.
(Kenny, a political scientist like Nathan and a good friend of ours, was somewhat upset that I didn’t learn more at the seminar about the operation and function of the administrative elites in this world. “What’s the point,” he said with his usual Calvinist intensity, “in breaking through a cosmic barrier if you don’t find out how they run things in your neighboring cosmos?”
(That’s Kenny for you. No problem at all with the existence of another cosmos. The only problem for him is why I didn’t do something useful during the time I was more or less in charge. By useful he means, as befits the President of the SSRC, something that would add to the store of human social science knowledge. “Kenny,” I told him airily, “God is too busy to pay any attention to those things.”)
“Good morning, my lady.” Malvau smiled complacently and bowed. “I see you are at work early.”
“I must deal with this excrement before we have the excrement of the negotiations.” She glanced up at him. “You look very satisfied with yourself this morning, ’Vau. Bed another woman?”
“A very familiar woman, since you ask, my lady.” He looked so damn proud of himself that you would have thought that it was his idea instead of mine.
She leaned back in her chair, and put aside her trapezoidal-shaped writing implement. “N’Rasia?”
He bowed again and smiled quite happily. “Old loves are the best are they not? Especially when rediscovered?”
“Does she look as self-satisfied as you do?”
“I cannot answer for how I appear, my lady, but, since you ask, I must report that my mate seemed quite content when I left her this morning.”
A smile played at the corner of the Duchess’s lips, making her very lovely. “I must congratulate you both.” She half rose from her chair and kissed her blushing councilor on the cheek. “I hope your happiness continues.”
“We pray to the most high that it does … now, if I may make a suggestion about the negotiations?”
His suggestion was that since it was the Feast of the Two Moons the next night, she would invite Lenrau and a few of his aides to eat the sunset meal in her pavilion. He would be there along with a f
ew of her advisers, Linco, and one or two others. They might over the fruit and wine arrive at some “principles.”
“With some good fortune, we could even establish groups which would sort out the more complicated issues that separate us.”
“If we can remember what they are.” She grinned wryly. “Cancel the other negotiations?”
“Oh, by no means. The heat can be radiated in public, the light shed in private.”
She nodded. “How very wise. The Lady N’Rasia will accompany you. We owe her a debt.”
“My wife is not concerned about such things…” he stammered.
“I want her here at the meal,” she waved away his objection. “If I say she is to be concerned, she will be concerned … but will they accept our invitation?”
“Would you, if it were reversed?”
“After some hesitation.”
He nodded wisely. “So will they.”
It was a near thing, however.
Ranora, naturally, clapped her hands, executed a joyous somersault. Kaila smiled pleasantly, as much enthusiasm as he ever displayed. But the warriors were against it and voted unanimously at a meeting (in which one of the men from Navarone on the mountain inveighed against the foul-smelling whore in language I will not repeat). G’Ranne, who seemed to have lost her power of speech, contented herself with watching Kaila intently.
The priests, horrified to learn of the invitation, whispered that it was sacrilege to eat the Meal of the Two Moons with blaspheming infidels; a delegation of prosperous overweight burghers from Lenrau’s city appeared towards the end of the day to register their fears and anxieties.
“She’ll kill you,” screeched a Mother Superior of the previous night. “She’ll kill all of you.”
“I hardly think so,” Kaila murmured gently.
Ranora stuck out her tongue behind the woman’s back.
“We could ask for hostages.” Lenrau cocked an eyebrow. “I’m sure she’ll offer herself again. No, the Lady may and doubtless does have her faults, but treachery is not one of them. The question is not safety. It’s whether any good can be accomplished.” He glanced at the stony face of the ilel who, arms akimbo, stood at the door of his chamber, building up to one of her towering temper tantrums. “Or perhaps whether it will do any harm.” She climbed down from the tantrum and smiled approvingly at him. “Kaila, will you convey to the Lady B’Mella our grateful acceptance of her most charming invitation? G’Ranne, will you accompany us to the dinner?”
The ice maiden was startled. “I have nothing to wear!”
“I’m sure that can be corrected.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
Smart move, coopt her.
“It will be the first time in four hundred and thirty-nine years that our leaders will eat the Meal of the Two Moons together.” The courtier could on occasion turn pedantic. “I shall tell her that too.”
“Doubtless she will be pleased to learn that,” the Duke smiled ruefully. “Also the first time in either of our lives.”
“Which is more important,” crowed Ranora.
So Kaila crossed the meadow, Ranora piping his way with a dramatic variation on his theme. She called forth the Duchess with a burst of sound that could have come from a trumpet, bowed very low when the Duchess emerged, then scampered away from the pavilion like an eighth grader who has broken a window in the public school.
“I cannot recall that the ilel is included in the invitation.” B’Mella found Kaila’s smile as hard to resist as anyone else and treated him with the same deferential reverence he accorded her.
“As you know, my lady, I am responsible for the spirited little wench. If I give an absolute order she will obey me.”
“I will not put that burden upon you, my lord. Indeed, I would be disappointed if the magic imp did not appear.”
“I think we will both agree that she would be intolerable if I told her that.… She is very fond of you, my lady.”
“I cannot imagine why.”
The courtier had the last word. “If you will permit me to say so, my lady, I can.”
It did not work out so easily for Malvau. His edgy wife, trying to pretend that nothing had happened the night before, greeted his return at the end of the day with perfunctory neglect. He in turn proclaimed pompously that the Lady B’Mella required her presence the next night at the Meal of the Two Moons.
Both of them were trying to return to their old ways. I began to wonder whether I’d made a mistake.
I also found, to my dismay, that they were no longer pawns to be manipulated in my story, but people I cared for. I was now emotionally involved in their evolving love/ hate connection. Dear God, or Dear Other Person, how the hell did I get into this?
“I despise that woman. At her age, no husband or children and no concern about either. I will not eat with her.” She was working herself up into an enormous rage, the kind I bet she’d used often in the past to control and dominate her husband. “Nor with that evil blasphemous pervert from the other side. It is a sacrilege the Lord Our God will abominate.”
’Vau had been, I think, of mixed mind about the invitation. On the one hand, proud that his wife had been invited, on the other fearing the negative reaction he thought he would encounter. I could see in his face, hesitant and weak, that he was about to agree with her and phony up an excuse through which the Duchess would instantly see.
DON’T LET HER DO IT, I advised.
He nodded, took her arm firmly, and said, “It is necessary for us to have a private talk, my dear.”
While the servants and their daughter watched wide-eyed, he virtually dragged her away from the tents and into the forest.
She was terrified, fearing I think that she would be beaten. Their society, like ours, has deadly violence lurking beneath the surface. I can’t judge whether there is more or less husband/wife violence on their side of the barrier. The wives over there, however, are generally in excellent physical condition and give as much as they get. Battered wives they have, and lots of battered husbands too. Perhaps these two had never physically punished each other—they had more effective ways of inflicting pain and humiliation. N’Rasia looked sure she would be hurt.
DON’T HIT HER, I warned him.
If he heard me, he didn’t show it. I guess he really had no intention of hitting her.
“Now listen to me, woman,” he said quietly, one hand digging into each of her arms, “and listen carefully. We have three children and five grandchildren, have we not? Good. And a virgin daughter we both love very much? Do you want her raped by warriors before the Feast of Four Moons? Do you want the heads of your grandchildren to be smashed against the rocks? Do you want you and your other daughter and your daughter-in-law to be stripped and sold on the auction block? You don’t? I thought not. You think those things can’t happen now, because they have not happened in fifty years? You think that only the warriors fight wars in our modern days? I tell you that we are on the edge of a return to barbarism. There are many who wish it, some who will stop at nothing to accomplish it. If this attempt at peace fails, the night will return again.”
“Why me?” She struggled to break free of his hold.
“Because the Lady requests it, because she realizes that she needs another woman at the dinner, because the woman should be the wife of one of her councilors, because you are attractive and, as I learned again to my delight last night, capable of great charm. If those are not enough reasons, then the final one is that I want you there.”
YOU’D BETTER ACCEPT, I warned her.
“Very well,” she said ungraciously. “I will obey.”
What came next was entirely his idea, not mine.
“No,” she exclaimed as he began, “not here, not now.”
He didn’t force her, though he wouldn’t let her out of his grasp either. But he knew all the skills of seduction and applied them to her with ruthless cunning. Probably, I reflected, as I bowed out of the picture, for the first time in their lives
.
I ventured into their city and discovered that sentiment there had turned in favor of the meal with the other side. The people were dancing and singing and guzzling large amounts of wine. It was part of the festival, but also hope was in the air.
And hope between ’Vau and ’Rasia. When I checked in with them later, they were ambling back to their tent hand in hand, ’Rasia unabashedly wanton. The servants pretended not to notice. Their daughter rolled her eyes in astonishment.
“You must explain to me what I ought to know about tomorrow night,” she said respectfully to her husband as they ate their dinner. “You know so much more about these matters than I do.”
I glanced at my watch. Six o’clock. I had spent almost seven hours with the game and it had seemed no longer than seven minutes. I was completely hooked.
Didn’t I have something to do tonight? I glanced at the calendar. The Goggins were picking me up for supper in a half hour. I was barely ready when they arrived.
Now here’s where things get strange, real strange.
7
A Midnight Visitor
Gail and Terry took me to a classy new restaurant on the Red Arrow Highway. The food easily beat McDonald’s, which in that part of the world meant that it was a place where on any night of the week you could meet at least five or six and maybe a dozen or more couples from Grand Beach.
“Would you look at those two,” my hostess said in astonishment. “They look like something good has happened to them.”
Joan and Tom Hagan were in one of the community’s more perennially troubled marriages. He was an important political person and she an active social climber. They should never have married, it was generally agreed up and down the beach. This summer rumors of divorce had become statements of fact. Yet here they were, holding hands and smiling dreamily at one another like young lovers.
He seemed as self-satisfied as Malvau, she as contentedly wanton as N’Rasia.
“Anyone,” I said cynically, “can have an occasional happy summer romp.”
“Not those two, not after what they’ve said and done. There’s something much more powerful going on. I wouldn’t have believed it.”
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