“Having read Nerissa’s book also,” said Deleon, aware that Calla was now staring at him, “I thought I’d better.”
“But now, you think, it cannot hurt her?”
“If she’s hurt enough to join an order of suicides and plan her death, in sober earnest, as if it were her wedding,” said Deleon, furiously, “what more harm can be done to her?”
Calla laid a hand on his back. Through the thin cotton of his smock he could feel the warmth of each separate finger. He wondered if he would have forever over the bones of his spine the red imprint of her narrow palm. She was looking at Verdialos.
“The book is locked,” said Verdialos.
“Forgive me,” said Deleon, “but I think I’ll send the key to her by courier.”
“As you like,” said Verdialos, smiling. “I suggest that you address it to Cinnamon, and take some care that it reaches him. You may remember that your other sisters were given to prying and tattling?”
“Cinnamon?” said Deleon; the resentment grew stronger.
“A Tichenese boy; your cook employs him to do errands.”
Deleon fastened on the source of his discomfort. “Did Isobel marry Hanil Casalena?” he demanded.
Verdialos grinned, enlivening his whole thin, dark, unemphatic face. Calla’s hand hardened on Deleon’s back. “No,” said Verdialos. “Some things never change.”
That he understood made Deleon angrier. Verdialos reached down from the platform and took the book from him. “I’ll give this to your sister,” he said. “Will you warn me what to expect?”
“What concern is it of yours?”
“I am her mentor, her advisor. Might this make her wish to hasten the day of her death?”
“I think not,” said Deleon. “It’s always comforting, isn’t it, to have been right all your life?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Verdialos, a little anger, a little iron, entering his voice for the first time. He stowed the book in a pocket, and from another pocket pulled a strip of paper, which he held out to Deleon. “If you should want me,” he said.
Deleon, looking him straight in his expectant brown eyes, made an astonishing discovery. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.
Calla leaned past him and took the paper from Verdialos’s hand. “If I may,” she said.
“By all means,” said Verdialos. “I’ve enjoyed our conversation. Good day to you, Mistress. Master Benedicti, good day.”
• • •
“Well!” said Calla, when he was gone. She sat down a few inches from Deleon, her back to the platform, and leaned over to see his face. “I wondered about your name,” she said. “The Bennel never lived who’d be taller than your shoulder, and any one of them has more color in one earlobe than you have in the whole of you.” She patted his knee. “They don’t wear trousers, either.”
When Deleon did not answer, she said, “You didn’t like him.”
“I think,” said Deleon, not thinking at all, “that I should like him better did not—” and broke off aghast. Calla seemed unmoved; perhaps she hadn’t noticed. “It’s hard to hear about my family,” he said.
“Did your parents hate you so?” Fortunately for his self-control, she sounded neither skeptical nor pitying, but as if she were verifying some minor statement she had not heard properly the first time it was made.
“No more than the usual, I expect,” said Deleon. Without the balance of Nerissa’s book, the brownish book in the other pocket pulled that side of the smock down. He was not very neat-fingered, but he could have drawn the last two pages from memory, not just the words but the very curve and scrawl of his mother’s untidy writing, the only untidy work he had ever seen from her. She had made eels boiled in broth—a dish heartily hated by every other member of the family as a vile foreign mess, and despised by Cook as fit only for peasants, for his birthday dinner, and he had not stayed to eat it.
Cook had never liked the custom of birthday dinners anyway. Liavekans were very odd about their birthdays. Even people who would never invest their luck, and thus never be vulnerable on each subsequent birthday while they reinvested it, often kept the date a deep secret.
Eels were bad enough: eels to celebrate a birthday had made Cook, fond as she was of Deleon, suddenly stubborn, and she had taken the maid and gone home for the day. The absence of her sharp eye had enabled him to escape; that, and the fact that the smell of the stew made Nerissa, otherwise his second shadow, sick enough to tell him to go away. He had always hoped that she did not remember that that was the last thing she had said to him.
“Del?” said Calla. It was the first time she had used his nickname, the one bestowed on him by the company. The Acrivannish diminutive was Leyo, but he had never told them.
Deleon shook his head vigorously and stood up. “If I were to play this simpering fool,” he said, “how ought I to deliver her three sensible speeches?”
“Three!” said Calla. “One at the most.”
“Come out into the light,” said Deleon, “and I’ll show you three.”
• • •
In the event, Deleon did not play the simpering fool. Thrae, who after all had been cajoling and confounding players for the better part of twenty years, went away on the day set for the casting and returned triumphant not only with Sinati, but with her new magician to do the sets and backdrops. Two Houses in Saltigos was mercifully short on spectacle, containing no mountains, seas, deserts, fires, thunderstorms, flying furniture, talking dogs or vanishing gods at all, but only two walking trees and a modest blizzard. These ought to be, Malion said to a protesting Lynno, within the scope of even the newest magician.
Lynno, of course, was protesting not the new magician’s lack of experience, but his presence as Sinati’s lover. Deleon wondered if Thrae were losing her touch. First Calla, now this. When he saw the magician, a most unprepossessing young man with a wispy moustache and the body of someone who has sat reading in the same spot since he first learned to spell “camel,” he understood. Lynno had been a tumbler before he became a player; and Lynno’s pride was such that, upon viewing this rival, he would find his estimation of Sinati somewhat lowered. Deleon envied this facility in Lynno; any lover of Calla’s would rise in his own estimation.
The magician, whose name was Naril, was, in fact, suitable: well-read, patient, and possessed of a vivid imagination. He would probably manage their sets very nicely, and for considerably less than Thrae had been paying more experienced people in the field.
The company of the Desert Mouse therefore settled in happily enough to rehearse Two Houses in Saltigos. Calla, who had not in fact favored Thrae and Malion with her views of who should play whom, and had been given the part of Bremeno, the young lord who was the counterpart of Sinati’s simpering fool, seemed a little absent-minded, but her work was normally so brilliant that she did well enough. Deleon, who had barely accustomed himself to being in love with her, began to experience, at unexpected moments, a desire to snap at her, and chose not to consider in detail what, if anything, she had done to irritate him.
He was playing Bremeno’s servant, a part that suited him much better than that of the yellow-haired fool. Aelim was the servant of Lina, the fool in question. This meant that he and Deleon were thrown a good deal together, running over the scenes in which only the two of them appeared. Thrae, who had seen far better than Calla how important their two parts were to the proper movement of the play, asked them to practice in private and work out between themselves a number of issues involving the precise character of the relationship between the two servants, what regard they had for their own employers and for their employers’ opposites, and whether they ought to seem very much alike or quite different. Andri Terriot was a master of ambiguous dialogue.
“This is the best chance either of you has ever had to be an interpreter as well as a puppet,” Thrae told them. Her lined dark face with its elegant bones looked so smug that Deleon thought his guess must be right: she was an old friend of Terriot’s.
Which was all very well—and in fact, exhilarated both Deleon and Aelim—but Deleon knew that his presence exacerbated Aelim’s nerves just as Calla’s exacerbated his own. He kept as much room as he could between himself and Aelim, avoiding Calla’s brand of careless, affectionate gesture. Every once in a while, he caught Aelim watching him as he knew he himself watched Calla; but for the most part, Aelim matched his behavior.
Nothing untoward happened, and both of them began to look rather strained. Deleon saw very little of Calla, which did not help matters as much as he had expected. He began to wonder, as his store of minor memories of her grew tattered and dim with much handling, if it would be kinder to Aelim to give him a hand on the shoulder or a tug of the hair to cherish from time to time. But Deleon was not demonstrative by nature, even when he had something to demonstrate; and Aelim was even less so. Where Deleon suffered whatever gestures of affection the company chose to bestow on him, Aelim had a way of absenting himself from under a friendly arm, or standing too far away to have his hair pulled in the first place. It was probably better to leave him alone.
Rehearsals went along with far less uproar than usual—a tribute, perhaps, to the unaccustomed excellence of the play. They had only two major arguments.
The first, a ten-day into rehearsals, had to do with the precise date of the first performance, for which the posters must be ordered from the printers in time. Thrae wished to follow their accustomed schedule and open the play thirty days from its casting. Malion, quietly but repeatedly, said that, because the play was longer and better than those they were used to, they should take an extra five-day to polish it, and open instead on 27 Wine. The discussion followed its usual course, Sinati agreeing with Malion, and Lynno with Sinati, while Aelim, Deleon, and Calla made some attempt to argue the matter on its actual merits and were forestalled by Thrae. She was not, oddly enough, aided by Malion, who generally took up a position opposite to hers only in order to flush out those who disagreed with her and put them in their places. He seemed, this once, to be in genuine disagreement with her. It did not help him in the end, of course; but it made Deleon uneasy.
Two Houses in Saltigos would open on the twenty-second of Wine.
The second argument, which was by far the worse, took place on the twenty-first, when they gathered in Thrae’s cluttered study to consider the rehearsal just completed. Sinati, scolded severely by Thrae for having produced an uneven and insufficiently polished performance of the scene in which Lina was at last brought face to face with Bremeno, flung her copy of the play down among her compatriots and, most unusual for Sinati, whose normal method of attack was winsome tears, began to shout.
“It’s Calla!” she said, at the top of her well-trained lungs. “We’ve never been over this scene together! She’s out all day, and I go home with Naril at night!”
There was a harrowing silence. Deleon, dumbstruck, saw that Aelim was staring at Calla in an astonishment at least as great as his own; that Malion looked blank, Naril perplexed, and Thrae frankly unbelieving. Thrae might demand Sinati’s talents, but she was unlikely to have any illusions about her nature.
“Calla?” she said.
Calla folded her arms across her green tunic and smiled. “I’ve been undergoing a course of study in the afternoons,” she said. “Aelim and Deleon work in the evenings; Naril didn’t object; Sinati’s just lazy.”
“That may be,” said Thrae. “But you are negligent, if you employ your considerable energy elsewhere when we are rehearsing a play.” Her soft voice bit like the touch of rain in winter.
Deleon, flinching, looked away from Calla.
Calla, replying, sounded perfectly composed. “I offered to work in the mornings, if Sinati preferred it. A very little accommodation on her part would have sufficed.”
“Mornings!” said Sinati, with a wealth of scorn suitable to Mistress Oleander herself. “I shouldn’t think your course of study,” she said, as if she were saying, “your hideous iniquities,” her lovely face a mask of righteous fury, “would leave you fit in the mornings.” And she turned her huge black eyes on the green glass jar of Worrynot that Malion kept on the sewing table.
Deleon, following her gaze with amusement, stared suddenly, and refrained most narrowly from clutching at the pain in his middle. The level in the jar was considerably down. He looked at Calla, who, her mouth slightly open, was regarding Sinati as someone particularly house-proud might look at the carcass of a rat in the kitchen. The Worrynot was probably Sinati’s doing. But Deleon considered Calla’s green tunic, and the uncharacteristic turns of phrase she had just employed. “Undergoing a course of study.” “A very little accommodation on her part would have sufficed.” A course of study in the House of Responsible Life. Deleon remembered the feel of her hand on his back when Verdialos grinned, and thought he would be sick. He took a step backwards and was arrested by Malion’s gnarled grip on his arm.
“Let it finish itself,” said Malion softly.
“Sinati, let be,” said Thrae, who would have let Calla run a brothel in the cellar and a private college of suicides in the attic so long as it did not interfere with her playing.
“Negligence is negligence. Yours is no less reprehensible because you want to be with Naril in the evenings. Why did you not come to me sooner, if you and Calla could not agree?”
Sinati’s mouth drooped. Deleon, in the detached and logical part of his mind, revised his estimate of her playing ability.
“You don’t like tale-bearers,” said Sinati.
Thrae, her fine gray hair escaping from its jeweled combs, her face stiff, her fists clenched, caught sight of the four wandering players they had hired for the minor parts, staring with dropped jaw and speculative or horrified or injurious eye, and let her breath out hard. Malion freed Deleon’s arm and chuckled under his breath.
Thrae said, “I will stay here, tonight, with both of you, until we have mastered this scene. The rest of you may go; it was well done.”
Deleon went out and drank sweet Tichenese wine, the sort meant for sipping in small glasses, until his head swam and his pulses settled. Malion found him at daybreak, cursed him back to the theater, dosed him with something that tasted worse than the goats’-milk chocolate, and put him to bed in the little room the magicians used. He dreamed of the Acrivannish spring he had never seen, and his sister Jehane, the best of a hideous family, picking the golden crocuses and taking them to her big brother Gillo, who laughed and threw them in the well.
• • •
The Desert Mouse was full. The posters announcing the play had been of the usual form: they did not boast of the playwright, since most of the playwrights whose work the Desert Mouse presented could not with truth be boasted of. But the bare name of Andri Terriot must have been enough. Aelim came behind the curtain and remarked that the proportion of shabby to splendid had altered for the better; there might even be nobility out there, and there were certainly a number of extremely rich people.
Malion’s dose had worked. Deleon had a stinging headache and a feeling in his belly as if he had been hit with a rock, but these were not from the wine. He had slept all afternoon, missing his last private practice with Aelim. Aelim, who in their younger days had been known to knock him down because he stumbled at an entrance, said not a word about this far greater transgression.
Deleon wondered what he knew, and how long he had known it, and, in a detached and logical way, whether it hurt him.
The play opened well. Calla played Bremeno, who had been lightly sketched in by Terriot as a serious scholar with a turn of absent-mindedness, as an intelligent and endearing fool, a man who had known the names and uses of every herb in Liavek by the age of twelve (so said Terriot), but did not understand the child’s joke about the camel and the Empress (so indicated Calla). Deleon, admiring this performance from his servants’ spyhole, suddenly realized what she was doing. She was playing Aelim. Deleon got up and walked back of the platform three lines too soon, but was compos
ed again for his own scene, wherein he met Aelim, the servant of Lina, in the marketplace, recognized his livery, and sounded him out.
Aelim was considering bolts of cloth turned from dusty cotton to masses of silk shot with gold by Naril’s skill, holding them so that Lina’s livery was hidden. He was supposed to put down the one he was holding just as Deleon passed him by, so that Deleon could glance at him, glance again, and approach him. Deleon, closer to the audience and also the focus of their attention, looked abstractedly over their heads in the manner of one who is probably about to miss the opportunity of a lifetime, and saw Verdialos on the third bench, center, intent and absorbed. Verdialos, who talked like a philosopher; Verdialos, who could help you make a beautiful and orderly death; Verdialos, to whom not only Nerissa, but Calla, had spoken at length; Verdialos, who felt responsibility for anyone who might think of killing himself.
Deleon was seized by a disastrous but enchanting impulse, and grimly acted on it. Turning a little too quickly and already hearing what Thrae would say to him about it, he caught sight of Aelim, stopped dead, and proceeded to enact someone smitten with love at first sight. He then recovered his equanimity, settled his cap more firmly on his head, and approaching, spoke, in husky and uncertain accents, the line Aelim was not expecting for perhaps ten seconds more.
Aelim stared at him for about as long as it took the laughter to die down. Then, with the generosity and the care for the theater that Deleon had relied on, Aelim played up to him, admiring in his turn, but cautious; and half relieved, half disappointed, several speeches later, to be presented with a political plot and not a romantic proposition. All their dealings with one another thereafter were laced with the silent language of one servant’s courtship and the other’s consideration of it, so that any ambiguous proposal on the part of one served as two proposals at once, and any acquiescence likewise. The audience enjoyed itself mightily. Aelim manifested a turn for ironic comedy that Deleon had never seen in him before. That, at least, should please Thrae.
Points of Departure Page 13
