In Acrivain, thought Jehane, they say that love and a cold cannot be hid. In the topsy-turvy land of Liavek, one would inevitably receive a sunburn as the reward of love. Livia had gotten hers sitting on the beach with the unsuitable young man she had finally been allowed to become engaged to. Jehane had gotten hers in the far less satisfying pursuit of loitering in the Street of the Dreamers, moping enjoyably at the Tiger’s Eye, which the object of her affections visited like a stray cat on its rounds.
Things had gone too far when somebody with skin the color of a fish belly and a mind like a good clock could stand gaping in the afternoon sun of Liavek for two hours. Livia was only twenty-two; in Acrivain, they would be beginning to treat her as Liavek treated its fourteen-year-olds. And she had, moreover, actually been courted by the young man in question; she could afford a sunburn. Jehane was four years older and much cleverer. It was time she found something to do with herself. She thought, upending the jug and finding it empty, that she might begin by trying the ale in the keg. Her mother brewed it every year, because that was how one did things in Acrivain. She then drank one mug, declared that the taste reminded her of home so powerfully that she could not abide having it in the house, and made one of Jehane’s brothers sell it. The latter part of this yearly ritual had been overlooked in the excitement attending Livia’s betrothal.
Jehane filled the mug to the brim and took a healthy swallow. It tasted like aloes and cats’ piss and sourdough. “That’s Acrivain for you,” said Jehane, and took another mouthful.
Her youngest sister, Nerissa, found her there some hours later. Nerissa was looking for her cat, who had chosen to mount an attack on the dried fish stored in the cellar. Jehane, sitting happily in a welter of cushions with her third jug of ale half-empty between her knees, startled Nerissa half out of her wits.
“Nissy,” she said hospitably. “Just the girl I want to see.”
“Hana? I thought you were sick. What an awful smell of beer. Has the keg leaked? Hana, you’re drunk. Whatever is the matter? Has Livia taken all the willow bark? I’ll kill her, the hoarding monster. Come upstairs before you catch your death, and I’ll bring you something better than ale.”
“I lack advancement,” announced Jehane.
“What?” said Nerissa, fluently.
“I need employment,” explained Jehane. “Like yours. I want to work in the House of Responsible Life.”
“No, you don’t,” said Nerissa. “And they wouldn’t have you; you’re too cheerful by half. Come on, Jehane, do get up. Can’t you go work at the Tiger’s Eye?”
“No,” said Jehane. “I’m too besotted by half. And I won’t get up until you’ve had some ale. It’s the drink of our homeland, Nissy, and you’ve never even tasted it.”
“I’ll get Mama.”
Jehane laughed.
“Well, you’re not quite out of your senses, are you?”
“Drink some ale, Nissy.”
“If Mama finds out we’ll have no peace for a month. Mercy, Hana, it tastes dreadful, like abandoned bread dough.”
“It gets worse,” said Jehane, “but after a time, you don’t mind.”
“You’ve been mooning over Silvertop again, haven’t you? When are he and Thyan getting married?”
“Not soon enough,” said Jehane. “That’s why I want to work for the House of Responsible Life. I’m not cheerful at all. Nissy, I feel like one of Floradazul’s exercises in mayhem.”
“Jehane, you are more cheerful on your worst days than I am on my best. They won’t have you. There’s nothing they could teach you.”
“If I don’t find something to do, Nissy, I shall go mad.”
“Acrilat will preserve—” said Nerissa, and stopped.
“Exactly,” said Jehane. “Have some ale.”
• • •
The Desert Mouse was preparing for an Acrivannish play. So far as Deleon knew, it would be the first Acrivannish play ever performed in Liavek. This was not the triumph it appeared. Thrae, who owned the theater and exercised over each of its operations an erratic but iron control, had insisted that, instead of reconstructing from memory any of the classic Acrivannish plays, Deleon should write his own. He was Acrivannish, so it would be Acrivannish.
Deleon would have protested more vigorously had he not been persuaded that this odd stricture was his fault. He had suggested that he sneak into his parents’ house, where he had not set foot for nine years, and abstract one of his father’s books of plays. He and Aelim had thought the suggestion funny, and had elaborated on it happily during rehearsals for the annual production of The Castle of Pipers, which any of them could have performed as a one-player show while asleep. Thrae’s insistence on an original, modern Acrivannish play probably stemmed from the fear that Deleon and Aelim would indeed break into the Benedicti household and, if not actually be arrested as thieves, at least suffer some unpleasant scene with Deleon’s family that would put them off their work for a month.
She had had the playbills printed already, which Deleon considered the height of foolishness. He had renamed the play three times since its inception. Half the parts were not yet firmly cast. He was struggling, in the middle of the third act, to fuse into some coherent whole his original grand tale of spying, murder, and serpentine intrigue with an unwanted family drama that had reared its multifarious head suddenly in the second act and seemed likely to drag his entire plot off course and wreck it on the rocks of what Aelim said was a comedy of manners, and Deleon privately thought of as lower-class melodrama.
He had been sitting there with the pen resting on the paper long enough for all the ink to leak out and make a monstrous blot. Deleon snatched the paper off the table; yes, the ink had gone right through and made an elongated black stain on the red cloth covering the table. The red cloth was a cloak belonging to Calla, and she was supposed to wear it in The Violent History of the House of Dicemal. No, in The Catastrophic Tale of the Prince of Moons. No, Thrae had rejected that title, too. In Deleon’s bloody play. Would Thrae let that one by? The Bloody Play. She might laugh, but she wouldn’t let him do it; they would have to reprint all the playbills. What was the blasted thing called? The Revenge of Acrilat? No, that was a real play by Petrane. And the ink was still on Calla’s cloak.
“Damn,” said Deleon, belatedly. His sister Jehane would have known how to get the ink out—yes, of course. “Aelim? Where’s that rice powder?”
Aelim was lying on Deleon’s bed, because there were books piled all over his own. He wore a pair of red silk trousers that also belonged to Calla, which he had mended for her and then put on absently when the stationer’s girl brought another stack of paper for Deleon. (They couldn’t afford such services; but Deleon had promised to put her in the play.) Aelim’s skin was the color of strong black tea, his hair was blue-black like the seaweed you saw at low tide, and his eyes, Calla had once said, were breathtaking brown, which sounded silly until you looked at him. Deleon, doing so, thought that he was really far more beautiful than Calla, who was too thin and too fidgety. But Calla made his throat hurt like the early flowers of Rain that would be gone in a week. Aelim he regarded more as he would some very beautiful book or sculpture that he intended to keep for a long time. This attitude vexed him. He didn’t think it would vex Aelim in the slightest, but it was better not to find out.
“I took it back to the theater,” said Aelim, after returning Deleon’s scrutiny with one of his long, opaque looks. “Malion was asking for it.”
“He can’t need it; we’re not rehearsing yet.”
Aelim sat up into a thin beam of sunlight, and the profound darkness of his hair took on hints of blue. Deleon smiled at him. Aelim didn’t smile back. But he said, in the dry voice that meant the same thing, “Perhaps he spilled black ink on a cloak of Thrae’s.”
“Cold water, then, do you think?”
“The dye will run,” said Aelim. “That’s only clutch-shell red. You’ll do better to think of a reason that Mellicrit goes about with a black s
pot on his cloak.”
Deleon snorted, and then said slowly, “Well, Rikiki’s right ear!” If Mellicrit’s sister had thrown a bottle of ink at him in their youth—which she very well might, the vixen—then he would wear that cloak ten years later so that she could—“Aelim,” said Deleon, picking up his pen, “We’ll make Thrae print up a new run of posters with your name on them also. Ahead of mine,” he added, and began scribbling.
Four pages later he flung the pen down and said, “Thrae’s mad.”
“Not she,” said Aelim, who had lain down again with his arms behind his head. He had been doing a lot of this lately, and explained when challenged that he was learning his part, which was neither settled nor mostly written. “She may drive us all mad one day, but she’ll stay cool as sherbet, and find a play where every character’s a lunatic.”
“Five Who Found Acrilat,” said Deleon. “My father’s got it.”
“I daresay,” said Aelim, sharply for him.
“It’s a very fine play.”
“I daresay,” said Aelim, in an easier voice. “Why is Thrae mad?”
Deleon pushed his chair back and went to sit on the edge of the bed. “Acrilat may be a very poor sort of god,” he said, “but It makes a splendid play.”
“Why is Thrae mad?” said Aelim.
It was too hot to argue. “Because she trusts me to finish this play in time, and to make of it something of which she won’t be ashamed. She doesn’t trust any of us to do anything else. She reminds us when it’s rent day, she keeps a jar of Worrynot in her study for us, she lectures us night and day on the art of playing, she won’t let us go barefoot in the theater. But she thinks we—and especially I—can pull off this play as if it were just another Mistress Oleander.”
“It’s her revenge for Two Houses in Saltigos,” said Aelim. He reached up a long brown arm and slid his cool hand under the hair that stuck to Deleon’s neck. “Better for you to enact your own tragedy, she thinks, than to be perpetually inserting tragical interpretations into her comedies.”
“We’re creasing Calla’s trousers,” said Deleon.
“They’ll have to be washed and pressed anyway,” said Aelim. “They’re all over sweat and dog hair. I wasn’t thinking when I heard the bell; I had them in my hand, so I put them on.”
“What were you thinking of?”
“How long ago it was that the Acrivannish alphabet diverged from the Zhir. I think the inscrutable men who speak like beasts, in Thy Servants and Thine Enemies, were Zhir. You said that was written about three hundred years ago?”
“Yes. That’s when my play happens, too.”
“Does it happen in Acrivain?”
“The first act does. The second happens I know not where on the sweet brown earth.”
“And the third?”
“Oh, Aelim, I don’t know. I don’t know how this is going to end. I don’t think I can kill all these people.”
“You’ll disappoint Sinati,” said Aelim, dryly. “She has never died on platform in her life and she’s like a mouse in a bakery about it.”
“Oh, I’ll kill Sinati with pleasure,” said Deleon. “But if I do, then the rest of them go too.”
“Why?”
“She’s Second Queen. You don’t kill queens and get away with it. At that, it might be amusing to write about people who did.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be wise. You don’t want to write about the virtues of killing heads of state.”
“Why not?”
“Leyo? Whom is the theater for, in Acrivain?”
“Acrilat,” said Deleon, surprised.
“And would you write about the virtues of killing Its priests?”
“Why not? It kills them all the time.”
“Rikiki give me strength,” said Aelim. “I forgot that all the Acrivannish are mad. Deleon. In Liavek, plays are for the Levar. Don’t write a play in which a queen is killed and her dispatchers prosper. It’s unkind and dangerous.”
“The character’s not a ruling queen,” said Deleon. “She’s just the wife of the ruler. She’s forty-six years old and she has eight children. The Levar is a child, Liavek is ruled by His Scarlet Eminence, and neither of them is coming to the play.”
“Thrae says Andri Terriot is coming.”
“Aelim, what is the matter with you?”
“Trust me. Don’t make Sinati a queen. Make her a priest.”
“In Acrivain, the dispatchers of priests don’t prosper.”
“Don’t set it in Acrivain. Set it in Ka Zhir; set it in Liavek; set it in the Airy Elsewhere if you like. You’re not writing a history.”
“If Sinati were a priest,” said Deleon slowly, “Acrilat might send somebody to kill her, if he couldn’t send her mad.”
“Sinati hasn’t the imagination to be sent mad,” said Aelim.
“Well, the character isn’t truly like Sinati. But she has the will of a camel. So. If they had proof that Acrilat had told them to do this thing, they would be safe.”
“But not admirable,” said Aelim, in a stifled voice.
“What?”
“Killing someone on the word of a mad god?”
“Some of them aren’t admirable,” said Deleon. “But I want you and Calla to be admirable. Aelim! Acrilat needn’t come into it. If you and Calla were to construct the proof—”
“Leyo, will you do me the favor of settling on names for your characters? Calla and I are not going to conspire against anybody’s god, however mad.”
“Mellicrit and Chernian, then.”
“Chernian means ‘I might have been yellow’ in S’Rian,” said Aelim.
Deleon dropped his face into Aelim’s fragrant bare shoulder and began to laugh. “Tell me a word that means, ‘I delight in the irrelevant,’” he said, “and I’ll name your character that.”
“If Thrae agrees with your casting.”
“I can’t tell you, Aelim, what a joy it is to me, to be always reminded of everything I want to forget.”
Aelim slid his fingers further into Deleon’s hair. “It is the price I exact,” he said, “for being made to forget all I want to remember.”
“Why don’t you put Calla’s trousers in a safer place?” said Deleon.
Outside, the sun beat the smell of dust up from the narrow street.
• • •
Nerissa Benedicti was annoyed. It took her some time to figure this out. She was accustomed to feeling frightened, oppressed, hopeless, smug, neglected, disliked, protective, affectionate, and furious. Lately, she had from time to time surprised herself feeling happy. But a negative emotion with the approximate weight and staying quality of a hungry mosquito was new to her.
The nature of her problem came to her on an oppressive afternoon, three days after she and Jehane had drunk Acrivannish ale in the cellar and she had been forced to explain to her sister just exactly why she could never work for the Green priests. Jehane was the only person Nerissa had ever seen who, when told of the nature of the House of Responsible Life, had not laughed at its fundamental concept. Jehane had hated it, and Nerissa had found it advisable to work longer hours.
She sat now in the room assigned to Verdialos in the House of Responsible Life, copying crumbling scrolls scribbled hundreds of years ago by people whose minds were not on their handwriting. She was supposed to keep her mind on hers, so that the copied accounts of all these ingenious demises could be sent to the printer. Everybody else was tremendously excited at the notion of having more than three copies of the Green Book, and copies that you could read as casually as the Cat Street Crier. Nerissa, having been engaged in copying the originals for almost two years, was largely unmoved. She knew how many gaps and guesses there were in her accounts; how many times she had asked someone to help her and how many times she had gritted her teeth and invented something plausible. She also knew just how disturbing the accounts were. She was beginning to wonder if some of the early Green priests had not perhaps been a little distorted in their principles. Was that
why they had made the rule against magical suicides, to keep out people like that?
Not that it seemed to have helped. Gorodain, Serenity of the whole Green Order—its head, insofar as it could be said to have one—had obviously been as addled as Acrilat, running about murdering wizards and adhering to the principles of the original order, which had been not a decent, philosophical church of suicides but rather a school of assassins. Verdialos had been first haunted and then preoccupied, and on occasion actually sharp, ever since they caught Gorodain. Nerissa supposed it was a shock to him. Gorodain was his superior and his advisor; had even been, perhaps, to Verdialos’s muddled and tortured youth what Verdialos was to Nerissa’s.
It was at this point that Nerissa realized that she was annoyed, and only annoyed. Verdialos had been neglecting her, but it wasn’t his fault, or hers either.
She had sat here idling and made a monstrous blot on her page. “Nnnng!” said Nerissa, who no longer swore by Acrilat, found the Tichenese curses Jehane relied upon to be unsatisfactory, and was unacquainted with any others. She fumbled in the drawer of her table for the rice powder.
With his usual gift of timing, Verdialos walked into the room, preceded by a huge tangle of green linen. Nerissa couldn’t decide whether to smile or throw the ink at him. Then, as he put the cloth down on his desk, from which its top four layers promptly fell onto the floor, she just stared. He had cut his hair. He would never be prepossessing, but even the silly bowl-cut he had gotten, the kind you gave the children who wouldn’t sit still for anything more, made the perpetually hopeful expression of his face justifiable; he no longer looked like a man smiling while his house burned.
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