Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “Del?” said Naril. “Do you know about the effects yet?”

  “I want a blizzard,” said Deleon, completely at random, “that is also a thunderstorm. The grandmother of all thunderstorms. And I want a burning castle and falling trees. But all the fire is to be blue and white, except around Sina—around Brinte. And at the very end, I want all the effects to vanish; not just the fire and snow but the sets we’ve talked about. I want people standing on the bare platform wearing just the clothes they walked on in.”

  Naril looked taken aback and then extremely pleased. Deleon, who could feel Aelim’s concentrated gaze like the heat of a candle on the side of his face, considered the rest of them one by one. Yes, he had been successful. They all thought, hearing him state so definitely what he wanted, that the play must indeed be near completion. All except Aelim.

  “I’ll arrange to have it copied, then, Deleon,” said Thrae, “and call the extras for Sunday.” She spoke with her usual serenity, but there was a very faint warning in her eyes. She wanted to believe him, but she knew him too well.

  Today was Rainday. Thrae was going to have to pay more than she ought, to get that play copied by day after tomorrow. He would have to give it to her early tomorrow. He was a fool, and Aelim was going to call him one the first chance he got.

  “I’ll bring it in the morning,” said Deleon, and grinned charmingly at her. Thrae was accustomed to the blandishments of players, and merely said, “Good, then,” but Deleon caught Calla scowling. She disapproved of using their art at such moments. She would disapprove a great deal more if she knew that Act Three was unborn and unconceived.

  Thrae and Malion went off together to argue about which extras they would approach, and Sinati came up to Deleon, with Naril tagging possessively behind her. She smelled of jasmine; Naril smelled much more reassuringly of white soap and cinnamon.

  “Del,” said Sinati, “if you want me to get Brinte, make her odd to look at; tall, or yellow-haired.”

  “Perhaps she could have glowing red eyes?” said Calla. She wore, as always, the scent of Ombayan tiger-flowers; but she also smelled of dust. She had probably been climbing about in the attic after Thrae’s cat again. “Or crown of antlers?”

  Sinati, who was the only player in the entire company who could use magic to change her appearance, and was possessed of a melting dark beauty and a vanity to match it, gave Calla the best reproachful glance in her repertoire, the one the traitor Ruzi’s betrayed lover had given him. Calla burst out laughing.

  Aelim said, “Leyo. If she had a dragging limp—”

  “Anybody can perform a dragging limp,” said Sinati.

  “I know,” said Deleon. “You shall limp as much as you like, Sinati; that will do very well. But for Thrae’s instruction, we’ll make Brinte bright blue.”

  They all gaped at him; Calla stopped laughing. “Deleon, if it isn’t intrinsic to the plot,” she said in an excellent imitation of Thrae, “she’ll just throw it out and cast whom she pleases.”

  “It’s intrinsic,” said Deleon.

  “It must be a very odd play,” said Sinati, clearly trying to sound bright and looking very dubious.

  Aelim sat down suddenly on Thrae’s Tichenese carpet, dropped his face into his hands, and began to laugh.

  It was possible, thought Deleon, that he was the only person present who had seen Aelim laugh before. “He’s read it already,” he said to Calla.

  Calla gave him a level and opaque look.

  “But I thought it was a tragedy,” said Sinati, in her dangerous voice.

  Calla snorted, reached down, and pulled Aelim’s hair. “Of course it is,” she said. “That is why he is laughing. Get up, you wretch, and take Deleon home so he can turn Brinte blue.”

  Deleon looked at the two of them and felt the even tenor of his blood stumble. That brisk tug on a generous handful of hair was Calla’s gesture to him. It appalled him that he should be jealous that she used it on Aelim, who had almost certainly not welcomed the attention. It appalled him that he should still be jealous that Calla was paying this attention to somebody else, not that somebody was paying it to Aelim. Would he ever stop loving her? He had been living with Aelim for a year and a half. With no other person in all the world could he have shared those two rooms above the shop of Penamil the apothecary and his three black dogs, without going mad in a tenday. Aelim, with his long silences, his curious linguistic preoccupations, his glancing and intermittent humor, had made of his bodily presence a solitude, of his mental presence an embrace, and of his rare embraces an oblivion for Deleon. For someone whose heart had been starved for as long as he could remember, not only of love but of privacy, Aelim was the only possible choice. And yet Deleon knew that if the chance were ever offered him, he would take Calla. Mercifully, she knew it too, and would never even seem to be giving him that chance.

  He looked at them now in their Liavekan immunity, smooth and dark as deep water, full with the unthinking serenity of people who are living in their proper place. He thought of the snow he had never seen, the mountains he would never remember, the mad god he could not propitiate, the hot, intricate, friendly bustle of Liavek that had made his parents’ failure permanent and their discontent a closed door he could neither break nor open.

  Acrilat, he thought, thou art crueler to thy servants than to thine enemies. Those who hate thee prosper and those who love thee suffer entanglements of the spirit. I must love you, though I don’t believe in you, because this is a supreme entanglement of the spirit. And on that thought, he felt Act Three tremble on the edge of his mind like a half-blown soap bubble on its hoop. He would have to balance it all the way home; if it burst he would never get it back and Acrilat would be his only refuge.

  “Aelim?” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Aelim drifted to his feet at once. Calla gave Deleon a look of rueful tolerance that was so wide of the mark that he laughed at her, kissed the top of her head, and snatched Aelim out the door. Behind them they heard Calla chortling. It was her delighted chortle, the way she laughed at people she was fond of, not the one she used when she thought something was absurd.

  Aelim did not call Deleon a fool, or anything else, on the way home. He lit three lamps, which was an extravagance, and began to make kaf, which was a luxury reserved for death, illness, and inviting Malion and Thrae up for dinner. Deleon, writing frantically, let him do as he pleased. The entire family drama unfolded itself, perfectly and obediently, lavish with color and pure in form as a Tichenese silk fan. His only terror was that his mind was too small to hold it until he could consign it safely to paper. Grand, ringing phrases, homely jokes, terrible and simple accusations and denials, came to him in orderly procession like the lists of old words in Aelim’s books. It was not yet dawn when he laid down the pen, shook his aching hand, and took a huge gulp of stone-cold kaf.

  Two of the lamps had gone out. Aelim was asleep, flat on his back on the blue wool rug. He was one of those people who never slept with their mouths open. His breathing hardly stirred his striped linen shirt. He could pose for a statue of the young Acrilat, thought Deleon; and love and grief pierced him like arrows. He had not meant to wake Aelim up to read him the play, but he knelt on Penamil’s worn tile floor and touched Aelim on the cheek.

  Aelim was as dignified in waking as in sleeping; he opened his eyes and looked inquiring, as if he had been interrupted in contemplation.

  “It’s finished,” said Deleon.

  Aelim sat up and held out his hand, and Deleon put the inky pile of paper into it. He had meant to watch every expression on Aelim’s face as he read it; in fact, he almost fell asleep, and jumped when Aelim spoke.

  “This is splendid,” Aelim said. “But where is Act One?”

  Deleon thought for a moment that Aelim wasn’t awake either; and then he understood. He had forgotten his royal court and its intrigues. And that wasn’t all he had forgotten.

  “I must be mad,” he said. “This will require six extras, some of them wit
h rather long parts.”

  “Wait,” said Aelim. “Give me Act One.”

  Deleon fetched it.

  “What have we now? King, priest, their daughter, their son, their chamberlain, and their steward. Six, of course, a good fat part for everybody. Two messengers and a knife-maker. Where’s Act Two? Thank you. Mother, father, two sons, two daughters. Six again. Deleon, what if you were to subsume the family drama into the court? Why shouldn’t the priest’s daughter be her chamberlain and her son the steward?”

  Deleon stared at him. “I will make Thrae put your name on those posters,” he said. “I’ll run all over town with a paint pot and add it myself.”

  “Thank me after you’ve changed all the names and added at least two scenes to Act Three,” said Aelim. “I’ll make some more kaf.” He looked at Deleon for a moment and added, “And some soup.”

  • • •

  Despite a welter of minor criticisms and maddening observations of the most useless sort, everybody loved the play. Thrae emerged from her study into the hallway where they were all passing pages around and reading thrillingly from their chosen parts, and in two dozen words squashed everybody’s spirits as flat as a piece of Ombayan bread. She gave her own part to Calla, Calla’s to Lynno, Lynno’s to herself, Aelim’s to Malion, Malion’s to Sinati, Deleon’s to Aelim, and Sinati’s part, the murderous blue priest with the will of a camel, to Deleon.

  Everybody except Aelim and Deleon rose up shouting, swept Thrae back into the study, and settled in for a siege they all knew was doomed to failure, unless Malion took a truly violent aversion to Aelim’s part. Deleon, whose eyes felt full of sand and his head of cotton, met Aelim’s grave stare and suddenly began to laugh. “Do you like your part?” he said.

  “It doesn’t mean ‘I might have been yellow,’” said Aelim.

  “What does it mean?”

  “‘One who waits.’”

  “Do you like it, Aelim?”

  “I should like it better if I had a full month to fit into it.”

  “Aelim.”

  “I like it very much,” said Aelim, thus fating himself to play a one-eyed young girl who loved cats and embroidered (badly) her own poetry (very good) on an endless series of cushions.

  “Then the rest of them must live with it,” said Deleon.

  The rest of them did live with it, although with no very good grace. Calla was absentminded for two days, Lynno was obtuse for three, and Sinati sulked continuously. Malion and Aelim seemed to enjoy themselves from the start, but bemusedly; Thrae, who very often took no part at all, played the feckless brother intended for Lynno with an energy and a sense of comic timing that Deleon admired greatly, though he feared its ultimate effect on his tragedy.

  Thrae, appealed to on this point by Calla, snorted and said that all the best tragedies had a comic element. Just like a Liavekan, thought Deleon. But he held his tongue. The dark aspects of his play were beginning to alarm him; if Thrae wanted to light a few candles for the final turn of the plot to snuff out, he would trust to her judgment. He did wonder at her turning everybody’s expectations, not least his as the playwright’s, so completely upside down. Perhaps they had all been getting rather smug, and this was her way of beating the moths out of their brains.

  His own part terrified him. He did not know where this woman Brinte had come from. She made for a complex and demanding part and had three of the best speeches in the entire play, speeches that he continued to be proud of long after many of his effusions had begun to make him wince. But he felt profoundly uneasy playing her. Or perhaps it was the playing out of her relations with the characters of Calla and Aelim that disconcerted him. Calla was the King, Brinte’s husband, whom she scorned; Aelim was her dutiful daughter, the chamberlain, whom she pitied but did not value. Deleon, who had known better for years, found his true relations with the players colliding with the relations he was supposed to be playing out; he found himself softening or clarifying his lines, adding bits of business to undercut them. This confused Calla, enraged Aelim, and, in the last week before opening, drew from Thrae a series of stinging rebukes that widened to include the entire company when she saw that they were listening to her instead of conferring with Naril about the dispensation of the special effects.

  Everybody improved miraculously after that, except for Sinati; but Thrae knew how to deal with Sinati. She did it through Naril, as usual. She was enabled to do it by the curious incidence that the first six performances of When Lilacs Strew the Air were already booked full and the first three not only reserved, but paid for. This had not happened since the time Thrae bought the theater, and probably had never happened in its history. Nobody reserved a seat, because the theater was seldom full. Thrae took the money, paid everybody early (with exhortations against spending the money unthriftily, and specific instructions to Deleon to get a new shirt, Calla to buy a pair of boots instead of relying on Sinati’s castoffs, which were too big for her, and Lynno to pay his bill at the Mug and Anchor before Daril put him into her pot-boil and ruined a recipe a hundred and fifty years in the making). She then tripled the order to Naril for special effects, and paid him for half of them on the spot. This cheered Sinati immediately; and when she saw how many of the additional effects would emanate from her character, she ceased to be any trouble except in rehearsal, and was no more trouble there than usual.

  On the evening that Thrae paid them all, three days before the play opened, Deleon and Calla slipped up to the little front room with a lantern, dragged Malion’s scribbled seating plan out of the drawer, and read all the names. Calla’s family, of course, and Lynno’s, and Sinati’s. Verdialos, Calla’s friend from the House of Responsible Life; he wanted four seats. Deleon thought of four short, green-robed people with untidy hair and hopeful expressions, sitting all in a row, and laughed. Calla pulled his hair, but said nothing. Deleon steadied his breathing, which was becoming easier after she did something like that than it had once been. Andri Terriot, who wrote for the Levar’s Company. Aritoli ola Silba, a critic of painting who had recently shown a tendency to extend his endeavors to the patronage of other forms of art. Tenarel Ka’Riatha. Now that was an old Liavekan name. It might not, in fact, be Liavekan at all but rather whatever it was that the original inhabitants had spoken before they were conquered by the nomads Tichen had driven out. Aelim would be interested. Dicemal Petrane, who wanted eight seats. That was an Acrivannish name, but the Petrane family was not in Liavek; it was gloating over its dominion of Acrivain. Perhaps it was a Zhir or Tichenese name that only looked Acrivannish. Transliteration was a tricky thing. He could ask Aelim.

  “I wish ola Silba weren’t coming,” said Calla.

  “He liked Two Houses in Saltigos.”

  “He hated The White Dog.”

  “Of course he did, it’s an abominable—Calla!”

  “Yes, of course I’m joking. You’re coming along,” said Calla. “Ola Silba should love your play; that’s just the trouble. I fear this joy is prologue to some great amiss.”

  “You must, if you’re quoting Mistress Oleander. What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve told you. Just walk warily. Let’s not get too full of ourselves.”

  “Thrae will see to that,” said Deleon; and when he saw that she still had three creases in the clear dark skin of her forehead, he patted her on the cheek. Over the sharp line of bone, her skin felt like a velvet cushion a cat has been sleeping on. He thought of telling her so, but she would only laugh and ask if she should go for the clothes brush.

  After Thrae’s scolding, Deleon managed, not to banish his unease, but to disguise it. For the first two acts, any hint of it that might show through would be all for the good; but if he could not manage to forget his private miseries by Act Three, he could single-handedly turn the play into a disaster. Perhaps that was what Calla had been trying to tell him.

  Aelim, questioned about the linguistic oddities of their first-night audience, said that yes, Ka’Riatha was a S’Rian word, and that
he had thought it was a title, not a surname; but titles often became surnames. He wandered off into a list of examples. Dicemal Petrane, he said, did not sound like any reasonable transliteration from either Zhir or Tichenese; but there were at least two schools of unreasonable transliteration. Also it might be Ombayan; Aelim didn’t know much about Ombaya. Deleon was greatly amused and somewhat comforted. Even if some unthinkable catastrophe had propelled the Petrane family from Acrivain to Liavek, they could hardly pose much of a danger to him or his family. It must have been a pleasant surprise for them, newly arrived in this barbaric community, to see that a civilized play was going to be performed. Deleon only hoped it was civilized enough. On reflection, he hoped the name was Ombayan and the entire matter irrelevant.

  He was more worried about his own performance. He suspected Calla and Aelim of having conferred on the matter. Aelim became far less withdrawn than usual for the last three days before opening, and Calla’s habitual friendliness lost its acerbic edge and became merely comfortable. He found his part easier for these dispensations, but not enough easier to keep him from being in a ferment the night they opened.

  Mercifully, the first scene was Sinati and Calla’s, and the second Sinati, Calla, and Malion’s. Lurking behind the dusty green curtain, the other side of which Naril had made so potently a hedge of lilacs that Deleon could smell that bright, cool fragrance above the dust, Deleon realized that Sinati was being splendid tonight. Her lines contained a high proportion of poetry, much of it rhymed, because he had intended them for Malion, who could manage such things. Sinati had never been much good at poetic dialogue before, but it seemed that suddenly tonight, after a mere nine years of lectures from Thrae, the sense of what Thrae taught had finally found a place in Sinati’s sharp, narrow, self-occupied mind. She was doing beautifully. Deleon could have kissed her. Besides getting her own part across just as she ought, she was setting the platform for his own entrance, as the mother to whom she owed what she was.

  Calla was perfect as always; and Malion, as the young steward, was enough to break your heart. Malion was as gnarled as an apple tree and about as sympathetic as a worm in one of the apples. Naril, of course, had done most of the softening of Malion’s appearance; but Malion himself was making that strong, young, diffident voice of the dutiful son who is despised, and cannot see why.