Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Deleon settled himself into the imperious, the impervious, the unimpressionable queen and priest, and, when his cue came, walked on platform with no trepidation in him anywhere.

  It was not until very near the end of Act Two that he had leisure to examine the audience. There was an enormous bonfire of Naril’s making taking up much of the platform; Naril had added a frieze of flames to the walls of the theater and set a little blue fire dancing from the head of everybody in the audience. It made them all look ghastly, but Deleon could pick out the austere, moustached face of Aritoli ola Silba; the tired, thin, more sparsely moustached countenance of Andri Terriot; various strange faces wearing various expressions of absorption; an alarming visage with a thin scar on either cheek, framed in long dark ringlets, incongruous next to the alert, dubious face of a young girl; one very dark old woman who looked extremely grim. And there was Verdialos.

  He had cut his hair. He was accompanied not by three other green-robed, untidy little men, but by a tall, dark, cheerful woman and two very tall, very pale, younger women. The flickering blue flames turned their golden hair a very pretty green. Behind them, all in a row indeed, were the pale faces and pretty green heads of a middle-aged man and woman, two men in their late twenties, two round young women in their early twenties, a more angular woman in her early thirties, and a man of about the same age who held her arm possessively. He, too, was pale-faced and green-headed, but his face did not bear the distinctive stamp of the others.

  Deleon’s family had come to his play. He knew that at once. Then bewilderment took him; he could not positively identify a one of them. The angular woman in her thirties, who was pregnant, was surely his mother; but that man who held her arm was a Casalena, not his father. The two young women with Verdialos must be Jehane and Marigand; but he could not imagine any set of circumstances that would bring them to the House of Responsible Life. And where was Nerissa?

  Everything shifted suddenly, as if he had changed to the next leaf of a kaleidoscope. That was Nerissa in the row with Verdialos; she had grown. With her was not Marigand, but Jehane. His allies, with Verdialos. And the rest of them, his enemies, ranged behind him. The pregnant woman was Marigand, with her husband. The round ones were Livia and Isobel; the young men were his brothers. But that meant this placid middle-aged creature was his mother, and this hollow-eyed man who tapped his long, thin fingers on the bench beside her was his father. They looked like anybody’s parents. They looked nothing like his. Deleon could hardly hear Calla’s speech to Malion above the rattling of his heart. He wouldn’t be able to utter a sound if he didn’t calm down. Well, who would look familiar, in such a light? But what in the holy preservation of Acrilat were any of them doing here? Of course Verdialos had brought Nerissa and Jehane, probably with Calla’s conniving. But to whose account should he lay the appearance of all the rest of them? Dicemal Petrane, indeed. That had Nerissa’s handwriting all over it. What would make her do such a thing?

  Calla, who was speaking lines to Malion that Brinte was not supposed to overhear, but was supposed to interrupt, repeated the beginning of the speech that was Deleon’s cue, with a tinge of exasperation appropriate to her character’s view of Brinte but intended to express her disapproval of Deleon. “Indeed, she’s bloody, bold and resolute. I know not—”

  Deleon turned his head with the majestic deliberation of some large reptile in Calla’s direction, and began moving methodically but quietly towards where she and Malion sat in a bower of lilac. They would have to alter the undertones of this scene. It wouldn’t hurt in the long run. Malion had wanted to do it this way in any case, and Thrae had overruled him. No doubt she would put Deleon’s abstraction down to actual rebellion; which was in her mind the lesser sin. He moved faster, so that Calla would not have to improvise as much; she gave a guilty start and then flung her head up with the sort of defiance more suited to somebody’s adolescent child than to her husband. Brinte bestowed on this creature, this smudged copy of a husband, a look of withering scorn, and began to speak.

  • • •

  Nerissa knew just when Deleon saw them. By then she wished he would not. Verdialos’s face, when he met her and Jehane at the front door by arrangement, and saw behind them the tall, gold-crowned throng that had brought her to his keeping in the first place, had made her think as she ought to have thought sooner. He might indeed have known that her brother was working at this theater and had written this play; he might indeed have planned that she and Jehane should encounter him, and he them, unawares. But he knew her; through her he knew Jehane; in however small a degree, he knew Deleon. If he had thought it was time for the three of them to meet, he might have been right. His face as he looked from her to her family was not reproachful, but bore the sickened expression of somebody who has made a massive miscalculation and is going to have to pay for it. There was a class of things, thought Nerissa, that he had trusted her not to do; and she had done one of them. Through him she had betrayed Deleon not just to the sisters who loved him, but to the entire family he had fled from. She was glad Etriae was there. And she still wanted to deliver pain to the rest of her family more than she wanted to spare Deleon its sting.

  Then the play began. Deleon was bright blue, with long black hair and judicious padding; she would never have recognized him without the list of characters and players someone had handed her on entering. But she knew his voice. It had changed since she knew him, though it was still rather light, and he had pitched it high, since he was playing a woman. But she knew it. She realized for the first time that all her family spoke with an accent. It was not in the pronunciation but in the rise and fall of the words that Deleon’s origins proclaimed themselves. Surrounded by the bland, clear Liavekan of the rest of them, Brinte’s slight oddity of speech set her off from the rest of her family very effectively.

  She not only knew the voice, she knew Brinte. This was their mother, as she and Deleon had seen her in their childhood. The chamberlain and the steward were Nerissa and Deleon; not in their appearance or in many of their characteristics (although the chamberlain was dreadful at embroidery and liked cats), but in their alliance. The other son and daughter were far worse than any one of Nerissa’s sisters or brothers, but, as the sum of Marigand, Gillo, Givanni, Livia, and Isobel’s faults, they were very close to the mark. The King was kinder than she remembered her own father, but perhaps he had been so to Deleon. But with all its royal and religious trappings, all its deadly serious intrigue, this was the story of her family, and of her and Deleon’s alliance, shorn of its ignoble aspects, faithfully retaining both its folly and its wisdom, and tending, she saw as the play progressed, not to its actual conclusion but to the one she and Deleon had desired in their darkest moments. And because of the royal and religious trappings, that conclusion was just and proper.

  Nerissa’s eyes filled up somewhere in the middle of Act One and continued to trouble her for the rest of the play. She was profoundly grateful that, as the top of the list of players proclaimed, in deference to the Acrivannish custom, there would be no interval. She did not dare look at Jehane, who, as far as Nerissa could tell, was not in this play at all but would certainly realize who was. She did not dare to look at Verdialos, either. Behind her, her two sisters twittered softly together, her brothers made rather louder remarks until their mother silenced them, and her father, her married sister, and her brother-at-law made not a sound. Did Mama understand this play? Did any of them?

  She saw something else, too, as Act Three proceeded. This was her brother’s apology to her. The alliance, the awful discovery, the failure of the alliance. But because this was a play, there was a reconciliation and a final hideous plot. Nerissa felt that she could not watch the end and could not possibly look away.

  • • •

  Deleon had had doubts about omitting the interval, but as Act Two drew to its strung-up conclusion, he was grateful for this lack. A rest would not have helped. He wanted to finish this. Once Brinte had died as she richly deserved
, perhaps he could go and be sick in peace.

  Matters took their course. Sinati and Thrae, the wicked daughter and the feckless son, betrayed their mother’s plot, which would not benefit them as much as they thought it should, to their father. The three of them then plotted to overthrow her plans; and their plot collided disastrously with a plot to the same end by Aelim and Malion. In a howling blizzard set about with lightning, Sinati and Deleon had their final sorcerous battle. Naril was surpassing himself, perhaps even exceeding his commission. Deleon had perhaps not paid as much attention as he ought to the spectacle planned here, but he could not remember that the arcane motions he had practiced were supposed to result in quite so much light, music, howling winds, or damage to the set. His own lines frightened him; they seemed to take on sound and color and motion as they left him, to shape the air as a glassblower shapes the molten glass, to make themselves present. Naril was good, but Thrae was going to have his hide to patch the curtain.

  Nor did things quiet down when they were supposed to; Deleon and Sinati had to improvise for quite five minutes before the sudden hush that denoted a stalemate descended on the ravaged court of Brinte. Then the crossing and recrossing, the upsetting and the unintended effects of everybody’s careful plans began, and swept the play and everybody in it to its woeful conclusion. Deleon spoke his last lines and died; everybody followed except Calla, who sat, the bewildered King bereft of his books and poetry, and pronounced a wistful and inadequate epitaph on the lot of them. The curtain dropped in a cloud of dust and lilac.

  Everybody got up and brushed himself off; and Deleon remembered what, by immemorial custom, came next. The curtain would come up, they would all kneel to the audience, and then they would climb off the platform and mingle with the audience until they could conveniently sneak off to their dressing room and clean the paint from their faces and the dust from their souls.

  “I can’t do it,” he said aloud.

  “You have to,” said Aelim’s serene voice, and Aelim’s cool, light hand closed with amazing force on his shoulder. “Are they all here, Leyo?”

  “Every blessed one.”

  “I shall be pleased to have a look at them.”

  “Aelim,” said Deleon, alarmed. “Don’t make it worse.”

  “Only for them.”

  “That’s worse for me, too.”

  Aelim’s grip slackened, and through Thrae’s skillful paint job and the fading glamour of Naril’s arts, the brown eye not covered by a patch stared earnestly at Deleon. “That’s a pity,” said Aelim. “Don’t worry, then, I’ll be mute.”

  He wasn’t the only one. Deleon stood oblivious in a chattering flurry of congratulation—smiling at Andri Terriot, and Aritoli ola Silba, and the dark, grim old woman in her gorgeously woven robe, and Calla’s mother—waiting for the moment when the shifting crowd should show him his family. But most of them must have gone. What he finally found was Verdialos speaking with great force to a tearstained Nerissa, while Jehane towered in the background, looking as she had the day he brought an abandoned footcab home. She had grown even more than he had.

  She felt him looking at her and met his eyes. Deleon grinned at her. Jehane pushed swiftly behind Nerissa and halted in front of him. “That,” she said, “is the best revenge that ever I saw or heard tell of.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be on you,” said Deleon.

  “I know,” said Jehane.

  “I think, in fact, that you deserve a mote of revenge on me.” Deleon took her hands, which were even colder than Aelim’s. But she had a nice firm grip.

  “A whole dust pile,” she said. “I’ll forgo it, Leyo, you look so miserable.”

  “I’m not, as a rule,” said Deleon. “This is Aelim.”

  “You made a perfectly splendid chamberlain,” said Jehane. “Some of Deleon’s lines would have confounded a news-teller.”

  The two of them shook hands gravely, and Aelim said, as if he were suggesting they embark on some arduous, years-long plan of research, “You must come to supper soon.”

  “I will,” said Jehane. She let go of his hands. “Leyo, you had better speak to Nerissa.”

  She said that, too, in exactly the tone she had used to explain that he would have to give the footcab to the City Guard, which would try to find its owner or deal with it properly if they could not. Deleon almost laughed, but now was not the time to say anything. She might have forgotten all about it. He would remind her when she came to supper.

  Nerissa, mercifully, had stopped crying; she was pink in the face and regarding Verdialos furiously. Deleon, with the unnatural clarity that sometimes accompanied his understanding of a new part, realized what had happened. Calla had told Verdialos about the play; Verdialos had gotten seats for Nerissa and Jehane, certainly the only people it was at all reasonable to bring to see him; and Nerissa had decided to drag along the whole family. Acrilat alone knew why.

  “Nissy,” said Deleon.

  Nerissa looked at him over Verdialos’s shorn head. With her pink nose and red-rimmed eyes, she resembled a rabbit the Casalenas had once had. Deleon had not seen her cry since she was three years old. His play had made her cry. He felt, for a moment, a pure pleasure; and then he felt guilty. He tried to look encouraging; she might just fling herself into his arms. She had used to do that when something had happened that she couldn’t bear. Nerissa was always not being able to bear things; the problem with his family was that this normal childish reaction to being thwarted was caused, in their case, by things that really were unbearable.

  Nerissa did not fling herself at him. She walked forward quite slowly and put her arms around him. She was as tall as he was and smelled of dust and paper and more pleasantly of limes. It did not seem necessary to say anything.

  • • •

  Jehane felt as if somebody had put her insides through a garlic press. Having supper with one’s long-lost brother was all very well in its way; but that same lost brother had made her present dilemma desperate. She had to get out of that household. She had to find something to do. The awful clash of plots against their mother was going to happen, not in so clean and intricate and dramatic a manner, but it was going to happen, and she was going to be elsewhere when it did, with as many of her sisters as she could persuade to come with her. But where was she going?

  “Jehane!” said a strong, dry voice, carrying easily over the hubbub of the audience. Jehane jumped, and looked around for Granny Carry. She was standing with Verdialos, of all people. What a dreadful combination those two would make, supposing they could ever have any goal in common. She negotiated the chattering little people of Liavek absently, gave poor duped Verdialos an eloquent grimace, and said, “Good day to you, Granny; did you enjoy the play?”

  “It was extremely instructive,” said Granny, dryly.

  Jehane decided to keep her mouth shut, and promptly found herself saying, “That is a lovely cape. I particularly admire the subtle thread of green.”

  “It’s a wall-hanging,” said Granny, “and it’s yours if you want it.”

  “What?” said Jehane.

  “You heard me.” Granny piled the material into her arms.

  Jehane ran it through her hands. It was remarkably soft for something so rough-looking, remarkably resilient for something so light, remarkably pleasing to the eye when you really considered the threads and colors that made it up. “What a great deal of thought and toil something like this must take,” she said. “But there’s nothing like it, when you’re finished.”

  “I can teach you to do it,” said Granny, in the tone of somebody telling a cat to get down from that table this minute.

  Jehane stared at her and wondered if the old woman really was as mad as her sisters thought. Whom did she think she was talking to?

  “Well?” said Granny.

  “Hana,” said Nerissa’s tear-drenched voice, “you’ve been saying you want some occupation. Some remunerative occupation. Do you know what you could sell that hanging for?”

&n
bsp; “I couldn’t sell it,” said Jehane, clutching it.

  Granny looked very pleased; all she said was, “We’d start you on something less imposing. Besides, you can’t keep them all. They gather dust, and the cats have kittens on them.”

  “Well,” said Jehane, collecting herself, “how could I possibly refuse such a prospect as that?”

  • • •

  Deleon passed with a kind of floating relief into the familiar dressing room, with its worn slate floor; its wavery green mirror; the six rickety tables each marked by its owner; the rough-plastered white walls covered with rejected sketches for costumes and characters, torn-off title pages of plays, and many of the costumes themselves, along with a quantity of brass lanterns, feathered fans, bronze bracelets, strings of Saltigan crystal and ropes of wooden beads. Thrae would install Andri Terriot in her study with a glass of wine, and then come and praise their performance to them. Tomorrow she would rip each of them in pieces like an old sheet fated to end its days as a collection of dust rags; but she never faulted anybody right after a performance. If she was too angry to say anything pleasant, she would fail to appear.

  The room was rather crowded. Calla’s mother had brought her a wreath of jasmine and firethorn, and stayed to watch her put it on. Deleon and Aelim’s landlord lingered to give them a cream to take off the blue paint. The old woman in the beautifully woven dress was standing in a corner with Naril; she looked grimmer than ever, and Naril looked apprehensive. Deleon wondered if she had objected to his special effects.