Act of Will

by A. J. Hartley

  If I’d stopped at two, I might have got away with it. But no. Brundage emerged at the stage door just I was withdrawing my hand. I grinned and blustered and asked him what the crowd was like, but it was no good. He’d seen.

  Brundage was a tall, slender man with a sardonic face that made him seem smarter than he was. He was a good minor bad guy, but didn’t have the stage presence to be a real villain, and though he had a loud voice that carried well in a brassy sort of way, he delivered every line at full volume. As a man and as an actor, he had no depth, no richness or complexity. He also didn’t like me very much and was a good friend of Rufus Ramsbottom.

  It was thus with some trepidation that I slipped past him, avoiding his eyes as I made for the stage door. He let me go, but he was smiling that slightly twisted smile of his, like he was sucking something very sweet and very sour at the same time. He wasn’t letting me off the hook; he was figuring out how best to twist it.

  I listened for the cue and strode out, but my heart wasn’t in it, and even the familiar patter of applause at my appearance didn’t still the wobble of my stomach. This was going to get worse before it got better.

  “Good day, my lord,” I said on cue. “I feared I’d come too late.”

  I was Julia, a minor love interest in a play largely preoccupied with a series of bizarre poisonings. I’d played the part a dozen times, and though it was a smallish role by my standards, I had some speeches in the fourth act in which I whined about justice and honesty and got to rant and wail a bit. Sometimes the audience even cried.

  Not today, I thought. If there was any weeping to be done, it would be me, crying over an empty purse and being drummed out of the company for dishonesty. And it might be worse. Brundage and Rufus were men of little imagination, but they usually came up with something terse and painful in the way of punishment. Once when one of the prop boys had been caught listening in on some conversation they had wanted to keep to themselves, they had cut off his right earlobe to make the point. It was as close as they came to whimsy.

  Twenty lines into the scene, Rufus had an exit. Usually it was a relief to see him lumber out of sight, and the play as a whole picked up as those still onstage got to do more than navigate around his cluelessness, but not today. I knew that the moment he got off, Brundage would be waiting to tell him how I had adjusted his funds, and by the time I headed into the green room, they’d be ready to have a little word with me. Except that it wouldn’t be a word. It would be something altogether different involving an oak cudgel and a bit of lead pipe. Whether or not they would hand over whatever was left to the Empire, I couldn’t say, but being welcomed into the company after this seemed a long shot.

  I watched him go off, my guts hollow, and it was like I’d never been onstage before. I knew I had lines, but for a moment I just stood there, my mind blank, feeling the audience starting to watch me in that too-curious way they have when they sense someone screwing up, like hyenas spotting a wounded gazelle. Rafe Jenkins glowered at me across the stage.

  “So, Lady Julia,” he said, completely buggering up the verse, “you already spoke to my lord Francisco?”

  “What?” I said, tearing my eyes from the stage door where Brundage and Rufus were whispering just out of the audience’s sight-line. “Oh, right. Yes. I did.”

  Someone in the front row nudged her neighbor and giggled. Even in my stark, bewildered terror, a tiny part of me hated her for it.

  “And,” said Rafe, laboring and glaring still more pointedly, “Lord Francisco told you that—”

  “That,” I said quickly. “Something. Yes. He told me something.”

  It was like I was watching someone else, some stupid kid in a dress who had no right being onstage in public.

  A ripple of mirth coursed through the entire pit and I flushed. There was a long pause and Rafe glared at me. I had no idea what my lines were. I couldn’t remember the plot or who I was supposed to be. All I could see clearly was Rufus waiting for me in the green room with his cudgel. Then there was a bang at the back of the house and, for the briefest of moments, things seemed to be looking up.

  The bang came from the main street entrance into the theatre. I heard shouts, and the crowd standing in the pit began to part like sheep before a dog. Probably a rowdy drunk, I thought: just the excuse I needed to slip away until things cooled down a little.

  But it wasn’t a drunk. It was a man on a horse, riding right into the theatre. He wore silver plate armor and a white cape. Behind him were twenty foot soldiers: Diamond Empire guards. There was a murmur of discontent, but the air smelled of unease, even panic. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  The mounted officer produced a roll of parchment and, as his horse skittered to a halt on the cobbles, started to read aloud in one of those voices that you can tell isn’t used to being messed about.

  “On behalf of the Diamond Empire, governors of these territories,” he said, “I hereby declare this and all such theatres permanently closed as houses of rebellion and immorality. The building will be demolished by fire and the land impounded by the state. The following lewd and seditious persons are to be taken into Empire custody for their part in the playing and writing of plays and entertainments unbecoming to the dignity of an Empire territory.”

  I stared at him. He couldn’t be serious. Close the theatres? Arrest the writers? It was madness.

  The crowd thought so too. There was a surly grumbling from all over the building and a scattering of boos and hisses.

  The officer nodded as if this was to be expected, and the soldiers drew their weapons. They were serious.

  “William Hawthorne,” said the officer.

  “Hello?” I said guilelessly. “Yes?”

  The officer paused.

  “I’m reading the list,” he said.

  “List?”

  “Of those who are to be arrested,” he added with steely patience.

  “Ah,” I said. “William who?”

  “Hawthorne,” said the officer. “Isn’t that you?”

  “Me?” I said. “No. Never heard of him. I’m just a kid.”

  “That’s Hawthorne, all right,” said a big, booming voice from the stage-left side. It was Rufus. He took a step out onto the lip of the stage and pointed a thick finger at me. “William Hawthorne.” He added, in case anyone might have missed the gist of the chat thus far, “Actor, playwright, thief, liar, and all-round snake.”

  It was his most flawless performance to date.

  The officer considered this. Then, returning his eyes to the list, he said simply, “Take him.”

  SCENE II

  Making an Exit

  Immediately two of the foot soldiers plunged through the crowd towards the stage: I hesitated, but I had been visited by a sudden and violent conviction that being “taken” by these men would likely turn out to be a very bad thing indeed, something far beyond even Rufus’s mean little imagination.

  Sedition? I was an apprentice actor who had some small talent with a pen. How was that sedition?

  It made no sense, but the Empire tossed that word around with fond abandon, and anyone tarred by that particular brush wouldn’t see the light of day for some considerable time. Hadn’t a poet in Freescroft had a hand cut off only a couple of days ago? I wasn’t sure, but it suddenly seemed more than likely. And the fines! Why must authorities persist in thinking that actors have some secret treasure trove? At least if they demanded one of my hands, I could oblige. If they wanted silver, I was really screwed.

  All this mental rambling took about three seconds, during which the young troopers in the pit readied themselves as if they expected some monstrous grizzly to come crashing towards them. In fact, of course, I was an adolescent in a dress—a skinny adolescent at that, whose combat skills were limited to the ability to deliver heroic battlefield speeches from old plays.

  Panic set in. I had no choice but to turn myself over.

  Having reached that conclusion rather reasonably, I cannot say
exactly what it was that made me scale one of the pillars that supported the stage canopy and scramble over the rail onto the balcony. Maybe my simmering resentment of the Empire had finally taken over. Maybe I was standing up for the oppressed in the face of overwhelming force. Maybe I was outraged that the art of the theatre should be so demeaned by these thuggish philistines. Maybe, and this was more likely, I just hated the idea that Rufus’s limited intellectual abilities should be so instrumental in bringing me to “justice.” Yes, that was more like it. My pride was injured.

  Stick around, I thought, and they’ll wound more than your pride.

  Two of the soldiers had unslung bows and were training them in my direction. By the time I had hauled myself onto the balcony—and try doing that in a floor-length velvet gown—one white-feathered arrow had whistled over my head and another one had slammed into the oak rail just below my hand. The crowd murmured, coming to life as if the play had picked up where it left off. I gave a startled yelp, half dumb realization of what I had begun to do, half sheer bladder-stretching terror.

  I glanced down. I always loved being up here in the balcony with the music rooms behind me and a sea of faces turned up and hanging on my every word. I’d had some of my greatest actorly moments from this very spot, a suitably dramatic place to go down in a hail of arrows.

  But the play wouldn’t end that way. Not today. No tragedies for William. I was in strictly comic mode, which is, I suppose, why I pulled the ladder over and started shinning up to the trap in the canopy. I started up, dodged another arrow, nearly fell to a messy death on the stage below, and wrenched the trap open. As the officer below started barking more orders and the crowd began to panic, I climbed, skirts hitched round my knees.

  Inside the roof canopy was what the company members mock-ingly called “the gods.” It was from here that we lowered some poor bastard in dreadful makeup at the end of those awful the-plot-has-fallen-apart-and-only-some-ludicrously-unrealistic-device-can-cobble-together-an-ending plays. There wasn’t much up there but rafters, a winch, and another ladder up onto the thatch. I was up it before you could say “death wish.” The audience, those who weren’t running to get out before they were held responsible for this little fiasco, applauded me. No one liked the Empire all that much.

  There was a chimney stack at one part of the thatched ridge, and I flung myself at it and clung on for dear life, wondering vaguely what lunatic scheme was likely to get me out of this unskewered. The roof ran only around a part of the stage and the perimeter galleries, so I could see the chaos in the yard below quite clearly. I leaned out to look down, and another arrow shot up and came within a cricket’s knee joint of finding my throat. Rufus was on the stage, shouting and pointing like the fool he was. And I was sitting on the roof in a dress being shot at by the Empire.

  Oh yes. Rufus is the fool here.

  Where the devil was I going? I looked around for the obligatory passing hay cart (a staple element of stories like the one I seemed to have wandered into) into which I could safely leap, but it had missed its cue. Five soldiers and the officer were on the stage now, all shooting and trying to shut Rufus up, while Brundage stood there like a sardonic angel of death, sending glances of bitter amusement up with their arrows. For the moment I was safe behind the chimney, but four of the troopers were on their way up after me.

  There was still no sign of the hay cart.

  There was, however, a house, its roof about ten feet away. The street was about thirty-five feet below. I released the chimney and let another arrow scud past me. Then I rose, setting one foot on each side of the sloping thatch, and began running or staggering to the far end, where I half jumped, half fell across the gap.

  The edge of the neighboring roof hit me in the stomach, drove the breath from my body, and almost knocked my wig off. (Don’t ask why I was still wearing it. I have no idea.) There were shouts and the sounds of running feet below. I clawed myself up, that infernal dress making it almost impossible for me to get my legs up. (How did women move in these things?) I hitched the skirt up around my waist and—as if they had been waiting for me to do just that—one of their arrows immediately found my thigh and stuck there like a firebrand.

  I rolled myself out of sight and stared with horrified fascination at the wooden shaft that grew out of the side of my leg, wagging about as I shifted to get a better look. Any sense of pain was temporarily stifled by disbelief. This was a new dimension to my life: Bill the Moving Target, Wounded Will. I pulled at it and gasped as it slid out easily, blood seeping out in a thin trickle. Not much of a wound, I pointed out to myself, vaguely disappointed. The flat arrowhead had gone in at an acute angle, barely under the skin really, but it hurt like . . . well, like an arrow in the leg, actually, and it served to remind me of what I was doing.

  I tore a strip off the hem of my dress and tried to bind it round my leg to staunch the blood, but it fell off as soon as I rose to a crouch (the bandage, not my leg). The pain, which had been dull and smoldering, suddenly reared like a small pony and kicked me irritably. For a second I just sat there, but I knew that while the wound in my leg was pretty minor, if I stayed where I was, they’d give me something to be proud of.

  I started to crawl, swearing under my breath at Rufus Ramsbottom, the Empire, the patrons of the Eagle, and, without good reason, Mrs. Pugh. I passed three chimney stacks, my dress snagging constantly on the thatch, and kept going. I knew that this chain of mediocre dwellings led into one of Cresdon Town’s poorer market areas, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was at the end of the terrace. After half a dozen successful (well, reasonably successful) years as a theatrical manipulator of other people’s greed and stupidity, with hardly a brush with the authorities, I was reduced to dragging my bleeding self—in a dress—through filthy, nest-filled, spider-riddled thatch, while members of the dreaded occupation force tried to put pieces of steel through my windpipe. Nice job, Will Hawthorne, you finally got what you deserve. Good old Quick Bill. Another blinding success delivered by Will the Sharp. And all for three lousy silver pieces. Not enough to cover my funeral. Curse Rufus, curse the Empire, curse me.

  Then, without warning, the thatch became terra-cotta tile. Now what? I could hear geese and housewives in the street below. I lifted my head a fraction, waited for an arrow through my throat, and, when it didn’t materialize, looked about me.

  The town had not fared well since the Empire took control, and this was one of the poorer districts. There were puddles of stagnant, muddy water ranging from mere wheel ruts to large greenish pools across the street, all choked with refuse and buzzing with summer flies. Some of the soldiers were down there, their noses screwed up in disgust, their mud-spattered white cloaks hitched up around their thighs, but they didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. I risked a glance back the way I had come and saw three more working their way across the roof. I had to get down.

  I leaned out over the edge, wondering if I could survive the drop, and found myself looking upside down into an open leaded window set in the plaster and timber wall below me. An elderly woman with a bucket of God knows what poised to be dumped into the street met my gaze and held it.

  Without a word she pushed the window wider and stepped back. I swung myself down and through in a single movement that only five minutes ago would have seemed impossible.

  The woman silently returned to the window, caught the eye of one of the soldiers, and pointedly emptied her bucket into the over-flowing drainage ditch below. A waft of shocking stench reached us before she shut the window.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I babbled.

  “Shut up,” she muttered, “you’re not safe yet. They aren’t that stupid. Get a move on. Don’t gape, you idiot, do something. What kind of a fool are you anyway, hopping around on the roof while they shoot at you?”

  I looked at her with more irritation than I would have thought possible in the circumstances, and wondered vaguely if she could be related to Mrs. Pugh.

&n
bsp; There was an open doorway that led into the house proper, a bed, a small table, and a wall of pine boards where the wing had been built out over the street so it butted up against a house on the other side.

  “Got a weapon?” she asked in a businesslike tone. “Sword? Mace?”

  I shook my head, temporarily dumbstruck. Of course I didn’t. That would have been illegal. She tutted pointedly, a look of bored exasperation on her wrinkled features, and started rummaging in a battered armoire, from which she produced a heavy-looking felling ax. She heaved it at me haft-first and it swung madly as I struggled to control its weight.

  “Go on, you idiot, go on!” she snarled, hobbling away from the swaying ax head. “Cut it down before you kill us both.”

  She indicated the pine-boarded wall. I stared at her, wondering if she was serious, then heard the banging and shouting of soldiers downstairs. She made an impatient gesture as if she was dealing with a mentally subnormal baboon and I, suddenly angry at her and pretty much everyone else in the world, swung the ax hard into the wood.

  It was faintly satisfying to see the splinters fly. I gritted my teeth and hacked away as the old woman behind me kicked my shins and told me to get a move on. For a moment I was tempted to swing the bloody thing at her, but that desire was replaced by surprise at seeing a middle-aged man on the other side of what was left of the wall, climbing hastily out of a tin bath and staring at me with terrified astonishment.

  I turned to thank the crabby old bag but found she was already descending to answer the door and deflect the Empire guards, clearly the only people she hated enough to be of such dramatic assistance to anyone. The man on the other side of the wall backed off with disbelief in his eyes as I set to climbing through the hole. He flashed a look of alarm at the ax, so I dropped it and made pacifying noises that in no way helped the situation. For about the fiftieth time since this nightmare began I wished I wasn’t wearing a dress and a cascade of blond curls. There was only one way out of the room, and I took it, blundering past him onto a landing and down a staircase, while he stood gibbering and staring as before. You couldn’t really blame him: it’s not every day that a cross-dressing ax murderer smashes his way into your bathroom. Not waiting to examine my surroundings, I found the back door and unbolted it.