by S. D. Tower
It seemed clumsy to me. “But then you have to keep making more little bars when you want to print a different book.” “No, no. When you’ve printed all the copies you want of one book, you take the rows apart and rearrange the bars to make a new one.”
“I see,” I said politely. It sounded clever, but I didn’t think it would catch on. You’d need so many of the bars, and every time you wanted another copy of, say. The Seven Beauties, you’d have to reassemble them. But with carved pages, all you had to do was put the block in the press and start printing. The man’s wife was so enthusiastic about it, though, that I agreed with her that it was a wonderful idea.
That settled, I decided to buy The Game of Love and Chance, and we haggled amiably over the price. Eventually we agreed on a fair one, and I got some coins out of my belt pouch.
As I held them in my palm, about to count out the money, my lips went numb and the back of my neck tingled. On a silver dram, the Sun Lord’s embossed profile shivered and dissolved, to be replaced by Nilang’s visage in miniature, staring up at me. A voice in my head whispered:
Drum Street, Fat Duck Canal, the blue door
The face vanished. As always, the sending seemed to last much longer than the heartbeat it actually required. The printer’s wife had noticed nothing. I gave her the money, tucked the book into my bag, and slung it over my shoulder.
“Where,” I asked, “might I find Drum Street and the Fat Duck Canal? Are they nearby?”
They were very near, in fact, and she gave me directions. A quick glance showed that Perin was still haggling. She liked a bargain well enough to keep at it for a long time, so I decided to slip around the comer and at least look for the blue door.
I went a little way along the esplanade and found Dmm Street, then walked along its short length to the canal. This was a narrow waterway; houses rose high on both its banks, shutting out the sun and casting everything into shadow. A stone bridge, balustrades carved with shells and flowers, carried the street over the dark green water. It wasn’t a shopping area, but there were still lots of people going to and from the Round with their bundles. Above, laundry sagged from cords strung between balconies. Two women were gossiping across the narrow gap of the street.
A house rose three stories on the canal’s far side; the door on its water landing was painted light blue. I crossed the bridge and found the street doorway, whose iron grill stood half open. Behind it, an archway opened into a small garden, into which fell a blade of brilliant sunlight. An old woman, shrunken with age, was standing in the light, looking very happy.
She wasn’t Nilang, and I hesitated. But then she bowed as if to someone unseen, tumed, and hurried toward me. As I stepped aside to let her pass into the street, she paused and whispered: “Ah, dearie, she'll set you right. Nobody could do anything, but she did. I can sleep now, thank the Gentle Goddess. But you must be good, you hear? You must be good.”
She tottered away and I went through the gate into the garden. A red willow grew against one wall. Nilang, wearing a green and silver robe, sat on a wooden bench. She was feeding a white pigeon that bobbed in the grass at her feet; unalarmed at my approach, it continued to pluck fragments of nut from her slender fingertips.
“Mistress Nilang,” I said.
She glanced up at me. “Ah, Lale. You came quickly.”
“I was in the Round,” I said. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but she had aged not at all. And to my annoyance, I was no less nervous in her presence than I’d ever been.
Scrutinizing me, she said, “You were surprised at my summons?”
“I didn’t think to see you in Kuijain, mistress.”
She looked sardonic. “Which is a polite way of saying: ‘What are you doing here?’ However, you ask a reasonable question. Briefly, I am in Kuijain on your account.” She fed the last nut fragment to the pigeon, which fluffed out its feathers as if annoyed, then flew off to perch in the red willow.
I looked over my shoulder at the gate, then up at the windows above us. Nilang said, “No one is listening.”
“You said you were here on my account?” I prompted.
“Indeed. I am in the city to transmit your dispatches to the one we both serve. When you have information, come to me.”
So this was how I was to communicate with Mother. Tossi hadn’t told me, back in Istana, and perhaps she hadn’t known. She’d assured me I’d find out when I reached Kurjain, but I’d started wondering when that might be. Now I knew.
“You’re surprised that I was sent to you,” Nilang went on. “You expected anyone but me. So you ask yourself: How can a certain person dispense with Nilang’s skills, even for the highest of purposes?”
“Yes,” I agreed, “I was wondering that.”
“She can manage without me, though she doesn’t enjoy doing so. Thus you see, Lale, how important you are to her, that I have been sent to Kurjain on your account.”
I was honored, and said so.
“My presence will serve other purposes, too,” Nilang went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You will eventually require substances against impregnation. I’ll supply them as necessary. You still have the ones I sent you away with?”
“I do. I haven’t needed them.”
“No lovers?”
“No, Mistress Nilang.”
“Good. The Sun Lord will no doubt appreciate your intact state, men being what they are Another thing. Forget the name you just spoke. Here I have a Taweret name, which is Dasetmeryj Netihur. And I have never set foot in Tamurin. You have never seen me before today.”
“Yes, Mistress Netihur,” I answered. Then, because the question had been much on my mind of late, I asked, “Everything hinges on whether he’ll make a companion of me. If he doesn’t, how am I to proceed?”
“By some other means,” Nilang said. (I would never think of her as anything but Nilang.) “But that won’t be necessary. He will fix on you as the wife he’s lost.”
I had a question, one that Tossi had not been able to answer. “How long,” I asked, “has Mother known I looked like the Surina? She never mentioned it to me.”
“What does it matter?”
“Nevertheless, I would like to know.”
Nilang shrugged. “Since you were fifteen. That fortunate happenstance, and your acting skill, are the reasons she sent you to Istana. You are now prepared for your work.”
It was the truth, yet it was a falsehood in that it concealed a greater truth. I had not asked exactly the right question; although, if I had done so, Nilang would not have answered it. Not then.
“But I'm not her,” I pointed out. “Why would he accept me in her place?”
“Because he’s human. He will try to recover her by any means, because that’s the nature of loss. Even knowing that the presence of his beloved in you is only a phantasm, he will still want you to be her. If you encourage his delusion and cooperate with his longing—but without seeming to— you will own him utterly.” She smiled, a rare and unnerving expression on that doll’s face. “In short, you must play a role. You must become the woman who was the Surina.” “This assumes he loved her enough to want her back.” The idea of the Sun Lord harboring the softer emotions still seemed bizarre to me.
“Oh, he wants her back,” Nilang said. “He loves her still. Oh, yes.”
I was in no position to argue this. “I’ll have to give you reports,” I said. “Where and how are we to meet?”
“Here, for the time being, when I send for you. No one in your household will think it odd if you consult a spirit summoner from time to time—everyone does it, after all. If the others want to see me also, bring them, but as far as they’re concerned, you and I never met before Kuijain.”
“They came to Chiran a few years ago,” I pointed out.
“They never saw me, because I was at Three Springs then. Now, as for your reports, you will not write them down. Speak them to me and I will deal with them.”
“Yes, Mistress Netihur.”
&nbs
p; She rose to her feet. “And for the time being, don’t exert yourself to see me. You can accomplish nothing of consequence until the Sun Lord takes you up. But you are to prepare the ground, are you not?”
“Yes, mistress,” I said. “I am to acquire friends in places of influence, and make myself known as a person of interest and merit.”
“Exactly. Placed as you are in the Elder Company, there will be an abundance of such opportunities. Waste none of them.”
“Yes, mistress. But unless you need me further, I should go. I came to the Round with someone today. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
“Be off with you, then.”
I left her in her garden and hurried along Drum Street. When I got back to the Round, Perin was bargaining vigorously with a scent dealer, not far from where I’d left her. I had my new book to explain my absence, but I’m not sure she’d even noticed how long I’d been gone.
I’d felt carefree when we arrived at the market, but the mood had fled. Nilang’s summons had reminded me all too sharply that I was not in Kuijain to enjoy myself. I was here to carry Mother’s war to the stronghold of the enemy, and I would be wise to remember that if I wanted to survive.
Fifteen
By month’s end the Elder Company should have put on several dramas, at least two in the palace and the rest for the public. But because we had to wait for the Sun Lord to return, we lost money every day. Master Luasin was angry enough over this to chew swords and spit daggers; his agreement with the Bureau of Arts specified compensation in such a case, but the bureau was reluctant to pay. He managed to remain polite to its officials, but in the privacy of our villa he fumed and fussed, and swore he’d never set foot in Kurjain again, which we all knew was nonsense.
We weren’t idle, however. We now knew which plays we were to act for the Sun Lord’s pleasure, and to tune our performances we rehearsed them in the villa’s inner courtyard. I had already learned all the female roles of the essential High Theater repertoire, which luckily happened to cover the works the Sun Lord wanted to see; otherwise I would have been scrambling to absorb several new parts. Eshin had done the same for the male characters, and we were both polished enough to eam a tentative acceptance from the others. Perin, who was a generous soul as long as you acknowledged her genius, gave me bits of useful theatrical advice, as would an older sister. One was how to avoid being upstaged by another actress, which she said Imela was prone to doing. Perin wasn’t above it herself, though, and she and Imela got into quarrels over it. No wonder Master Luasin had gone gray.
The Sun Lord retumed to Kuijain near the beginning of Early Blossom, during the Torch Festival. He’d come down the Jacinth River by boat and was arriving at Feather Lagoon, so the Elder Company all went down to the quays, along with most of Kuijain’s population, to see his flotilla arrive. There were a dozen craft, all bedecked with pennants and banners—troop transports carrying his escort of marines; a clutch of dispatch gallopers; and leading them all, the big sequina that carried the man himself. The vessel was painted in his colors of scarlet and copper, with the mnning stag of his bloodline at the bow, and glearned with prodigal amounts of gilt and silvering. Her bulk dwarfed any sequina I’d seen in Kuijain’s canals: I counted fifty oars, all swinging in perfect unison, a dmm thumping the rowing-beat like a bronze heart. That was how I saw Terem Rathai for the first time: as the Sun Lord, standing on the sequina’s raised stem deck, wearing a long crimson cloak over his parade armor, waving at the vast and thunderous crowd. He was bareheaded, helmet under his arm, but I could not see his face clearly for he was too far away.
Nevertheless my heart missed a beat. Until this moment, I’d been able to think of my mission as no more than a play in which I was to perform. But there he was, the very flesh and bone of him, and now suddenly it was altogether real. I was to make a confidant and lover of that man on the sequina’s deck; I was to make him rely un-questioningly on my faithfulness and loyalty; and then I was to betray him.
We watched the sequina pass. Perin was pink with excitement. I remembered how warmly she’d spoken of him, so I studied the Sun Lord as well as I could from a distance, to try to understand what stirred her. I couldn’t detect it, although I noticed that he was slim even with the armor and moved very gracefully. And he was young, having just tumed twenty-six when I first saw him.
The sequina passed from the lagoon into Red Willow Canal, and carried my lover-to-be out of sight. I thought.
Well, in a few days it's down to business, and felt a flutter of anticipation under my breastbone.
It was down to business for the Elder Company even sooner than that, although the Torch Festival was giving most of Kuijain a holiday. The next moming, a message came from the Bureau of Arts: We were to perform for the Sun Lord on the following day, but before that we must present a sample of our work to the Magister of Diversions, so he could be sure we were up to the mark. Master Luasin gmmbled at the implied insult, which he endured every year, and that afternoon a bureau official arrived in a palace sequina to take us to Jade Lagoon.
We entered the palace by the Wet Gate and found ourselves in the mooring basin, where the sequina deposited us onto a stone quay. Later I came to know the palace well, but as the official led us into the grounds I had only a confused impression of blue roofs and vermilion pillars, clipped hedges, flagstone paths, omamental pools, and tall buildings among groves of crab apple and cherry trees.
The official conducted us toward one such building, which Imela whispered to me was the Porcelain Pavilion, where the palace theater was. It was a large stmcture of two stories, with an unbroken row of big windows under its swooping eaves and a rank of smaller windows below. The window’s white stone frames had lattices picked out in red and white. It gained its name, I realized, from the lovely sea-blue tiles that sheathed it from ground to eaves.
Bronze doors opened directly into the theater. Within, the stage and the musicians’ gallery were at the far end, and mnning along each side were three stepped rows of benches. On my right was a gilded doorway, and from this a broad stair descended to the theater’s center floor. This floor was called the valley, and in a public theater was for people who couldn’t afford bench seats. But in the Porcelain Pavilion, the Sun Lord’s dais occupied the valley’s center, and on the dais were two chairs of state, one for him, one for his Surina.
Over hers lay a gray cloth of mourning, and as I passed it I imagined a chill, as if the woman whose place I was to assume might be watching me with unseen eyes.
Standing near the stage was Tijurian, the Magister of Diversions, a senior official of the Bureau of Arts. He was a stringy, birdlike person with a gloomy voice and a face to match, and appeared to find the Sun Lord’s entertainments a very serious business indeed.
We were to present him with the fourth canto of The Omen from the North, which has everyone onstage and is very difficult, what with the mixed narrative and declamation, and singing in three modes. Being a meticulous sort, Tijurian also wanted it with the music and the movable backdrop paintings, which belonged to the palace theater and were of the quality you’d expect in such a place. But this was nothing new to my companions, for the Elder Company endured this official examination every year, and they treated it merely as an extra rehearsal.
We weren’t introduced to the magister. In fact, Tijurian didn’t even glance at me or the other actors—my first example of the haughtiness of many of the Sun Lord’s senior officials. He held a quick conference with Master Luasin, they both bowed to the Sun Goddess’s cabinet shrine, and then we got started. Eshin and I, being understudies, had little to do except keep out of the way, so we slipped into the wings to watch. I didn’t know about the spy holes in the wings then, or I could have peeked out into the theater to see how the magister was responding.
But everything went perfectly, and when the piece ended, a brief silence ensued. Then I heard Magister Tijurian say, in a tone of deepest respect tinged with agitation, “My lord, I beg you accept my w
orthless apologies. I did not see you enter.”
At the same instant, the entire Elder Company knelt on the stage, heads bowed. I’d never seen Master Luasin do this for anybody except Yazar, and Eshin whispered, “Father Heaven, it must be the Sun Lord!”
I suddenly couldn’t get my breath, and a wave of vexation swept through me. I was utterly unprepared. I wasn’t wearing anything special, and although my hair was clean I hadn’t done much with it. And now here he was. I cursed myself for being so careless, though obviously I wasn’t the only one to be surprised.
A flat, dry voice said, “Get up. Master Luasin. The rest of you, too. Well, such a pleasure to see you again. I was passing and heard the music. Admirable, flawless as always.”
The Sun Lord certainly didn’t have an appealing voice. Hearing that from the pillow next to mine wasn’t something to look forward to. I shrugged off my distaste and listened carefully.
“Thank you, my lord,” Master Luasin was saying. “Your praise far exceeds our merits, but your generosity is known to all.”
“So I hear,” the dry voice answered. It had a faint whistle, as if its owner breathed with difficulty. “I also hear that you have a pair of students with you. Are they here?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Permit me to see them.”
Master Luasin tumed to peer into the wings. “Lale! Eshin! Come out, if you please!”
This was the moment. I took a deep breath, stood up straight, put my shoulders back, and walked onto the stage.
Tijurian was in the valley, facing the man who stood by the Sun Lord’s dais. I almost stopped in my tracks. Whoever that man was, he wasn’t the Sun Lord. He was old, withered, plainly dressed, and leaned on a stick. There was nothing memorable about him; he looked like the gaunt old men you see anywhere, all wrinkled neck and spotted hands, sitting in the sun by a cottage door.