Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  It is like a disease, he thought as the crowd began to break up, some pushing forward toward Anissa and the high nobility, others hastening out into the cold winds that swirled through Market Square. In all respects it looked like an ordinary, festive occasion, but Tinwright and everyone else knew that just across the bay a dreadful, silent enemy was watching them. A fever of disordered thinking rules the place, and I have it as badly as anyone here. We are not a city anymore, we are a plague hospital.

  To his shock, Hendon Tolly actually noticed him as he tried to slip past.

  “Ah, poet.” The guardian of Southmarch fixed him with an amused stare, leaning away from a conversation with Tirnan Havemore. Elan, who stood beside Hendon, did her best not to meet Tinwright’s eye. “You skulk, sir,” Tolly accused him. “Does this mean you will not have your poem ready for us at tomorrow’s feast? Or are you merely fearful of its quality?”

  “It will be ready, my lord.” He had been staying up until long past midnight for almost a tennight, burning oil and candles at a prodigious rate (much to the disgust of Puzzle, who had an old man’s love for going to bed just after sundown and for pinching coppers until they squeaked). “I only hope it will please you.”

  “Oh, as do I, Tinwright.” Tolly grinned like a fox finding an unguarded bird’s nest. “As do I.”

  The master of Southmarch said a few more quiet words to Havemore, then turned to go, tugging Elan M’Cory after him as though she were a dog or a cloak. When she didn’t move quickly enough, Hendon Tolly turned back and grabbed at her shoulder, but wound up pinching the pale flesh of her bosom instead. She winced and let out a little moan.

  “When I say step lively,” he told her in a quiet, measured voice, “then you must jump, slut, and quickly. If there are any tricks like that in front of my brother I will make you dance as you have never danced before. Now come.”

  Havemore and the others standing nearby did not even appear to have noticed, and for a mad moment Tinwright could almost believe he had imagined it. Elan silently followed Hendon out, a patch of angry scarlet blooming on the white of her breast.

  It was strange to step out this way, her lower limbs moving so freely. In truth, Utta felt disturbingly naked—the shape of her own legs was something she usually saw only when she bathed or prepared herself for sleep, not striding down a street with nothing between them and the world but a thin layer of worsted woolen hose.

  Sister Utta had done her best not to nag at Princess Briony when the girl had become fixed on wearing boy’s clothing, although in her heart Utta had felt it was the sign of something unbalanced in the child, perhaps a reaction to all the sadness around her. But suddenly she could understand a little of what Briony had meant when she had spoken of “the freedoms men take for granted.” Was it truly the gods themselves who had made women the weaker sex, or was it something as simple as differences of dress and custom?

  But they are stronger than us, Utta thought. Any woman who has been despoiled or brutalized by a man no taller than she knows that only too well.

  Still, strength alone was not enough to make superiority, she reflected, otherwise oxen and growling lions would command empires. Instead, men hobbled oxen so they could not move faster than a walk. Was it true, as Briony had complained, that men hobbled their women as well?

  Or do we hobble ourselves? But if so, why would we do such a thing?

  Of course, women would not be the first or only slaves to aid their captors.

  Listen to me—slaves! Captors! It is these times in which we live—they turn everything downside up and make us question all. But meanwhile, I am not watching what I am doing and will probably walk myself into the lagoon and drown!

  Utta looked up. She hadn’t actually reached the lagoon yet, and was in fact only halfway down Tin Street, near the Onir Kyma temple—still outside the Skimmer neighborhoods. She was glad of the temple tower and the few other landmarks she recognized: she had never been this far from the castle except on the main road to the causeway when she and her Zorian sisters went to the mainland for the spring fair.

  A group of men lolled in the road ahead of her, all but blocking the narrow way. As she drew closer she saw they were ordinary men, not Skimmers—laborers by the look of them, unshaven and wearing work-stained clothes. To her surprise, they did not make way as she approached but remained where they were, watching her with sullen interest.

  I am used to being a woman, she thought —and a priestess at that. People step aside for me, or even ask blessing. Is this the way it is for all men? Or is there some reason they are blocking the road?

  “Here now,” one of the smallest of the men said. He had a lazy, self-satisfied tone that suggested he was their leader, size notwithstanding. He pushed himself away from the wall and stood before her, blocking her path. “What do you want, little fellow?”

  It was all that an outraged Utta could do not to argue: among women she was considered tall, and she was nearly the same height as this fellow, although vastly more slender. “I have business ahead,” she said in her gruffest voice. “Please let me by.”

  “Oh, business in Skimmertown, have you?” He raised his voice as though she had said something shameful and he meant everyone to know. “Looking for a little fish-face girl, eh, fellow?”

  For a moment Utta could only stare. “Nothing of the sort. Business,” she said, and then realized she might sound too haughty. “My master’s business.”

  “Ah,” said the one who had been questioning her. “Your master, is it? And what business does he have down in Scummer Town? Hiring fishy-men for cheap, I’ll warrant, taking work away from proper fellows. Ah, see the look on his chops now, boys!” The small man brayed a laugh. “Been caught out, he has.” He took a step nearer, looked Utta up and down. “Look at you, soft as marrow jelly. Are you a phebe, then? One of those?”

  “Let me go.” She tried to keep her voice from shaking but didn’t entirely succeed.

  “Oh, do you think we should?” The man leaned closer. He stank of wine. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” said a new voice. “Let him go.”

  Both Utta and her persecutor looked up in surprise. A hairless man had come into the alley from a side-passage —a Skimmer, Utta realized, with a scar down his face that pulled one eyelid out of shape. The crowd of men blocking the alley stirred with an animal shiver of hatred Utta could feel.

  “Hoy, Fish-face,” said her antagonist. “What are you doing out of your pond? This part of town belongs to pureblood folk.”

  The Skimmer stared back with a face stiff as a wax effigy. He was not small, and for a Skimmer he was solidly built, but he was hugely outnumbered. Several of the men moved so that he was more nearly surrounded. He smiled—his injured eye squinted shut as he did so—then he raised his head and made a froggy, chirruping noise. Within moments half a dozen more young Skimmer men began to drift into the alley, one holding a baling hook in his fist, another tapping a long wooden club against his leg, grinning toothlessly.

  “Merciful Zoria,” Utta breathed. They’re going to kill each other.

  “You lot shouldn’t be past Barge Street,” said the man who had accosted her. He was grinning, too, and he and the first Skimmer had begun to circle each other, one lazy step at a time. “You shouldn’t be here. This is ours, this is.” He spoke slowly, like an invocation—he was summoning the powerful mystery of violence, Utta realized, with as much careful method as a priest used to call the attention of a god. She could not help staring at the circling pair, her skin feverchilled.

  “Get out,” someone said from just behind her—one of the other Skimmers. She felt strong hands take her and pull her away, then another hand shoved her in the small of the back. She took a few stumbling steps away from the center of the now-crowded alley, slipping and tumbling into the mud. She looked back, half-expecting one of the men who had accosted her to try to stop her, or one of the Skimmers to shout at her to run away, but she was out of the center of the violence-spell now and
she might as well have ceased to exist. The two main antagonists were feinting gently and almost lovingly at each other with knives she had not seen before. Their comrades were silently facing off, ready to throw themselves at their opposites when the first blow was struck.

  Slipping in the wet street, clumsy as a newborn calf, Utta struggled upright and hurried away even as someone let out a shout of pain and fury behind her. A larger roar went up, many voices shouting, and people began to step out of the tiny, close-quartered houses to see what was the matter.

  The child who opened the oval door was so small and so wide-eyed that at first, despite herself, Sister Utta could nearly believe the Skimmers were indeed a different kind of creature entirely. She was still shaking badly, and not just because of her encounter with the street bullies. Everything was so strange here, the smells, the look of things, even the shapes of the doors and windows. Now she stood at the end of a swaying gangplank on the edge of the castle’s largest lagoon, waiting to be admitted to a floating houseboat. How odd her life had become!

  There were no Skimmers left in the Vuttish Isles of Utta Fornsdodir’s childhood, but they still featured heavily in local stories, although those in the stories were far more magical than those who lived here beside the lagoon. Still, they were strange-looking folk, and Utta realized she had spent almost twenty years in Southmarch Castle without ever really speaking to one of them, let alone knowing them as neighbors or friends.

  “H-hello,” she said to the child. “I’ve come to see Rafe.” The urchin looked back at her. Because the child had no eyebrows, hair pulled back (as was the habit for both male and female Skimmers) and a face still in the androgynous roundness of childhood, Utta had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. At last the little one turned and scuttled back inside, but left the door open. Utta could only guess that was an invitation of sorts, so she stepped up onto the deck and into the boat’s cabin.

  The ceilings were so low she had to bend over. As she followed the child up the stairs she guessed that the cabin had at least three stories. It definitely seemed bigger inside than outside, full of nooks and narrow passages, with tiny stairwells scarcely as wide as her shoulders leading away both up and down from the first landing. Her guide was not the only child, either—she passed at least half a dozen others who looked back at her with no sign of either fear or favor. None of them wore much, and the youngest was naked although the day outside was cold even for Dimene and the houseboat did not seem to be heated. This smallest one was dragging a ragged doll by the ankle, a toy that had obviously once belonged to some very different child since it had long, golden tresses. None of the Skimmers Utta had ever seen were fair-haired, although their skins could be as pale as any of her own family back in the northern islands.

  The first child led her up one more narrow staircase and then down another before stepping out onto the deck on what she guessed must be the lagoon side of the houseboat. Utta could not help thinking they seemed to have reached it by the most roundabout way possible.

  The young Skimmer man looked up from the rope he was splicing. The little one, apparently now relieved of responsibility, skipped back into the boat’s ramshackle cabin. The youth looked up at her briefly, then returned his attention to the rope. “Who are you?” he asked in the throaty way of his folk.

  “Utta—Sister Utta. I come with a message for you. Are you Rafe?”

  He nodded, still watching the splice. “Sister Utta? I thought you smelled a bit unmanly, even for that place.” He meant the Inner Keep, she guessed, but he said it as though he were talking about a prison or a forest full of unpleasant wild beasts. “Did someone tell you we’d be after any woman, no matter how old?”

  I am old, she reminded herself. Surely I can’t take offense. She looked at him; he carefully did not look back. He was as young or younger than any of the Skimmers who had come into the alley, and his arms seemed long even by the standards of his folk. He had slender, artful fingers, and a firm, good jaw.

  “I was sent by the Duchess Merolanna of Southmarch,” she said. “She was given your name as someone who might help us. We need a boatsman.”

  “Given?” He raised a hairless eyebrow. “Someone’s been free. Given by whom?”

  “Turley Longfingers.”

  He snorted. “Would be. He’d be happy to see me get myself killed on some drylander errand, wouldn’t he? He knows Ena and I will be hanging the nets come springtime and she’ll be old enough then he can’t stop us.” He stared at Sister Utta now with something like curiosity. “Does it pay well, still, this errand?”

  “I think so. The duchess is no pinchpurse.”

  “Then tell me what she wants done and what she’ll pay, Vuttswoman.”

  “How did you know?”

  “That you’re Vuttish?” He laughed. “You smell Vuttish, don’t you? Still, you’re better than most. Compared to a Syannese or Jellon-man, you’re spring seafoam and pink thrift-blossoms. Jellon-folk eat no fish, lots of pig, don’t they? You can smell one a mile distant. Now, if we’ve finished talking on how folks smell, let’s speak of silver.”

  36. The False Woman

  Suya wandered long in the wilderness and suffered many hardships until at last she came to the dragon gate of the palace of Xergal, and there fell down at the verge of death. But Xergal the Earthlord coveted her beauty, and instead of accepting her into his kingdom of the dead he forced her to reign beside him as his queen. She never after spoke a word.

  —from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One

  There were skulls for sale in all the marketplaces of Syan, some baked of honey-glazed bread, others painstakingly carved from pine boughs, and even a few shaped out of beautiful, polished marble for nobles and rich merchants to put on their tables or in their family shrines. Sprigs of white aspholdel were set out on tables to be bought and then pinned to a collar or a bodice. Kerneia was coming.

  Briony realized with astonishment that she had been traveling with the players for a full month now, which was nearly as strange as what she found herself doing most days—namely, acting the part of the goddess Zoria, Perin’s daughter. In truth, it was stranger than that: as a character in Finn’s play, Briony was a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a goddess pretending to be a boy, an array of nested masks so confusing she could not concentrate on it long enough to waste much time thinking about it.

  Makewell’s Men had not yet performed the whole of Teodoros’ rewritten play about Zoria’s abduction, but they had worked up most of the main scenes and tried them out on the rural population of northern Syan as the company moved from place to place. It had been strange enough for Briony to speak the goddess’ words (or at least such words as Finn Teodoros had given her) in the muddy courtyard of some tiny village inn. Now the players had begun to follow the green course of the Esterian River and the towns were getting bigger as they traveled south. Audiences were growing, too.

  “But there are so many words to remember,” Briony complained early one evening to Teodoros as the others trooped back from their afternoon’s sightseeing. “And I have memorized only half the play!”

  “You are doing very well,” the playwright assured her. “You are a cunning child and would have done most professions proud, I’ll warrant. Besides, most of your speeches are in the parts of the play we have performed already, so there is not much left for you to learn.”

  “But still, it seems so much. What if I forget? I almost did the other night but Feival whispered the words to me.”

  “And he will again if you need him to. But you know the story, my girl—ah, I mean, my boy.” He grinned. “If you forget, say something to the point. Hewney and Makewell and the rest are experienced mummers. They will come to your aid and put you back on the track.”

  It was the sort of thing old Steffens Nynor had always said to her about court protocols, and as with the castellan’s instructions about the intricate details of the Smoke Ceremony she had been forced to learn for the Demia’s Candle h
olidays, she suspected it wasn’t going to be quite as easy as everyone was telling her.

  The Esterian river valley was perhaps the most fertile part of all Eion, a vast swath of black soil stretched between rolling hills that extended from the northern tip of Lake Strivothol where the city of Tessis spread wide, up the hundred-mile length of the river to the mountains northeast of the Heartwood. Briony remembered her father saying that he guessed as many as a quarter of the people in all of Eion lived in that one stretch of land, and certainly now that she saw the farms covering nearly every hillside, and the towns (many of them as large as any city in the March Kingdoms outside Southmarch itself) butting against each other on either side of the wide, cobbled thoroughfare and along the river’s eastern shore as well, she found it easy to believe.

  Ugenion, once a great trading city, now much reduced, Onir Diotrodos with its famous water temple, Doros Kallida—the company’s wagons passed through them all, sometimes traveling only a few hours down the Royal Highway (still called King Karal’s Road in some parts) before they stopped again in another prosperous village or town. Syan was at the same time so much like and unlike what Briony had known most of her life that it made her even more homesick than usual. The people spoke the common tongue with a slurring accent she sometimes found hard to understand (although it had been their tongue first, Finn Teodoros enjoyed pointing out, so by rights Briony was the one speaking with an accent). Some of the folk who came to see the players even made fun of how Makewell and the others spoke, loudly repeating their words with an emphasis on what they clearly felt was the harsh, chopping March Kingdoms way of talking. But the Syannese also seemed to enjoy the diversion, and Nevin Hewney told her one day it was because they were more used to such things than were the rustic folk of the March Kingdoms, or even many of the city dwellers of Southmarch.

  “This is where playmaking grew,” Hewney explained. His broad gesture took in the whole of the surrounding valley, which in this unusually empty spot looked like a place that had scarcely seen a farm croft, let alone a theater. As always when he had downed a few drinks, the infamous poet was enjoying his own discourse. Seeing Briony’s confusion, he scowled in a broadly beleaguered way. “No, not here by this particular oak tree, but in the land of Syan. The festival plays of Hierosol—dry tales not of the gods but of pious mortals, most of them, the oniri and other martyrs —here became the mummeries of Greater and Little Zosimia and the Wildsong Night comedies. They have had plays, playmakers, and players here for a thousand years.”