“But that’s all Sinati can do,” said Calla, leaning across the scrubbed wooden table and pinning him with the full force of her great yellow eyes. “She might as well have been a courtesan. She never bruises her elbows when she falls down, because it would never occur to her to fall as a real person would.”
Deleon put his hand over his eyes. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t start it again. Don’t tell Thrae that characters in a play are as real people.”
“I’m not telling Thrae,” said Calla. “I’m telling you.”
Deleon removed his hand and grinned at her. “Only as a rehearsal for telling Thrae,” he said.
Calla frowned at him, putting three straight lines in the clear dark skin of her wide forehead where the short hairs stuck and curled a little in the heat of the room. Deleon swallowed.
My love is as a meadow of goldenrod, he recited grimly to himself; her hair is as the autumn maple and her eyes like the sky above a fall of snow. As usual since Calla came, the Acrivannish poetry served to show him the inadequacy, not of his taste, but of itself.
“Why won’t you talk about it?” she said.
“Look what happened,” said Deleon, recklessly, “the last time I talked about it. Sinati’s gone.”
“Is this the basic obstinacy of your nature,” said Calla, “or some Farl—some Acrivannish superstition?”
“What?” said Deleon. It had taken Aelim two years to manage “Acrivannish” rather than “Farlandish.” Out of some linguistic and scholarly subtlety he had been unable to explain, Aelim, who stared at you in patient puzzlement when you told him a joke, thought “Acrivannish” a very funny word.
“I was talking to my mother about planting pear trees,” said Calla, “on the day of the Marketplace Massacre. Must I therefore never talk about planting pear trees again? Shall we listen now for the sound of pistols?”
“That’s absurd,” said Deleon, heatedly.
“Yes,” said Calla, smiling.
Deleon let his breath out and managed to decline the gambit. She could talk circles around him until she snagged him in the noose of his own words and knocked him flat, whereupon he would tell her what she wanted to know: that the moment when he first began to want her, and that other, grimmer moment a day or so later, when he saw Aelim betray himself, still stung. He was not in any case ready to tell her that he loved her; and he would never be ready to tell her that Aelim loved him.
“Show me the play,” he said, “and let me decide whether I’ll like being a simpering fool with yellow hair.”
Calla handed the untidy sheaf across the cups to him.
“‘Two Houses in Saltigos,’” read Deleon, “‘a play by Andri Terriot.’ Andri Terriot.” He looked up into Calla’s new-student face, and told her what she must know already. “He writes for the Levar’s Company!”
“Which can afford to send back a play not to its liking,” said Calla.
“Well, no doubt. But why send it to us?”
Calla shrugged. “Maybe he’s an old friend of Thrae’s.”
Something in her voice made him look at her carefully. Her cinnamon mouth was turned down at one corner.
“You don’t like Thrae,” said Deleon.
“I think,” said Calla, “that I should like her better did all the rest of you not hang on her like Red Priests haunting their temple during a bad harvest.”
Deleon went on looking at her. It was the first unattractive aspect she had ever shown him. She put her long, dark hand over his where it held the forgotten manuscript. Her touch was warm.
“Read the play,” said she.
Deleon read it. Once she had taken her hand away, he was even able to attend to it. The verse was very odd. Many Liavekan plays were in verse, blank or rhymed. The rhymes were often complex, but he had never seen anything so tightly constructed as this. And most Liavekan verse-plays used either the long dactylic line that suited so well the sound of their language, or an iambic pentameter that suited any language. This one used an eight-beat iambic that thumped along ruthlessly like a wagon on a bad road and made everybody in the play sound a little mad. And yes, here was that ridiculous song. The playwright, after the infuriating habit of playwrights, had not indicated any music for it. It did fit very well the Acrivannish tune Calla had been using. The yellow-haired fool would be the singer.
The plot concerned two minor noble courts in Saltigos, the principal members of each of which spent the play in ultimately fruitless stratagems to avoid meeting one another. One of these was the simpering, swooning fool. She certainly had a fat part, but even aside from the song, Deleon did not much care for it. Her counterpart across the city might do; but, regardless of their relative paucity of lines, the strong parts in the play were those of the two servants who schemed that their employers should meet, to the servants’ enrichment and the undoing of the employers. The undoing, as in most Liavekan plays, loomed throughout the play as a very great danger, but in the event was harmless and, to Liavekan tastes, extremely funny. As usual, Deleon found this deliberate thwarting of tragic expectation a grave flaw.
He looked up unsmiling from the last page and found Calla’s eyes on him.
“You haven’t any sense of humor,” she said. “You smiled four times and chuckled once. I read it yesterday and I’m still sore of laughing.”
“You’re muddling up your lines,” said Deleon, mildly hurt. “Listen closer to Thrae next time. My sense of humor is deficient; it’s Aelim’s that’s lacking altogether.”
“Is that why—” said Calla, and stopped, regarding him thoughtfully.
So much for Aelim’s privacy. “That,” Deleon said, over the accelerated thud of his heart, “is why Thrae gives him all the jesters’ parts. She’s hoping to teach him.”
Calla went on looking at him for a short time, much too long a time, and clasped her hands under her chin. “Shall you enjoy the simpering fool?” she said.
• • •
When they came back, a stranger in a green robe was pacing up and down the little platform and regarding their dusty hundred-spectator theater as if it were the Fountain Court at the Levar’s Palace. Even the helpful gloom that three small lanterns made out of the darkness did not cause either the theater or the intruder himself to seem better than shabby.
“May we help you?” said Calla, in her best carrying tones.
The stranger, not starting, turned and looked at them, and said something they could not catch. He seemed prepared to outwait them. Calla seemed equally prepared to go away and leave him to prowl about the theater, but Deleon was curious. He was very pleased, as he picked his way across the benches to the stage, to hear her following him.
“May we help you?” he said again.
“Is this the poisonous little mouse, no longer than your finger, that lives at the borders of Ka Zhir?” said the stranger, in his voice a faint echo of the storyteller’s chant.
Deleon rammed his knee into the first bench and stood staring, his heart cold and clammy. That was in fact why he had chosen the Desert Mouse. The venomous creature, after which some whimsical fool had named the theater, had been in Nerissa’s favorite story, told to them over and over surreptitiously by Cook; their mother’s most lamentable failing had been a distaste for stories. Cook had called it a foolish tale, as if nobody else cared for it. Had she been wrong, or did this man know a great deal more than he ought?
“Are you looking for someone?” said Calla, at his elbow. She did not in fact smell like cinnamon or kaf or chocolate, but of the tiger-flowers that grow in Ombaya: a perfume that must have cost her half a levar. Books and scent were the only things she ever spent money on. She wore Sinati’s old boots because Thrae did not allow anybody to go barefoot in the theater.
“I’m looking for Deleon Benedicti,” said the stranger. His voice was light and unemphatic, as if he were thinking of something else, or talking to himself. The low platform did not give him much advantage of height over Deleon; Liavekans were mostly short. He was neit
her more nor less dark than most of them; his hair was the usual black, and very badly cut. He had large brown eyes and a hopeful face.
Deleon had abandoned the name of Benedicti seven years ago, replacing it more or less at random with Bennel, a name that gossip bandied about from time to time. Anyone who knew the name of Benedicti was probably best avoided; but anyone who knew it probably knew also to look for a tall, pale, yellow-headed person. There were very few of those in Liavek, and even fewer outside the community of exiles near Old Town, where anybody would seek first. And this man knew Cook’s story.
“Who sent you?” said Deleon.
He had not intended this to be an admission of his identity, but the stranger took it so, and smiled. “Your sister says she breaks things.”
Deleon experienced a lurch of the heart almost comparable to that with which he greeted Calla’s appearance in a room. “I have five sisters,” he said.
“Which of them breaks things?”
Deleon was seized with perversity, not least because he sensed so plainly beside him Calla’s alert and sympathetic interest. “My sister Marigand,” he said precisely, “breaks hearts. My sister Isobel breaks rules. My sister Livia breaks heirlooms, but only when she’s in a temper. My sister Jehane breaks her own heart, and would break yours if you had one, being the best of a most hideous family. Are you satisfied?”
“And your sister Nerissa?”
“My sister Nerissa,” said Deleon, furiously, “when she was four years old, broke one of the five glass bowls we had managed to bring with us in our flight from Acrivain. Our mother therefore told her that she broke things, and Nerissa believed her. Are you satisfied?”
“She wonders if you are dead.”
“And I’ve wondered if she is.”
“She will do better to think you are.”
“And shall I do better to think she is?”
“She will be,” said the stranger. “You may rely upon it.”
What a mercy he had not succumbed to the brisk blandishments of the Tiger’s Eye and bought those Tichenese earrings for Calla, who would not have worn them anyway. “How much do you want?” said Deleon, with as much coolness as he could muster.
“You misunderstand me,” said the man in green, in the tone of one who has intended just this. “I am from the House of Responsible Life.”
This meant nothing to Deleon, who was prepared to make a malicious joke out of it anyway. The man in green forestalled him. “We are an order of suicides.”
Deleon sat down hard on the second bench, and Calla burst out laughing.
“If you all kill yourselves, where is your order?”
There was something in her voice more than mirth, behind the mockery. She sounded as she had in the discussions of singing, however much it might have appeared to Malion and Thrae that she was merely being troublesome. She wanted to know: she had a passionate and serious interest in the answer.
The stranger sat down on the edge of the stage, swinging his feet in their scuffed green boots. “There must be an order to the killing,” he said to her, quite soberly. “My name is Verdialos.”
“Mine is Calla,” she said; Deleon admired the subtle courtesy wherewith, since he had offered no surname, she omitted hers also. “And this,” said Calla, without smiling, “is Deleon.” She propped one knee on the bench next to him.
“A good death to you,” said Verdialos, looking straight at him.
What had Nerissa told him? “What,” said Deleon, blessing Thrae’s training, that kept his voice steady though his insides were like a welter of custard, “is a good death?”
“I think,” said Verdialos, still regarding him steadily, “that you know that as well as I.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Calla, briskly, but still with that note of genuine inquiry. “Suppose you tell me.”
“How do you regard death?” Verdialos asked her.
“As something to be avoided for as long as may be.”
Deleon, relieved of Verdialos’s attention, slid his eyes sideways at her. Was that true? He supposed it was true of most people; but would anybody who felt so have indulged in half of the insane things she did?
“And yet it comes as the end?” said Verdialos.
Calla shrugged. “Unless one is The Magician.”
Verdialos smiled. “To most of us then. And presumably to you?”
She nodded, and a veil of her black hair slid from her shoulder and lay across Deleon’s arm.
“How will you meet it, when it comes?”
“With my back turned,” said Calla, with finality; and Deleon, incredulous, heard her voice shake. She had made it shake just so as Mistress Oleander’s maid; but except for the new-student voice and an occasional demure remark, she seldom employed her arts in private conversation. It was one of the reasons he loved her.
“What,” said Verdialos, half mocking and half sorrowful, “so ignominious as that?”
“What do you suggest?” snapped Calla. So she had snapped as Ruzi, the spy and traitor in How They Came to Eel Island. He had never heard her do it as herself.
“I suggest,” said Verdialos, smoothly, “that death may be for you, or for anyone, the best event that ever you saw or heard tell of.”
He reminded Deleon of Thrae, teaching Lynno and Calla her theories of playing. Thrae had said these things before; she had said them to Deleon seven years ago and to Aelim two years after that; she would say them again; she could say them when she was too drunk to stand up; she could bring any conversation, start it never so wildly from its point, around to them again, even in her sleep: but this by no means meant that she did not believe what she said. In Verdialos’s voice were the same automatic ease and the same underlying conviction.
Deleon sat listening to them, as Calla’s questions grew kinder and Verdialos’s answers more involved. It ought to be he, not Calla, who was conducting the other side of this discussion. Verdialos had come for him; and come, it must be, from his sister Nerissa.
Nerissa, three years younger than he, with whom he had formed a solid, enduring, and malicious alliance of two against the rest of their family, which so clearly hated them. For they were the last two, the only two born in Liavek, the two whose addition to the requirements of a large family and an even larger network of spies, informers, and less fortunate exiles, had eaten up their father’s small and painstakingly acquired income out of Acrivain.
Nerissa, with whom for seven years he had played a secret game of death. They had drifted from mere childish fantasies of accident, from the state of mind that says, “If anything happened to us then they’d be sorry,” to the meticulous devising of ways whereby they might kill themselves. They grew expert at weighing the merits of a painless death against the necessity of making their parents as sorry as possible. They had never found a method that pleased them well enough to be employed.
And when he was twelve and Nerissa ten, Deleon had run away.
Listening to Verdialos, Deleon thought that they must be, both of them, minds after the Green Priests’ own hearts. Just so carefully, with just such artistic thought, did the members of this order plan their deaths. Their motives were other: not to make anybody sorry, but to make order and beauty out of the only event in their lives, said Verdialos, over which they truly had control. It appeared, in fact, that a desire to make somebody sorry was not allowed in the House of Responsible Life, any more than a desire to escape from an unhappy entanglement of feelings, or from a humiliating and irrevocable mistake, or from an ever-present and irritating responsibility. Candidates with those motives were made to wait until they had better ones.
Deleon wondered why Calla wasn’t laughing. This was the sort of thing she laughed at. Even he, with the detached and logical part of his mind, could see its classic and lovely absurdity. It ought to make a splendid play, in the best Liavekan tradition. But Calla had fallen silent, her leg pressed against Deleon’s shoulder and her eyes on the bench.
“So you see,” said Verdial
os to Deleon.
“You have my sister?” said Deleon. “She’s vowed to die; the manner of her death has been laid down?”
“Yes,” said Verdialos.
“Will it be soon?”
“No, not soon,” said Verdialos. “She has a cat.”
“A cat!” said Deleon.
“The responsibility one must not shirk,” said Calla, with perfect seriousness, and without looking up.
Deleon, aware of a startled resentment with no discernible cause, frowned at Verdialos. “Did she ask you to find me?”
“No,” said Verdialos. “But she told me of you, and after that I was obliged to discover you, if you were not dead already.”
“But—”
“We see a great many parents,” said Verdialos, “who think their runaway children have come to us. It seems best to us to find those children whom we do not have, that we may dispel wrath and refute the accusation that we have and are hiding them. The Acrivannish are easy to trace.”
“So you’ve come to help me to a beautiful death?”
“If you wish.”
“Would you be so obliging,” said Deleon, without in the least intending to, “as to give something to Nerissa for me?”
“What is it?” said Verdialos.
Deleon turned up the hem of his smock, considered for a moment, and ripped the hidden pocket out of it. He shook from the frayed blue cloth a little book bound in virulent purple velvet—one ran out of kindly colors after the sixth child—and held it out. It was the size of his two hands, and locked with a minute brass lock.
“This is an Acrivannish custom,” he said. “It’s how we teach children about love. We don’t speak of it. But a mother and father will keep a diary of each child’s conception and birth, which they will rewrite as the fancy takes them, and give to the child on his twelfth birthday.”
“You ran away on yours,” said Verdialos.
“Yes,” said Deleon.
“Because of what you read?”
“Yes.”
“And took Nerissa’s book also?”
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