Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Both of them were on platform, either the focus of a scene or spying around in the background, for the entire portion of the play from then to the interlude. During the interlude, Deleon fully expected their souls to be flayed with the merciless implement of Thrae’s tongue. But Thrae had gone forward into the audience and was talking, with every appearance of amiability and serenity, to a thin, fluffy-haired man with a large moustache. He was frowning.

  “That,” said Malion, inserting himself between Deleon and Aelim as they peered out, “is Andri Terriot. When the play is done, I shall introduce you.”

  And having, in his way, punished them as severely as Thrae would have, he went out to pay his respects to the playwright whose work they were distorting.

  Deleon and Aelim went on looking at the audience. There was no use in apologizing to Aelim and too much danger in thanking him. Deleon wondered if Calla had noticed, and what she thought.

  “Rikiki’s ears and whiskers!” said Aelim, with more force than Deleon had ever heard him use. “Aritoli ola Silba’s out there!”

  “It must be somebody’s birthday,” said Deleon, with automatic malice.

  “It is,” said Calla, passing them in a hurry with the great feathered fan of Lina in her arms. “Thrae’s. Why do you think Malion wanted to move the opening?”

  Deleon’s heart battered him like a storm of hail. He wished this were because of what Calla had said and not merely that she had said it. He looked at Aelim.

  “Terriot,” said Aelim to the dusty green hanging on which Naril had worked such changes, “and ola Silba. And we do this.”

  “From what I’ve heard of ola Silba’s preferences,” said Deleon, forgetting in his agitation to whom he was speaking, “he should like it all the better.” He added hastily, “And he’s not a consultant to any patron of our art, is he?”

  “Who knows where his whims will take him next?” said Aelim, who had probably heard a great deal more gossip about Aritoli ola Silba than Deleon had. “A mere paragraph from him, a line carelessly spoken the next time he judges a portrait, would be enough, if he chose. He’ll see that our interpretation is not in the lines,” said Aelim, “and that it damages the main story. And he will hate it all the more.” There was no reproach in his tone; he might have been explaining the operation of the trap-door to a newly-hired player. He looked at Deleon for the first time. “We had better mend this, in the time we have left. Shall I insult you, and you spurn me, while Sinati is singing?”

  “We can’t,” said Deleon. “The time isn’t enough. It would distract from the conclusion.”

  “More than it has already?”

  “I think so. Better not to thwart the expectations we’ve built. Let’s finish it, Aelim.”

  There was a protracted pause, during which Deleon looked as steadily as he could into Aelim’s grave face, and the entire character of the conversation just finished took on a second and shadowy set of significances. Aelim’s face darkened a little as the blood rose under his brown skin, and his forehead grew damp, and he took two steps away from Deleon and sat down, abruptly, on Mistress Oleander’s discarded chair of state.

  “It’s all right,” said Deleon. If Calla, for complex reasons of which love was not one, had offered herself to him, would he have looked so? Probably.

  Aelim pressed both hands through his short black hair, finer than Calla’s, and having in its depths gleams and hints of blue, not red. His voice wavered a little, like a candle in a light draft. “Del, listen to me. Sinati’s entirely capable of having taken that Worrynot herself.”

  “I know. That isn’t it.”

  “Deleon. This is not yourself; this is Thrae’s birth luck.”

  “No,” said Deleon. “It’s Thrae’s bad luck that I did this at opening; it is not luck, Thrae’s or anyone’s, that has made me do it.”

  “It would be mad,” said Aelim.

  “Acrilat will protect us, then.”

  Aelim made a violent fist and then, very softly, closed his other hand around it. His skin was the color of old wood. “Del,” he said, steadily. “Calla says the Green Priest is married.”

  “Aelim, that isn’t it.”

  “She told me to ask you about your parents.”

  “She doesn’t know anything about my parents. Aelim, let’s finish this. Let us simply do it. I am very tired,” said Deleon, steadying his own voice with extreme care, “of intellectual discussions.”

  “Indulge me in just one more,” said Aelim. “Calla says that, because your parents hated you, you are afraid of love.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Deleon, who had only honesty to give him, and did not intend to stint it. “But not because my parents hated me.”

  The ethereal notes of Malion’s flute fell lightly into the breathing silence wherein they stared at one another. As he ended, they must enter.

  “So,” said Aelim.

  “Let us go on,” said Deleon, “as we have begun.”

  They climbed the stairs to the upper platform, whence, in their personalities as the two scheming servants, they would witness unseen the final discomfiture of their over-trusting employers. Aelim, for the first time in their long and kindly acquaintance, laid his arm around Deleon as they went. And Deleon, for the first time in his longer and less kindly acquaintance with existence, leaned into the hollow of Aelim’s arm and closed his heart to the thoughtful prickings of his mind.

  With Aelim’s arm still around Deleon they came out onto the high platform with its carved railing, where Naril held for them a bright but heatless torch of his own devising. Naril’s broad and usually placid face was charged with pleasurable curiosity, and he made at them the expression of commiseration appropriate to people who had incurred Thrae’s wrath.

  When Deleon was sure the audience had seen them, he drew back half a step and smiled, deliberately and dazzlingly, into Aelim’s eyes, as the young daughter of Mistress Oleander had smiled at her mother’s lover. Aelim, his eyes huge and his mouth grim, turned his own head aside from the audience and touched the hand nearest its devouring eyes to Deleon’s hair. Their point made, they turned to lean on the railing and observe, with whatever expression or lack of it seemed best to them, the fated meeting of Lina and Bremeno.

  Deleon, settling a smug film of satisfaction over a face that felt like old untended leather, watched Sinati in her golden guise and Calla, her hair tucked up in a linen cap, stand six feet apart and exchange poetic insults. Sinati recited the lines precisely, bringing her voice down hard on each stressed syllable and flinging the rhymed words at Calla as if they were stones. Calla’s deeper and more flexible voice rushed over the verses, keeping only to the sense of them and letting the rhyme and rhythm stumble in her wake as best they might. Deleon was struck again by Thrae’s brilliance. Neither delivery was what she taught or hoped for; but, set against one another, they showed up better than anything else the players might have done the fundamental opposition of these two temperaments. In the pause before the comic turn of the plot, the audience was perfectly silent.

  “Terriot’s pleased now,” breathed Aelim in Deleon’s ear.

  “Stew and rot Terriot!” said Deleon, more quietly yet, but with great venom. “This ought to have been a tragedy. Doesn’t he know it?”

  “One day,” said Aelim, his insouciant, cunning servant’s gaze fixed immovably on the bright head of the character that his had betrayed, “we will make it one.” And he laid his neat dark hand over Deleon’s thin pale one, on the railing carved with Ombayan tiger-flowers and little poisonous mice. His touch was icy.

  It was the habit of the company, after they had knelt to the audience, to climb off the platform and mingle with them. This was the only neighborhood custom Thrae had been unable to change after she bought the theater. Deleon did not, as a rule, mind it much. The audience was apt to consist half of the players’ families and half of the shopkeepers he saw every day, and therefore to be both familiar and congenial.

  Tonight, however, he and Aeli
m slid behind the dusty green curtain before Sinati had even stood up, and went side by side in silence through the crooked halls of the theater.

  There was usually a certain vagueness about whether any given piece of clothing worn by a member of the company belonged to that person or to the theater. If you were particularly fond of any item of your own clothing, you didn’t wear it to the theater at all, lest Thrae should decide that Sinati needed it for her next part and Sinati should then take it home and dye it yellow. Deleon had lost his only Liavekan shirt that way, and determined to keep to smocks thereafter. The situation had its benefits, of course. Calla had worn the Purple Priest’s robe from Mistress Oleander to her sister’s wedding in Fruit, instead of spending money she didn’t have on a dress she would never wear again. And Deleon had been able to take home and cherish the black cap she had worn as Ruzi without anybody’s so much as raising an eyebrow.

  It was therefore not necessary to comment when Aelim, having stuck his head outside and ascertained that it was still raining, left the robe he had worn this afternoon hanging on its hook and pulled a hooded cloak on over the red livery of Lina. Then he opened up his worn leather pouch, extracted a large iron key, and held it out on his palm to Deleon.

  Deleon hoped it was not necessary to comment on that, either. He took the key and looked at Aelim.

  “Penamil will let me in,” said Aelim; he rented two rooms from an herbalist who kept late hours. His level and unreadable gaze reminded Deleon uncomfortably of Calla’s when she had asked him if Aelim were suffering. “I wish you would think again.”

  “I’ll do what you wish,” said Deleon, managing to look him in the face, “and I will see you later.”

  Aelim turned and went out the door. Deleon sat down in Mistress Oleander’s chair of state for about as long as it takes to pull on a pair of boots. Then he jumped up and made for the door. He had had enough of thinking.

  “Well!” said Calla behind him.

  Deleon turned, and leaned against the cold, rough-plastered wall. Calla came beaming into the cluttered room and sailed her linen cap at the mirror that, according to Malion, made you look like a drowned man just rising to the surface of the sea. Because she was careful about such things, the cap did not knock over the bottle of clovewater that Sinati had left open on Aelim’s table.

  “Verdialos has asked me to tell you,” she said, “that he understands that you are no longer in need of his advice or services. I must say you might have dropped a letter to him or a word to me, instead of incurring Thrae’s wrath in so spectacular a—Deleon?”

  She was so quick. He loved her for that also. She came forward, quite sober now, and from a distance of perhaps a hand’s width peered at his face as though he were a plant with a disfiguring blight.

  “You don’t love Aelim,” she said.

  “Verdialos is right just the same,” said Deleon.

  “But I asked Aelim to tell you—”

  “He told me,” said Deleon. “Should I love him for that?”

  “You’re very well suited,” said Calla, in the tone of someone preparing to argue to a standstill anybody who might choose to object.

  Deleon stared at her, and his mind presented to him a collection of occurrences and suggested to him how they were related. He thought of his lack of humor, and of Calla’s wanting him to play a simpering fool who would sing mad Liavekan words to a delicate Acrivannish tune. He thought of his matter-of-fact acceptance of his sister’s joining the Green Priests, and how Calla had appeared to join them herself. He thought that she had known Aelim loved him, and must have known that he loved her. He thought that she believed his parents had hated him. He thought of how careful she was, in great matters and small ones. She did not love Verdialos, and she had not meant to kill herself. But she had hoped to make him think so. She had endangered the success of the play to make him think so. Had she in fact visited Verdialos at all?

  And because his mind would always prick his heart with any weapons that it had, he spoke his discovery perhaps less kindly than she deserved. “You like to meddle,” he said.

  Calla took two steps backwards and slammed Bremeno’s walking-stick down on Sinati’s table. “It isn’t meddling!” she said. “People don’t understand; they won’t see; they won’t think. Not even Aelim, who notices everything. Not even you, who sit on the back bench in your Acrivannish superiority and mock at Liavek with every third breath as though it were a badly-written play performed by trained birds.”

  She stopped, and suddenly burst out laughing. Deleon wondered if an excess of plotting had turned her brain. She looked at him and pulled his hair, hard. “You don’t even think that’s funny,” she said, in despairing tones. “You look as solemn as a camel while I spout bombast. We should never suit. You won’t connect things; you won’t consider things properly; you aren’t interested in understanding.”

  No, she had not meant to kill herself; but yes, she had visited Verdialos. She had gone to Verdialos because he would connect things, and consider things properly, and because he was interested in understanding.

  “What,” said Deleon, who did understand, but nevertheless felt meddled with, “ought I to consider?”

  “That you love me,” said Calla, “only because you know we shouldn’t suit. You loved your parents and they gave you hatred. Therefore—”

  “Wait,” said Deleon. “Wait. Let me think a moment.”

  He pressed his hand over his eyes, and through his steadily worsening headache set about methodically finishing with his former life. He had given Nerissa’s book to Verdialos; he had promised himself to someone he would never be in danger of loving in any manner that would cause him this immensity of pain. If he were now to give up his two secrets, the one seven years old, the other less than seven months, there would be nothing left, and he must hereafter find new things to occupy him. It did, also, appeal to his deficient sense of humor to give Calla these secrets as the first and last gifts of the love she disbelieved.

  “Calla,” he said, from under his hand, “I want to tell you something, but you must promise that you won’t—”

  “Meddle?” said she.

  “That you won’t try to arrange matters as they ought to be arranged?”

  There was a pause, during which Calla shifted her feet twice and sighed heavily once, and Deleon breathed the scent of Ombayan tiger-flowers and considered the way in which his headache throbbed with his heartbeats.

  “You ask a great deal,” Calla said.

  Deleon waited. As he had hoped, her curiosity proved greater than her desire for action. “I promise,” she said. “Now look at me, and tell me.”

  Deleon dropped his hand. The three creases were back in her forehead, and the corner of her mouth turned down.

  “I love you,” said Deleon, baldly, “because I see my faults remedied in you, and yours in me. I think we should suit very well, if I chose to suit with anyone at all. But I don’t choose love.”

  “You haven’t had love!”

  “I have,” said Deleon. “That is why I don’t choose it now.” His mother had written it in the little brownish book: that whatever she and his father might have felt about Nerissa, they loved Deleon, and were distressed at his avoidance of them and his championship of that appalling sister. He had read it, and run away. “My parents loved me,” he said.

  Calla looked exactly as Aelim had when Deleon wrote out the Acrivannish alphabet for him and he realized that it was related to the script of Ka Zhir: astounded, furiously intrigued, and painfully delighted. She demanded, “Why haven’t they tried to find you, then?”

  “Because the Acrivannish are very proud, revengeful, and ambitious,” said Deleon, “and because they did hate Nerissa.”

  “Whom you loved?”

  “Whom I championed,” said Deleon, “as my fellow in oppression.”

  Thank any and every god in Liavek that she was so quick. She frowned briefly, but asked him no questions. He clenched his hand on Aelim’s key. He m
ight perhaps survive this.

  “When I promised not to arrange things as they ought to be,” said Calla, “did I promise not to speak to you at all about these things?”

  “What you have to say,” said Deleon, “say now.”

  “You say you don’t choose love, but Aelim loves you.”

  “But I know it,” said Deleon, “and not knowing it hurt me first. And I do not love him; and loving you hurt me second.”

  “That’s very tidy for you,” said Calla, very sharply, “but what of Aelim?”

  “Aelim knows,” said Deleon.

  “Then Aelim is a fool.”

  “Calla, you promised me.”

  “I know,” said Calla. He had never seen her look so angry. “But I promise you this as well. If ever I see Aelim in the House of Responsible Life, I will break my word to you.”

  “Thank you,” said Deleon, who was indeed tired of intellectual discussions.

  “This is like one of your plays,” said Calla.

  “No,” said Deleon. “No one will die.”

  “No,” said Calla, “but it might be better if someone did.” She seemed to listen to what she had said, in the manner of one running over a set of difficult lines. Then, once more, she laughed. Deleon jumped, and she pulled his hair again, quite gently.

  “I am starting to talk like one of your plays,” she said. “Let’s make an end.”

  She walked past him and put her hand on the latch of the door.

  “It’s raining,” said Deleon. “Take a cloak.”

  Calla looked around the room. “I brought a black one, but I don’t see it.”

  “Aelim took it,” said Deleon.

  “He may keep it,” said Calla. She scooped up a voluminous yellow wrapping that Lynno had worn in “The Castle of Pipers,” and went out.

  Deleon leaned in the doorway and listened to the sound of her feet going along Sandy Way and into the Lane of Olives, where it mingled with the tattered noise of the rain and vanished. He had a most ferocious headache, and his face was hot. He put his hands up to it, and they were as icy as Aelim’s had been.