I trust that in time he'll see the wisdom of your choice, and our choice, and marry again. Anatoly has in any case agreed to abide by your decision. I hope this finds you well and flourishing. Regards, Tess.
Then, below this and written in an entirely different, almost painstakingly-precise handwriting, was another sentence, this one in Rhuian rather than Anglais. "7 beg your indulgence for addressing you in this impertinent fashion, Diana, but I hope you will at least for a moment look at this as a man would and not let that damned female practicality push aside the feelings of the heart. This was signed simply, Hyakoria Bakhtiian.
At the bottom, someone had traced onto the paper the outline of the earring Anatoly had given to her, and she back to him. It was like a signature. It was a promise.
The five minute call came up on the theater screen. "Oh, hell." Her hands shook, but she forced herself to put the letter down. She took in three breaths to steady herself and then started furiously applying makeup, eyes first. "I come on in scene two. Oh, damn."
The door burst open and Joseph charged in. "Di! Your hair! Where's your wig? You didn't give your ready call-" He jerked to a halt, seeing Marco. A look of quick sympathy passed over his face. "I will go out," he announced. "In sixty seconds I will come back in." The door shut behind him.
Diana set down her pencil and rose and turned to face Marco.
"What are you going to do?" he asked. "Tess told me what was in the letter, more or less. I agreed to deliver it because… well, because I was coming here, and we had to hand-deliver it. You'll have to burn it, you know. We can't leave any evidence that she's alive where the Chapalii might find it."
It was a grandiose dream she had had, two years ago, meeting him and wondering if he and she, the hardened explorer and the young adventurous actor-Goddess, it was a horrible cliche, and maybe that was why it had gone so badly. But he deserved honesty. And she had a play to perform.
"Marco, I don't know what I'm going to do. But don't wait for me. I can't promise you anything, not yet, maybe not ever." Then she crossed over and kissed him, once, lightly.
The door opened. "Scene over," said Joseph. "So sorry. Out. Di, damn it anyway." The wig mistress charged in and stuffed Diana's hair into the wig cap and men peeled the wig on over the cap. Joseph stood over Diana while she blended on the base to cover the seam and finished with her mouth and eyes, and did the rouge. At some point during this frantic activity she saw Marco move, in the mirror, and leave, that quietly. He left a single red rose behind him, on the table.
"Stand!" ordered Joseph. He dressed her in the swathes of robes that Zenocrate, the daughter of the Soldan of Egypt, wore on her first entrance, led in by the great conqueror Tamburiaine as his captive and intended mistress.
The cue light came on above the door.
"I'll guide you up the stairs," said Joseph.
In the darkness backstage, he gave her hand into Vasil Veselov's. They entered.
It was a good, attentive audience, eager to be enthralled by the story and patient enough, with both parts of Tamburiaine before them, to be forgiving of Vasil's novice errors, snags in the way the energy ran, a focus thrown the wrong way, a glance held too long, although never, ever, a missed line.
To be fair to Vasil, he performed well, very well, considering how short a time he had been acting. The part was made for him, of course. She knew who he was playing. He wasn't playing Tamburiaine, he was playing Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, the way he moved, the way he turned his head, the way the sword swayed at his hips, the way he looked toward the heavens when he spoke of his destiny-Vasil had studied Bakhtiian so closely that he had internalized Bakhtiian's bearing, his tone, almost his whole being. But for his fair hair and his beautiful, flawless face, he might have been Bakhtiian, crueler, even a little comic in his excesses, but a man bent on conquering the world. It was easy enough, as Zenocrate, to fall in love with his power.
They ate dinner backstage in the two-hour break between Part One and Part Two. Yevgeni came backstage. He always did. He as good as haunted Hyacinth wherever he went, except when he worked. Yomi had found the young rider employment at a cobbler's shop, building handcrafted boots, and he seemed happy enough there and proud of his work. But then, he came from a common family. Diana tried to imagine Anatoly making boots for a living, and could not.
"Places!" Yomi announced. They went back on, for Part Two.
Zenocrate dies.
"Black is the beauty of the brightest day,
The golden ball of heaven's eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves…
For amorous Jove hath snatched my love from hence,
Meaning to make her stately queen of heaven…
Behold me here, divine Zenocrate,
Raving, impatient, desperate and mad…
Come down from heaven and live with me again!"
In the end, Tamburlaine himself cannot triumph over his own mortality. He takes ill, he fights and wins his final battle, and when he admits at last that death is upon him, he calls on his men to bring in the hearse of Zenocrate.
From the hearse, lying still, visible to the audience and yet disguised somewhat by the frosted glastic walls, Diana watched Vasil give his final speech. She watched him cry. Not for himself. Tess Soerensen was wrong about one thing, at least: It wasn't true that Vasil hadn't given up anything. This much Diana had learned-obliquely- from Karolla. Vasil had simply given up the only thing- the only person-he had ever truly loved outside of himself.
"For Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God must die."
He died, and still tears leaked from his eyes as Hal spoke the final lines. "Let heaven and earth his timeless death deplore. For both their worths can equal him no more."
Vasil was crying for what he had lost, and for what Ilyakoria Bakhtiian would never know.
Diana cried, too, because Tess Soerensen was, after all, right. Anatoly couldn't come to Earth. It would be cruel, above all else. Anatoly belonged on Rhui, just as she belonged here. He had agreed to abide by her decision, and though so often he found some way to make the decision fall the way he wanted it to, this time she had to make the choice. She knew what her decision must be. It was time to let him go.
CHAPTER FORTY
David liked Meroe Transfer Station because he had designed it. Together with his two codesigners, he had worked in a unifying motif of huge pyramidal chambers and buttresses in the open concourses that resembled giant wings, all linked by an enclosed stream that ran through most of the station. He had managed to weasel out enough money from the design budget to commission fifty artists from varying disciplines to decorate the interior, with serpents and rams and giraffes, groves of date palms and acacia trees, sandstone statues and intricate mosaics of fused glass inlaid into gold.
Twenty years later, he still liked it, he decided as he strolled through Concourse Axum on his way to the gate from which he would take ship back to Odys, and Charles.
He wished Nadine could see it. He would have liked to share it with her, to show her how it interlocked, how the architecture and the ornamental motifs reflected each other, how the dimensionality of building in space both freed and limited the engineer. Had it really only been eighteen months since he had left her? It seemed like one month, she remained so clear in his mind. It seemed like a hundred years.
Impatient with himself and these pointless reflections, he tapped his one piece of luggage against his leg. The plastine tube thudded gently against his thigh, light but sturdy. It contained three hand-drawn maps that David and Rajiv had done together, to send on to Rhui, to Tess. They were ostensibly a map of the principality of Jeds, a detailed map of the city, and a detailed map of the palace of Morava and its grounds, based on his survey, but coded into the key was a secondary matrix on which Tess would build a secondary architecture for the saboteur network based on the architecture and layout of the palace of Jeds, the palace of Morava, and-although this wasn't mapped-the traditional spiral layout of a jaran camp, which made the arrangement of tents look haphazard until one divined the pattern by which they were set up.