“There was no way out, trapped in that box canyon. We could neither advance nor retreat, nor move save to swing our swords to save our lives. We were surrounded and outnumbered, and we would have died there to the last of us, had not Theocles, bedecked in gore like his own armor…this is good.” The actor scratched his nose and looked at his pages again. “I like this. So, I’m going to be, what, like bloody and bandaged up here?”
“Yes,” the director responded. “We’re going to have you start off the whole thing, just come in all gruesome like that. It should give a nice ambience to the rest of the piece.”
“Isn’t it weird that I’m praising Theocles, though? Like making him out to be a hero?”
“Yes, that’s the dichotomy, Charles. We want to set Theocles up as a war-hero in the beginning, so that his descent into cruelty is heightened.”
Skinner sat in the back of the theater, listening. She was in the dark, and none of the actors would have recognized her as the writer, anyway. They’d been receiving the pages of the script anonymously. While she still felt a twinge of guilt, using the story she’d heard like this, she had to admit it had helped. The visit to the hospice had given her a broad brush with which to paint the horrors of war across the script, lending both a dark, gritty reality to the story, and helping to generate a depth of sympathy for Theocles’ character.
Is it all right if I’m doing it for the right reasons? She wondered. If it leads to a more conscientious rule, to less of a willingness to wage war…does that make it worth it?
Twelve
True Spring came, with the comfortable regularity of all of Trowth’s seasons, and if there was one time during that city’s long war against its elements that could even remotely be described as comfortable, it was True Spring. Second Winter thawed, snow melted, and the streets ran thick with cold, clear water. Crisp, salty breezes snuck past Trowth’s ancient sea-wall, and came close to dispelling its omnipresent umbra of cloud and pollution. The sun warmed the city’s old stones.
The end of the season would turn raw and rainy, of course, as heavy, damp air poured in from the sea, but, every year, for two weeks at the beginning of the season, Trowth enjoyed as close to perfect weather as the benighted metropolis was capable of. The Armistice, as these two weeks were commonly called in deference to the unacknowledged campaign that the weather waged against the town, extended to every aspect of Trowthi life. Old enmities were forgotten, debts were-if not forgiven-at least suspended, no harsh words were offered. Two weeks of clear, warm weather after the annual nightmare of Second Winter was enough to cool even the hottest-tempered ruffians; well-to-do citizens and irascible low-lifes alike poured into the street, and no man or woman even considered marring these days with violence or misdemeanor.
Shutters were thrown back, doors and windows left open, and warm feelings and good cheer filled the vast honeycomb of houses, pouring out into the streets, where men and women promenaded late in the lengthening days. All of the human and indige need for human contact, pent up and repressed for the rest of the icy year, found expression during Armistice, and seemed determined to make up for lost time.
It was no surprise that the Armistice was also a time for theater premiers; both the Royal and the Public saved all of their most promising work for the warm True Spring grace period, during which time audiences were traditionally larger and more well-disposed to spread positive word of good performances. Very occasionally, the theaters used this temporary period of universal largess to support plays that, otherwise, might have raised violent objections. Theocles-published, for propriety’s sake, under the innocuous nom-de-plume “E. E. Beckett”-would have earned approbation simply for its first ten minutes, so clever and vicious was Elizabeth Skinner’s excoriation of the Emperor and his war. It was hardly a surprise that Emilia Vie-Gorgon had arranged for the premiere of Theocles to fall on the second day of Armistice which arrived, as all seasons in Trowth arrive, precisely and dramatically.
Valentine Vie-Gorgon was entirely unaware of his cousin’s machinations, or indeed, her or of Skinner’s involvement with the play at all. What he did know is that his long-exasperated but always-affectionate father had given him a ticket for the reviewer’s box, and there was little the young coroner enjoyed more than the social and artistic entertainment provided by a night at the theater. Valentine shared the box with Roger Gorgon-Crabtree, a noted reviewer for the White Star. Roger was a very fat and conspicuously charming man, whose affable, almost vapid demeanor belied a razor wit and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of his subject. He was, in short, absolutely the ideal companion for the premiere of Theocles.
Roger met Valentine at the theater’s entrance, where they were permitted to go directly to their seats-tickets having already been collected. A substantial crowd milled pleasantly outside, eager for admittance and simultaneously pleased at not having to have to hurry to avoid the cold, or the rain, or mind-bending psychestorms, or the sharp-edged calcite hail that would come in late Summer. If anything, the low-rated families and well-off merchants and shopkeepers that represented the majority of the crowd seemed disinclined to waste the beauty of the Armistice by going inside at all, and if they could have waited in line until the sun was long set, and the late-night chill found its way back into Trowth, they probably would have.
“Have you heard much about this one, my boy?” Roger was asking him, as the two men settled into the plush chairs in the critics’ box.
“No, it’s new, isn’t it?” The theater was full of warm chatter, almost necessitating that Valentine shout to his companion. “Based on the poem?”
“That’s right,” Roger was saying, sipping at the complimentary punch provided in hot steaming bowls for the box seats. “Though I’ve heard-and mind you, you’re not to repeat this-that the writer, a Mr. Beckett, was also the unnamed collaborator on the Bone-Collector’s Daughter.”
“I don’t think I know that one.”
“Oh? Played at the Public about two years ago. Caused quite a stir, if I recall correctly, religiously outrageous and all that. At least, as outrageous as Canthi pantomime can be, if you take my meaning.”
Valentine did not, as he had paid very little attention to his literature classes in school but, not wanting to seem like the sort of man who had wasted a very expensive education, allowed that he did indeed take Roger’s meaning, and it was more than a little extraordinary that the play ran as long as it had.
“Quite right,” Roger replied. “Quite right, my boy. But you know, the crown is always hesitant to shut the theater down. I don’t know, I suppose you don’t remember it, but there was a play, ten or fifteen years ago. A silly thing, but it made a few jokes at the expense of our beloved Emperor-Word protect him and keep him! He had his men close it down after a week, declared it an affront to the crown, put it on the Black List. And wouldn’t you know, a month later and someone’s published it. Just printed up pamphlets of this script and sold them for pennies on streetcorners. He probably made a fortune.”
“People bought it?”
“Well, no one would admit to it, obviously. Sh, sh, it’s starting.” Roger had an unpleasant habit of talking during the performance, making snide and sometimes astute observations, or asking innocuous questions, and then shushing Valentine before he had a chance to respond. He also carried with him, to support his bulk, a heavy wooden walking stick, that he was perpetually tapping on the box’s railing as a way of showing his good favor. Still, there was something interesting about Roger’s perspective-his sense of history and structure served to inform what turned out to be an astonishingly deep text.