People laughed.
Some of the musicians sitting on the stage’s edge jumped from the platform to move among the audience, collecting small iron coins, either in their cloaks or in the bodies of their actual instruments. Other musicians came out on the platform, already playing a rhythmic melody.
Now with her scarf and bells, diminutive, freckled Vatry rushed to the platform’s center and began to shake her hair and leap and smile and wink into the audience, now and again turning one of her astonishing flips!
People were generous!
Three times Pryn saw gold held up, to be thrust a moment later over the shoulder of another watcher and tossed into some musician’s basket or outstretched cloak.
To one side of the audience in a loose group stood a dozen or so slaves. Most wore their collars on naked shoulders. None was from the brewery. Pryn saw a few white collar-covers, but not many. Given her coming journey, she did not want to give the mummers any of her coins. But everyone else seemed to be, in laughing, clinking handfuls. The musicians were not asking from the slaves…
Pryn stood near a grove of pecan trees. Vatry did another flip, and all attention, including the musicians’, went forward. Pryn put down her sack, reached under her bloused-out shift, pulled the iron collar from her sash, and raised it to her neck. She pushed the iron semicircles closed — a small click.
Dropping her hands, Pryn looked about.
She felt a tingling over her entire body. No one seemed to be watching. It struck her for the first time, as she dropped her chin almost to hide it now she wore it, that the collar was not particularly comfortable. She picked up her sack and stepped out from the other side of the trees. She walked, leisurely (she hoped), toward the slaves at the clearing’s side.
A musician passed her with several different kinds of flutes tied top and bottom with thongs and strung about her shoulder. Her spread cloak sagged with iron coins — and at least as much gold as Pryn had once seen Madame Keyne thrust into the hands of a would-be assassin. With her oddly angled, wide-spaced eyes, the musician only glanced at Pryn. Pryn felt her body heat from ankles to ears. But the musician did not pause for any contribution.
The slaves she moved next to did not look at her either. While Vatry continued her dance, Pryn looked at them a lot, though — mostly for differences between herself and them which might betray her to some more-practiced eye. Were their hands, as they clapped at Vatry’s next flip, held differently from hers? Was there something special in the way this one beside her carried his sloping shoulders? Or in the way that heavy woman toward the front there kept rubbing her hand back and forth on the print skirt at her thigh? Or the way that one enfolded his cracked mug in both hands with the fingers interlocked at the front? What about the way the one with the collar-cover stood, one sharp hip thrust out? Certainly there must be something that marked them as different, marked them as belonging to the collar — which, now that she had become part of its meaning, was, after all, only a sign.
For a while Pryn found herself trying to imitate the gesture of one, the stance of another, seeking whatever might give her imposture more authority, till her attention was caught up by the skit that had replaced Vatry on the platform.
There was a beautiful princess, played by the leading lady, who somehow looked much younger than Pryn knew her to be from the time she’d eaten with the mummers back in the Kolhari market. There was the great and glittering monster, operated from offstage, who wanted to eat the princess. There were several dashing young men, some of whom had mothers and some of whom had girlfriends, and all of whom seemed to be in furious, comic competition; there was also a slave, who seemed, as far as Pryn could tell, to belong to everyone, since everyone gave him orders. He received many comic kicks and beatings, but nevertheless was always getting away with something — now a glass of wine from a fine supper that had erupted into a comic argument, now with a piece of gold from a stupidly mismanaged bargain. Both the slaves on one side and the workers on the other laughed. Indeed, two slaveboys, no older than she and both with brimming mugs, poked each other in the sides and made such loud comments, and seemed so generally tickled at seeing themselves represented on stage at all, it looked to Pryn as if it might grow into a real disturbance. Some of the workers were clearly annoyed; but none of the slaves seemed inclined to stop it. A few musicians still moved about, taking some last coins. In the excited state the collar produced, Pryn grew sweatingly uncomfortable at the rowdiness beside her. Finally she lifted her sack and moved toward the back. At the ledge, she just glanced down at the lower beach —
Along at the water’s edge, kicking bare feet at the wet sand, were Yrnik and big-eared, gawky-elbowed Tetya! They were laughing about something. Indeed, Tetya did not look like a boy who only that morning had beaten an old woman into insensibility. But then, Pryn thought as she stepped away, she probably did not look like a girl who’d just freed one.
Certainly they hadn’t seen her. Nor did they look as if they were headed up here.
The idea had been with her. But at a glimpse of someone from the brewery, idea became movement. Vatry was not in the skit. Two other mummers’ wagons — for props, scenery, and sleeping space — sat either side of the rocks. Pryn took her sack off beyond the wagon she’d recognized as the prop cart in which, when she’d last seen them in the city, Vatry had been housed.
The side wagons were angled back to the tree. Some musicians not in this skit stood at the wagon’s end near the horses. The musician who’d passed Pryn with her cloak of coins now cuddled the feedbag around one red muzzle. She stroked the bony forehead while the creature ate. Pryn felt something of the tingle again; she went further along beside the trees. She planned to work her way through the brush into the backstage area. But the further away she was when she started in, the less chance there’d be of someone shooing her off. Sack over one shoulder, she pushed in among saplings and undergrowth. If she’d gotten through her last night, certainly she could get through it today. When she reached the shadow of the larger trees, the undergrowth lessened. She worked her way to where the wagons must be, then started out.
She saw the rocks; she saw the wagon tops.
The center one had painted houses hanging on its back. Behind the wagon to the right, five mummers in their costumes hauled away a third of the monster, who’d apparently devoured the slave and just met defeat for it at the hands of the most sympathetic of the young men, who’d been played by a very tall, very beautiful, very black actor. On stage, the young man and some fishermen and the princess were singing about it now —
There was Vatry!
The little dancer stood in the door of the nearest wagon, talking to a man with a dark, muscular back. He wore a loin-rag wrapped around his hips and between his legs; a shaggy sheath hung at his belt.
Vatry’s hair was wild, unkempt, and there was no red in it.
The man’s was black and tied with a rag. He was handing Vatry a sack, not much larger than Pryn’s.
Vatry took it and thrust it inside behind the wagon’s door jamb.
The man turned to walk away — and became a woman!
Pryn caught her breath.