“I have no desire to leave my guild.”
“But you could. Today. That’s the thing to remember. People don’t want other people to be people. They throw names over them and lock them in, but I don’t want you to let them lock you in. Dr. Talos is worse than most. In his own way, he’s a liar…”
She left the accusation unfinished, and I ventured, “I once heard Baldanders say he seldom lied.”
“In his own way, I said. Baldanders is right, Dr. Talos doesn’t lie the way other people understand lying. Calling you Death wasn’t a lie, it was a… a…”
“Metaphor,” I suggested.
“But it was a dangerous, bad metaphor and it was aimed at you like a lie.”
“Do you think Dr. Talos hates me, then? I would have said he was one of the few people who’ve showed me real kindness since I left the Citadel. You, Jonas — who’s gone now — an old woman I met while I was imprisoned, a man in a yellow robe — who also called me Death, by the way — and Dr. Talos. It’s a short list, actually.”
“I don’t think he hates in the way we understand it,” Dorcas replied softly. “Or for that matter, that he loves. He wants to manipulate everything he comes upon, to change it with his will. And since tearing down is easier than building, that’s what he does most often.”
“Baldanders seems to love him, though,” I said. “I used to have a crippled dog, and I’ve seen Baldanders look at the doctor the way Triskele used to look at me.”
“I understand you, but it doesn’t strike me that way. Have you ever thought of how you must have looked, when you looked at your dog? Do you know anything about their past?”
“Only that they lived together near Lake Diuturna. The people there appear to have set fire to their house to drive them away.”
“Do you think Dr. Talos could be Baldanders’s son?”
The idea was so absurd that I laughed, happy to have the release from tension. “Just the same,” Dorcas said, “that’s how they act. Like a slow-thinking, hardworking father with a brilliant, erratic son. At least so it seems to me.” It was not until we had left the bench and were walking back to the Green Room (which no more resembled the picture Rudesind had shown me than any other garden would have) that it occurred to me to wonder whether Dr. Talos’s calling Dorcas “Innocence” had not been a metaphor of the same kind.
Chapter 23
JOLENTA
The old orchard and the herb garden beyond it had been so silent, so freighted with oblivion, that they had recalled to me the Atrium of Time, and Valeria with her exquisite face framed in furs. The Green Room was pandemonium. Everyone was awake now, and sometimes it seemed that everyone was shouting. Children climbed the trees to free the caged birds, pursued by their mothers’ brooms and their fathers’ missiles. Tents were being struck even while rehearsals continued, so that I saw a seemingly solid pyramid of striped canvas collapse like a flag thrown down and reveal beyond it the grass-green megathere rearing on his hind legs while a dancer pirouetted on his forehead.
Baldanders and our tent were gone, but in a moment Dr. Talos came rushing up and hurried us away down twisted walks, past balustrades and waterfalls and grottoes filled with raw topazes and flowering moss, to a bowl of clipped lawn where the giant labored to erect our stage under the eyes of a dozen white deer.
It was to be a much more elaborate stage than the one I had played upon within the Wall of Nessus. Servants from the House Absolute, it seemed, had brought timbers and nails, tools and paint and cloth in quantities much greater than we could possibly make use of. Their generosity had waked the doctor’s bent toward the grandiose (which never slumbered deeply) and he alternated between assisting Baldanders and me with the heavier constructions and making frantic additions to the manuscript of his play.
The giant was our carpenter, and though he moved slowly, he worked so steadily, and with such great strength — driving a spike as thick as my forefinger with a blow or two and cutting a timber it would have taken me a watch to saw through with a few strokes of his ax — that he might have been ten slaves toiling under the whip.
Dorcas found a talent for painting that I at least was surprised by. Together, we erected the black plates that drink the sun, not only to gather energy for the night’s performance, but to power the projectors now. These contrivances can provide a backdrop of a thousand leagues as easily as the interior of a hut, but the illusion is complete only in total darkness. It is best, therefore, to strengthen it with painted scenes behind, and Dorcas created those with skill, standing waist-high in mountains as she thrust her brushes through the daylight-faded images.
Jolenta and I were of less value. I had no painter’s hand, and too little understanding of the necessities of the play even to assist the doctor in arranging our properties. Jolenta, I think, rebelled physically and psychically against any kind of work, and certainly against this. Those long legs, so slender below the knees, so rounded to bursting above them, were inadequate to bear much weight beyond that of her own body; her jutting breasts were in constant danger of having their nipples crushed between lumber or smeared with paint. Nor had she any of that spirit that animates the members of a group forwarding the group’s purpose. Dorcas had said that I had been alone the night before, and perhaps she had been more nearly correct than I supposed, but Jolenta was more solitary still. Dorcas and I had each other, Baldanders and the doctor their crooked friendship, and we came together in the performance of the play. Jolenta had only herself, the incessant performance whose sole goal was to garner admiration.
She touched my arm, and without speaking rolled enormous emerald eyes to indicate the edge of our natural amphitheater, where a grove of chestnuts lifted white candles among their pale leaves.
I saw that none of the others were looking at us and nodded. After Dorcas, Jolenta walking beside me seemed nearly as tall as Thecla, though she took small steps instead of Thecla’s swinging strides. She was a head taller than Dorcas at least, her coiffure made her seem taller still, and she wore boots with high, riding heels.
“I want to see it,” she said. “It’s the only chance I shall ever have.”
That was a palpable lie, but as though I believed it I said, “The opportunity is symmetric. Today and only today the House Absolute has the opportunity to see you.”
She nodded; I had enunciated a profound truth. “I need someone — someone the ones I don’t want to talk to will be afraid of. I mean all these showmen and mummers. When you were gone, no one but Dorcas would go with me, and no one is afraid of her. Could you draw that sword and carry it over your shoulder?” I did so.
“If I don’t smile, make them leave. Understand?”
Grass much longer than that in the natural amphitheater, but softer than fern, grew among the chestnuts; the path was of quartz pebbles shot with gold. “If only the Autarch saw me, he would desire me. Do you think he will come to our play?”
To please her I nodded, but added, “I have heard he has little use for women, however beautiful, save as advisors, spies, and shield maids.”
She stopped and turned, smiling. “That’s just it. Don’t you see? I can make anyone desire me, and so he, the One Autarch, whose dreams are our reality, whose memories are our history, will desire me too, unmanned or not. You have wanted women other than me, haven’t you? Wanted them badly?”
I admitted I had.
“And so you think you desire me as you wished for them.” She turned and began to walk again, hobbling a little, as it seemed she always did, but invigorated for the moment by her own argument. “But I make every man stiffen and every woman itch. Women who have never loved women wish to love me — did you know that? The same ones come to our performances again and again, and send me their food and their flowers, scarves, shawls, and embroidered kerchiefs with oh, such sisterly, motherly notes. They’re going to protect me, protect me from my physician, from his giant, from their husbands and sons and neighbors. And the men! Baldanders has to throw them in the river.”