Uneasy Alliances Part 7

"Now why should that be?" he asked, drawing out a small coin and putting in down.

"He views you as compet.i.tion, King of Players," said the barkeep. "He is a storyteller in the streets. What will you drink?"

"Half water, half wine," said Feltheryn. "That is foolish of him, for he will be able to tell a thousand tales to each play I perform. And the stories we offer are different."

"Half water?" the barkeep asked, and his look was of the greatest contempt.

Feltheryn drew himself up tall, taller than the barkeep though not so broad or strong: taller than anyone in the room, though probably thinner than anyone as well.

"I am an old man, in case you have not noticed," he said with dignity. "My body does not move as quickly as it once did, nor do my guts digest as well. I will pay you as if the whole cup were wine."

That settled the matter and the barkeep gave him what he wanted.

"I will pay for something else as well," he said after he had taken a drink. "Something within your proper duties but which might be distasteful without the gold."

"And what is that?" asked the barkeep suspiciously.

"By now you know Rounsnouf, my comedian," Feltheryn said, gesturing toward the table where his actors were so engrossed that they had not noted his entry. "I fear that he knows this place better now than he ought, at least for the welfare of my plays. I will pay you a fit sum if on certain nights, when we are to perform, you will forbid him entry until the play is done."

"And what's to stop him drinking elsewhere?"

"It is not the drink he values in this place, it's the people. I do not think he will find such a ripe a.s.sortment elsewhere in Sanctuary, and if he knows that he can come here but for play nights, I do not think he will feel abused."

The barkeep named a price, Feltheryn d.i.c.kered it down (though it was within reason) and the bargain was struck.

"But you must tell him what you've done," the barkeep concluded.

"Just so," said Feltheryn, finis.h.i.+ng his drink and gesturing for another.

His cup refilled, he made his way across the room, avoiding the table of Hakiem, and joined the party. Rounsnouf and Snegelringe introduced him to their new friend, Hort. then they all swapped stories and poems for a while. Feltheryn did not tell Rounsnouf what he had done until the next morning, when the little comedian took it in stride.

"Would that the G.o.ds," he said in acceptance, "were so steady of will as a director!"

The final piece of planning involved extra bodies, for The Power of Kings was a spectacle play and the effect of spectacle was achieved largely through filling the stage with elegantly clothed people. Feltheryn had taught many a young actor the importance of a walk-on role by citing the case of the handmaiden in The Murder of Queen Ranceta, a part which gave the young woman playing it but a moment on stage but without which the play could not exist. (It was the handmaiden who delivered the tray with the fatal flagon of poisoned wine, and without the poisoning there was no play!) Now the question was where to hire attractive young women to don the robes of court ladies, and where to hire young men to wear the garb of court gentlemen.

Feltheryn asked Lalo, who certainly should be able to ferret out beauty if anyone could, and Lalo asked his wife Gilla, for he was not confident in the enterprise. Gilla suggested that Feltheryn talk to Myrtis, the proprietrix of the Aphrodisia House, with the admonition that the women who worked there were above average in looks for their trade; and a vote of confidence in their honesty to their employer. Feltheryn did as Gilla bid and was delighted to find that Myrtis could not only supply him with lovely ladies but knew where to hire young men just as pretty and reliable to wear the beautiful clothes he promised.

It was not long before the theater neared completion, before the sets were painted and dried, before Glisselrand had brought in seamstresses to help her finish the arduous task of building the last of the costumes.

Actual rehearsals got under way, the piecemeal chunks of the drama were glued together into scenes, then acts, then the ladies and gentlemen of the evening were called in (by day, so that they could continue to work nights until the opening) and the grand sweep of the drama was st.i.tched in its final glorious pattern.

Feltheryn ceased to sleep much for even after so many years an opening night excited him. He ran lines in his mind constantly, missed, re-ran them. He worried over the success of his new theater, he worried over the nuance of each line in the play, he worried over things that a week before would have flowed by him like mist in the night. He took to dressing in a shabby cloak and wandering the streets, hunched over so that his height would not mark him, and listening to the crowds.

Were they talking about the theater? About the play?

If not, something must be done.

He longed for the days when the mere fact that he and Glisselrand slept together without benefit of marriage was sufficient to t.i.tillate the ma.s.ses. In those days there had been no difficulty in drawing a crowd. The pride of the youthful Rankan Empire had filled the streets of Ranke with pleasure seekers, and the craving of a young empire for respectability had made scandal easy, Scandal in Sanctuary would be hard work, he thought.

The theater was decorated within with banners and garlands of flowers made of gayly colored silk, and the night before opening they decorated the outside as welt. It must be a festive occasion, and it was to be such a novelty in Sanctuary that all kinds of people offered help. Molin came by and asked that they move virtually everything movable, to make sure it would work. Myrtis stopped in-at an hour unknown to a woman other profession-and a.s.sured Glisselrand that she and her ladies would be bringing trays of sweetmeats for opening night. A wagon pulled up and unloaded several barrels of excellent wine, courtesy of the as yet unseen prince. It seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Feltheryn retired that night with only the slightest anxiety, and sank immediately into a sleep filled with naming vistas, tragic emotions, and thunderous applause.

The actors slept late the morning of the opening, as was usual. Days of rehearsal had now to be traded for nights of performance, and the energy required for such was enormous, particularly of people who had reached the ages Feltheryn and Glisselrand had. Lempchin brought them breakfast in bed, a tradition which they indulged despite the cleaning which the kitchen would require after the boy's attempt at cooking.

Snegelringe came in and Feltheryn complimented him on his performance at the dress rehearsal: "I think you have the role at last," he said. "The way you walked was perfect! Just the right balance of n.o.bility and indolence for KareL"

"I was pleased with that myself," said Snegelringe. "Actually, I owe it totally to Rounsnouf and his fascination with that tavern. I was casting about for a model and one of his friends, a dark young woman who fights as a gladiator, told me she could show me a man very much like Karel if I would attend her. I did, and we rode to a brief hunt. Out on the hills she pointed out some n.o.ble dandy and his guards, and even from the distance I could see that he was what I wanted for the part."

"Who was he?" Feltheryn asked, sipping at the tea which Lempchin had made too strong. He much preferred tisane.

"I've no idea," said Snegelringe. "I asked her, but she laughed and said it were better I did not know, for he was not the kind of man I would enjoy knowing."

Feltheryn furrowed his brow. It was not likely to be a source of difficulty, but he preferred to know from what hand all the cards in the game had been dealt.

"Will she be coming to the play?"

"She says she would not miss it for the world; especially once I had told her Prince Kadakithis and the Beysa would be there in the newly flocked box. She said she would be bringing several other ladies as well."

"Ah, good," said Feltheryn. "The more n.o.bility the merrier!"

"The house will glitter like Midwinter Festival in Ranke," said Glisselrand nostalgically, and Feltheryn detected just the slightest regret in her voice. It had been good in Ranke with the Emperor's support.

She threw the covers back dramatically and sat up in the bed.

"And I." she announced, "must glitter twice as bright! Lempchin! Go out to the herbalist and get me a box of henna, my hair is beginning to show grey!"

That buzzing, casual time before the opening pa.s.sed, the afternoon when there was nothing to do but a thousand tiny things that had to wait, then had to be done. The blue hour came, the stars began to p.r.i.c.k the sky, and Lempchin lit oil lamps on the front of the theater. The inner doors were closed and the outer doors were opened, and Lempchin prepared to sell admittance.

Feltheryn headed for his dressing room, stage left, and prepared to put on his makeup. He did not need as much as he once had. Now the job was to make him seem young enough for the part of the king. Once it had been a task to make him seem old enough.

He was part way through when he heard the voice of Hort outside his door, and with it that of Rounsnouf.

"But you could wait," Hort said. "He will still be there later!"

"I could, but I won't!" said Rounsnouf, and the voices moved past the door to Feltheryn's dressing room, toward the back entrance of the theater.

Feltheryn felt a moment of panic, dropped the sponge with which he had been applying rouge, and leaped to his feet. He hurried out into the pa.s.sage, but it was too late. The door was closing and Rounsnouf and the storyteller were gone!

"s.h.i.+pri's Dugs!" Feltheryn swore, and his voice carried like Vashanka's thunder. The door to the dressing room next to his own opened and Snegelringe looked out, his facing looking oddly pale with only the base applied, and no eye or lip color.

"Hold the house!" Feltheryn instructed. "Rounsnouf has fled, and I must chase him!"

"To the Vulgar Unicorn?" Snegelringe inquired.

"If so, I'll have the hide of the barkeep. I paid him to be sure the curtain was on time!"

He went back into his dressing room, wiped the makeup from his face with a wet towel, then pulled on a tunic. Just to be sure he would be taken seriously he added the belt with the King's sword. He threw a short cloak over the tunic against the chill, then he left the theater. No matter that the sword was cheap iron, a hand on the hilt was all it usually took!

He glanced up the alley from the stage door as he went and noted that people were already arriving. He would have Rounsnouf's skin for this escapade, and possibly a bit from Hort as well!

He rushed through the gathering darkness, still running lines in his mind for the second scene of the first act. In a matter of minutes he was at the Maze, then within it. He was so angry that he barely noticed the patter of feet that fell in behind him, forced them in fact from his attention until they speeded up: until it was apparent that they were running after him, close and with intent.

The skill most necessary to an actor upon the stage is the ability to adjust rapidly to changing circ.u.mstances. If a door sticks one must be ready to make it appear a part of the play. If a sword sticks in its scabbard one must be ready to dodge a ch.o.r.eographed blow and keep the action flowing while one gets it free. It was not so much self-preservation as stagecraft that made Feltheryn whirl upon his a.s.sailants at the last moment and slide his sword free, raising it over his shoulder in the menacing stance of a broadswordsman ready for the downstroke.

The shadows before him skidded to a halt. There were five of them (poor odds) and he recognized them at once as the pickpockets who had tried for his purse that first day in the bazaar. Wicked sharp steel glinted in the scant starlight, definitely better weapons than the fake sword he wielded.

The tallest one, the boy whom Snegelringe had wounded, gave a laugh. "King indeed!" came the young voice. "Nothing but an old player!

One with too much gold on his person at that! And this time with no pudgy sidekick to defend him!"

The youth was right, Feltheryn observed, but his words showed inaccurate judgment.

"The gold is all spent," he said, keeping his voice carefully level and below the middle force. "As to the rest: I am old, but not without skills." "Skills to be tried!" snarled the boy, and they all came at him. "Die then!" Feltheryn cried, and this time he let forth the full power of his voice, a voice trained to reach at least the third balcony of the largest theater in Ranke. And as he spoke (for he did not have to shout to be heard from one end of the Maze to the other) he brought the iron sword down with his full strength and speed, straight at his opponent's head.

One knife caught in his cloak as he swirled it with his left hand. Another thrust between his ribs, under his descending right arm; but its force was not sufficient to go all the way in, so startled were the thieves by the force of his voice. Two of the boys jumped back, terrified. The leader, primed on his pride, managed to avoid the iron blade descending toward his head, but not quite enough. The edge was not terribly sharp but it was moving fast enough to break his collarbone where it struck, even as his blade sliced across Feltheryn's belly, drawing blood but not managing to gut him.

It was not unlike the fight in Rakesblade, and Feltheryn, barely feeling the wounds in the excitement of a performance, delivered his lines with force enough to rattle their teeth: "Is this your best, you unborn wh.o.r.eson snakes?

Is magick then your honorless defense?

See too my holy blade I can enchaunt.

So that its light your rude entrapment breaks!"

The fact that they were not using magic against him quite escaped their attention at that moment, for the sword in Feltheryn's hand began to glow a bluish white, spilling its weird light into the shadows and illuminating the scene dramatically. They had no idea that the light from the blade was all there was to the magic of the spell contained in the play. They only knew that their leader was once more screaming in agony and that the man before them was much taller than he had seemed a moment before: that he seemed unharmed by their attack, and that they were not winning.

"Gralis, forget him!" cried one of the boys to their leader, and then they all bolted, leaving the wounded Gratis to fend for himself.

Feltheryn stepped forward, brandis.h.i.+ng the glowing sword at his agonized enemy.

"Go thou into darkness!" he commanded, from later in the same play. "Take demons now for playmates if you will, and leave forever, these the lands of light!"

Through the pain in his ruined shoulder the boy heard these words and, harking back to the terrors that had so recently reigned in Sanctuary, he lost control of his bladder even as he turned and staggered away, doing his best to run.

Feltheryn stood triumphant, the light blazing from the sword in an unnaturally quiet and empty street. He watched the horrified and incompetent thief disappear into the shadows, then he realized that something was wrong.

There was no applause!

The light of the sword fizzled out as if it had been doused with a bucket of winter cold water, and the pain hit Feltheryn where the two blades had cut him. He shook himself, took a deep breath, then thrust the stage sword back into its stage scabbard. He felt the wound across his belly and determined that it was not going to be fatal, then checked the piercing between his ribs. That was more serious, and would require a chirurgeon: after the performance.

He turned and headed for the Vulgar Unicorn, his anger returning full force.

-But he was not prepared for what awaited him when he slammed open the door and raked the brown darkness with his steel-blue gaze.

Rounsnouf and Hort were two of three sitting at a table engaged in animated conversation while the barkeep-a barkeep different from the one Feltheryn had bribed-poured dark beer in their mugs.

The barkeep registered a look not much different from that of any other man faced with trouble, but it was the third patron at Rounsnouf's table who captured and held Feltheryn's attention. A daemon! They were drinking with a gray-skinned, wart-faced, wall-eyed daemon! "Oh dear," said Rounsnouf. "I believe I've upset my director." "Lady of Stars!" exclaimed the young storyteller. "You're wounded!" "Not so much in the flesh as in my heart!" Feltheryn proclaimed, a quote from the play he should now be ready to begin.

"I would not have come just now . . ." Rounsnouf said lamely, and he gestured to the daemon.

"Snapper Jo's fault?" the daemon queried. "Just a little drink with friends. Very human thing to do!"

"To the Theater!" Feltheryn proclaimed. And if the habitues of the Vulgar Unicorn had been familiar with the whole corpus of the sacred plays they would have seen in the fire of his eyes the conjuration of most ancient deities from the most ancient dramas.

They were not, but n.o.body argued.

Still, the night's difficulties were unended.

Bandages, ointments to kill the pain, makeup, costume, light calisthenics to fill his blood with air to support his voice; all these were accomplished, and the curtain went up. From the wings Feltheryn listened to the love scene in the garden between Snegelringe and Glisselrand, running his lines and clearing his mind of all the nonsense that had slowed him. It was past, after all, and only the play now existed.

The scene drew to a close and the curtain was drawn, then he and Rounsnouf and Lempchin, with the aid of the roaring boys provided by Myrtis, pulled the ropes, moved the panels, and in general changed the scene to that of the King's study. He took his place on the stage, seated at the King's great desk, and the curtain went up.

Feltheryn came alive.

There was an audience and he could feel it, feel every living being as a presence, their eyes upon him, their breathing slowed, their minds involved-their emotions guided as they submitted themselves, for the duration, to the magic of the show. He began the monologue in which the King voiced his doubts, then Glisselrand entered and he began the part of the play that was his personal favorite, for it said, better than any words of his own could ever hope to say, what he felt about her: "How shall I call you then?

Like some great bird, that though she be my slave can yet take wing?

Like some famed horse, that though I hold the reins can race the wind?

I call you love, and hold you in my arms, and yet you overpower me.

I call you wife, and you must call me lord; and yet I wors.h.i.+p at your shrine!"

He ceased to exist as a separate person and became the tragic king, a man doomed by circ.u.mstance to destroy all that he loved in life, rescued from the ultimate humiliation only by the intervention of supernatural forces at the end: forces beyond his comprehension.

The scene changed again and the pain hit him, then he launched back into his performance and it was gone. Only when the first act was complete did he really understand that he was seriously wounded. Instead of going out to the little secret pa.s.sage behind the lobby (Molin had included it without question) to listen to the public reaction to the play, Feltheryn stayed in his dressing room, resting for the forceful and terrible interview with the High Priest, preparing for the cold and terrible act of burning his enemies at the stake, the auto-da-fe that was the play's most stunning spectacle.

By the end, however, as the story ground to its inevitable conclusion with the ghostly figure of the King's dead father dragging his grandson Karel into the tomb, the pain was pus.h.i.+ng past all Feltheryn's defenses. And there was something else, something that had tugged at him increasingly throughout. As the curtain fell and he dropped the character from him like a discarded robe, he placed it.

There was no applause.

No more applause than there had been in the alley earlier. Instead there was a curious buzz, something between anger and amus.e.m.e.nt, partaking of both; as if the audience didn't know what to do.

He had felt it, had known with the back of his mind that something was wrong, but he had been too much at odds with the pain to pay attention. Now his mind focused on it with a clarity like sunlight on springwater.

He started to go through the curtains for a bow, .if not to receive applause then to gauge the danger, but Glisselrand took his arm and stopped him.

"I think not," she said, and he saw that there were lines in her face that age had not put there.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't quite know," she replied, "but I think we shall find out. The Prince and the Beysa have sent word that they are coming backstage. Let's get to the green room."

They had taken the precaution of providing their own greens for the opening, so by the time Prince Kadakithis and the Beysa Shupansea swept in, Feltheryn and Glisselrand were seated behind a desk amidst baskets of flowers and fruit with potted palms to either side. It had not been easy to find potted palms in Sanctuary, but they had grown used to them in Ranke and they felt it would identify them positively with the capital in its days of glory.

The effort was apparently wasted.