Harmony (35 page)

“We were working late over at the Barn,” Mali said. “We were on our way home.”

“They beat the shit out of him,” Cris exclaimed.

I hovered helplessly. “Who?
Who
?”

Mark unzipped his coveralls and tore off his undershirt. With it he blotted gently Sam’s battered face. I shuddered. Could a man take such a beating and live?

Cris wiped his hands on his thighs and looked to Mali. “What d’you want to do? Where should we take him?”

“To the hospital!” I gasped. “Where else?”

Mali knelt. “Sam? What do you think?”

Sam palmed blood out of his eyes. His forehead gleamed wetly. “Gonna need doctor’s care this time, Mal.”

“And you’ll get it.”

“We’ll have to call Security,” Cris warned, and finally I understood. They wanted to keep this quiet. My instinct would have been to scream bloody murder.

“Cora Lee’s sure to have a private doctor,” I suggested. But Cora’s was a ten-minute walk.

“Can you make it?” Mali whispered.

Sam’s chuckle rattled damply in his throat.

“We’ll carry him,” insisted Mark.

Mali flicked another glance at Songh, searching the shadows. The street remained still and silent. “Likely they took off when you all stopped.” He touched Sam gently. “They weren’t planning to leave you alive, bro.”

“Hey, I don’t kill that easy,” Sam coughed.

“Right.” Mali’s face, caught in a drift of moonlight, could have been carved of jet, if rock can be thought of as angry.

“You’re all right?” I asked him.

“They weren’t interested in me.” The blood on his shirt was Sam’s. “All right. Gwinn, fast as you can to Cora’s. If she hasn’t got a doctor, let her call the cops. If Omea’s there, tell her… no, never mind. Just go!”

“Did you see them?”

He nodded. “Four. Young and strong.”

“And professional,” wheezed Sam. “Some vacation, huh?”

Behind me, Jane was moaning softly.

“You think it was the CDL?” I asked.

“Later,” Mali spat. “Go on, now. Out of here!”

I snatched up my discarded bike.

Jane dropped her bike and Mark’s in a sudden clatter. “Oh god, oh god! It was me! It was my fault! I told them! I told them it was Sam! I told them Sam was the Conch!”

* * *

Cris says Jane became hysterical and could not be questioned until Sam was safe at Cora’s and her doctor had assured us that he was tough and would probably survive. I was too busy being scrub nurse to notice, trying to stay calm, trying not to wretch at the sight of Sam’s blood on my hands.

Dr. Jaeck was a dryly humorous man not much taller than Cora who talked impasto paint technique with her as he stapled and sutured and taped Sam up on the big refectory table in Cora’s kitchen. He later observed that it had been a long time and another dome away since he’d treated his last life-threatening case of assault and battery, and what the hell was going on in Harmony?

Mali paced the impromptu surgery like an angry specter, Sam’s blood drying to brown on his yellow T-shirt. Mark and I manned the portable autoclave and rinsed towels while Cris kept an eye on a catatonic Jane in the great-hall. The others, when they came home, hung out in the corners of the kitchen, still dressed for the concert they’d been attending. I listened without hearing for a while before I realized their murmur was a nearly ritualistic recalling of past assaults and injuries to troupe members.

“I’m worried more about his inside than his outside,” the doctor advised when Sam had been carried upstairs and Mali had settled by his bed to worry. “That body took a heavy beating.”

“It’s his hands he’ll be worried about.” Cora took Jaeck’s arm. “You’ll come see him first thing.”

He nodded, threw us all a final quizzical look, and let Cora see him to the door.

* * *

We gathered in the great-hall, where Cris stood watch over Jane. She was hollow-eyed but aware of herself again, curled tightly into the corner of a plush green sofa. Songh dozed in an armchair by the fireplace.

Omea’s bracelets tinkled as she shook him gently awake. “Best get home, child. Your people will be wondering.”

He blinked up at her shyly. “I called them. I told them I was sleeping over at the dorm.”

“You can, you know,” said Mark.

Omea stood back. “Did you tell them why?”

“I can’t tell them, but if I go home, I can’t not tell them.”

“You understand that not going will look like taking sides anyway?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Songh replied faintly. “I know.”

Omea smiled. “Well, if you’re sure, then. Welcome.”

Ule beetled over to crouch before Jane like a small ogre contemplating dinner. “Now what about this one?”

Jane shrank into the cushions with a moan.

“Oh, Muley!” Omea nudged him aside and eased herself down beside Jane. “You are perfectly safe with us, dear. Do you feel up to telling us about it yet?”

Jane had cried herself dry. Her voice was rough and uninflected. “I never thought they’d… I thought they’d just arrest him and send him away. I thought they’d leave us alone, that the harassment would stop when the people knew the Conch was gone from Harmony.”

Omea took Jane’s hands and held them gently. “You thought Sam was Latooea?”

“My speculation,” Cris admitted. “But I—”

Omea waved him to silence. “And who did you tell this to?”

“He said if I told, he’d have me thrown Out.”

“He will never know you told, child. That we promise.”

Jane was too broken and exhausted to resist. “I told Mr. Brigham.”

And that was no surprise to me.

THE RESPONSE:

The Eye kept Jane with them and sent the rest of us home, with instructions to say nothing about the beating. The terror glazing Jane’s eyes as we walked out of Cora’s great-hall in the early hours was equal only to the wonder in them later that morning when she showed up at the Arkadie not many minutes behind me.

She moved in a daze to her spot near the showers and pulled her chair tight to the counter. She took up her brush but made no move to begin painting. “They said they’d take me with them if I’m not renewed.”

“How’s Sam?” Maybe the Eye was ready to let her off easy, but I was not.

“They said it wouldn’t be just like Harmony and I said anything was better than being put Outside and then Moussa laughed at me and said it
was
outside, at least for now, unless the planters have their way.”

“Damn it, Jane. How is Sam?” I’d dreamed about him, and Micah, until their images had combined and I was begging forgiveness from a battered, bleeding face with Micah’s numbed eyes.

“Oh. Sam is, uh, coming along, Mali said. After the doctor left, they magicked him up a little and he’ll be all right soon.”

“They magicked Sam?”

“Oh yes.” She dipped her brush and began to paint. “And they made a sign. Did you see it?”

This was too weird. I decided her brain was too busy with revision and reconception to be able to handle normal conversation. “See what?”

“The eye, up over the plaza. It’s there. They put it there.”

I studied her more carefully. “Jane, after we left, did they give you anything, like to eat or medicine?” Drugs, I was thinking, it’s got to be.

She shook her head slowly. Her every move was deliberate. “They talked with me for a long time and then they put me to bed. They gave me Mali’s bed since he’s mostly in Cora’s room now. You should go out and see it. It’s pretty.”

I set down my brush, wondering if it was safe to leave a person alone when they were so obviously in shock. But there was no one around to whom I could entrust her with any sort of appropriate explanation, so I encouraged her to keep working and headed upstairs to see this wonder for myself.

And there it was. An eye, in midair above Fetching Plaza. It was too early for tourists, but the local merchants were neglecting the setting up of their stalls in order to stand about gawking and marveling.

It was almond-shaped, a green outline with a pupil of gold shimmering like a flame through glass. It was the symbol on the Mattalike banner that the Eye had unfurled during their spectacular entry at the Gates, the symbol Te-Cucularit had forbidden Hickey to use. Insubstantial though it was, it didn’t shift or fade, and it bent a benign and knowing regard on the plaza and the admiring merchants and especially on the imposing white cylinders of the Arkadie.

That is a really clever hologram, I told myself, truly masterful. The mystery was how the Eye had gotten it up and running so quickly and invisibly, never mind where they’d found the machinery.

Meanwhile I kept hearing Jane, in that awe-flattened voice: “They magicked him up a little and he’ll be all right soon.”

* * *

But not so soon that the attack could be concealed from Howie, and Howie immediately called a press conference. He insisted that the entire Arkadie staff put aside their frantic preparations for
Crossroads’s
first technical rehearsal and pile into Theatre Two, even though he knew he’d be fighting the noise of construction onstage.

“If this is his way of moving into the theatre…” Micah went off to buttonhole Howie while the staff filed into the house.

Reede Chamberlaine had flown in from London and most of the trustees were there, Cora, of course, and Campbell Brigham, puffing around, his oh-so-appropriate outrage tempered with a hint of I-told-you-so. Cora chatted earnestly with him, indicating that the crux of the night’s revelations remained a secret among ourselves.

The Eye didn’t show until Howie pinned on his mike and was about to get things started. As the saws screeched in the background, ten black-robed, black-hooded specters filed hands-linked down the aisle and settled on the carpet in front of the first row.

Ten
? I hastily recounted. As the tenth sat down, the sixth collapsed, leaving a flattened nest of black fabric and an empty space in line. Oh, bravo, I thought.

Howie’s graphic secondhand description of the assault told me the Eye had omitted our part entirely, and I relaxed a little. I hadn’t even told Micah.

“This brutal act,” Howie orated, “is the culmination of a campaign of insult and injury aimed not only at this troupe of actors, our guests in Harmony, but at the founding principle of our unique Town, that of the freedom of the artist to do his work undisturbed by people who may not agree with him.”

The news service reporters were uninterested in the freedom of the artist. They wanted the gory details. Actual physical violence in their own streets! The brave Chat reporter who asked if the Eye was indeed sheltering the Conch was treated to Howie’s comedic version of public ridicule. He fended off all questions about the eye in the plaza with an air of smug complicity and sent the press home intrigued and laughing.

Then he called a
Gift
cast and staff meeting in the greenroom.

The actors’ greenroom was luxurious compared to the shop crew room. The ceiling was high and white, the walls were done in tweedy beige fabric, and the comfortable furniture seemed to have all come from the same catalogue, perhaps even recently. Food and drink dispensers hummed amiably in an alcove, and a bank of show monitors offered views of each theatre from left, right, and front of house.

Reede Chamberlaine looked like he’d been dragged away from something more important, but he offered Mali a sympathetic nod and patted Moussa’s broad back paternally, then inclined his silver head to kiss Omea’s cheek as he took a seat beside her.

Brigham joined them. I watched him for a sign of guilt. But he only shifted his bulk around in a chair too small for him and looked bored.

“… and because of their high visibility,” Howie came in, exclaiming to Cora, “the Eye’s the perfect victim for these lunatic-fringers looking to make a splash.”

Brigham leaned over to murmur with Chamberlaine. Insubstantial movement began among the Eye, the same little shufflings and shiftings that had made such magic the day of the raid. Brigham sat up chuckling from his final remark to Reede and found himself surrounded on three sides by dark Tuatuan faces.

I relished his quick battle with panic. So did Mali. He grinned at Brigham ferally. Recalling his sudden rage at the Brim, I had a satisfying vision of Mali leaping with fangs bared at the fat man’s throat. But after a half second’s recognition of mutual emnity, the two men smiled at each other cordially and turned their attention to Howie as he raised his hand for silence.

“Reede and I have a few things to add that we didn’t need to share outside the family.”

Sean and Ruth slipped in late and leaned against the wall beside the door. Micah shifted uneasily beside me.

Howie looked us up and down, drenching us all with his sincere disappointment. “This is not going to be my usual pep talk. We’re too far gone here for ‘fight, team, fight.’ I know this has been a long, hard season, but that’s never an excuse for the kind of slacking off I’m seeing in this theatre.

“Many of you seem to have forgotten we’re doing
two
shows here at the Arkadie. Sure, one’s a monster, but the other techs next week and right now we’re where we should have been with it a month ago! Let’s get on with it!”

Behind him, the door thudded softly, Sean and Ruth leaving.

“Damn,” said Micah softly, and Howie paused, looking after them querulously. “And I’m not reserving all my complaints for the production departments! Reede?”

Chamberlaine stood at ease, his hands in his pockets and his patrician chin lifted. “First of all, as the man responsible for bringing the Eye to Harmony, I must say I’m appalled by this betrayal of Harmony’s long reputation for hospitality to guest artists. As artists, we should be allowed to be above politics. However, as we’ll all admit, there are two sides to every story.

“For instance: I’ve been hearing reports in London about misbehavior in rehearsal… and elsewhere.” He caught Pen’s glance and held it until Pen looked away, then moved languidly behind Mali’s chair, leaning over him companionably, smiling.

“Really, my dears, this petty squabbling among yourselves is better settled in your tribal councils. It has no place among professionals on the rehearsal floor and no place in public. If you won’t show yourselves as responsible members of modern society…” He shrugged at them whimsically. “You shouldn’t wonder at a few outraged locals taking things into their own hands. When in Rome, you know…”