Winterlong (17 page)

At my audacious question Lalage stared, then laughed so hard that she inhaled her wine and Justice had to slap her back to stop her choking. She had drunk a great deal by then, as had Justice. I allowed myself a sip for politeness’ sake only, though it had a cleaner taste than the water in its rusted carafe.

“He’s a comedian!” she exclaimed when she could talk again. She leaned companionably against me. Her hand rustled through the grass and started to glide up my thigh. I moved closer to Justice, trying to hide my disgust. “Are you a Player, then, Sieur Aidan? You are too fair for a Curator!”

“Aidan has not lived with his people for many years,” said Justice. He licked a drop of grease from his finger.

“Then why is he shorn?” She ran her other hand up my back to toy with my short hair.

“A sign of respect for his people,” Justice explained clearing his throat as he glanced at me.

Lalage nodded drunkenly, her voice softening. “Oh, I understand, dear Aidan.”

Overhead, twilight deepened. I sighed and let her take my hand as she continued earnestly.

“Our people are of the House Saint-Alaban. And even though they have cast me aside for being
too old
—” She twirled a stray curl from one of her braids, batting her eyes. “Well, as you can see, I’ve not forgotten how to take care of myself. Not like some elders.”

She paused, slightly out of breath. I took this chance to disengage my hand. I tugged a leg from the capon and started to gnaw upon it.

“Aidan is blessed with a memory somewhat shorter than yours,” began Justice. He drew me toward him, stroking my neck, I felt as if I were playing a weary round of kiss-in the-ring with Gligor and Anna. I started to pull away; when:

“Help, mistress. Help help help help help,” piped the server. It had bumped against the far wall of the atrium, it wheels grinding against the brick. “

Another sound came from outside. Muffled voices. Then laughter and the thump of a strong hand upon wood. Beside me Lalage sat up straight and carefully put down he wineglass.

“Ask who it is,” she commanded the server; but it only; mewled
help help help help.

“Damn,” muttered Lalage. When she stood she swayed slightly. “Who is it?” she shouted as she walked toward the far wall.

“‘An ambassador from Witchland and his train,” quoted a resonant voice.” ‘We craveth present audience.” He also sounded drunk.

Lalage wiped her hands on her shift. She raced to the wall, stumbling on a stone and sending a peahen caterwauling. I glanced at Justice, wondering if we should flee but he only waited until Lalage was halfway across the atrium, and then drank what remained in her wineglass.

I stood and followed our hostess. In the twilight I could just make out a heavy planked door in the wall, crisscrossed with metal and set with a listening auricle that amplified the voices of our visitors, so that I heard them shuffling in the grass outside and giggling. Lalage fumbled with several locks, finally drew herself up, and shouted “Open!”—whereupon the door flew outward. A thump and more shouts and curses followed. After a moment a bedraggled retinue tramped into the atrium.

“Toby!” Lalage threw her arms around the neck of the tallest figure, who, by his clothes and bearing, seemed to be the leader. Behind her the server squealed piteously, until a plump girl in short skirts and tight crimson jacket kicked it into silence. I drew closer to a tall plum tree.

“We have interrupted a rendezvous!” boomed the tall man. He had a deep voice and a long ruddy face ending in an unruly black beard. He drew himself up and surveyed the atrium grandly, casting Justice a mocking little wave. “How clever of us! We’ve found a Paphian boy, another Saint-Alaban, too.” He blew a kiss, then turned back to Lalage. “Many greetings, dear cousin! Girls, get out of the
way.”

He stepped aside so that the others could spill into the court. Four of them: two young girls, one the plump interloper who was now pulling peaches from the trees and tasting them for ripeness; the other a tall, heavyset girl with black hair and a mustache. She carried a heavy satchel. A rangy young brown-skinned boy strode in next, somewhere between my age and Justice’s. He wore velvet knickers that displayed his slender fawn-colored legs and two enormously knobbed knees, like a pair of blackthorn walking-sticks.

And, finally, stepping demurely behind Toby, a diminutive figure in a woman’s dress and lace bonnet. I poked my head around the tree to stare at her.

“Why, here’s another!” exclaimed Toby, sweeping Lalage from his path and stepping toward me in one long stride. “My dear cousin, are you poncing?”

I shrank from him, but he pulled me from the sheltering branches. Nearly two heads taller than myself—and I was tall—his hair stuck out in an untidy aureole, adding inches more to his height. His lanky torso was draped in a long loose tunic faded to a drab memory of its former glorious blue and smelling of face powder and sweat. He jammed a huge hand beneath each of my armpits and lifted me, until I stared him square in the face.

“A pretty catamite,” he announced. He kissed me on the mouth and set me back on the grass.

“I am Toby Rhymer, boy,” he intoned, thrusting his hand at mine. “A
nom du theatre,
of course.
Né’e
Toby Crouch, of the Historians.” As I took his hand, Justice slipped beside me. Toby glanced at him, nodding. “Toby Rhymer, my dear.”

“Justice Saint-Alaban,” he said. “You’ve met my companion Aidan.”

“Aidan,” said Toby.

“Aidan,” a soft voice echoed. From behind him peered the tiny figure I had glimpsed before. I squinted, trying to make out the wizened face hidden behind the torn lace. From within the cloud of white netting I glimpsed only a flash of intelligent black eyes surveying me calmly.

“That is a woman, sieur,” she whispered. Justice flinched beside me, but Toby only guffawed and pinched my cheek.

“I bet you could play the part better than I ever could, eh, boy?” He laughed, and gave Justice an admiring look. “A handsome leman, Saint-Alaban.”

I stepped from him to gaze down at the figure who had recognized me so easily. From the folds of her bonnet peered a shriveled face, so that for a moment I thought her a very old woman. But a hag with extraordinarily bright eyes and a gentle voice. She gazed back at me unperturbed, so that I drew even closer, until I gazed directly into her face and found myself drawing back her silken bonnet. , I stepped back in amazement.

“Justice!” I gasped. “Look!”

With a sigh the little figure raised her head to Toby, then plucked back the bonnet with very long slender brown fingers. Justice drew in his breath.

“A monkey!”

Toby Rhymer shook his head and knelt beside her, drawing his arm protectively about the folds of her gown. “No,” he said. “Miss Scarlet is a wonder, a marvel, the prodigy of a prodigal age; a troglodyte with the wit and grace of a Paphian and the brilliance of a Curator, a beacon in these dark and desperate times. In short, An Actress.”

She tipped her head modestly, her long lips drawing back to show sharp yellow teeth. “Ah, Toby,” she murmured; in her voice the rustle of warm leaves. “He is a showman,” she said aside to me apologetically; then fixed me with a piercing look. She said no more; but in her deep-set eyes I read that while she had seen through my disguise she would not betray my secret.

“My dear Miss Scarlet,” gushed Lalage, brushing aside the insistent hands and imprecations of Toby’s troupe to greet the chimpanzee. “It’s been much too long since I had the honor of seeing you perform.”

“How kind of you,” murmured Miss Scarlet, extending those extraordinarily long fingers to be kissed.

Behind her the plump girl and her mustachioed companion mocked Lalage’s greeting. Toby glanced back at them.

“Ladies! Perhaps our hostess will not object to your performing ablutions before performing a Bluebeard or Hamlet this evening?” He inclined his head to Lalage.

“Of course not.” She rose and shook the grass from her shift, motioning the girls to follow her.

“Fabian—you will assist Lalage in serving our meal,” Toby ordered. With a wink the long-legged young man disappeared after the others.

“Please forgive my rudeness,” Justice began. Toby brushed him aside, taking Miss Scarlet’s hand.

“I am not in need of your apologies, and Miss Scarlet Pan rises above such idle speculation. It is Her Way,” he said. “May we join you?”

We settled back at the stone table, Toby escorting his little soubrette and seeing that she was comfortable before seating himself. I was unable to resist staring at Miss Scarlet. She beckoned for me to sit beside her.

“I have never known an animal that could speak before,” I said. Across from us Justice was offering Toby the last sip of Lalage’s plum wine. “We had macaws and budgerigars at
HEL
, but they only repeated our speech. They had no reason.”

The chimpanzee nodded, extending one foot to grasp a peach in her curling toes. She passed the fruit from foot to hand and began to munch it daintily.

“I grew up among the Zoologists,” she began, pausing to flick a drop of ambrosia from her lip. “As I girl I was quite ill, and underwent a number of operations which resulted in long periods of convalescence. The Zoologists have a cinematograph, film projectors, and video monitors. I spent the months of my recovery watching the spectacles of the last centuries. The experience left me with an undying affection for the glories of the proscenium and the lost and lamented silver screens. I was, in short, stagestruck.”

I listened eagerly, sensing within her tale faint echoes of my own fate. “These operations gifted you with speech?”

Miss Scarlet nodded. “Yes.” She stroked her throat, extravagantly furred with lustrous dark hair. “I bear scars, here, and—” She caressed her temple, pulling the hair back so that I could discern the faded impression of an incision.
“Here.”

She regarded me curiously. “Do I detect a resonant sympathy within your bosom, Aidan?” She dropped her voice to a husky whisper. “I call you Aidan because your friend addresses you thus; you own another, a gentler name perhaps? Do you too heed the circean songs of Melpomene and Thalia and Calliope?”

I shook my head. Toby Rhymer had now extracted a flask from within the folds of his tunic. He and Justice passed this between them, engaged in their own discussion—which inspired Toby Rhymer to fix me with a very long, searching stare. I turned back to Miss Scarlet.

“I am an heteroclite, like yourself.” I bowed my head to display the scars upon my own scalp. “I also was given speech as a child—”

“But as your birthright.” Miss Scarlet reached to touch a node upon my temple. I shivered: the touch of that gnarled hand, so like and yet so alien to my own, filled me with a vast and lonely awe. “But all such miraculous venesections have a price. I lost all contact with my family, all pride in my race. When I last glimpsed the faces of my parents it was with the terrible knowledge that they were brute animals, and ever would be.”

She pressed her fingers to her jutting mouth as though to stave off the painful memory. “And you, Aidan? What did they take from you?”

“My heart,” I said softly. “My soul.”

“But surely you have a heart, who travels in such romantic fashion with one of the Children of the Magdalene.” She indicated Justice on the other side of the table. “And we all have souls.”

“He is not my lover,” I replied. “And my soul is not my own.”

She edged closer to me, her petticoats rustling as they brushed my knees. “I understand,” she said at last. She gazed so intently that I looked away. “There is another set of eyes that sees me through your own. You are possessed by an afreet. A demon.”

She leaned back once more, resting her hand upon my knee reassuringly. “Well, Aidan, that is not such a bad thing. Changelings have their own kind of luck—literature teaches us
that
if nothing else!—as well as beauty; and while heartless and soulless they may still assist mortal men and women in their sanguine challenges—”

She coughed delicately, then recited in a soft voice:

“They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;

They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,

And husband nature’s riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.”

I listened spellbound, hearing in her rich tones the echo of some distant battle, the clash and clamor of a great day dawning to which I would soon wake. Then I shook my head, as though dispersing a dream from my bed in the Home Room.

“How do you know such things?”

A smile twitched across her wrinkled face as she tapped a finger to her lips. “Science has awakened her brother Magic from his long sleep. The goddess is alive, Magic is afoot. And you and I will follow in their train.” She turned from me to take Toby’s hand.

It may have been that Miss Scarlet and I spoke for longer than I imagined. Certainly I have since seen hours fly past when she was onstage, and her audiences stir themselves afterward as though resentful that they had been cheated by a performance of mere moments. I was surprised to see that already Lalage and the Players had returned. The little server squeaked behind its mistress, its hold filled with bottles and globes and a small glass cylinder filled with absinthium of a poisonous green. Behind them Fabian juggled tamarillos and plums, dropping them much to the amusement of the pretty round-faced Player who carried a bowl of fieldcress and nasturtium blossoms. Last of all came the mustachioed girl, balancing on her broad shoulder a platter of salted pigeons.

Fabian tossed a plum to Toby. With a flourish Toby presented it to Miss Scarlet. Lalage bowed to us, her head held proudly despite the crooked crown of leaves that had displaced the neat braids upon her brow.

“You bring me good luck, cousins!” she called out to Justice and myself. Justice grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth. Toby blew a kiss to Miss Scarlet.