Till Human Voices Wake Us Page 13

  And when they went into the theatre he thought: and I am nothing. That is why he could play Hamlet even with his mind crippled and his heart that he had thought hardened broken.

  Not that he needed his heart to meet his fate tomorrow. Just the sword to defend the crown.

  Without magic he was not the Lord of  Ysthar; without music he was not himself; without Kasian … without Kasian he once again had nothing but his pretences to protect him.

  It was either his worst or his best performance; he couldn’t tell.

  Chapter Eight

  The River

  At intermission Raphael watched the rest of the cast covertly from a position leaning against the props table. No one looked quite the same as he pictured them to himself; he felt as if he’d lost his colour vision.

  He desperately wanted tea but couldn’t fetch things out of his bag properly without his magic. He deliberated asking Robin for money (or, alternatively, to boil water for him), but couldn’t bear the questions that would be sure to follow. He leaned against the table and pushed against his magic, like testing a bruise to see if it hurt. It still didn’t work.

  Will came up, frowning. Like Scheherezade he was far more ordinary-looking to Raphael’s unmagical vision. His hair more chestnut than red, his eyes more definitely hazel-brown than green, his inner brilliance less apparent. Raphael had wondered how no one could see in him the greatness of his poetic vision, and now thought: he really is utterly ordinary. No wonder. Envy cracked through him like being winded.

  “No one’s talking to you tonight?”

  Raphael was in character; he raised his eyebrow sardonically. “No one usually talks to me.”

  “They’re mad because we don’t have the night off and they’re blaming you.”

  Of course: it was Tuesday night, usually their night off before the double matinee and evening performances on Wednesday. When Robin had asked Raphael to play he’d insisted on having this Wednesday afternoon free. The run ended on Thursday, Friday being a holiday, and to make up the number of performances Robin had decided to perform the Tuesday as well. If the rest of the cast were even half as weary as Raphael he couldn’t blame them for being annoyed at losing the day off.

  It was true that no one but Robin and Will (and occasionally Hazel) talked much to him, nor he to them, but the others did usually exchange polite commonplaces as they passed him, as they were not doing tonight. He was surprised he felt cheerier for hearing the reason, not having realized at all that he had noticed their disgruntlement in any personal way.

  Will stroked his hand across Yorick’s plaster skull. “What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I have an unavoidable commitment.”

  “And thus you answer, duty.” Raphael didn’t have anything to say to that. After a moment Will added, “You ought to accept help as well as offer it, you know. You’re a generous man: but not generous enough to let others have the pleasure of giving you things. Friendship is reciprocal, Dickon.”

  If it had been another week … but it wasn’t. Atlas did not ask his friends to hold up the sky for him while he went to the beach for a holiday.

  But then perhaps he had none. Heracles had hardly been a friend.

  “‘He would be happy who knew the causes of things and subdued inexorable fate and every fear to his feet,’” Raphael said, and while Will was still puzzling out the Latin dragged his unwilling self into the gaping maw that was the stage unbuffered by his magic, a silence worse than the dragonfire of the night before.

  ***

  Hazel was just passing the door as he came out of his dressing room afterwards. He smiled and she waved at him, prompting Roderick Maxwell to frown severely. “It’s disgusting how people deceive others as to their real intentions,” he said to Fortinbras, who snickered.

  Raphael felt no obligation to respond and ignored them, but was less successful when accosted by Robin. “Oh, Dickon, your brother’s here.”

  His emotions abruptly flared up so sharply he found his throat seizing on a sour reflux. He carefully imagined the feelings settling amidst flying buttresses, like a flock of pigeons around a cathedral. “Where is he?”

  “Here,” Kasian said. He was leaning against the backstage props table fingering the swords left from the duel. Will, who stood beside him, moved out of the way as Raphael walked up.

  “I thought you were going to Gabriel’s.”

  He spoke in English, but Kasian, picking up Hamlet’s sword, replied in Tanteyr. “I did.”

  Raphael said nothing to this. He folded his arms into what he realized after doing so was too defensive a posture. Against that physical statement he positioned his silence, waiting to see what his brother would do.

  Kasian moved the sword this way and that in the air as if testing its balance. “I wanted to—ah—I wanted to apologize. I think I was a bit high-handed talking to you, earlier.”

  He did not say, I’m sorry for drugging you.

  Raphael nodded, spoke very blandly. “I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

  He did not say, Why?

  The sword hovered between them. Raphael thought of his father, and that, after all, he did not know anything of what Kasian had been doing with himself since their fourteenth birthday, what their father had said, what lies (or half-truths? or worse yet, full truths?) he might have heard from Circe that made him serve nirgal slaurigh the day before the end of the Game.

  Without magic to occupy his mind Raphael found himself utterly at a loss for how to move forward. Kasian finally poked him with the bated tip of the sword. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  Jab.

  “I should have thought a bit more was in order.”

  Jab.

  “You really are exasperating sometimes, you know that?”

  Jab.

  “I wish you would say something.”

  Jab.

  “Anything.”

  Raphael thought that his brother’s precision was impressive: he was hitting the same spot each time. It would not be long before he had a new bruise on his forearm.

  “I asked Gabriel why he hadn’t seen fit to mention that he knew you were alive.”

  Jab.

  “He said that you’d never brought it up and he didn’t feel right talking about you behind your back.”

  Jab.

  “Thirteen years of the phoenix—your phoenix—and you never once asked after us?”

  Jab.

  A little breeze whiffled through his hair and brought the sound of a muffled curse and other furtive movements. Robin and Will and half the rest of the cast and crew were still there, watching Kasian poke him. Raphael looked around and everyone except Robin hurriedly pretended to be doing other things. Robin simply grinned.

  “I admit I was prodding you a bit in asking you about Orpheus.”

  Jab, almost meditatively.

  “I know you must have given up a lot to be as good at magic as you are.”

  Jab.

  “It’s as good as music, anyway.”

  Jab.

  “You never had the—”

  Jab.

  “—I don’t know—”

  Jab.

  “—Courage, was it?”

  Jab.

  “Or nerve?”

  Jab.

  “Or presence of mind?”

  Jab.

  “To actually go after your dreams—”

  Raphael grabbed the point of the sword. There was a short, sharp, pause, stinging like a stone flung from a sling.

  “Is it that way, then?”

  Raphael said nothing, too busy weighing down the flying buttresses of his poise. It wouldn’t do if one of the great cathedrals simply tipped over under the weight of a tower or a pigeon—

  Kasian jerked away the blade and struck him lightly on the cheek with the flat of the sword. “Hereby I challenge you, my lord, to a bout.”

  Perhaps not so much slingshot as boulders from a mangonel.

  “Surely you won�
�t refuse to defend your honour?”

  The words were formulaic, drilled into them along with the lessons in swordplay. They came without thinking from the depths of Raphael’s memory, more from a hundred stories about the Red Company than from any thought at the time that he would ever answer them himself. “Surely not,” he said.

  “You can use the stage,” Robin said brightly when he turned to see if the space was open enough. “Everyone’s cleared out but the janitors.”

  Raphael nodded curtly and walked onstage, Kasian following him. With all the lights up and the scenery removed the boards were bare and dusty black. Kasian paced out the steps for the beginning position and stood waiting.

  Raphael caught himself from saluting in the European manner and instead bowed carefully, with all appropriate flourishes, the way he remembered from when he was young. He had failed miserably in the duels their father had taught him, while his twin had won even more frequently than Tefen.

  Kasian had taken Hamlet’s weapon, so Raphael held Laertes’s plainer one; its balance felt strange in his hand after half a hundred evenings of the other. He felt stupid and clumsy, his magic gone, his body shouting at him, his heart somehow both dry and heavy. It was nearly midnight, six hours since he’d drunk the nirgal slaurigh, and his magic was gone.

  So. Kasian came three days before the end of the Game. The day before the end he drugged Raphael. Then he challenged him to a duel, with bated swords to be sure, but yet … Raphael found he didn’t care what Kasian was doing. He didn’t feel angry. He felt like the Stoic’s dog. They used to say that a man under fate was like a dog tied to the back of a cart: he could choose to run or be dragged, but either way he was following.

  Happy indeed he who could subject fate to his feet.

  Raphael breathed deeply, the way he took a deep breath before entering Hamlet’s character, and entered the character he had developed for himself through the years of the Great Game Aurieleteer, that of someone who knew what he was doing with a sword. He was not as great as his father, of course, but he was proficient enough nowadays.

  He took a step into the Lord of  Ysthar, felt the immediate lack of response from his magic with sickening force. He jerked half a step back from the Lord of  Ysthar, into James Inelu in full glamour. He could do that without magic.

  Kasian took the first move, as he always had, beginning with the questioning probes of their first lessons and later warm-up practices. It was these Raphael had dredged from his memory when he began to fence again; nevertheless he was surprised that he could block them so easily. He relaxed a little, shut off his mind from the audience and the identity of his opponent. This was just as well for Kasian, hastening through the more advanced probes, launched suddenly into a full-out attack.

  Raphael began to move about the stage freely. He had a small advantage there, for he knew its dimensions thoroughly, whereas it was Kasian’s first glimpse of it; the edge of the stage was present in his mind in a way it could not be for his brother. But Kasian had inherited a large measure of natural talent from their father, talent honed by constant application and one-on-one tutelage from the greatest swordsman of nine worlds.

  Even the exigencies of the Great Game Aurieleteer were no substitute for that teacher. Far sooner than he would have liked, for he stayed with his usual mixture of offensive and defensive moves until he had to choose either to go for a killing move or to protect himself against one, Raphael found himself embarking on the defensive pattern he had developed over all those years of practice and fight, a defense that no one had ever yet broken. His hope, at this stage, was that his opponent would tire soon; he did not cheat by recourse to magic. When he had magic to cheat with.

  Kasian, however, did not seem impressed. He began to frown a little. Raphael, in a place he associated with being stared at, did not think it was concentration, but rather annoyance, or perhaps peevishness. But the defensive pattern worked as it was intended to.

  A hollow noise boomed out under the sound of their footsteps. Raphael was so focused on his swordplay he forgot he wasn’t sensing magic until he saw Kasian’s glance flick sideways as it sounded again. It was creakier this time.

  His brother increased the tempo and weight of his blows. The noise ground out again, and the lights flickered a little. This time Kasian did not flinch: his eyes were intent and emotionless but for the pleasure in motion well executed, and the swords were moving at speed and strength enough that if a blow landed it would have drawn more than welts; close to the full battle mode, where even with the bated tips an ill-placed angle would mean severe injury.

  Raphael couldn’t feel the magic swirling around them, but in the buzzing static and deep wooden groans he knew they had awoken the sanctuary protections that he had laid on the theatre when he knew he would be coming every day at regular times in the run-up to the end of the Game.

  The sanctuary protections were against violence, raised by any real intention of such they sensed. If he was angry, he couldn’t tell what this emotion was at all, he felt numb and desiccated. If Kasian was angry … dear Lord he couldn’t be seriously trying to kill him, Circe couldn’t have bound him to that, could she? Not with magic—Raphael would have seen that—but there were other ways of binding someone, of twisting them from their right mind, of breaking them to your will, and she was very skilled at those methods.

  Raphael stopped and raised his left hand just as Kasian lunged forward. He caught the bated sword-tip in his palm and felt as if he had plucked a sudden blossom of pain.

  Kasian, panting, held his lunge. Raphael had forced himself to appear calm and collected in all such occasions for so long that he was able to stand straight and ungasping with the sword pressing against his palm so hard it bowed into a parabolic curve.

  The building creaked again, and the lights dimmed in a frill of static discharge. Kasian started a bit and nearly lost his balance, keeping it by dint of leaning into the lunge farther. The sword snapped.

  Kasian stumbled upright and looked around the theatre, perhaps at the audience of astonished cast and crew, or at the way the building continued to grumble to itself with creaking wood and flickering lights. “I think,” he said in English, “that we have offended the gods of this place.”

  He looked long at Raphael before deliberately slashing his own palm with the jagged edge of the sword. He held out his hand so that several drops of blood fell onto the floor. “My blood for your honour.”

  Another old ritual, also learned by rote in those long-ago lessons: blood for guardian spirits, salt for mischief-makers, milk for hearth-keepers, and water and fire to ask fertility of the sky and the earth. Music for the phoenix to come home again in her bonfire immolation, the only time their father would let him sing—

  Raphael closed his hand against the welt and turned to Robin, who was gaping with something between astonishment and glee. “I’m sorry for the sword.”

  Robin took both hilts, Kasian offering the broken one to him as Raphael gave him his, and blinked rather fetchingly. “You don’t feel the need to give blood to the lares?”

  Raphael had set the protections for the houses of sanctuary on Ysthar; he knew the secret names of the spirits that kept watch, and it was his hand that punished law-breakers. Anyone who acted with violence raised the guardian magic in warning; anyone who assaulted another after the warning was bound into punishment. There had not been many who had broken them, but their chastening was on his head.

  How angry was Kasian, to raise them so strongly?

  “I shall be surety for them,” he said blankly, and walked out of the theatre.

  ***

  He made it most of the way to the river before Kasian caught up with him. His brother grabbed at his arm so he perforce had to stop. “What is wrong with you? You keep saying the most exasperating things—or the most intriguing!—then leaving. Don’t you have anything to say? You seem much happier to walk off and brood melodramatically than deal with your problems.”

  You
poisoned me, he did not say. What did Circe promise you? What did she say you were doing? What did she claim those spices would do?

  Raphael went back to his mental image of a cathedral and began to shore up his flying buttresses again. High above London the clouds were an immobile lid under the great winds. “I don’t want to talk.”

  “Do you ever want to talk?”

  He shrugged, stiffly, his shoulders hunched tense. He straightened them with resignation and realized he’d walked blindly if most briskly down a street that led to Lambeth Bridge. They were nearly there already. Kasian kicked a stone and swore when he stubbed his toe. It wasn’t a swearword Raphael knew but it certainly sounded rude. He caught himself wondering what language it came from and when Kasian had learned it and whether he was ever tempted to swear in highly inappropriate situations, perhaps when holding court. Whether it was appropriate for how he himself felt this moment, with Ysthar’s magic dammed behind powers he could not access, the winds couched awaiting him, his heart dead.

  “Your friends told me that they’ve never seen you lose control. They’ve debated drugging you just to see what you’d say.”

  They were on the bridge. Raphael stopped when he realized his stride had carried them halfway across. He couldn’t even see his house. That quiet discovery broke some barrier of reticence in him, and bitterly he said, “So you thought you would oblige them?”

  “I thought—” Kasian stopped, swore again, robustly, and turned so vehemently Raphael backed up against the balustrade. “I wanted you—I wanted you to be—why didn’t you ever come home?”

  Raphael very carefully held back the first three things that came to his lips. As temperately as he could he said, “I am home, Kasian.”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Did you think we didn’t care?”

  “I have seen no evidence to the contrary.”