Till Human Voices Wake Us Page 18

  “I promised I would see it out. It won’t be any harder than last night. And I’ve played in worse state.”

  Kasian sighed. “Why do I believe you?”

  “Truly. Once with pneumonia and a broken arm, and I hadn’t even read the final version of that play before. Once exceptionally drunk.”

  “I find it hard to believe you let yourself get drunk very often.”

  The waitress had reappeared and was talking urgently to the man in the suit. He hastened over to their table just as Raphael said, “Not very often, no. But it has been known to happen.”

  “Mr. Inelu,” the man said, “I am very sorry, but there seem to be quite a number of people outside.”

  Despite knowing he had no money, Raphael stuck his hand in his pocket. The man followed his motion and said, sounding almost shocked, “Please, it’s on the house.”

  “That isn’t—”

  “You’ve given me advertisement worth more than the price of two meals,” the manager (so Raphael guessed he was) said earnestly. “You sat near the window!”

  “Somewhat foolish of me,” he murmured, but he let the man guide him through the restaurant to the back door. This led into an alley full of rubbish from the warehouse next door. The manager said, “This is not the nicest route, I’m afraid, Mr. Inelu—”

  Raphael settled himself into James Inelu and smiled charmingly at him. “I’m sure we’ll be fine. Thank you.” He pulled at Kasian’s arm and led him down the alley to the next, and, once out of sight, dropped resolutely into anonymity.

  “You do that so quickly,” Kasian observed. Raphael stepped out onto the wider street before Southwark Cathedral and saw the breaking crowds still speaking excitedly with a feeling of total mortification.

  “I shouldn’t have been caught at all.”

  “Will you take a cab to the theatre?”

  Raphael slowed his brisk walk to a pace that accommodated Kasian’s saunter. He wasn’t sure which felt better to his ankle. “I don’t think I have enough money with me.”

  “I do, which I would have told you if you’d given me half the chance. I exchanged some when I first arrived, and haven’t had much occasion to spend it. So will you take a cab? And promise me you’ll take one home, and rest between acts?”

  “It’s usually better to keep moving,” he said, but he did guide their footsteps towards the Borough High Street instead of keeping to the pedestrian routes. When they got to the high street he flagged a taxi very quickly, and was surprised to feel how he trembled sitting down. Kasian’s expression was rather smug, but he refrained from saying anything further.

  The traffic was bad. By the time they got to the theatre Raphael’s headache had blossomed. He practised various meditation techniques with mixed results; he couldn’t say he achieved anything like serenity or disinterest, but he did end up feeling as if his body was a kind of half-controlled pet only loosely tethered to his mind. It was not an altogether uncomfortable sensation.

  At the stage door Raphael handed his brother over to one of Robin’s flunkeys with the request that he find him a good seat, then made his way to the changing rooms. He was perhaps a little slower than usual, but with the taxi had arrived earlier, so he got to congratulate himself on being right on time.

  Once ready he leaned against the props table watching the other actors cross into their own characters. Robin bustled over, smiling crookedly, but before he said anything Roderick Maxwell came sweeping up in Claudius’ robes and an expression actually approaching a sneer. Raphael watched Roderick stalk towards him with mild interest to see how he himself would react. He no longer felt as if he were deciding to do things, merely responding.

  Roderick said, “Ah. You’re here tonight, I see.”

  He put emphasis on you. Raphael blinked at him, trusting Kasian when he said that he’d come the day before, though his memory of everything after opening himself to the winds was both hazy and raw enough he didn’t want to dig. “Yes. Was there something?”

  “I wonder if somebody might be interested in knowing what you get up to.”

  There was so little possibility that Roderick had any idea what Raphael actually got up to he didn’t respond with more than a raised eyebrow and a faint smile of enquiry.

  Roderick made his lip curl, something he did as Claudius to Hamlet, and as Roderick to James Inelu, quite frequently. “It’s just that you clearly have been enjoying the perks of your status and I think your fans would like to know how erratic you have been this week.”

  “That was subtler than I should have expected,” he said, enlightened. “I can give you the names of people at American tabloids who probably would find your suspicions of—drugs, I imagine?—quite fascinating indeed. I’m afraid I really don’t care very much what you tell them, but if it makes you happy, Roderick, go ahead.”

  There was one of those silences larger than the space between the people not talking. Raphael smiled at Roderick, rather heartened at how easy it was to talk on his own behalf, really, when he let himself.

  Roderick dropped the curling lip in favour of chagrinned surprise and no small embarrassment. He released an obvious flare of temper by snapping, “It’s Rod, dammit.”

  “Oh,” said Raphael, with a smile whose innocence was so pure he could have bottled it, “is it?”

  Roderick drew in a seething breath but let the actress playing Gertrude pull him away with the whispered comment that the play was about to begin.

  Robin shook his head, grinning. “I owe Will another five pounds.”

  Raphael resettled himself on the props table, trying to get the weight off his bruised and battered half, and quirked his eyebrow at Robin. “Whatever for?”

  “We’ve had a longstanding wager as to whether you would ever fall out of character. Knowing you for longer, I bet no; knowing you better, he bet yes. He swore that you did yesterday, just for a few seconds, right in the middle of act five. Don’t worry, no one else noticed—I would have sworn on oath you were Hamlet. It was rather creepy during intermission. Which no doubt is why Rod is spouting forth nonsense about drugs.”

  There was a faint query in his voice. Raphael smiled reassuringly. “I’m afraid concussion makes me enter my roles more deeply than usual in the first instance.”

  Robin’s hissed “Concussion!” prevented him from adding the second thought, that over the years he had been injured frequently enough on occasions when breaking his character would have had dire consequences for that to have become a necessary habit. He shrugged instead. Robin followed the abbreviated movement. “Anything else relevant?”

  “I wrenched my right shoulder as well.”

  “That perhaps explains why Hamlet turned out to be left-handed last night,” he muttered as the guards exited and the courtiers assembled for their entrances and Raphael with one step entered Hamlet and the circumscribed action of the play.

  ***

  At the intermission he retreated to his dressing room, mindful of his half-promise to Kasian.

  Robin met him at the door. “I phoned Zebulun to fetch me some salve I have of my mother’s place. It won’t help with the concussion, but let me see the shoulder.”

  Raphael paused. “Does it have poppy in it?”

  Robin opened the jar, which was full of pale pink lotion that smelled of cloves. “Probably not. Why?”

  “I have bad dreams.” At Robin’s sudden frown Raphael added, “Not like that. When I take opium I have hallucinations. Projectile hallucinations.”

  “Ah. I see the concern. I doubt it. I think it’s mostly beeswax and gillyflower petals, to be honest. Good solid fairy magic. I should tell Rod you’re taking it.” He grinned to show this was a joke. Raphael unlaced the doublet and slid it gingerly over his head. The shirt came next, also laced and rather disheveled. He sat down on the stool enjoying, in a distant kind of way, the feel of cool air on his skin.

  “By the Sun and the Moon! That’s your idea of a ‘wrenched shoulder’? The bruises go across your back.
And what are these, stitches?”

  “Kasian must have sewn them. If you’re not going to do anything with your salve, I’ll put my costume back on and take my chances with Roderick’s opinion of my habits.”

  “I think you should be taking drugs, the way you look. No, don’t move.”

  Raphael braced himself for the touch, but his magic was still quiescent and though Robin was a bit rough—possibly the salve numbed his fingertips as it was numbing Raphael’s surface wounds—it was nowhere near what he’d have expected from such closeness. Perhaps Robin had his own powers deep-down too.

  “This … this is magefire,” Robin said, tracing a finger down a line along Raphael’s right side. It didn’t tickle. “Who attacked you?”

  “We all have our enemies.”

  Robin kept smoothing on the salve. Raphael felt a tingle of his power as well, Robin giving him that gift of strength to heal. That did tickle. A pause. Then: “I didn’t know you had enemies who would attack you like this. All the magic folk adore you.”

  Raphael snorted at that grand exaggeration. “Not all of them.”

  “I would have fought at your side.”

  “It was my fight.”

  “You didn’t ask me. I would have helped you. No matter who your enemies were.”

  Raphael heard total sincerity and not a little hurt. He didn’t know what to say; the numbness from the salve seemed to have worked its way inwards as well.

  Robin added, “As you would for me, I thought.”

  “I would,” he said, feeling a soft wind swirl about them from Robin’s emotional state. It felt like summer, and rain, and woodlands, entirely out of place in the dressing room. “Robin … thank you.”

  “Oh, I live but to serve,” said the Prince of the Fairies, with strongest irony.

  ***

  During the second half of the play he found himself slipping.

  He held on to Hamlet as an anchor. He had nothing else to hold on to, nowhere to put what he thought and what he felt: his framework was gone and his mind was in ruins and his body blazing with pain. Anything else that might have been himself was afire.

  But it was hard, very hard, when every word was a razor-edged shard in his mouth. They seemed unfamiliar to him even as he pronounced them, almost as if when he spoke the words were new at that moment. Yet no one faltered in replying. He watched his emotions from within and knew nothing but the stage and the dusty places in the wings. Between the collapsing inferno of his order and Hamlet there was nothing but the tissue of words that Will had written long ago for him to say.

  His attention narrowed with every passing scene; when he was not on stage he did not have to try to think of nothing. His mind was full of incoherent struggles.

  He held on to Hamlet, forcing himself into the character as he had forced himself into a hundred others, squeezing into that fit so snug he might have become stuck except that no one tried to draw him out.

  There was a white madness seething under Hamlet’s words, and no one noticed but he. He felt the inevitability of the tragedy as tactile as the fall of a mountainside. Pain raged all too clearly around him.

  Hazel’s Ophelia had a broken heart that juddered through the gaps between her words. Replying he knew he hurt her but it was like prodding a bruise with a broken finger, so cruelly did the words stab him as well. Each exchange grew sharper, harder, broken-mirror fragments in the dustmotes in the floodlights. His words whet the air around him; he moved through knife-edges. Moving his hands in antic gesture they lacerated his skin and cut open his back.

  The words and emotions fell out of the air and lay about the floor, kicked into drifts like the waist-deep shadows in the valley in the story. He waded through them with difficulty, and they were diamond splinters and wrought-iron thorns. When he jumped into the grave they rimmed his neck and closed over his head. When he opened his eyes he saw glints on darkness. When he breathed the words seared his throat.

  The worst was that it was not cold. He could have borne the cold. It was hot with the blind malevolence of a summer desert. Hammer-stroke light, the air that suffocates with the leavings of centuries, the parched silence that swallows the largest sound without fulfillment. His heart grew frenzied with the fury of the words. They pelted around him like elfshot. But at last he grounded and fell still upon the reef of death.

  “Now cracks a noble heart,” said Will, and he, he, he was thrust into blindness with only an after-image of the light burned upon his vision.

  “Good night, sweet prince,” said Will, “and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” A sharp beat thrust through the close air. “Why does the drum come hither?”

  There was creaking and noise and much thumping of feet straggling to a halt in surprise, and then Fortinbras’s bellow cut through the sound. “‘Where is this sight?’”

  “What is it you would see? If aught of woe or wonder—”

  It took him a moment to realize that Will had stopped halfway through the line. He thought muzzily that Will of all people should not forget the line halfway through, and wondered what had happened that he stopped. He smelled tea and allspice and roses, and white fire dazzled through his eyelids. There was one long low cry and then wings rushed close over his head and back behind the stage.

  “Cease your search.”

  ***

  Sounds clustered in lethal sharpness close around him. The noise baffled him: he kept hearing one thing and thinking it another. The applause of the audience was like the fall of leaves from oak trees in the winter, the sound of his pulse the rush of water on a pebbled beach. He could hear the movement of blood in his veins, but when words were spoken they might have been the utterances of stones. He turned in his place mute within a greater silence.

  Impossible light filled his vision; the scent of roses was in his nose and mouth. Everything was dark but for his phoenix: but she turned away from him. He wanted to go to her but he could not see where to step. She was out of his reach and the way between them impassible. The Abyss cut the space between them, and there was no bridge. Noise filled his ears, but none of it was sound.

  “Why do you not go to her?”

  He twisted around. Pain blossomed into agony as he pressed into the broken-edged air. He had to consciously think of the motion of his lungs; they were bound with iron clamps and he had to push them open and pull them shut with mechanical force.

  He held in the movement of his heart so that his hand stopped before it reached the first of the thorns and sword-blades hedging him in, and for a moment the interlocking edifice did not crash upon him.

  Robin stood a little way off in a pool of his own light, beyond the thorns and beyond the edges. He had been the one to speak, his voice steady as an oak tree.

  His own mouth was full of fractures and his tongue made no sound. He quivered. His shoulders began to bleed, the moisture trickling down his back.

  “Why do you hold back?”

  He wanted to say he was not holding back, he was holding in, so that the thorns without did not tear him, so that the pressure within did not shatter the last remnant of his being. He was not in a natural position—his ankle was trembling with its own melody of agony and his muscles quaked with tension.

  His heart was the only thing he could hear but for Robin’s voice and it shouted its pain into his head so that he would have brought his hands up to his temples but that he dared not move. The Abyss was at his feet, and if he did not hold in he would fall. He did not have anything to hold on to: no one was there but Ishaa and Robin; and he had spurned his friend, and he could not reach Ishaa.

  There was silence, all the noises dropping down and down and down below the bottom of the world, all illumination fading in the depths. He was teetering; he nearly fell. He looked around for support, but everything was falling away from him, Robin and Ishaa in their own light on the other side of the darkness, on the other side from him, so far he could not leap across.

  Then Kasian was there.

&nbs
p; With his arrival the thorns toppled out of the air and lay innocently on the floor as shadows cast from a dim light, the broken sword-blades the cracks between floorboards. Kasian was ordinary, gloriously ordinary: he did not stand on the edge of imaginary darkness: he turned on the light.

  “Raphael,” he said imperiously, “come here.”

  Ishaa spread her wings and the fire fell down soft as snowflakes.

  He would have gone to him, but he looked down, and there at his feet fell the one shadow Kasian could not banish. The Abyss gaped there still, and if he were to fall he would fall for a long time before he reached the bottom.

  If the old stories were even true, and there was a bottom. A place where the world tree had its roots: though it was said that its roots ran into poisoned waters now, for the Adversary inhabited those dark places. He did not want to see the Adversary again.

  “Raphael,” Kasian said again, “please. It’s time to go home.”

  Ishaa called out. Her voice was too beautiful for him to bear, and he stumbled back a step. Her voice was in harmony with the high stars, whose song he had once known. In the dangerous high places there had been concord once. He had locked away that thought and concentrated on the balance of opposites. One and one, and not two.

  “Raphael, it’s safe. Won’t you trust me?”

  Trust? he thought. The word Kasian used for you, fhira, was the tenderest and most intimate word for family relations and friendships, one only to be used with one’s best-beloved. What had he called Kasian? thayen, a word for a stranger. A positive word for a stranger, but still … Tanteyr had forty words for you, each one with a different connotation. Fhira had the divine fhenn as the first sound.

  Ishaa blazed into a new sun. Fire beat against his face as light reached across the abyss to touch him, a bridge across a hidden river. Trust. Whom else should he trust but his brother, his friend, his king?

  He closed his eyes and stepped out.