The Magician of Karakosk, and Other Stories Read online

  In any case. As I say, when Firial approached me as I was turning from the town square down my charming little alley, it took me a moment to recognize her. She was nice looking enough, don’t misunderstand me: long, straight hair—blondish, I think—intelligent, slightly weak brown eyes, rather a round face, decent sort of figure, not too thin, not too plump. Not too anything, in fact, and there you have it. The poor child had been born into a family who were all too everything; what was there left for her but mildness, gentility, good manners? No, her hair was brown, brown it was, I’m almost sure of it.

  “Dardis,” says she, coming right to the issue—very unusual, she was ever a diffident, dithering girl—“Dardis, I need a favor.”

  “There’s a change,” I answered her fairly shortly. I had put in a maddening day, as I’ve said; otherwise I’d not have dreamed of speaking in that tone to one of her rank. “Your brothers never need anything from me, it’s always what they want. In truth, I am very tired of your brothers, my lady Firial.”

  Firial smiled then. She did have a very nice smile, I remember that. “I often am myself,” she said. “May I walk with you, Dardis, to your house?” I bowed, and she put her arm through mine.

  So we walked together, and townsfolk saluted Firial as we passed, always recognizing her a little too late for more than a hasty scramble of a bow. After a few polite questions about the rehearsals (she hardly ever came to the theatre, and never with her family), she told me straight out, blushing only a little, “Dardis, I am to be married.”

  “I wish you joy,” I replied. There had been two or three lordlings from the northern provinces hanging about the Jiril’s court that summer; apparently, he had concluded negotiations with this one or that. “If you should desire my company to perform at your wedding, I can assure you that we would be greatly honored. We have a wide repertory of suitable scenes, songs, poetry, selected monologues—”

  She cut me off with a single shake of her head. “Thank you, but this wedding may as like as not be held in a barn, performed by a drunken peasant priest, with gaping shepherds for witness. My choice of a husband will greatly displease my father.”

  “Ah, ah—an elopement,” I said. I hate elopements. You don’t just lose the ingénue who runs off in the night; most often she takes a perfectly good musician or comedian with her. I asked, very cautiously, “Your pardon, my lady, but it must take a rare man to so offend the Jiril that he would forbid you to wed him. May I know the name of this remarkable gentleman?”

  Firial again gave me that smile that transformed her ordinary little face. “But you know it well already, good friend,” she replied. “He is Deh’kai, my father’s head cook. We have loved one another since he was a potboy getting beaten for stealing bits of cake for me. We are promised, and I will have no other.”

  I understood her situation altogether too well. Young as he was, Deh’kai was already a master cook: not only could he play superb variations on the most common regional dishes—what they call soudrilak these days and ask half the earth for is no more than Deh’kai’s version of a stew every local farmwife knew—he had also invented recipes of his own that were just beginning to become famous beyond the borders of Derridow. Believe me, the Jiril would have parted far more willingly with any of his children than with that boy. At the same time, he was certainly not about to let his daughter live in Derridow as the wife of even such a cook as Deh’kai. I felt quite sorry for her. I was younger then.

  We had reached my cottage. Hoping to avoid asking her in, which would mean hurriedly preparing a suitable meal when all I wanted in the world was to down my usual glass of black wine and take a nap, I cautiously asked what favor I could do for her. The words were hardly out of my mouth before Firial pounced on them, and on me as well, dragging me inside as I unlocked the door, and slamming it behind us. “We have planned our escape on the first night of your play. My father has insisted that I attend, along with the rest of my family, but he will pay no attention to me once the performance begins. I must let Deh’kai know where we are to meet, the moment the play is over—but I have so few moments with him, and I dare not write, and I thought that perhaps you might….” She let her voice trail off, very affectingly, and looked away.

  “That I might add a speech with a meaning for him alone,” I said. Firial looked up, her eyes shining. “Dardis, if only you would! It is our one chance, we will never have another like it. My father suspects us, I know he does, and he will be sure to keep us apart forever and make me wed some stupid, hateful baron, unless you help us. Oh, please, please, Dardis!”

  A born blackmailer, you see, like her brothers. Only the leverage employed was at all different. At least she had the finesse and the subtlety not to weep, there’s that. I said wearily, “Lady, I will do what I can. Doubtless you have your speech with you?”

  She had it indeed, a few barely legible lines scrawled in the margins of a book of etiquette. I don’t remember them at all—thank the gods for something—but they went well enough into a scene in the last act in which King Vilnanash’s dying son tells his dearest friend where he wishes to be buried. A Fors boy named Brij—easily the slowest study I have ever known—played the friend, and I dreaded the thought of having to teach him new lines at this stage of things. But I told Firial all the same that she could count on me, and she left in a state of such grateful bliss as would nauseate a rock-targ. I drank more than one glass of black wine that afternoon, and napped not at all.

  So that’s everyone except Davao, isn’t it? He showed up himself a day or two later, an anticlimax as always. I actually pitied Davao, I must say, at long intervals, for his position in his family wasn’t one I’d have wished even on certain theatre managers of my acquaintance. He burst in on me in my dressing room—gods, just to say it, dressing room, brings back a time, a world, a life I have spent so many years trying to forget, for my own sake. And yet, perhaps it is as well to whisper the words aloud once in a while—“dressing room, dressing room, yes, I had my own dressing room once, all to myself, and not on wheels. It had a real mirror, and a special shelf for my makeup kit.”

  Anyway. Davao found me trying on a new face for King Vilnanash, a more stylized one, something like the shaded black-and-white faces that actors in the west coastal provinces give their legendary royal personages. I was just at the point of deciding that the old look was best when Davao slammed into the room without bothering to knock. His skin was misbehaving again—I wonder whether it ever cleared up—and his thin yellowish hair looked like the old urine-damp straw my company beds down in most nights. But the quality of his rage was as new minted and feverish as though he hadn’t been devotedly cosseting it since the day he was born.

  “Dardis!” he shouted, making my name sound insult enough to demand a duel. “Dardis, what’s this I hear about all three of my bloody brothers sneaking around to see you? What did they want, hey? What did you promise them?”

  He was trying to sound like the Jiril, you see, as they all did in one way or another. But he never got it right, poor boy—even Firial did a much better imitation than he. I said, “Nothing at all, my lord. They came only to catch a glimpse of the production, and to wish us luck. Nothing more, I do assure you.”

  Davao glowered suspiciously at me, but he did it so poorly that I was able to beam back at him, my own face full of benign and humble innocence. I could never have gotten away with it with Torleg. Davao finally muttered, “That’s as may be, but I do want something from you, and I’m not to be trifled with. You understand that, Dardis? No trifling.”

  And what was to be his contribution to The Tragedy of King Vilnanash the Accursed? Not a line of verse, not so much as a stage direction: no, our Davao wished to interpolate exactly one word—the name Riath, to be exact. He laboriously explained to me that it was the name of a martyred patriot, who also happened to be the distant ancestor of one of his dearest friends. Now, by sheerest coincidence, our first performance would fall on the eve of his dear friend’s birthday.
“I want you to put his ancestor’s name into that speech where Vilnanash starts talking about all the great and famous men who have died for his country. It’s to be his birthday present, he’ll like that, that’s what I want. Do it.”

  Well, assuming you could swallow the notion of Davao having a dearest friend, let alone his actually giving anybody anything, the request itself was by far the easiest one to comply with. Lisonje, being the person to whom I spoke the lines, caught the new name in the list immediately, but did nothing beyond raising a weary plucked eyebrow. When I explained afterward, she only shrugged, saying, “Why not, whyever not, how much more trouble can we be in? I just want to remind you, Dardis—when they are coming for us, and we have ten minutes to pack and get out, the good makeup towels are mine.” She would have fitted quite neatly in with the Jiril’s family, Lisonje, in some ways.

  So there you have it, if you’re still paying attention and haven’t fallen asleep behind those politely open eyes. Five interpolations, none really damaging in themselves—oh, a couple perhaps showing a few seams, nothing embarrassing—but each one a signal to somebody, and all of those somebodies being alerted through our mouths. If I was still taking it all too lightly, by Lisonje’s standards—and yes, yes, as matters did turn out, yes, I suppose I was—my defense must be that I had a role to perfect myself, a huge cast to teach and direct, musicians to supervise—musicians to find, that was most of it—and the Jiril’s resident lighting experts to wheedle and cozen and cajole into giving a scene something resembling the mood I asked for. A poor excuse, doubtless, but the very best a poor player can afford.

  So, then. The eve of our first performance came at last. I had a horrendous case of nerves all that day, but I always do—like you, I’m quite sure. It’s a simple question of knowing, in a way that no mere actor can ever know, exactly how much can go wrong, how rich and vital with appalling possibilities is the disaster waiting hungrily for you. Nususir remained as placid as only the truly unimaginative can be; but Trygvalin was like a horse who smells fire somewhere near, and Lisonje—Lisonje was calm without being in the least tranquil. She had spent most of the day packing all her props, costumes, and makeup for abrupt departure; and as often as I told her that she was wasting her time, just that often she rolled her eyes scornfully without bothering to answer. Someone is going to strangle her one day, when she does that with her eyes. I can wait.

  As for the rest of the troupe, they went about the usual business of any company just before its opening: vomiting, sweating, shaking, card playing; fits of screaming laughter alternating with a kind of hysterical silence I have known nowhere but in the theatre. Chachak the clown spent the day drinking, deliberately—I am certain of it—reducing himself to a state where he couldn’t even stand up to be sick, let alone to dance or sing. We had no Second Clown, so I was forced to parcel out his lines between several other actors, and delete his jigs and clogs altogether. No great loss in this play, but disconcerting to the cast, who were nervy enough already. I busied myself, as is my custom, with the most ordinary tasks I could find, making certain that costume changes would be ready, that the musicians in the gallery knew every one of their cues, that the fresh torches were set into the proper sconces, and the smoke and thunder and lightning machines also just where they should be. Lisonje jokes with frightened actors before a performance, teasing and comforting them. This is what I do.

  From time to time, one or another of the younger ones would slip forward to peep from behind a flat at the spectators, which is always a mistake. Each time they came back dazed and terrified all over again by the commotion that seven hundred people can make shuffling into a theatre, quarrelling over places, calling out to friends, bawling for the vendors of fruit and sweets and ale, while those in turn bawl their wares until our flimsy backdrops billow with it. I’ve breathed that noise in and out for so long that it becomes difficult to remember right just how frightening it was when I was sure they were all howling for my blood. But I do remember, yes, I do still.

  The Jiril and his small entourage arrived just as late as they should have, and not a moment later, and took their seats in the row reserved for them, while their subjects cheered exactly as lustily as was expected. His four sons filed in one at a time, each nodding briefly to clumps of louts wearing their well-known colors—the Jiril appeared to be taking no notice of these—and Firial trailed behind, eyes dutifully lowered, nothing in her bearing to suggest that she had every intention of absconding with her father’s cherished cook that same night. The said cook, Deh’kai, I saw high in the servants’ gallery—a handsome lad, rather slim for a cook—craning constantly forward to stare down, never once taking his eyes from her. I recall thinking, Ah, you’ll learn, you’ll learn.

  I waited until all of the Jiril’s people were seated, and then I stepped out in my role as the Chorus—the actor playing King Vilnanash always doubles as the Chorus—to welcome the audience and assure them that they were in for a rare treat:

  …a tale of woe greater than words can tell,

  Of pride, power, vain ambition, all cast down,

  A house supreme dispersed to such blind dust

  As all we come to, howsogreat our might—

  As all we come to, sitting here tonight….

  I don’t care for Prologues or Choruses, as I’ve said, but there are worse, if you have to have them. And the first act, showing King Vilnanash at the height of his reign, is the only one in the play that really holds together—as an act, I mean, not as an assortment of loosely related scenes. We sailed through it, with Lisonje stealing every scene she was in—every gesture, every smile, every sideways intonation, every turn of her body on the stage, every shifting rhythm of her speech, all workman’s tools in her shameless seduction of the audience. And I not only let her get away with it, I helped her—I played her foil for that first act as though the entire play were about Queen Noura, not her pitiful accursed consort. Tomorrow night I would tread on her gown, if I had to, to keep her from upstaging me….

  …but then, tomorrow night the worst would surely be over and perhaps nothing at all be changed. Perhaps none of the Jiril’s sons’ followers would turn out to be as ready for a revolution as they thought they were; the old man might well have bought them all off himself, as he once subverted the priests of an invading barbarian army so that they predicted utter disaster if the attack were not indefinitely postponed. But what I was truly betting on, as I always do, was inertia: the fact that most of the time, in any human situation, nothing much actually happens. You’re a man of some experience, you know where to put your money when it matters. Tell me I am wrong.

  Yes, well, I was wrong that time. Right in principle, but wrong in result, the old story. The oration into which Davao had desired me to insert the name of Riath occurs in the first act, and the moment I spoke it, shrill, if thin, cheering broke out in various corners of the house. I grew tense at first, and then had to struggle manfully to keep myself from breaking into laughter. If that lot represented the sum of Davao’s cohorts, the Jiril had more to worry about from colic and hoof-rot in his stables. So much for those rebels, anyway.

  And so much for the first act and on into the second with a fine rhythm building, the spectators already gripped (those who were actually there to see the play) by the ruin looming ahead for King Vilnanash, and I myself drawn so much deeper into that proud, doomed imbecile than I had expected—you know how that oldest magic happens—that I completely forgot about the three new lines Torleg had written in for the sorceress. When Nususir delivered them, in her best prophetic style, a hungry roar went up all around the theatre that was as shockingly different—in kind, not merely in volume—from the yelping of Davao’s gang as a puppy’s whimper for milk is from the hunting howl of a rock-targ. Nususir froze where she stood and had to be prompted to recall her next words. Not I, never; but I lost poor Vilnanash for the rest of that night. From then on, of course, it was nothing but lines and gestures and crossings, playing with one
eye on the audience and one ear desperately alert for the next interpolation. Probably one of the worst performances I ever gave, not that it matters.

  They never fully quieted down again, Torleg’s folk, once having acknowledged their leader; nor did Davao’s, though you couldn’t always hear that lot. And in Act Three, when Trygvalin brayed his defiance of his father in Javeri’s inflammatory rant—why, then here came a new faction altogether, reared up on their stamping feet and blaring their support till the solid old walls of our former tannery shook with it. After that it was pure chaos, with only occasional interludes of simple, wholesome bedlam. We on the stage could barely hear one another, and then only because we abandoned any notion of projecting over that uproar and spoke under it, as one can do. And even so, there were long stretches where for the canniest of us—let alone our utterly panicked apprentices and journeymen—we’d no choice but to mouth the words, if terror hadn’t ridden them out of our heads, tread our practiced measures from entrance to exit without colliding, and pray that we were all still somehow in the same scene of the same act of the same play. And mind you, mind you, that was yet early on.

  Backstage, the tumult was hardly less. I cut the intervals between the third, fourth and fifth acts down almost to nothing, because that howling out front, regardless of content, was raw madness, whether you actually feared it or no, and would swiftly make every one of us mad. If Lisonje was white about the mouth, bumping into the set and dropping her props, you can imagine what the rest of them were like. I wished to give them no time for the terror to take real hold; nor those others time to measure and savor their strength. Once I peeped out myself and saw the Jiril sitting calmly in his grand chair, looking around him with interest as his sons’ partisans chanted their slogans, each side mocking and threatening all the others. The sons themselves had not yet dared to stir from under the Jiril’s eye, not one of them. His wife was looking as annoyed as though Firial had disappointed her again; while as for that demure minx, she barely raised her eyes from some rather gaudy beadwork she had brought along with her. Even in the last act, when the dying Sakha gasped out the words which (if he could hear them—Trygvalin couldn’t) would enlighten her lover as to their meeting place, she appeared to be paying no attention to anything but her domestic task. Gods, there are times when I wonder why I bother dragging men along in my company. Men always think acting is playing, pretending; you never can really teach even the best of them otherwise. Women know it’s life.