Inversions (20 page)

‘Perhaps.’

‘So much to remember that is not entirely natural, so many opportunities to make a mistake.’

‘Dear Duke,’ the Doctor said with some concern. ‘I hope this is not some subtly disguised warning.’

I happened to be circling my immediate partner with my hands clasped behind my back and was facing .the Duke Quettil at this point. I got the impression that he was momentarily taken aback, unsure quite what to say for the moment before the Doctor went on, ‘You are not preparing to step on my toes, are you?’

The Duke gave a small, high laugh, and with that the timeous demands of the dance took both the Doctor and myself away from the centre of the figure. While our other four-set took the centre, we stood alongside each other, our hands clasped or on hips as appropriate, marking time with one foot then the other.

‘All right so far, Oelph?’ the Doctor said. I thought she sounded slightly breathless, and even as though she was enjoying herself.

‘Aye, so far, mistress. The Duke seemed’

‘Were you teaching Quettil extra steps there, Doctor?’ Adlain asked from her other side.

‘I’m sure that there is nothing I could teach the Duke, Guard Commander.’

‘I’m equally sure he feels just the same way, madam, and yet he appeared to lose his way for a moment in that last turn.’

‘It is a complicated figure, as he himself pointed out to me.’

‘Yet one he chose.’

‘Indeed he did. Does Count Walen dance it as well, do you think?’

Adlain was silent for a moment. ‘I fancy he might, or at least fancy that he fancies he might.’ I saw him glance at the Doctor. His half-mask allowed him to show a smile. ‘However I myself find it takes all my concentration just minding my own steps without attempting to scrutinise somebody else’s. Ah, excuse me…’

Another set. ‘Good Doctor,’ young Duke Ulresile said, meeting her in the centre. His companion, the young lady whose name I forget, seemed no more inclined to talk to me than Lady Ghehere.

‘Duke,’ the Doctor replied.

‘You look most striking.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That mask, is it Brotechian?’

‘No, sir, it is silver.’

‘Ah. Indeed. But does it originate in Brotechen?’

‘No, in Haspide. I had a jeweller fashion it.’

‘Ah! It is your own design! How fascinating!’

‘My toe, sir.’

‘What? Oh! Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘And your mask, Duke?’

‘What? Oh, ah, some old family thing. Do you like it? Does it please you? There is a companion one for a lady. I would be honoured if you would accept it with my compliments.’

‘I could not possibly, sir. I’m sure your family would object. Thank you, nevertheless.’

‘But it is nothing! That is, it is very it is, I should say, regarded as most elegant and graceful, the one for a lady, I mean, but it is entirely mine to gift. It would be an honour!’

The Doctor paused, as though considering this offer. Then she said, ‘And an even greater one for me, sir. However, I already possess the mask which you see and have admired, and I find I can only wear one at a time.’

‘But . . .’

However, with that it was time for the two to separate, and the Doctor returned to my side.

‘Are you getting all this, Oelph?’ she asked, as we caught our breath and executed the marking-time steps.

‘Mistress?’

‘Your partners appear to become mute in your presence and yet you had the look of somebody concentrating on a conversation.’

‘I did, mistress?’ I asked, feeling my face redden under my mask.

‘You did, Oelph.’

‘I beg your pardon, mistress.’

‘Oh, it’s quite all right, Oelph. I don’t mind. Listen away, with my blessing.’

The music changed again, and it was time for the two rows of dancers to form a circle and then reconstitute themselves in an alternate order. In the circle, the Doctor held my hand firmly but gently. Her hand, which I’d swear squeezed mine just before she let go, felt warm and dry, and the skin smooth.

Before too long I was dancing in the middle of the great ballroom of our Kingdom’s second palace and arguably its first in opulence with a smiling, giggling, porcelain-skinned princess from the Half-Hidden Kingdoms in the high, snow-besieged mountains that climb most-way into the sky beyond the savage anarchy of Tassasen.

Her cloud-white skin was tattooed on eyelid and temple, and pierced with jewelled studs at her nostrils and the septum between nose and upper lip. She was short but curvaceous, dressed in a highly ornamented and colourful version of the booted, straight-skirted fashion of her people. She spoke little Imperial and no Haspidian, and her knowledge of the dance steps was somewhat fragmentary. Still she contrived to be an enchanting dancing partner, and I confess that I caught little of what passed between the Doctor and the King, noting only that the Doctor looked very tall and graceful and correct while the King seemed most animated and merry, even if his steps were not as fluent as they would normally have been (the Doctor had strapped his ankle up especially tightly that afternoon, knowing that he would be certain to take part in the dancing). Both wore smiles beneath their half-masks.

The music swelled and rolled over us, the grand people and beautiful masks and costumes surged and eddied about us, and we, resplendent in our finery, were the bright focus of it all. The Doctor moved and swayed at my side and occasionally I caught a hint of her perfume, which was one that I was never able to identify and cannot ever recall seeing her apply. It was an astonishing scent. It reminded me at once of burned leaves and sea spray, of newly turned earth and of seasonal flowers in bloom. There was, too, something tenebrous and intense and sensual about the scent, something sweet and sharp at the same time, at once lithe and full-bodied and utterly enigmatic.

In later years, when the Doctor was long gone from us and even her most manifest features were becoming difficult to recall with perfect clarity, I would, in diverse moments of private intimacy, catch a hint of that same odour, but the encounter would always prove fleeting.

I freely confess that on such occasions the recollection of that long-ago night, the magnificent ballroom, the splendid profusion of the dancers and the breath-arresting presence of the Doctor seemed like a capstan of ache and longing attached by the ropes of memory to my heart, squeezing and tightening and compressing it until it seemed inevitable that it must be burst asunder.

Engulfed in that riotous storm of the senses, by eye and ear and nose beset, I was at once terrified and exhilarated, and experienced that strange, half-elatory, half-fatalistic alloy of emotions that leads one to feel that if one died at that precise moment, suddenly and painlessly (indeed ceased to be rather than went through the process of dying at all), then it would somehow be a blessed and culminatory thing.

‘The King seems happy, mistress,’ I observed as we stood side by side again.

‘Yes. But he is starting to limp,’ the Doctor said, and sent the briefest of frowns in Duke Quettil’s direction. ‘This was an unwise choice of dance for a man with an ankle which is still recovering.’ I watched the King, but of course he was not dancing at that point. However, I could not help but notice that rather than make the fill-in steps, he was standing still, weight on his good leg, clapping his hands in time instead. ‘How is your Princess?’ the Doctor asked me with a smile.

‘Her name is Skoon, I think,’ I said, frowning. ‘Or that may be the name of her homeland. Or her father. I’m not sure.’

‘She was introduced as Princess of Wadderan, I believe,’ the Doctor told me. ‘I doubt that Skuin is her name. That is the name of the type of dress she is wearing, a skuin-trel. I imagine she thought you were pointing at that when asking for a name. However, given that she is a female of the Wadderani royal family, her name is probably Gul- something or other.’

‘Oh. You know of her people?’ This confused me, for the Sequestered or Half-Hidden Kingdoms are some of the most remote and thoroughly land-locked places in the known world.

‘I have read about them,’ the Doctor said urbanely, before being pulled into the centre to dance with the tall Trosilian Prince. I was paired with his sister. A lanky, generally ungainly and rather plain woman, she nevertheless danced well enough and seemed quite as merry as the King. She was happy to engage me in conversation, though she did seem under the impression that I was a nobleman of some distinction, an illusion which I was probably rather too slow to dispel.

‘Vosill, you look wonderful,’ I heard the King tell the Doctor. I saw her head dip a little and she murmured something back to him which I could not hear. I experienced a pang of jealousy that turned for an instant to wild fear when I realised who it was I was feeling jealous of. Providence, our own dear King!

The dance went on. We met with the Duke and Duchess of Keitz, then formed a circle once more the Doctor’s hand was as firm and warm and dry as before and then took up again with our earlier eightsome. I was breathing hard by this time and did not wonder that people the age of Duke Walen usually sat out this sort of dance. Especially when one was masked, it was a long, hot and tiring business.

Duke Quettil danced with the Doctor in frosty silence. Young Ulresile fairly ran into the middle of our group to meet the Doctor and continued in his attempt to press some portion of his family’s equity upon her, while she parried each suggestion as neatly as it was made awkwardly.

Finally (and thankfully, for my feet were becoming quite sore in my new dress shoes and I was in some need of relieving myself) we shared a set with Lady Ulier and Guard Commander Adlain.

‘Tell me, Doctor,’ Adlain said as they danced together. ‘What is a . . . gahan?’

‘I’m not sure. Do you mean a gaan?’

‘Of course, you pronounce it so much better than I. Yes. A gaan.’

‘It is the title of an officer in the Drezeni civil command. In Haspidus, or in Imperial terms, it would roughlor in Imperial terms, it would roughly correspond to a town master or burghead, though without the military authority and with an additional expectation that the man or woman would be capable of representing Drezen at junior consular level when abroad.’

‘Most illuminating.’

‘Why do you ask, sir?’

‘Oh, I read a report recently from one of our ambassadors . . . from Cuskery, I think, which mentioned the word as though it was some sort of rank but without including any explanation. I intended to ask one of our diplomatic people but it must have slipped my mind. Seeing you and thinking of Drezen obviously secured it again.’

‘I see,’ the Doctor said. There was more passed between them, but then Lady Ulier, Duke Ulresile’s sister, spoke to me.

‘My brother seemed most fixed upon your lady physician,’ she said. Lady Ulier was a few years older than either myself or her brother, with the same narrow-pinched and sallow look as he, though her dark eyes were bright and her brown hair lustrous. Her voice was somewhat strident and abrasive even when pitched low, however.

‘Yes,’ I said. I could think of little else.

‘Yes. I imagine he seeks a physician for our family, which is of course of the finest quality. Our own midwife grows old. Perhaps the lady physician will provide a suitable replacement when the King grows tired of her, should we think her suitable and sufficiently trustworthy.’

‘With the greatest respect, ma’am, I think that would demean her talents.’

The lady looked down her long nose at me. ‘Do you, indeed! Well, I think not. And you perjure yourself, sir, for the greatest respect you could have accorded me would have been to have said nothing to contradict what I had just said.’

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. It was simply that I could not bear to see so noble and fair a lady so deceived regarding the abilities of Doctor Vosill.’

‘Yes. And you are . . . ?’

‘Oelph, my lady. It is my honour to have been the Doctor’s assistant throughout the time she has treated our good King.’

‘And your family?’

‘Is no more, my lady. My parents were of the Koetic persuasion and perished when the Imperial regiment of our late King sacked the city of Derla. I was a baby in swaddling at the time. An officer took pity on me when he might as well have thrown me on to a fire and brought me back to Haspidus. I was raised amongst the orphans of officers, a loyal and faithful servant of the crown.’

The lady looked at me with some horror. In a strangled voice she said, ‘And you wish to teach me the proprieties of who should serve our family?’ She laughed in such a way that the shriek produced surely convinced most of those surrounding us that I had just stamped upon her toe, then for the rest of the set she kept her nose angled as though trying to balance a marble-fruit upon its tip.

The music had stopped. We all bowed to each other and the King, hobbling a little, was surrounded by dukes and princes all of whom seemed desperately anxious to talk to him. The little Wadderan princess, whose name I had established was Gul-Aplit, gave me a polite wave as a forbidding-looking chaperone appeared at her side and escorted her away. ‘Are you all right, Oelph?’ the Doctor asked.

‘I am very well, mistress,’ I told her. ‘A little warm.’

‘Let’s get something to drink and then step outside. What do you say?’

‘I’d say that was a very good idea, mistress, if not two.’

We collected two tall goblets of some form of aromatic punch which we were assured by the servants was weak in alcohol and then, with our masks off at last and following a brief period to obey the call of nature we made our way out on to the balcony which ran round the outside of the ballroom, joining a good hundred or so others taking the fragrant night air.

It was a dark night and would be long. Seigen had almost joined Xamis at sundown that evening and for a good quarter of the wholeday there would be only the moons to light the sky. Foy and Iparine were our lanterns that evening, their bluey-grey luminescence filled out along the balcony’s tiles and the terraces of garden, fountain and hedge by glowing paper lamps, cressets of oilwood and scented pole-torches.

Duke and Duchess Ormin and their party approached us on the balcony, their way lit for them by dwarves carrying short poles, on the tip of which were large spheres of clear glass containing what looked like millions of soft and tiny sparks. As these curious apparitions came closer we saw that the globes contained hundreds and hundreds of glowflies, all milling and darting about in their strange confinement. They spread little light, but much amazement and delight. The Duke exchanged nods with the Doctor, though the Duchess did not deign to acknowledge us.