Till Human Voices Wake Us (16 page)

“
Inshallah
,” murmured Sherry.

Raphael felt like the bottle of ginger beer in the Underground, effervescence gathering force. He wondered what Kasian would do if he said,
It is your doing I may fail
.

He told himself dispassionately he would not shatter. If tomorrow he had to face Circe with his sword and his crown alone and nothing more, he would.

Into the silence that billowed around them there came a knock on the door. All started but Raphael, whose muscles were now too much under his control to do anything so unconsciously. Sherry stood up and went to answer it, her voice carrying down the short hall: “Come in.” A pause, then: “You were out in the garden?”

Raphael turned to see Hazel Isling. She smiled fitfully at him. “I saw James standing in the window and I was wondering if you wanted to come with me to the theatre.”

“Yes,” he said. “Let me get my coat.”

“Of course,” she replied, brushing her hands down the front of hers. “It’s turned cold, I fancy, just now.”

He readied himself and came back to the edge of the sitting room. Against the dark window Kasian was an inverse silhouette, glaring. Raphael turned to Sherry. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

She said nothing in reply, merely looked at him. He nodded to Angelica and did not look directly at his brother. “Good afternoon,” he said in general, and touched Hazel lightly on her sleeve. She seemed to come to herself with a start and with a jerky, compulsive smile at the others went before him to the door. He shut it behind them with a strong sense of relief and an even stronger sense of wrongness for the shape and tenor of the world around him.

They walked down the stairs and let themselves out of the front door. He let Hazel lead the way, which she did, walking quickly towards the nearest Tube station. He felt battered by the stares and second glances of people as they passed, resolutely folded his person back into protective anonymity. After a bit she said, “How do you know Sherry?”

He felt his attention lurching, replied belatedly. “We found each other once, in a desert in Persia.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Getting lost.”

They walked on. The air was thick and dark and murky, each streetlight casting a cone of light that illuminated little but its immediate environs. It was colder, the North Wind arriving. Passing in and out of shadow Raphael managed to push himself into James Inelu not-being-famous, that stranger people saw when they looked at his face. Fewer people stared after that, but the physical world was oppressively heavy. His neck ached.

“It comforted me so, somehow, to see you standing there,” Hazel said, with a clear attempt at poise, but her voice trailed off and he said nothing.

She swallowed a sobbing gasp. “My fiancé left me this afternoon. He’s been with someone else. For months, he said.”

He tried to tug at a little wind, found all he had done was lift his hands, pretended he had intended to rearrange his scarf. The burned bit on his hand throbbed. She went on in a quieter voice. “I feel so
used
.”

He smoothed his thoughts again, like pressing down a dog’s hackles, like brushing out knots in a horse’s coat, like polishing a carving. Hazel stumbled a bit and clutched his arm. He paused and waited for her to regain her balance. When she did they walked on again, her hand resting on his elbow.
 

He couldn’t feel anything but the touch, but he hated that she touched him and he was unprotected. Much as he hated the almost non-sensation of people touching him when he was protected by his magics, this was worse.

“Why did you look at me like that?” she asked. “For a moment I didn’t know who you were. I was afraid. Then you pointed at the sunset, and I saw it was you, and I—I don’t know—I think I thought that you understood, that you knew what I was feeling, that … Oh, I’m sounding so silly. How could you have known?”

He couldn’t remember what he had thought, couldn’t remember what he had been doing, until he remembered the tree losing its few remaining leaves in this unfriendly wind that was gusting coldy around them. He had watched her stumble around a garden while listening to someone telling the story of his own grief.

He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t say he knew that some sorrows cut to the quick of the soul, and bleed away the strength of the heart until one ends up between the rock of the passions and that of the intellect. He had no words to say that. Words were not his strength. Oh, how hard it was sometimes for the vegetable soul, the soul that is merely to do with the basest processes of life, to keep the blood circling and the air rushing and the body fed.

 
They descended to the Underground, not so far down as to the platform with the bottle. He didn’t have an Oyster card, had to fumble with change with the tourists. Hazel watched him as if he were suddenly a stranger to her as well.
 

It was the heavy hour for traffic, but he found a seat for Hazel and stood half-balanced before her. He was tightly controlled; no one recognized him now; no one looked twice. Neither spoke until they made their way to the surface again and began to walk towards the theatre. At length she stirred. “Tell me, James, what it was that made you look at me like that.”

Though she phrased it as an order there was nothing of the knife-edged arrogance of power in it: she ordered because she could not bear to ask and be refused. It was not what he did; he did not ask questions when he could not bear to hear no answer.

He looked at her for a long while, trying to formulate what he felt, then gave up, and in his mind ran over the words of others, trying to find a way to express it. They came to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob, intent on him as a bird is intent upon its food.

“‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,’” he said at last, and her face transformed with something he could not name, “‘and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.’”

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.