Bride of the Rat God (21 page)

Faces like that had surrounded Jim when he’d been assigned his uniform, his weapons, his place in the line of battle. Family men or loners, educated or laborers, artists or stockbrokers or would-be architects with one year of training yet to go...

They’d all crowded like that, she supposed, in a line to get what they needed for the following day, cracking jokes or smoking cigarettes. As men had done, she supposed, before every battle, even back in the days about which they were making this ridiculous epic.

Only Jim happened to be there the day they handed out bullets with the guns. Jim happened to stumble into one of the periods when the army wasn’t just out for ten dollars and a couple of meals.

Norah stood still in the darkness, the sudden heat of tears searing her eyes. It was only time and chance, she thought despairingly, that had put him in that army in Belgium instead of this one in this silly desert full of cowboys and fake palaces and cheap tin swords. For a moment, as she watched the faces, she thought surely she would see him there, black hair falling over his eyes, laughing as he used to.

The crowd parted and moved, but it wasn’t Jim’s face she glimpsed in the jaundiced splintery light.

To her astonishment—astonishment that wiped from her mind all thought of the world’s injustice—the face she thought she saw was Shang Ko’s.

An army on the march must be disciplined,

else disaster will strike even the strongest...

An army may have fatalities...

An omen for the taking of prisoners...

“D
OESN’T IT HURT
the horse?” Christine regarded the rigged chariot with some concern and reached out an assured hand to stroke the nearer of the glossy black team.

“Shucks, miss, not if it’s done right.” Smoky Hill Dan finished rolling his cigarette and stowed the makings in a little washed-leather pouch hanging from his belt since the blue and crimson charioteer’s kilt he wore had no pockets. With his hair hidden by a close-fitting leather helmet and with high boots laced to the knees, he still looked like nothing but a cowboy: big, competent brown hands, squint-lined gray eyes, and a light coat of body makeup to cover the fact that his chest, arms, and thighs were nearly as pale as Christine’s, in contrast to his sunburned face.

“Lot of people claim a runnin’ W is cruel on the horse. Hell, so’s a curb bit if it’s handled by someone who’s got no business handling it.” He flicked a fragment of tobacco from his lip. “You time it right and have your fella undercrank the camera a little, and I can put that team down on the mark easy as a daddy flippin’ a kid up onto his lap, and twice as gentle.”

“Personally,” said Emily, who was standing at the back of the small group gathered around the chariot, “I’d worry about myself, not the horse.” Unlike Christine, clothed in glittering silver armor whose form-fitting fragility could not possibly have protected her in anything like a real battle, Emily wore a girlish pink voile frock with a wide lace collar. She had finished her scenes with Roberto Calderone the previous day and was only along—complexion guarded by wide-brimmed hat, veils, and a very nineties parasol—to view the battle.

“Oh, pooh.” Christine made an airy gesture. “When I was—” She visibly bit back the words
married to Clayton,
a secret to which no one in Hollywood was privy. “When I was a little girl in South Carolina, my cousins took me hunting with them all the time. I fell off twice, and it never did me any harm.”

The charioteer grinned. “That’s the spirit, miss. I bet after a day’s work you fall into an easy chair harder’n you’ll hit that sand.”

Norah glanced over at the target area. The previous night Ned the lesser had dug a pit some six feet in diameter by nearly two feet deep, which had been filled in with empty cardboard boxes and then covered with loose sand. Bits of weed and scrub had been transplanted to mask the join with hard ground. With some regret, Hraldy had been talked into allowing Christine’s torso to be almost fully covered by silver armor: “I told them,” said Mary DeNoux firmly, “that if she isn’t covered when she hits the sand, she’ll get scraped, and we can’t hide it with makeup for later shots or retakes.”

Hollywood logic, thought Norah. Despite Smoky Hill Dan’s reassurances, she herself wouldn’t have wanted to be spilled out of that chariot no matter how carefully rehearsed it was.

On the far side of a convenient rocky rise Felix Worthington-Pontchart had planted the charge that would simulate the lightning bolts of Jehovah’s wrath.

“It’s quite simple, really,” explained the Englishman. “I push the plunger as you pass between those two rocks over there, and one-half second before you lay the horses down, there will be an explosion such as would do any man’s heart good to hear.” He pushed up his rimless spectacles and smiled with a child’s delight.

Norah turned away. All yesterday, as she had watched the charge and countercharge of costumed extras—men waving swords and shouting as they fell upon other men with Western Costume spears, chariots falling, soldiers smiting one another, Ahasuerus and Esther gazing nobly down into the cauldron of fate, and finally Laban the Splendid’s troops and Jehovah’s lightning bolts arriving to save the day—she had been conscious of a horrible sense of split perspective, an emotion compounded of grief and indignation and anger stirring in her heart.

She knew it was irrational. What she was seeing was just a spectacle, and not a particularly original one. Why it should trouble her she wasn’t certain. Only she knew that it did.

It wasn’t Mikos Hraldy’s fault, or A. F. Brown’s, that Jim Blackstone had been involved in the hellish reality of which this was only a frilled and absurd shadow. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Jim was dead. There was no reason for her to be angry.

And she hadn’t been angry exactly. But she found it very, very difficult to listen to the director ordering Vashti’s soldiers to charge the bowmen of Persia.

Considering the sheer chaos attendant upon filming a major battle sequence—maneuvers repeated over and over for different exposures and different angles, close-ups of men struggling and distant shots of wheeling troops, rolling clouds of dust and constant awareness of the changing sunlight, of the position of the new moon’s thin sliver among intermittent clouds of the daylight sky—it was astonishing that Alec had noticed. But as the previous night’s darkness fell, he had come over to the small dressing and mah-jongg tent where she sat absently stroking Black Jasmine’s fur and asked her, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She looked up from the cot upon which she was sitting with her best
I’m fine, just tired
smile.

Alec, covered with sweat-runneled dust, had raised her to her feet and led her gently but firmly away into the shadows of the towering rocks. The shouted commands of Ned the greater and his corps chiefs faded to flat echoes no louder than distant hammer blows, and the dove-colored light seemed to swallow the jingly chaos that surrounded Christine, Emily, the breakdown of the tents, and the retrieval of the spare greasepaint tubes, water tanks, cots and cushions, and stray mah-jongg tiles.

Small winds sniffed among the rocks. Dry shrubs and stalky weeds stirred and were still. Ground squirrels dashed for cover. Somewhere an insect rattled with a harsh, buzzing noise.

Alec sat her down on a rock. “What is it?” His glasses made two neat rings in the dust on his face. One of Norah’s many jobs that day had been to fetch a cup of water and a clean handkerchief every few minutes to keep the lenses clean, his own and the camera’s.

She shook her head again. “It’s silly.”

“Nothing’s silly.”

She sighed and brought it out as she would have brought out a tale of a burned dinner or a demolished car, all of a piece. “It’s just—my husband was killed in battle. It’s a bit hard for me to watch them playing at it.”

There was a long silence. The shadows thickened from silk to velvet, purpling to black. The voices of the extras diminished as the desert took them back, but Alec made no move, as if this conversation, the thing that had been said and could be said, were of greater importance than their own or Christine’s dinner.

At length he said, “I know. My sister’s husband beat her nearly to death with a mop handle. It was a long time before I could watch a Punch and Judy show.”

“It’s just...” Her voice came out thin as thrice-ground glass, and she waved angrily, trying to get enough breath to speak. “It’s just that I loved him so much.”

For a moment she sat upright, tears streaming down her face, her hands in her lap. Then Alec sat down beside her, gathered the bony awkward height of her against his shoulder, and held her like a brother... as Sean would have... the corner of his glasses poking her in the side of the head and their knees and shoulders bumping, not quite fitting.

And through it all, through the blinding hurt that she thought she’d left behind in a freezing attic in Manchester and the tears that she didn’t think were left in her, some portion of her mind kept repeating,
What would Jim think? What would Jim think?

But she knew quite well what Jim would think, because Jim had told her what he thought on his last furlough. “I hate to think about you lying in anybody else’s arms,” he had said, running his palm gently along her bare arm, cupping her shoulder, her elbow, her breast, as if he, like she, were memorizing a physical reality against the darkness to come. “But if something should happen to me, I don’t want to think about you living your life alone.”

He’d meant it, too. He hadn’t realized how alone she would be when influenza finished the carnage the war had begun. He certainly couldn’t have foreseen that she’d end up in this bright-colored Oz of palm trees, oil derricks, ersatz Spanish castles, and unlikely weather.

At some point, long after dark, she said, “I don’t know how Christine can stand it.”

“Chris hasn’t got your imagination.” He raised his head a little against the dusty mat of her hair. “The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who’ll see it on the screen. It’s like the people who read
Anna Karenina,
and because it’s in Russia they can say, ‘Oh, that’s not my pain they’re talking about.’ And Chris is tough. She goes from one thing to the next and doesn’t worry about the past. When a cat sits mere purring on your lap, you know for a fact she isn’t thinking about her former owner; she’s thinking about her dinner. That’s Chris.”

Norah laughed softly and owned that he had a point. What else she said to him that evening she didn’t know: anger at Brown, at Hraldy, at the war that had brought her the most precious thing in her life and then had taken it away again. He did ask her if she was angry at him for not going. The question surprised her. “I was always against the war,” she said. “My whole family was. It’s just that we didn’t really have a choice.”

When they walked hand in hand back to the edge of the day’s battlefield, all that remained there, like a spot of tar against the pale blur of sand amid the trash of vanquished armies, was one battered black Ford with
COLOSSUS
lettered on the door. Having told Christine of Fallon’s subterfuges to get her alone, she knew she could count on her sister-in-law’s sense of mischief to keep him at arm’s length until she returned.

And today she felt better watching Hraldy line up the close-up shots, seeing them, as Alec had said, as a kind of Punch and Judy show in questionable taste.

Christine mounted the chariot. Smoky Hill Dan reined expertly around and cantered the horses across the desert to the stake that marked the farthest point of the camera’s pickup, the light vehicle bouncing over ground that had been flattened and cleared for yesterday’s battle.

The course of the charge would be east to west, along the foot of the uneven rock hills that ringed the battlefield. Outdoor scenes were invariably aligned with the camera pointing north or south to prevent glare, backlights, or the shadow of the cameraman intruding into the illusion that this really was 480
B.C.
Norah suspected that part of the reason for this battlefield’s popularity among film companies was the fact that it was a long oval oriented east-west, with sufficient roughness around the edges to make it interesting but smooth enough to permit impressive charges. She wondered if in some former era it had been the bed of a long-vanished lake.

Hraldy gave the signal. The black horses leapt against their old-fashioned breast straps and picked up speed, manes flying, hooves churning dust that the morning sunlight transformed into a shining curtain boiling out behind them, Christine clinging desperately to the rail and to her lanky escort. As they passed through the two unmarked rocks, Worthington-Pontchart squeezed his thumb down on nothing and made a kissing noise with his lips. Smoky Hill Dan drew rein as they approached the sandpit, and back by the cars, where Mrs. Violet sat in the shade of an awning reading
Photoplay,
Chang Ming strained on his leash and let out a wild salvo of barks.

“Too fast!” Hraldy waved his arms. “We get fast driving in another shot. Here we cannot see you for dust! Christine, Christine, you are Vashti, queen of Babylon, devourer of men, betrayer of kingdoms! Does Vashti cling to her charioteer for protection against a little speed?”

“Can’t you put in a title that I’m checking to see how fat he is before I devour him?” Christine’s breathing was unsteady, but now that the first rush was over, her eyes sparkled with excitement. Dust clung to her face and hair and dimmed the glory of her silver armor; Mary DeNoux bustled up with a soft whisk broom to brighten it again, and Zena applied fresh powder and very gently shook the dust from the Persian queen’s disheveled locks.

“I’ll undercrank it to about twelve,” said Alec, turning the camera back toward its starting point. The chariot went back for another run.

“Aren’t they going to rehearse the fall itself?” Emily asked wonderingly, stepping so close to Norah that her parasol made flower patterns over them both. Behind them, all three dogs began to bark, throwing themselves against their leashes hysterically. Norah looked around almost subconsciously for Fallon but could see no sign of him.