Shadow Magic (41 page)

Fortunately, where my knowledge failed in the common slang, I was quite capable of a rough translation of such formal language.

“‘Long have I traveled this dark road,’” I translated. I kept my words no louder than the barest of whispers. “‘Long have I searched for a port in the dark storm. But I am cast out from my home—who will be loyal to me now?’”

I was given no further opportunity to continue, for with a sudden explosion—miniature fireworks, how utterly exquisite!—an actor appeared on stage, body frozen in a sharply angled pose. He looked more like a statue than a man, so still and so expressionless. His robes were made of the deepest cobalt blue and I caught on his back the three golden diamonds I’d seen before.

My fingers twitched at Alcibiades’ sleeve, and he was so distracted by the glorious display he even patted the top of my hand.

“‘My lord calls,’” I whispered, wishing I did not have to translate for the general. Nonetheless, it wasn’t particularly unexpected that he wouldn’t know this, the most formal dialect of the Ke-Han, reserved now only for the classics and performance scripts. “‘I hear him upon the wind. Who needs now the presence of a man loyal when the world is not? It is I, noble warrior! We fight as one!’”

The actor’s face began to change, but not through any motion he
made. Rather, it was through the subtle changes of
emotion
. I knew at once that he was the loyal retainer. Even I, stranger that I was, could feel the purpose behind his performance.

“Uncanny,” Alcibiades muttered.

The cheering from the audience began.

“‘Never shall we be separated,’” I continued, savoring each word. “‘I have pledged my life to thee, and thine it is, no matter who chases us down.’”

“I know who chases you down!” someone shouted from the audience. He was followed by such a chorus of hooting and jeering that I wondered what sort of training the actor must have had to ignore it completely—to carry on as though he were alone in the world. Indeed, alone like the prince and his retainer upon the high mountain.

“‘Is that you, Benkei?’ That must be the prince, offstage,” I said, as I leaned closer to the stage. “I wonder how he’ll appear—I wonder if he’s as beautiful as the one we were so lucky to see for ourselves—”

“Shh,” Alcibiades hissed. “You’re being rude.”

My cheeks were hot with amusement and pleasure, and the close atmosphere of the theatre, the heavy air made damp and close by all the bodies pressed together, waiting for the prince to arrive.

“Benkei, my sorry ass,” said a man sitting next to us, before he settled back to scratching the back of his neck as though he might have had fleas.

“‘My lord, I have brought you your sword,’” I whispered. “‘By your side I shall be as your sword. We shall fight as one, and safety under the gods will be ours.’”

“A little bit much, isn’t it?” Alcibiades murmured, shifting uncomfortably. It was either because he’d finished his dumplings or because the emotions of the people there had finally caught up to him. “A little bit queer, too. In Volstov, he wouldn’t be such…” Alcibiades trailed off, chewing the words over while he observed the actor, imposing and fierce and lit with glowing lamplight. “Well, such a damn hero.”

“Unless there was some good reason for his change of loyalties,” I added.

“Ch’. Foreigners,” the man sitting next to us said, casting us a disapproving look.

“My sincere apologies,” I said. It meant only that I had to settle myself
closer to Alcibiades so that we would disturb no other patrons of the arts with our commentary and with my translation, which I did. “‘Here you have come to complete your training. Even the spirits of the wind and trees respect your plight, and weep for it.’”

“This,” Alcibiades said, “is downright insane. How do they get away with it? What in blazes does their esteemed Emperor think?”

“They’ve given them different names, you see,” I replied mildly. “I think that makes it all less obvious.”

“Huh,” Alcibiades snorted, then,
“bastion.”

The prince had appeared.

It was not with fanfare and fireworks, as had his lord Benkei. It was not even with a shower of tinsel or through a trapdoor. He had merely come onto the stage as though he owned the stage, gliding across it like a spirit of the wind and trees himself. He, too, was dressed in blue, though it was scattered across with gold and silver, like light upon a deep lake. He was beautiful—though not, I noticed with some interest, as otherworldly as the true prince had been, the prince upon whom this entire madman’s charade was based.

I thought of Emperor Iseul’s eyes as he bore down upon Alcibiades, as though he meant to kill him. Indeed, he was not a man who would allow something so simple as substituted names to stop him from killing the playwright behind this insult and the actors who perpetrated it. Perhaps not even the members of the audience were safe, on account of their tacit participation.

It was much like being in the lion’s den while the lion was out. At any moment, the great beast might return to reclaim his territory, but for the moment, it was ours.

“The prince!” someone called from the audience. The cheers began in earnest over the dialogue I could barely translate properly when it was all I could hear.

“I’ve heard he’s got an army of spirits up north,” a nearby patron told his companion. Then, his voice hushed, he added,
“Prince Mamoru.”
The tone he used to speak the name was almost reverent.

“They’ve made him into a deity,” I told Alcibiades, my eyes wide with wonder.

“No,” Alcibiades replied. “They’ve made him into a god.”

I was about to correct him—to tell him the two were one and the
same—only then I didn’t. He was right. A deity was too small for what the second prince had become onstage, moving past his retainer with the grace of a moonbeam. Alcibiades was right. He
had
become a god.

I couldn’t help wondering if he knew it, the poor dear creature. At least he had someone with him. Someone as loyal and as unfaltering as time itself, as the narrator might have said. I felt a thrill run up my spine at the prospect; and, at the same time, I wondered where they were hiding themselves. If they truly were still alive.

It was as though Alcibiades and I had become caught up in a story, a tale of heroes and villains. There was something about the city that night, the smoke and the stage, that made reality seem very close to the stories. It was almost difficult to tell the difference between the two.

The smoke rose once again over the stage, and I thought I saw the flicker of screens being changed, the apparition of another face in the gloom.

“What now?” Alcibiades murmured, craning his neck to see.

There was a figure emerging onstage. He was taller than the prince, but more slender than his retainer. He stood rock-still at the center of a platform as it rose from somewhere below the stage, his eyes cast down, his arms stretched out to either side of him. His palms were upturned, as though awaiting adulation, and through the smoke I thought I saw a flash of the same crimson red we’d seen backstage. Indeed, even his face it seemed was painted in harsh, thick lines of the same color, and his robes were the color of blood. It was Alcibiades’ Volstovic red: the very same hue.

There was a sudden rush of movement from all around us, as everyone in the audience suddenly began to stir, whispering to their companions or stretching to get a better view. I sat up straight as I could, wishing not for the first time that I might borrow just a
little
of Alcibiades’ height.

The narrator was wailing again.

“‘My search is nearly over,’” I translated hastily, while using Alcibiades’ shoulder to lever myself up to see. “‘Soon I will have—’”

“Murderer!” someone nearer to the stage yelled. His words were slurred, as though he’d been drinking.

I saw our row-companion’s eyes go wide with shock, though all around the theatre there was a buzz of approval.

The actor playing the Emperor did not falter, but rather held so still
that I found myself a captive of his presence, unable to look away. There was no trace of remorse on his face. Indeed, there was no trace of anything at all. Rather, his expression was blank, devoid of any recognizably human emotion. It was like a palace mask, and yet unlike it, since the lines painted on his face made him look more demon than man.

Was that how the people of Xi’an viewed their new Emperor? It was a troubling thought.

“See if you ever track down your brother!” called another member of the audience, one less muzzy with drink.

Alcibiades sucked in his breath. Sitting as close as I was, I could feel it when he went tense, as though the play had suddenly turned all too real.

“What would his
father
have said? Turning against your own flesh and blood,” a nearby woman muttered disapproval to her companion, shouting the last to the rest of the theatre.

“Perhaps he’s gone mad, like his great-grandfather.”

“Perhaps we need Prince Mamoru back here to overthrow him!”

“I can’t hear
anything,”
Alcibiades complained, looking upset.

It was then, with a tremendous crash, that the doors broke open.

Men in deep shades of imperial blue—robes just as fine as the costumes upon the stage—stormed in through the splintered wood and torn paper. They had helmets on, to shield their faces, and each man carried a sword. Not the wooden practice swords I’d grown accustomed to seeing, either. These were live blades, and they glimmered wickedly in the lamplight as the guards marched in.

One of them stepped up onto the stage, obscuring the actor completely.

“By decree of Our Lord, Emperor Iseul,” he began.

Someone to our left booed loudly. They had clearly become carried away with themselves. The noise cut itself off suddenly, as though he or she had received an elbow to the stomach or a hand over the mouth.

“This play is over!” the guard shouted, driven to the edge of his patience. I felt Alcibiades beginning to stir next to me, and felt a familiar rush of excitement mixed with apprehension. Such interesting things always happened when I was with the general. It was a good thing I’d thought to bring my fan, which I unfurled to obscure my face.

“What’s more,” the guard went on, unsheathing his sword as his
fellow soldiers strode up the aisles in organized lines. “The lot of you are under arrest, pending the apprehension of those
responsible
for this piece of filth.”

A shout of dismay went up from the audience. Alcibiades surged to his feet, dragging me up with him.

There was a moment when I felt suspended in time, like an actor onstage myself. I saw the other patrons—our audience—as though frozen, anticipating the moves of the guards, our villains, dressed in blue.

The costumes were all wrong. “The heroes are supposed to be in blue,” I told Alcibiades in an excited whisper.

There was a flurry of crimson movement onstage; and, as though it had all been a part of the script, the pretend-Emperor brought his wooden sword down hilt first on top of the guard’s head. We in the audience had time for a roar of approval, putting all our praise for the play into one primal cry of appreciation.

Then the guards were on us.

Alcibiades pulled me forward, choosing to travel down toward the stage and against the flow of the crowd, which was surging back toward the far wall. I had no choice but to follow, since he was a dreadfully strong brute when he had a mind to be. And besides, I was no battle strategist.

“I shouldn’t think it would look very good for two of Volstov’s diplomats to land in jail,” I remarked, cheerfully tripping a guard who’d grabbed a young lady by the arm. She smiled at me before she wheeled around into the crowd, disappearing from view.

“We’re not going to,” Alcibiades grunted, pausing a minute to look around.

I took that opportunity, brief and breathless as it was, to examine the room myself. There were many patrons who appeared to be running for the nearest exit, like ourselves, but to my shock I saw more than one who’d stayed to land a punch or two against the guards. Onstage, the pretend-Emperor’s fellow actors had joined him, with the larger Benkei standing as a defensive wall against the surge of increasingly angry enforcers. I had looked up just in time to see the young prince-actor, delicate as a moonbeam, roundly kicking a guard in the shins, then dropping him down an open trapdoor.

I let out a whoop of approval. Alcibiades looked at me as if I were mad.

“Caught up in the moment,” I explained.

“Uh-huh,” Alcibiades said.

Then, quicker than I’d seen him move yet, he pulled me underneath the footbridge that traveled from the stage to the audience, connecting the two together in a brilliant stroke of theatrical innovation.

“We’re going out the back way,” he told me, bent almost double in the low space beneath the bridge. “You’ve got those knives with you, don’t you?”

“How could I go anywhere without my fan?” I said, pleased that he’d come to know me so well.

“Use them,” Alcibiades said, in a tone that made me think he must have been a very different person during the war, with so much fighting to keep him busy and less time to be sullen about every little thing.

The next thing I knew, we were moving again, under the overpass and back into the audience seating. Alcibiades lifted me under my arms—making no attempt to be careful about my clothes at all—and slung me up onto the bridge like a sack of common potatoes. He hauled himself up next and caught me at the shoulder, pulling me to my feet. All around us people were shouting. Some were rallying cries; others were threats of legal action. It was becoming impossible to sort one from the other.

I couldn’t help but feel a mounting sense of excitement, since Alcibiades had us running
straight toward
the actors, so that we might actually see them up close.

A guard pulled himself up onto the bridge and Alcibiades dragged me back behind him. Very shortly I was going to get tired of being so manhandled, as it was behavior I would never allow under normal circumstances, but there was something crudely touching about the whole matter. Never mind that it made me feel quite like the prince in question, and Alcibiades my loyal retainer, sworn to protect me and guard me while nonetheless treating me like merchants’ wares to be hauled about.