The Troupe (27 page)

An idea seemed to occur to Stanley. He gave Silenus a tentative look, and wrote:
THERE IS ANOTHER OPTION
.

“What?” said Silenus. “What would that be?”

Stanley wrote:
SOME OF YOUR OLD AGREEMENTS ARE STILL IN PLACE
.

“My agreements? Which ones would those be?”

THE OLDEST ONES. WITH THOSE WHO PROMISED YOU THE OBSERVATORY AND THE MOONLIGHT. THE INSTRUMENTS TO FIND THE SONG
.

Silenus and George both read what he wrote. While it made no
sense at all to George, Silenus stared at Stanley in disbelief. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, you’re out of your fucking mind,” he said.

Stanley wrote:
THEY HAVE NO REASON TO LOVE YOU BUT YOUR AGREEMENTS ARE STILL IN PLACE CORRECT
?

“Yes, but they’ll be sure to find some way to gut me like a fucking trout!” cried Silenus. “Stan, I love you, but this idea is some kind of stupid. I’ve had dealings go raw with them in the past, and never has there ever been a people more treacherous and feckless than that one. They’re experts at using language and binding agreements to their own ends. And their ends will mostly involve my guts on a platter, you get me?”

Stanley reluctantly nodded, and lowered his blackboard.

“So what will you do?” asked George.

Silenus glanced at George as though just remembering he was there. He walked over and sat behind his desk, and said, “How’s Kingsley doing? Is he any better?”

“No,” said George. “If anything, he’s worse.”

“Beautiful,” said Silenus. “I cannot have one fucking thing go right for me, now can I?”

“Franny told me he’s dying,” said George.

Silenus paused briefly. “Franny said that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Don’t go bothering Franny,” said his father. “She’s got it hard enough. She needs her rest, if she can get it.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“There’s nothing wrong with her. She just… she had an accident, all right?”

“That’s not what she told me,” said George. “She told me she died.”

Silenus looked at him, surprised. “She told you that?”

“Yes. It can’t be true, can it? You can’t be… be dead and just walking around.”

Silenus was quiet for a long, long while, and a terrible sadness crossed his face. Then he said, “I took Franny on to the troupe as an act of kindness, George. She was delivered to me by her husband, who was a friend of mine. He had attempted some very… unwise solutions to her state, you see. That state being death. He had hoped to bring her back. But, as you can tell, his attempts didn’t work, or at least not completely. He hoped I could repair what he had done and bring her back fully, or at least reverse what he’d tried. But so far I’ve been unable to.”

“Oh,” said George. “How long has she… been like this?”

“For years.”

“My God. What happened to her husband?”

“He passed away some time ago. I keep endeavoring to help her out of respect for the promise I made to him, and to her. But you can see why I’d prefer it if you left Franny alone, George. She has her burdens, just like we all do. You, me, even Kingsley. Everyone.”

“Kingsley’s killing himself, isn’t he?” asked George. “That’s why he keeps getting worse.”

Silenus gave George a long, cold look. He set the glass of brandy down on the table. “Franny didn’t tell you that, did she? You got that from the professor himself. He must’ve told you.”

“He told me a little. About where he came from.” George waited for some sort of explanation. When none came, he said, “How could you employ someone like that?”

“Kingsley?” said Silenus. “He’s a good man.”

“A good man? He had his own wife jailed!”

Silenus raised an eyebrow. “He told you she was jailed?”

“Yes! He told me all about what happened with his… child.”

“You misunderstand me. When I say that Kingsley is a good man, I don’t mean he’s morally just. I mean he’s useful, and competent, and he serves our goal well. Almost all of our players have had alternate uses to simply attracting an audience.”

“Protecting and performing the song,” said George bitterly.

“Yes,” said Silenus. “It angers you. I can understand that. But it’s the only thing that matters, George. Kingsley’s made his choices, and he’s dealt with the consequences. And he isn’t the first questionable person to have aided the First Song. He’s only one in a long, long line of them. I mean, hell. Look at me.”

George glanced up at his father. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist so that his brown long johns showed through, and a hint of gnarled, graying chest hair peeked out at their top. He sat slouched in his chair with his belly rising up, and his tobacco-stained, monkeyish fingers rested on its top. But his eyes were the most disconcerting thing about him: George had always felt that his father had unsettling, dispassionate eyes, but sometimes they seemed blue and faded enough to be unreal. George often felt that his father had spent long hours staring into things not meant to be seen.

He was not what George wanted, or needed. He was impossible to know, and even harder to love. And so long as the song needed to be protected, George would never have a place in his life.

“When will it end?” he asked.

“End?” said Silenus. “You think this will end?”

“Yes,” said George. “Please tell me it will. Please tell me there’s something we’re moving toward.”

Stanley raised his head. His eyes were sad, and he wrote:
THERE IS NO ENDING
.

“He’s right,” said Silenus. “There is no grail at the end of our quest, George. There is no finish. There is only survival. Day after day, year after year. We are fending them off with every minute of our lives. I will not lie to you, George, there is no respite from this burden. There is no point where it will be lifted. We must simply carry and maintain it, or die.”

George shook his head. “No. That’s not true. It’s a lie.”

“No, George,” said Silenus. “It is the truth. The greatest truth, the only truth. Things do not stop. They move on without us. It is a truth so great that most people must invent and live lies to deny it.”

“You don’t believe it,” said George. “You imagine an end, Harry.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. I can see it in you,” said George.

“And what end do I imagine, George?”

“When you showed me those wastes, that place that the wolves had consumed… you said the whole world would be like this, when the wolves won. You didn’t say ‘if,’ though. You said ‘when.’ As if it was sure to happen.”

Silenus seemed to crumple a little in his chair. He stared into the fire, and when he spoke his voice was a croak. “Yes. That’s so.”

“So you think we’re going to lose?” asked George.

Silenus sighed. “I think it is inevitable, yes. The purpose of our mission is survival, George. And one thing about survival is that it doesn’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever. It may not happen today, or tomorrow, or this year or even within my lifetime. But I know we can’t keep running forever. One day we will stumble, or stop.”

“But the previous troupes have kept it up for so long,” said George. “We’re just the most recent version, right?”

“Oh, yes,” said Silenus. “I believe there was a
Bunraku
troupe that was very efficient in the East for over a century, for instance. But think of what we’re facing, kid—the wolves never tire, never sleep, never die. And eons are but the blink of an eye to them. They were here before time, and they’ll be here after it. We can’t outrun them forever. We are simply delaying the inevitable.”

“Then why on Earth would you ever keep going?” asked George.

“It is rather stupid, isn’t it?” said Silenus.

“Well, maybe not stupid…
Futile
might be better.”

Silenus leaned back in his chair. “Whatever word you’d like, then. But it remains the same. We dangle by a string over the maw of something huge and vast and terrible. Even if we stretch the hours and the days out until their breaking point, how can they have meaning in the face of what’s coming?”

“Well, yes.”

Silenus cocked his head. “Hm. Let me tell you a story, kid,” he said. “This took place a long, long time ago, in England of all places, before I ever joined up with this troupe or even knew it existed. I was in a bad spot, did a few stupid things, and I found myself tossed in the clink with the likely punishment of deportation awaiting me. Now, I thought I had it rough, but my cellmate had it even worse. He was a skinny little Irishman, name of Michael Feenan, and he was meant for the gallows, to dance from the hemp until he’d shed his mortal coil and what have you. Unlike a lot of folk in the clink, he didn’t claim innocence. He said he’d done what he’d done—that being knifing a fella in a gin house—and he knew it was worth nothing to protest it, since we was all English bastards and we’d hang him no matter, you see. Which, you know, might’ve been true.

“Now, Feenan was set to dance a week from when I was thrown in his cell, but he was already in a bad state—when they’d arrested him he’d gotten a serious beating, and his right leg was broke in a couple of places. His shin and ankle were as swolled up and purple as a fucking plum, let me tell you. He could hardly sit up, it pained him so much. So when his time came, the guards were going to have to drag him up the scaffold steps like a cripple. But Feenan, he had different plans.

“He had his wife smuggle in some rope and some pieces of timber, and for that entire week he kept trying to make a brace for his leg. It was some of the most painful stuff I ever saw. Can you imagine what that’s like, some yuck who knows nothing about anatomy strapping a brace around his own swollen, broken leg? And then he’d try and walk on it of all things, testing it out. And nearly each time he’d fall. But Feenan never cried, or wept, or cursed. He’d just pull himself up, rearrange some of the brace, and try again.

“Finally on the day before his drop I asked him what he was doing. I mean, he was dead anyway, so why go to all this trouble? Why does the way a man walks to the scaffold matter? And he said, ‘The walk to the scaffold is the last walk I’ll ever get, Willie,’—for
that was the name I’d given them—‘And after that, it’s naught but the drop. And when the walk is all that’s left, it matters.’

“So when his day came they took him out and let him walk by himself. I got to watch from the window of my cell. He stumbled only three times. And each time he picked himself up, rearranged himself until he was as dignified-looking as could be, and kept walking. Even though his leg pained him and his very body was a burden, he kept walking, right up until he was hanged. He was hanged on this very beam, in fact,” said Silenus, and he tapped the warped piece of black wood. “Probably the best death it’d ever seen.”

He lit a cigar. “The way things end matter, George,” he said. “They matter more than the ending, or even where we’re going to. I never forgot what Feenan told me, and I took it to heart when I realized we could never keep this up forever. This very office is a reminder.”

“It is?” said George. “How?”

“Come here,” he said, and stood up and went to the bay window. “You’ve seen these stars before, haven’t you?”

George stood by his father and looked out the bay window. There below them were the cold, rocky wastes he’d glimpsed in the shadow in Hayburn, the endless gray cliffs and the cold white stars and the yawning black abysses. They seemed suspended several feet above it all, as if the window was floating in all that blackness, and he noticed the window had no knobs or locks, as if it should never, ever be opened.

“I put my office right in the middle of the death they threaten us with,” Silenus said. “They still have yet to find it, stupid things. I’ve got it so it moves around pretty frequently. But here I sit, every day, hanging over all this wasted nothing. I will never forget what the world could be, should my vigilance ever fail. And more than that, I will never forget that in a way we are all hanged men and hanged women, awaiting those deaths which cannot be avoided. Yet I will make sure that we live and die the way we choose for as long as we
possibly can. And I’ll do what it takes to ensure that. They can threaten me all they want, but I’ll never stop.”

George nodded. He thought he understood, even though it was a very strange story; he did not know much history, but he could not remember the last time anyone in England had been threatened with deportation. Then he remembered what Franny had first told him on the train, and asked, “What if they threaten the others, though?”

“Others?”

“Yes,” said George. “Would you risk the lives of the rest of the troupe? Or mine?”

Silenus looked at him, startled. “You I would protect at all costs. We cannot bear to lose you.”

George noticed that he had said “we.” “Because I have the song in me, or because I’m your son?”

Silenus looked down at the floor. Stanley turned to stare at him, concerned. Silenus said, “Well, because you’re my son, of course.”

George was quiet. Then he said, “But you had to think about it.”

“I… I didn’t. It’s just an upsetting question, that’s all.”

“An upsetting question,” echoed George.

“Well, yes.”

George laughed bitterly. “Protect at all costs… You talk about burdens, Harry, but I’m your burden, aren’t I? Something to be handled carefully, something never allowed out?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Silenus. “You know we have to hide the song, at any cost.”

“But there are better ways of doing it,” said George.

“Oh? And how have I mistreated you so terribly?”

George flushed. He knew he should not say this, since he had promised Stanley he’d try and forget about it, but he could not stop himself. “Well, you had me pelted with rotten tomatoes, for one!”

Silenus jumped a little, and George knew that Stanley had not told his father he knew. “W-what?”

“That’s right!” George said. “I know you arranged to have me
humiliated! And I’ve kept quiet about it for too long. How could you even think of doing something like that? Do you have any idea how horrible it was for me? And then you came and talked to me, but it was all a damn lie!”