The Troupe (44 page)

George eyed the horned skulls on one of the platters. “Rarest?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “For example, last night we dined on roasted ostrich with truffle stuffing, barbacoa of young rhinoceros, and a very fine fillet of blue whale, given minimal preparation. The fats of the fillet are so succulent, you know, you need hardly do anything to it at all.”

“You… eat things like that?”

“We dine upon many things here,” she said. “The rarest and strangest and most outrageous are best.”

“I think I see. Will our gift be a part of tonight’s feast?” asked George.

The lady’s pale, still face dipped down to stare at him. “Yes. We will start with it.”

George, feeling suddenly courageous, said, “If I might ask, what did Silenus do to you, my lady?”

“To me?” said the lady. “He did not do anything to me.” She turned and pointed. Far down the hall hung an unusually large portrait of a tall, majestic-looking woman with pale skin and raven-dark hair. She wore no mask, and she somehow managed to look imperious and kind all at once. George was reminded of his grandmother, which gave him a pang of regret. On the bottom of the frame was a small bronze plaque, and written on it was one word he could read even from there:
TITANIA
.

“Your mother?” George asked.

She nodded. “She was… very much a fan of Silenus. Your troupe leader is a wily, cunning man. Even today, I cannot tell if he deceived her, of if she wanted to be deceived. That may be the true nature of his art. The gift he has given today will serve as both an outrageously rare treasure, and a fond memento of her court… I suppose I ought to ration it, and drink it only, say, once a decade, perhaps on the
anniversary of her death. But no. We will drink it all tonight, I expect.”

“All of it tonight?” said Colette.

“Oh, yes,” said the lady. “We decided long ago to abandon living with any reservations, my dear. It is the only proper way to spend one’s final days.”

“What do you mean?” asked George.

“Surely you don’t think all this can last much longer, child? Ever since the darkness first came, we knew we could not survive forever. So, honestly, what is worth doing? One might as well enjoy oneself, and take in as many pleasures as one can. Even those that would normally be considered… extreme.” She sniffed. “This way.”

George lagged behind again to look once more into the feasting hall. On the closest corner of the table was a pile of what looked like rings. They were too small to fit the fairies’ hands, he guessed, but it looked like they’d fit his own. He wondered what they were doing there, but then one of the ladies-in-waiting called to him and he ran to catch up.

In the next room they were allowed to wander alone. George tried to stay close to Colette, but somehow Ofelia’s ladies-in-waiting split them apart and he found himself on the other side of the room. A shadow fell over him, and he looked up to see Ofelia herself standing over him.

“It is a beautiful work, isn’t it?” she asked.

He looked at the painting before them. It depicted a man grasping a woman beside a still pool. Neither party seemed particularly happy. “I suppose. I mean, yes, it is, my lady.”

He did not hear her bend down, but suddenly the lady’s face was just over his shoulder. “You have such fine hands,” she said.

“I have what?” said George.

“Fine, soft hands. Rosy hands. An artist’s hands. Is that so? Are you a man of talents?”

“Well, I sometimes like to think so,” he said.

She moved to the other shoulder. “Oh, how glorious. But do you get respect for your talents, boy? Somehow I think you do not. Otherwise, why would you be here, in such a poor state? I could give it to you, you know. I could give you applause and attention unending…”

George’s vanity perked up at this suggestion. To have the whole world applaud him was something he’d considered many a night. But just as he was considering it, his pride came clamoring out of its cave at the back of his head, and he said, “No, thank you. I believe I can win my way on my own skills.”

“Ah, but there must be something I can give you,” she said. “There has to be something you do not have…” She moved back to the first shoulder. “Oh, I know… I see you watching her.”

“Watching who?” said George.

“Don’t be coy,” said the lady. “You drink in her every move as if it were a fine wine. You desire her. You want to know the taste of her lips, her sweat, yes?”

George shivered. He looked to the side and saw the ladies-in-waiting doing the same to Colette, bending over to whisper into her ears. “That’s… none of your concern.”

She laughed. It was a high, tinkling sound. “I can give her to you, you know. I can breathe upon her eyes so all she could see would be you, whisper to her arms so they want nothing but your embrace. Would you want such a thing? It would be easy…”

He swallowed. The lady’s perfume swallowed his head and made thinking difficult. He still ached from what he’d discovered last night, and the thought of her in his arms was almost too much. But he shook his head. “No.”

“No? Why no?”

“Because then she’d be a… a puppet. A doll. It wouldn’t be real. We would have just dressed her up as something else.”

There was the rustling of fabric, and then the lady was whispering into his other ear. Yet now her voice was softer, and colder and cru
eler: “But I know whose seed lies still dewy on her cunt. I can
smell
it there.”

“God,” whispered George. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he shook his head.

“It is not just, is it?” asked the lady. “That he should have her, and enjoy her? Do you not hate him for it? Hate the idea of him gathering her body in his arms?”

“Please, stop.”

“I can hurt him for you,” said the lady. “Wound him, punish him, all on your behalf. Doesn’t he deserve it? You need only say the word, and I can do it with a snap of my fingers.”

“No,” said George. “I’d… I’d never want such a thing. Stop. Stop it and leave me alone.”

The lady sighed as if disappointed, and stood. “Well. If you’re sure.” Then she laughed gaily and called, “Come, children! Let’s proceed.”

Colette rejoined George, but she was clearly just as shaken as he; she stared at the backs of her hands, and sometimes trembled as if cold.

“What did they say to you?” he whispered to her.

“Nothing!” said Colette fiercely. “Be quiet.” But every once in a while she would shut her eyes as if she wished she were blind.

When they returned to the parlor Silenus and the seneschal were seated by the bay windows, deep in negotiations. “Have we decided upon a solution?” asked the lady, gliding over. The seneschal scurried up, and the lady bent nearly in half to hear his whisper. “Ah,” she said. “So what you need is a matter of duplication. Distraction, as you put it. That is simple enough.” She stood back up. “Well, a botkine should suffice, shouldn’t it? I’m surprised neither of you has thought of it yet.”

“I don’t know what that is,” said Silenus, sheepish.

The lady laughed. “Come out on the porch. It will be an easy task, though messy.”

The lady’s entourage and the troupe all exited through the French doors. The back porch was even grander than the one at the front. Beyond it was the dark, creaking wood they’d passed through; evidently it surrounded the house, though in places they could see narrow teeth of flame shining through the trees from the numerous bonfires.

The lady instructed the troupe to collect an assortment of material from the forest: a basket of river mud each, a tangle of ash twigs, several ropes of wisteria, pebbles, pinecones, straw, and so on. She assigned each of them an assistant to help, so the task was done fairly quickly. Once these were collected, she said, “Each of you must now build yourself from what you have gathered. Or, rather, what you
think
yourselves to be.”

“Can’t one of your servants do that for us?” asked Silenus.

“No,” she said. “It must be done by the subjects themselves. A botkine, like any art, is mostly suggestion and assumption—the creator suggests, the audience assumes and fills in the rest. It is spontaneous, manipulative, fragile, and very, very subtle, a half-finished canvas to be completed by the onlooker—but it must draw from the self-image, rather than anything else.”

Grumbling, the troupe set to work trying to construct copies of themselves from the primitive stuff. Perhaps due to the agreeable quality of the material, it was not hard, to their surprise: George, who had never displayed any capacity for the physical arts, soon had a framework of ash sprigs and wisteria vine standing up before him. He layered the spindly body with leaves and mud, and for its head he used a bag of straw. He was not sure what to give the face, and as he considered it the lady passed by. “Be honest,” she said softly. He shivered from her dreadful presence, but then painted on a face he thought quite sad, and lonely, and lost, for this was how he felt. Not for the first time George wondered if he would be better off at home with his grandmother, listening to the sighs of the nearby fields.

Finally the troupe stepped back from their work. (Franny, predictably, was the last to finish.) From a distance their creations seemed very poor things: leaning, messy sculptures with awkward arms and bent legs. But then the faraway firelight of the bonfires flickered over them, and for a second they saw people who looked almost exactly like themselves. Yet there were some slight differences: Colette’s copy, George noticed, was taller and not quite so muscular, and it was difficult to tell how dark her skin was. Stanley’s did not droop as much as its creator, and it seemed firmer, younger, and (perhaps it was George’s imagination) it kept glancing at George’s copy with an eager look in its eye. George’s own copy was an ugly, rough-looking thing with bad posture and rather angry eyes. This surprised him; George thought himself many things, but angry was not one of them. Franny’s copy, strangely enough, looked nothing like her: it was a thin, pretty young woman with a rather flinty face and smooth red hair. And next to hers was Silenus’s, and perhaps it was because George had not looked fast enough, but his father’s copy was buried in shadow, and could not be seen; though was its hand reaching up, as if to grasp Franny’s shoulder?

“I… I remember her,” whispered Franny behind him. “I remember that girl… It was so long ago.”

“You’ve done very well,” said the lady. “These are the perfect mixture of truth and untruth. I almost wish I had these people as guests, you know, rather than the real thing. Wasn’t that easy?”

“You’re sure this will work?” asked Silenus.

“It certainly will, if I am correct in thinking that the agents you are wishing to fool are not… overly familiar with conventional life,” she said. “Do I have that right?”

Silenus grudgingly nodded.

“Still playing the same old game,” she said. “I suppose chastising you for being a fool is not part of our bargain. Let’s discuss where you need these distractions to appear.” The lady, her seneschal, and Silenus withdrew to a table at the end of the porch, and after some
conversation the lady nodded and cocked her head. The bonfires fell slightly, as if the house and its property were suddenly distracted, and there was a great amount of rustling and creaking and sighing of leaves from the woods. The troupe turned to look, but due to the low light they could not see their creations any longer. Then the lady let out a breath, and the bonfires rose, and as their firelight crept across the woods they saw the constructs were gone.

“By tomorrow your pursuers should be on the hunt,” said the lady. “The botkines will appear at several of the protected areas, just long enough to garner attention, and then they will lead them on a merry chase.”

“We’ll need transportation to the next spot,” said Silenus. “I want to take as much advantage of the situation as we can.”

“I will allow the road out from the Founding to lead wherever you wish,” she said. “From there, it’s your own problem, and your matters are your own to foul or bungle up.”

Silenus glowered at her, but the lady leaned back in her chair and stared out at the forest. “Now,” she said. “What was that you said about a performance?”

The lady professed she did not care to see the full show. “I have seen it before, and I notice you are missing a position,” she said. “I would much rather see an act of my own devising.” To George and Colette’s dismay this act involved only them, and George felt sure she’d made this selection to torment them. The lady led them back to the parlor, and the dance floor was now clear save for a bulky and ancient-looking piano in the corner. Colette protested when they were told they were expected to perform cold, without any preparation at all. Yet the lady said, “Spontaneity has so much more to do with things than you know, my dear. Spontaneity, luck, and the conviction behind it all. Now go on. It is a very popular piece, it only premiered several months ago. He will play, and you will dance as the music moves you. Improvise your dance, invent everything as you go along.”

George sat down at the piano and looked at the music. It was called
Le Gibet
, a movement from a larger work by someone he’d never heard of, a Maurice Ravel. He knew right away that it was like nothing he’d ever played before: it was deceptively simple, yet he saw that below its placid surface it was tortuously difficult (though not as
difficult as the other two movements of the piece, which he briefly peeked and paled at).

Beyond Colette the lady’s servants were pouring the whisky Silenus had brought them. It glowed in the fairies’ little glasses and made their masks light up like lamps. Colette and George shared a long, nervous look before he started playing. Though both of them were terrified, George could not help but exult in this moment of attention. This was the one thing he’d wanted more than anything—to perform with her in front of a glamorous audience. Yet he had never thought it could be like this: the audience was terrifying, the music intimidating, and Colette seemed further beyond his grasp than ever.

George took a breath, and started playing. He almost stopped at the first sound of the piano. It had a haunting, echoing quality, though perhaps that was just the music itself, which was a soft, quiet, eerie piece reminiscent of church bells and lonely, snow-swept passageways. Colette did not dance at first, but stood swaying with her head bowed, as if she were being gently touched by the wind. And then, very slowly, her movements grew, and she began to dance across the floor.