Till Human Voices Wake Us (21 page)

“That explains why I hurt so much,” he replied seriously, and fainted.

***

When Raphael woke again, he found he was reclining on his back propped up on pillows. He was stiff, aching in his magic, and generally full of muttered complaints from outlying regions of his body and full too of a crashing sense of loneliness. For some reason he had music in his thoughts, a song from when he was young. He blinked at the ceiling. He should not be thinking of music.

He blinked at the ceiling again. It was not his bedroom ceiling.

Ishaa made a chirruping sound of disgust and he looked over. She was perched on the arm of the couch, where he was for some reason lying. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, in that half-language he had used when he could not speak clearly, and reached out hesitantly to stroke her cheek. She tossed her head away and leaped to the mantelpiece with a flick of her wings. She pecked once or twice at the sword, then began to preen.

His mind was heavy and unwieldy and it took him several minutes to determine what had woken him. Eventually he realized it was simply that he hurt. He sighed, for he would have liked to sleep a little longer, then decided there was no point lying there stiffly until his body seized entirely, and forced himself upright.

He frowned at his clothes for another full minute before realizing that he had not changed out of Hamlet’s. He had no idea why not; didn’t remember anything after the firework crackle of the end of the Game. Will was involved somehow—no, that must have been after.

After
, he thought. This was
after
. He stared at the bright specks whirling away in the room, realized they were in his vision, not magic. He felt drained. Actually the whole world felt drained. His magic felt blown-out, like a candle. He eyed the stairs doubtfully, then sighed again and began to climb.

At the top his momentum carried him into the corridor, where he had to rest before tackling the door to his room. He had forgotten about Kasian, and was startled to see a dark form sprawled across his bed. But of course, he thought slowly, his brother must have brought him home.

He tried to move quietly, but as he automatically bent in the wardrobe to retrieve a pair of socks from the basket on the floor his ribs hurt so much that he straightened with a gasp. He froze, waiting for the pain to subside, but Kasian only snorted and moved restively.

When he could he reached to get a shirt from the hanger, unthinkingly stretching up, and discovered immediately why this was not a good thing to do with what felt like a fractured or at least severely bruised collarbone. This time he actually staggered back and sideways from the wardrobe, knocking against the side table. It fell over with a loud crash and he froze again, staring at it and clutching his shirt to himself.

“Is it time to get up?” his brother asked sleepily.

“I knocked over the table,” he replied. “You can go back to sleep if you want.”

“No, no, I’m waking up.” Kasian pushed himself upright, blinking. He scrubbed at his face vigorously and grimaced horribly. Raphael watched, fascinated. Kasian finished this waking-up routine by yawning violently and pushing his hair back from his face with both hands. “Right. I’m awake. What are you doing?”

“Getting some clothes,” he said, whispering though there was no need to.

“For what?” Kasian whispered back.

“To get dressed?”

Kasian laughed abruptly. “You say that so doubtfully. Why do you need to get dressed?”

Raphael sat down heavily on the bed and regarded his feet with dislike. The socks he was wearing were unpleasantly stiff; he had the feeling that they were not even Hamlet’s, but were in fact his own ones from yesterday—the day before yesterday?—and were crunchy from dried blood. It was hard to tell as they were black.

“What day is it?” he asked, amazed at the luxury of having someone he trusted there to ask such a question of.

“What day? Ah … I don’t really know the names of English days. We argued two days ago. Three nights. Since then you’ve been … erratic.”

Raphael frowned in puzzlement, scratched his face, felt the scritchiness of new beard coming in. “We argued … you pushed me into the river, you mean.” And yet, he thought, he trusted him. He simply couldn’t believe that Kasian had intended to destroy him. He could have let him drown.

Kasian moved his shoulders awkwardly. “I was trying to—I wanted you to pay heed to me. But afterwards you—disappeared. I went to the play with Gabriel, watched you perform very well, except that you seemed to me as if you were hurt. You were using your off hand … I went back to Gabriel’s with him, but I was worried and came here in the early hours. You were on the floor …”

He had gone to the play. Will must have said something and that was why he remembered looking at him so clearly. He tried to remember it, couldn’t, but the attempt at focus did mean the haziness in his mind cleared briefly, with an unwelcome image of him holding Kasian up against the wall. “I attacked you. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Kasian frowned, yawned again. “No. Albeit I was glad you had no weapon to hand and chose not to use magic.” He stopped talking. Raphael reached down very slowly with his left hand, careful not to jar his right side, and began to work the sock off his left foot. That wasn’t so bad; that side’s muscles were stiff, but not actually injured. He wriggled his toes with relief, looking at the little bits of black sock fluff and thinking how silly feet look, white and corrugated, after a night in socks.

 
An irregular drip of rainwater was coming through the open window. Something in him tried to take those notes and make them into something intelligible and fine, but they were off-key and whatever it was in him that had once let him write music was long broken and gone.

“What happened?”

“When?”

“The other day. What were you doing to be injured like this?”

“A foolish bet,” he replied in what was probably the understatement of the century. He was abruptly and utterly fed up with the Great Game Aurieleteer and how it had destroyed his life. Nothing outwardly had changed, he thought; Robin and Will and Kasian and Sherry and all the rest, none of them would have to know. Nothing had changed.

Except my life, except my life, except my life
, he thought, and was suddenly awash in sheer panic, as if a crevasse had opened before him.

He caught sight of the picture of Eurydice on his wall, the sheen of light in her hair, spring behind her, and the panic turned to—what?—hope? Was that the emotion? She was turned away from the viewer; he hadn’t dared paint her face in full. What you could see of her expression wasn’t so very different from that on Circe’s face, when she smiled at the sun. The expression on his own face, when he saw it through Circe’s eyes, hadn’t been such a smile. It should have been, he thought. It should have been.

The next thought took him breathless:
It could be
. This was
after
.
After
.

“Kas,” he said on the impulse of that sudden surging emotion, “Would you like to go out for breakfast? Lunch? Whatever meal it is? To see another part of London?”

A swirl of emerald-green briefly crested into visibility. He blinked stupidly at it. His awareness of magic was almost non-existent. He sank his mind into the room a bit and found that the magic was piled into the corners and waist-deep downstairs, flowing around him in strange patterns that he did not recognize. When he reached out with his hand to touch one stream it curled around his fingers like the motion of a cat. He played with it a while. A thicker ribbon of heavy azure draped itself around his shoulders like an eiderdown comforter.

“Are you sure you should be going out? Though if you’re actually hungry I feel I should encourage you.”

Surprised to find it was true, he said, “I’m ravenous.”

“Like the Jibbering Cock of Mdango?”

Raphael half-grinned. “Which used to crow on the gable of the House of the Sun?”

“That’s the one.” Kasian looked at him soberly. “You really aren’t in good shape, you know, Relly
sha óm
. Who were you fighting with sword and magic?”

“A better swordsman and worse mage than I,” he replied, and pulled himself upright with such concentration he didn’t hear Kasian’s muttered response.

***

By the time they had both bathed and shaved and dressed it was something like four o’clock by Big Ben. Raphael grabbed a handful of change from the bowl near his door, hailed a taxi coming down Millbank, and directed the driver to take them to a small unpretentious restaurant in Southwark that had the best traditional English mixed grill in London together with a quite marvellous view of both Southwark Cathedral and the
Golden Hind
.

“What ship is that?” Kasian asked, as they slowly made their way from the road into the restaurant. Raphael’s ankle had made itself known to him and he felt rather more wobbly in his person than he had any intention of admitting.

“It’s a replica of a famous galley that sailed for England for a pirate, privateer, and adventurer named Sir Francis Drake in the sixteenth century. That’s when Will is from originally.”

Kasian’s next question was forestalled by the arrival of the waitress. She glanced from him to Raphael and then said faintly, “A table for two?”

Raphael smiled. “Please.”

“Of—of course, Mr. Inelu.”

Her words fell into a dead silence, at which point he realized that he was the object of the room’s attention. Since it was a Thursday in March it was not as busy as it might have been: but he was not the only person to know it did the best mixed grill in London.

Raphael tried his best to think about what to say, but his head was hurting very much—he desperately wanted food and coffee—and, really, what did he expect from five years acting in films with Circe ensuring he was known to the world? (And his own efforts; he couldn’t deny that he had gone to some lengths to be successful in Hollywood.)

Conscious of open-mouthed stares—though not, yet, much in the way of camera phones—without thinking further as he stepped to follow the waitress to the table he stepped forward into James Inelu-being-a-film-star.

This meant a smile that both acknowledged and broke off the attention without anxiety, difficulty, or embarrassment for any party. This was a great deal to ask from a smile, which is why he had spent quite a lot of time crafting it.

The smile conveyed gracious acknowledgment and pleasure at the encounter, a certain charisma together with friendliness and warmth like the sun coming out of a cloud. More importantly, it also conveyed mysterious depths such that its recipient responded with a kind of awe that was really a thrilling, crescendoing, almost primeval recognition of the sudden awakening of romance—possibility—glamour. It was what people of old Astandalas had felt at the mere rumour of the Red Company. It was everything modern Ystharians wanted from a film star. It was fey and mysterious as all get out. On occasion it made people faint.

The waitress and three-quarters of the other people in the restaurant took a deep breath in unison. The other quarter were still staring.

Well; with one exception. After one sideways smile Kasian put on a political face. The waitress sashayed over to the table before leaving them with the menus.

Kasian said, “I can’t read this script. Could you translate for me?”

Raphael looked down at the menu, which was written in a particularly obnoxious faux-Gothic font in honour (he guessed) of the cathedral, the
Golden Hind
, and the ancient prison that was also just around the corner. “Eggs Benedict, omelettes, ah …”

“I have no idea what either of those things are.”

“An egg is the reproductive body of a chicken.”

Kasian frowned at Raphael’s tentative effort at a joke. “All right, all right, you know what I mean. Have you been here before? The servant recognizes you.”

“I have been here a few times,” he said, which was true. “Kasian, to be honest all I ever get here is the mixed grill. I have no idea if anything else is worth having.”

“I thought, according to
Ser
Maximilien mir Daniroth, that you were a man of few fixed preferences.”

“One of them is the mixed grill here.”

“You say that so demurely.”

“Why do you always say Max’s full name?”

“I like how it sounds. Don’t you? Maximilien mir Daniroth of the
Onagel srovârel
.”

“Is that the ‘seven magpies’ in Calandran?”

“Yes.
Iô
,
dev
,
taere
,
gîl
,
nim
,
senn
,
srovâ
,
figin
,
rôm
. One to ten.”

The words reminded him of the old stories their parents had told. “Da used to live in
Targîleng-vad
.”

“Three-Quarters-Off is what it means in Calandran, because of a market held there that once ruined an invading army and thereby prevented Ixsaa from being annexed to Kisare. But it sounds much fancier when you say it with that lovely rich accent you’ve randomly assumed.”

“It’s not randomly,” he replied. The waitress came over with a coffee pot and another melting glance, to which he returned a slightly less brilliant version of the film-star smile and said, “Two mixed grills. Kasian, would you like coffee or tea?”

“Oh, coffee, please.”

She poured, paused, said confidentially, “
The Pirate King
is my favourite movie.”

“Thank you,” he replied gravely. She blushed and hurried off to the kitchen and some muted giggling with the other waitress.

Kasian took a sip of his coffee, then raised his eyebrow quizzically. “And what is ‘the pirate king’?”

“A pirate is—”

“I know. A scofflaw of the high seas. As the knight whose ship we passed, you said, was for his own queen. Or as our Tefen is in her own right.”

“Tefen is a pirate?”

“Tell me your tale first and I’ll tell you about her in return.”

Raphael glanced outside to meet a startled businessman’s curious glance. He suppressed a sigh and drank some of his own coffee. He was deeply relieved that the cook hadn’t changed for the worse in the period since he’d last been to the restaurant. “
The Pirate King
is the name of one of the, ah,
films
I was in. The most well-known one. Really the best.”