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4

Highwire

 

OF ALL THINGS acrobatic, I hate high wire the most. I’d much rather juggle knives, and somebody as clumsy as me has no business juggling knives.

It’s not just that it’s not forgiving. Flying is every bit as merciless—even more so—and I’ve never disliked flying as much as highwire. If you come out of a flying double roll wrongly and miss, you have to grab control of your center in order to be able to hit the net right. When you fall from the wire, you’re usually not rolling. It’s hard to hurt yourself, but it’s dreadfully easy to embarrass yourself.

Part of it, of course, is that when you’re on the wire, you’re always at the bottom of the pyramid. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, if you do it wrong, you fall—and if you’re doing it with somebody else, they fall, too.

I hate that. In this world of Nythrea, in this country of D’Shai, it’s always been more than hard enough for me to keep my own balance; I don’t want to be responsible for somebody else’s.

We were going to be doing our standard first-night show. It’s important that each of the nights of our appearance builds on the previous evening, but it’s also important that those who only attend the first night, or even the preview we do upon arrival, understand that they have been honored by the presence of the Troupe of Gray Khuzud. So we hold back, but only a little, and whittle away at that holding back until our final show.

The troupe had been given access to two rooms: one below, a small room that opened on the courtyard, and a suite above, on the top floor of the donjon. Large Egda, Sala and Evrem were preparing themselves in the dressing room downstairs; the rest of us were readying our entrances on the wire, anchored in the far wall, that stretched out to the trap-platform outside.

The Eresthais had set up the anchor, and Gray Khuzud had checked it, but checking the anchor was my job, and while I wasn’t a particularly good acrobat, I wanted to be reliable.

It was typical Eresthai work: they had selected a huge mounting staple that was just a little too large, then worked it thoroughly over the edge of the doorframe, and pulled open the legs far enough to slip some ingawood slabs down inside. Then they had clamped the whole thing down tightly, so that it was supported by seven of the massive stones of the wall, before they had tightened up the turnbuckles tightly enough to make the taut wire sing at the tap of a fingernail.

Good, solid work. It’s not my favorite anchor—I much prefer the security you get from proper redundant staking—but it was typical of the Eresthais: reliable, competent, unimaginative. My only complaint is that they’d set everything, including the platform out in the courtyard, fractionally too high; I’d be forced to duck as I walked out through the open window.

“Good enough for you?” The older Eresthai smiled as he gave his muscles a practice flex. Naked from the waist up, his torso oiled, his rippling muscles made his skin look almost transparent. Women like all that, so I’m told.

“It’s acceptable,” I said.

Enki Duzun giggled. “Don’t mind him, Eno. He’s just being himself.” Arms extended gracefully to the sides, she balanced for a moment on the ball of one foot, then dove forward to a handstand.

“My brother,” she said, walking back and forth on her hands, “thinks that the trick to being as good as Father is being every bit as unstinting in praise as Father is.”

“Really,” Gray Khuzud said, from behind.

I started; I hadn’t seen Gray Khuzud come in, either.

Folding his arms across his bare chest, he leaned against the doorframe. “Am I really so uncharitable, Enki Duzun?”

She tucked into a forward roll and then came to her feet a fingersbreadth from the wall. It’s not a flashy move, but it’s a tricky one.

“Well, yes, you are,” she said.

Gray Khuzud thought it over for a moment, and then laughed. “I suppose I am. And I suppose you would prefer it if I were to feed you a sweetmeat every time you remembered to hold on to the trapeze with both hands?”

My sister was fearless. “It would be a change, at least,” she said.

“It would be a change, at that.”

I looked out through the door. Under the flickering torchlight, the rigging stood waiting, taking up half of the courtyard. The rest of the yard was filled, and not just with the nobles of Lord Tosh-tai’s household: minor nobility from holdings all around Den Oroshtai had come into town.

I didn’t flatter myself it was just for our performance. Any noble who rejected Lord Toshtai’s invitation would likely find that the next invitation would be brought by Dun Lidjun and his army. An invitation by Lord Toshtai didn’t have the force of law and tradition that one by the Scion did, but lords less subtle than Toshtai had long noted the effect that the Scion’s Invitation had in preventing trouble—for the Scion, at least—and had long taken up the invitation habit.

Still, all mingled with apparent pleasure as they sat on the chairs that had been hauled outside for the occasion, servants passing among them with trays of meats and candies, and the mugs of hot mulled wine.

I could smell the cinnamon and firemint from here.

Down below, the musicians played something light and inoffensive. Hmm, maybe Fhilt was right: the zivver player did have a heavy thumb on the scratchbox.

I’m not sure that that’s wrong, mind, but maybe it fits into the category of things that are wrong but that I like anyway; he was skritching out a deceptively complex counter-rhythm.

Gray Khuzud stood beside me. “Very nice, eh?”

“Yes, father.”

Absently, affectionately, Father rubbed his blunt, callused fingers against the point of my jaw. “First night, Kami Khuzud.”

“I know.”

“You’d best be getting downstairs.” What he meant was Don’t embarrass us, Kami Khuzud.

“Yes, father,” I said, to both the voiced and the unvoiced command.

 

Entering to the sound of two silverhorns, Sala opened the first night’s show with half a dozen rings spinning on each arm, two each on her neck and waist.

Given that her outfit was silk, sequins, and movement, and given the action that all that entailed, she not only caught the attention of the men in the audience, but—with typical D’Sharan hypocrisy—seemingly bored the women, until the Eresthais lowered Large Egda the rope and loops.

The musicians were good: the drummer took up a slow, hypnotic beat, while the bassskin player dug in his greased thumb for deep, rough notes that sometimes overpowered the silverhorns. The chimer lay back, and the zivver kept time with the music while Sala went into her rope act.

It’s an old act, but Sala’s delivery was one of the better ones. The basic principle is that the acrobat dangles from a loop tied to the rope, say, two or three manheights above the ground, while somebody below spins the rope, spinning the acrobat.

Beginners hang by the wrist; more advanced work involves hanging by the ankle. Sala, clad only in a jeweled halter and silks, danced up and down the length of the spinning rope.

She hung on by first the wrist, and then the wrist and ankle, and then walked herself up and down the spinning rope, hanging by one foot while she slipped another into the next loop.

Her finale was always the same: facing the rope, she slipped her head into one of the larger of the loops, supporting herself by the back of the neck as Large Egda spun the rope faster and faster, until she was almost horizontal, the sequins on her halter flashing in the torchlight.

It’s graceful, but a lot more dangerous than it looks: it’s easy to snap the neck.

But then the rope stopped, and she released herself from the loop and slid quickly down the rope, braking only moments before her bare feet gently touched the dirt.

She bowed deeply toward Lord Toshtai, who acknowledged her with a fractional movement of his head that wouldn’t have dislodged a fly—for him, a vigorous nod of approval.

My turn.

I bridged the acts with juggling, simple stuff. First night was the easy one; basically, it was just a reprise of my entry routine, without fire. I had been playing with a routine with a single steel ball, but it wasn’t ready—I wasn’t ready—to play that in front of an audience.

So I tossed three juggling sticks through the air, occasionally holding on to two of them and batting the third around between them, keeping time with the musicians. Which was easy: the zivver player and I did an impromptu rhythm duel, him with his thumb on the scratchbox, me with the sticks, until with a smile and a wave I had to concede him the match and mastery.

His broad, black-bearded face split in a broad smile, and he graciously nodded back, strumming a complex arpeggio as the music slowed, becoming sinuous for Evrem.

I didn’t watch. I know that snakes aren’t really slimy, but they look that way to me, and they’ve always scared me. His first-night show wasn’t all that spectacular—he only handled two, or three, or at most four at a time, and none of them were the really fierce-looking ones like cobras.

But I still don’t have to like snake-handling; I didn’t watch until Evrem trotted offstage, his snakebag now bulging with the wriggling creatures.

The music picked up again, and again it was my turn.

Now, while I’m no great acrobat, I have always liked being in front of a crowd. There’s something special about standing out in the torchlight, the cold sand beneath your bare feet, with every eye in the house on you.

I trotted out on the sand again, this time with juggling wands, and with Fhilt. Two-man juggling is fun, particularly after you’ve practiced enough to make it look easy.

I dropped three wands to the dirt and kept three. Fhilt did the same with his. We started off with a simple shower, each juggling his own, then exchanging every fourth wand, rewarded with an Ah from the crowd.

Fhilt added a fourth to his stack, and so did I. And again, until each was showering five.

That sort of thing could have gone for another two or three wands, but I had come up with a variation that I thought was kind of special: instead of picking up the sixth wand, I mimed it, added the mimed wand to the shower. It’s a tricky move—you have to simulate the natural way that your hand speeds up when you release a wand, slows down when you catch it, all the while treating a phantom as though it were real.

It was a new variation, and it didn’t always work, but there was a moment of delicious silence as the crowd held its breath, deciding whether or not to take the move seriously.

You have to help them; it’s part of the job. I tried to see the wand, hear its gentle swish through the air as Fhilt tossed it back toward me, sense the thwock as its handle slapped into my palm, feel the weight as I brought it around and up and into my own shower.

And it worked! By the Powers, the audience cheered, the zivver player thumping out his approval on the scratchbox. He nodded to the balding bassskin player, and they picked up the tempo.

It happens, sometimes, when you don’t expect it: somebody catches fire, raises kazuh, and it spreads to others, each igniting off the others, like a torch taking fire from another one. This time, it started with Fhilt, and the spark was caught by the lead silverhorn player, as a triple-tongued fanfare both supported and cut through the applause.

I’ve always been sensitive to kazuh; I could feel its fire burn in my mind.

For a moment, I thought it was going to stop at that, but the zivver player picked up the theme, drawing a sweet stream of inverted, twisted runs out of his strings, his thumb hammering sharply on the scratchbox in counterpoint, while the bassskin player supported the whole structure of notes with a light thumb, and the drummer shattered the rhythm into a thousand raindrop spatters of accent.

The second silverhorn player and the chimer were the last to catch it, the horn breaking and reassembling his leader’s fanfare, the chimer tapping all six metal fingernails against his crystals so hard I thought they’d shatter, his thumbs and little fingers barely able to dampen the notes of old chords as he followed the frantic progression into new ones.

I didn’t have to look at them to see that all six of them had raised kazuh, and I didn’t have to look up to my father or across to Fhilt for approval to keep the juggling going on longer than we had intended.

I could feel more than see Fhilt smile, and then, with a coldness washing across me, his face went all ethereal and vague as his kazuh flared even brighter.

“Try this, Kami Khuzud,” he called out, tossing one of the wands aside, substituting a phantom wand for it, including it in the shower, passing it to me.

No.

But it was too late. We had tried two in practice, but never in front of a crowd. I kept up with him, trying to become motion, trying to be the juggling, not merely do it, but it was all I could do to keep up.

No; I would have to let skill go where kazuh couldn’t take me—I tossed one of my own wands aside, and then we were showering six wands, three of them solid, three of them imaginary, and every one of them real to us and to the wide-eyed faces in the audience.

The silverhorn screamed, notes rising and falling in a sweet staccato above the steady thrum of the bassskin and the complex chords of the zivver, rising to a crescendo, then falling back into an introductory arpeggio.

The sound was still sweet and full, but it was practiced, not quite the rich patchwork of kazuh music.

The moment had passed, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The crowd knew what to do: they cheered.

I nodded to Fhilt; he gathered up all of the wands, imaginary and real, and showered them as the rope dropped down from above.

I grabbed it in time for Large Egda to pull me and the audience’s focus high into the air, dropping both me and their attention on the outer platform of the highwire. Below, Fhilt finished with a flurry of tosses to Evrem, who was waiting in the wings, and left the sand to a loud spatter of applause.

My turn, again.

Actually, this was a simple job—I had to try to walk from the platform through the window, and as long as I didn’t lose control, it would be fine if I fell into the net; my job was to make wirewalking look as difficult as it is, not as easy as Gray Khuzud and Enki Duzun would make it.

I hate highwire, but I took a tentative step out, and called for the deep sense of balance that an acrobat must have, will have, as, arms spread widely, I walked over the audience toward the window, stooping as I fell into the Eresthais’ waiting arms.

“Very nice, Kami Khuzud,” the elder Eresthai said, as they lowered me to the floor.

Enki Duzun and Gray Khuzud were ready for their entrance: they exited through the window, one after the other, ducking through with more grace than I could have displayed.

Fhilt had followed me up to the platform and was already crossing toward the window in the first part of the highwire act.

Normally, I would have watched them; normally, I could watch my father perform as long as he cared to perform. But the act had left me weak at the knees. I leaned back against the wall, the rough stone cold against my sweaty back, and closed my eyes.

“Very nice, Kami Khuzud,” the younger of the Eresthais said, pressing a mug of cold tea into my hands. I drained half of it in one gulp, a trickle of the sweet nectar running down my neck while the rest ran down my throat.

The Fhilt/Enki Duzun/Gray Khuzud first-night highwire act is a flurry of fast motion, not of balance and danger. It’s a comedy of dramatic entrances and exits: right on cue, my sister did a forward roll that brought her through the window, dropping lightly from the wire to the deep pile of the carpet, her hand sweeping for the mug that I was already holding out.

She swigged a mouthful of the cold tea, slammed down the stone mug and then dashed away through the door, heading downstairs, giving me only a quick smile and a get-going wave.

Well, it was true enough. I was done for this show, and there was no particular reason to be waiting around for her teeterboard remount of the wire, or for the finale.

“They have porcelain tubs filled down at the baths,” the older Eresthai said. “With very hot water. No waiting. And clean clothes.”

While the house is supposed to see to the bathing needs of the troupe, too often the locals think of us as Bhorlani—tepid baths in cold bronze tubs.

But hot water, clean clothes and NaRee were waiting for me—I got going.

 

Still damp from the bath, I waited for NaRee under the old jimsum tree where we had first kissed, over by the south wall of Toshtai’s keep.

It stood there starkly alone, just at the edge of an overhang kept in place by a partly crumbling retaining wall, lit only by the crescent moon and the lamps on the castle wall, their light flickering through the long, breeze-stirred leaves.

A warm place, even in autumn: it seemed to generate its own heat, although the real explanation probably had something more to do with the smithy in the basement near the south wall of the keep, and the chimney that rose within the walls of the keep itself.

Below, the harsh blue moonlight shining on the still water made the rice paddies seem austere and alien, a too-loose liquid cloth, perhaps woven for the giants of the land and sea that used to walk Nythrea before the coming of man.

That was a nice image, but perhaps not quite romantic enough.

There’s nothing terribly romantic about rice paddies, I’m afraid.

I spread the blanket on the edge of it all, then sat down, and let my feet dangle over. It was pretty, but the Long War was still going on, and some things were not being taken care of. Someday the retaining wall would give way, and the rocks and the tree would fall down the slope on the houses far below.

Well, they weren’t my houses.

“We are not children anymore, Kami Khuzud,” NaRee said.

I had been too busy working out clever things to say to listen for her. She sat down next to me. Gone were the formal robe and makeup of the day: she was dressed in a pair of leather breeches and a short informal robe, her feet barely protected by sandals. The straps were tight against her skin.

“True enough.” I smiled. “Remember when you used to throw rocks at me?”

“You were an evil little boy, always strutting about, boastful of your traveling.”

Traveling is either one of the great drawbacks or great advantages of belonging to a troupe; most D’Shai—except for our beloved ruling class, of course, who make their semi-lustral pilgrimage to pledge their undying loyalty to the Scion—grow up, live and die within a day’s walk of the place where they’re born.

“I still am,” I said, slipping an arm around her waist. “Boastful of my traveling, that is.”

She leaned close to me, and rested her head against my shoulder, her breath sweet and warm on my neck. “Tell me,” she said. Her breath smelled of firemint.

“What do you want to hear about?”

“Anything. What do you see on the road, the roads?”

She’d asked before; she always did. And although I collected stories and images to spread before her, when the moment came to trot them out, I couldn’t remember one that I’d saved. Well, I could always start with the Ven, as I had all the times before.

“We were in the Ven two months ago. There are paved and unpaved roads there, but the god-boneroads are still the same, and still the same strange things.”

“Strange?” she asked, as she had many times before.

“They run along the ridges and hillcrests, some of them from town to town, some of them from nowhere to nowhere. They push up from the ground, smooth, like weathered bone, but yellowed in the sunlight. Grass and trees grow up near to the godboneroads, but never on them.”

They are smooth beneath bare feet in the daytime, but slippery in the rain, like they are covered with ... something.

I remembered, one rainy day, trying to negotiate my way along a godboneroad that led down the side of a hill, and how my feet slid out beneath me, and how I slid helplessly down the smooth whiteness, accelerating, slipping and sliding until the road bent and tossed me into the air and down into a rice paddy.

“Who made them? Who keeps them up, and why?” She ran a sharp fingernail gently down the side of my neck, then planted a light series of kisses where the fingernail had been.

“Nobody knows who made them; and nothing needs to keep them up.”

“Godboneroads,” she said. “Things must be very strange in the Ven.”

“There are strange enough roads in the True Shai and Otland.” I closed my eyes for a moment to get my bearings, and then pointed. “A few points north of sunwise ... there,” I said. “If you were to follow the road all the way there, you could walk down to where it leads down the cliffs to the shore of the Inner Sea, and further.”

“Further?” she asked, as though I hadn’t told her about it before.

“Yes, even further, if you had the desire to follow it. It doesn’t stop at the water; the road goes on, down into the sea. I don’t know how far.”

“Tell me.”

“I can remember pushing down into the dark, cold water, fishskin goggles tight against my face, past the long tendrils of seaweed that reached up their clammy fingers for me, trusting to the oaths of Cicela that the distant vague shapes that feed near the Oled outflow would leave you alone as long as you stay within reach of the road.”

“Cicela?”

“A friend of mine.”

It was hard to tell whether her smile was warm or cold. “You seem to have friends all over D’Shai.”

“It comes with the route, NaRee. But there is nobody who means as much to me as you do.”

I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not, but I tried to persuade myself that I didn’t care. I’m a fairly good liar at times; I managed to convince myself, just for a moment, that I didn’t care.

Life is sometimes so predictable: that was the moment, of course, when she came into my arms, her mouth warm and wet on mine.

After a long time, she pulled away, although not far. “You were talking about the road into the sea?” she asked.

“I was, at that.” I tried to recreate the moment in my mind so I could lay it out before her. “Dozens of divers disappear each year; more come back rasped by the brush of harsh sharkskin, but nobody who stays near the road ever disappears, as far as we know.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows why.” I toyed with the drawstrings of her robe, gently tugging at the knot. “It’s said that those on the road are under the protection of the Scion himself, but about that I don’t pretend to know either much or little.”

“Were you very scared?” She toyed with my fingers for a moment, then tugged the knot open herself.

“Never,” I said, pressing her back to the grass. “I knew I would come back to you.”

“Kami Khuzud, do you always know just what to say?” Her arms slid around my neck.

“Always.” I pulled her robe open. Beneath, her belly was smooth and white. I drew my finger across her skin upwards. Each small breast fit neatly in the palm of my hand, as always. “Always.”

 

“Well,” I asked, perhaps a bit more exasperated than I should have been, “how did you sneak out?” I regretted the sound of that instantly, and shook my head in apology, sealing it with a quick kiss on her forehead.

I pulled at the gate. It rattled, but it was still very definitely locked.

“I just walked through the gate,” she said. “Truly, Kami Khuzud, I was careful to leave the bar latched up. Somebody must have dropped it.”

That didn’t look good. I had hoped that NaRee’s parents would continue to turn their faces away from us. That was the best I could hope for. I would need their approval to court her openly, approval that would not be given to a peasant boy—but when you’re a peasant, even if only in theory, you learn that what matters is what happens, not whether or not others accept that it happens.

But I gave NaRee an encouraging smile. “Walls wouldn’t keep me from you; they won’t keep me from walking you all the way home.”

You don’t always need to see what you’re doing; I fixed the location of the bramblebush in my mind as I backed off, then ran at the wall.

In midstep, I decided to show off; instead of just vaulting to the top, I’d do a handspring from the edge of the wall, and spring over. Besides, it would give me more room away from the bramblebush, and I didn’t fancy another close fall to it.

I ran, and I leaped and sprang, catching the edge of the fence with my fingertips, but pulling my knees in toward my chest in a tuck as I straight-ened my arms, and sprang off the top of the fence, pulling myself over in a pike position as I looked for the landing spot I’d used before.

I landed with a clatter and fell over, hard.

Two rakes lay on the ground, each with a dozen finger-length iron tines pointing up, toward the sky.

A chill washed up my back, and then back down. If I’d just vaulted over as I’d done that afternoon, I could easily have landed on the tines, crippling myself quite handily, instead of just tripping over the handles.

Not everything that happens is a lesson of which Gray Khuzud would approve. Sometimes it pays to be a show-off, I guess.

“That’s a silly way to leave tools,” I said, mainly to myself. “Somebody might get hurt.”

Or perhaps that was the idea. No, that didn’t make any sense. I was reading too much into Rene’s look of naked hatred, that was all.

Even assuming it was him, how would he know where to leave the rakes? That was easy: I had marked the spot with my earlier landing, and that was just where the rakes were.

I would have to be more careful. I would have to be very careful.

“Kami Khuzud? Are you hurt?” NaRee’s whisper was far too loud. My darling wasn’t all that good at sneaking around. Not enough practice, I supposed, at first irritated, then thankful. I didn’t want her getting a lot of practice sneaking around.

I unhooked the gate, and let her in.

“Your gardener is clumsy,” I said, collecting a quick kiss. “Good night, NaRee. Tomorrow evening?”

“As long as we have, Kami Khuzud.”