Page 66 of Play of Shadows
The stagehands strained, the ropes tautened, and the curtain rose smoothly– to a deafening silence. There was no opening applause tonight, only those hungry stares.
It’s going to be fine, I told myself. For some reason, I remembered my grandfather, watching my grandmother drawing her blade from its scabbard as she entered the duelling circle: ‘Smooth as silk and twice as soft,’ he would always say.
I stepped out on the stage, Abastrini close behind me.
And everything went to the seven Hells.
Chapter 32
The Love Story
The stage was gone, the set with it. Rich red curtains had given way to a pale grey Midsummer’s mist. Cileila’s newly painted wooden pillars representing the stone columns at the gates of the ancient battlefield of Mount Cruxia had vanished too, along with the audience.
The air, oppressively hot just moments before, was now freshened by a cool breeze wafting past Corbier as he climbed the rope to a luxuriously appointed bedchamber. The mingled smells of sweat and clashing fragrances had yielded to the scents of wax candles and rose petals filling the room. The silence that had reigned over the theatre was banished by the quiet laughter of the young woman sitting on the edge of her bed and writing in the leather notebook on her lap with a feathered quill.
Ajelaine.
I’m in the wrong part of the play entirely,I realised with a start.Corbier never appears in Ajelaine’s room– the others will have no idea what’s going on!
I forced myself to focus not on the scene before me, but the one I’d left behind, trying to see the stage, to feel the hot, humid air inside the theatre and hear the voice whispering furiously behind me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
What was I doing?
‘Stop pushing me back!’ Abastrini was demanding.
Saint Dheneph-who-tricks-the-gods, let me escape this spell before it’s too la—There!
A kind of haze was filling Ajelaine’s chambers, and through it I could just make out the Belleza. My fingertips could feel the hammered tin of Abastrini’s fake armour even as my nostrils inhaled the aromas of beeswax, rose petals– and most of all, the scent ofher.
Ajelaine.
Concentrate. . . you can do this. You just need to make these two tales fit together. The scene is meant to take place at Mount Cruxia, but the stage is dressed with gravestones. . .
I opened my mouth and, ignoring the instinct to speak softly to the ghostly woman before me, instead deepened my voice to make it resonate throughout the theatre. ‘Is this your bedchamber I have risked so much to enter, Lady Ajelaine? Or the graveyard of my dreams?’
I heard shocked intakes of breath among the audience.
Please, all you saints and gods, let them believe that this bizarre juxtaposition of set and setting is just a bit of theatrical metaphor.
‘Without you,’ I continued loudly, gesturing to the elaborate splendour of the room no one but I could see, ‘all these fine tapestries and furnishings are naught to my eyes but dust and bones, for without your love, the world is a graveyard to me: a reminder of battles lost and battles still to lose.’
I walked to centre stage, playing for time so my fellow players could try to make sense of the cues I was trying to give them.
‘I see no bed here,’ I bellowed, sweeping my arm around, ‘no hearth to bring warmth to my skin. Even the light of your candles cannot reach me without your eyes to illuminate them.’
I heard the faint squeal of lantern-covers closing just as theworld around me went dark, and hoped the audience wouldn’t notice the scraping across the boards as the set was hurriedly adjusted.
‘Gods help me,’ I called out, wailing to cover the noise, ‘for I am blind without your love, Ajelaine!’
Silence. Emptiness. Seconds ticked by, each one slower than the last, until. . .
‘Then open your eyes, my Raven, for my love is always with you.’
The lantern-covers overhead slid back, allowing light to sweep onto the stage, revealing a four-poster bed enclosed in violet silk curtains sitting between the gravestones, creating the illusion of a tiny island of life and opulence stranded amidst a sea of death and desolation.
Gods willing, the audience will find all this terribly artistic,I prayed.
A lute began to play from within the bed curtains, triggering an unexpected but overwhelming urge inside me: Ineededto open those curtains, to see the woman awaiting me there. I strode across the stage and drew the silks aside so that I– and the audience– could see within.
