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I PULLED A PERSIMMON FROM THE TREE AND roasted it lightly for her on my thumb. Agrafena smiled beautifully, her teeth gleaming slightly orange—or perhaps I only wished to see them so. She allowed me to feed her the fruit, its skin brown and bubbling, as her own hands were indelicate.
“She took my old violin as payment,” Agrafena said when she had swallowed the last morsel. “The lava-and-fire fiddle that my grandfather hoped would serve me all my days. I watched her as she fit the fiery blue bow-string to whatever strange object it was that allowed Hour to talk. She took it out—Hour was mute for days—and opened it up on her workbench, spooling the string inside. It looked like a music box fashioned from the red stuff of a rooster’s coxcomb. But Hour’s voice was much better after that.”
We rose and walked deeper into the city still, the streets inclining downward, like water swirling toward a basin drain.
“My parents were horrified; my grandparents roared with delight, and my grandfather’s fire-beard was never so bright. But I found that if I did not play every day, if I did not dance, if I did not oil my hair and tighten the leather that lashes my fingers to my arms, I would shake and shiver like a starving beast. I knew peace only when I played, and so I went into the city, where a playing beast can earn her supper. Such is the fate of devils who bargai
n for their fiddles.” She stared ahead of her, into the murky distance. “The basil died first, you know. So fragile. My parents went to plant medicinal wildflowers outside of Urim, and I stayed. I stayed with Ajanabh, to watch her die and hold her old red head in my arms.”
We were passing through a section of town which was at once resplendent and shabby, spangled and torn. Every house’s door had a curtain of some deep red or purple or green shade drawn over it, tasseled in gold. Where the drapes were drawn aside, there were ornate knockers, a griffin or a lizard or an open mouth whose tongue clacked against its lip. But the velvet was worn through in many places, even burned through, and the tassels were unraveling, and the finish on the knockers was rubbed away by countless fingers. Every window had a cascade of flowers, lilies and roses and honeysuckle—and each was wilted and fading, brown at the petals, slumped over the sill. The air was full of dead sweetness. The whole quarter was full of trilling songs, scales sung up and down by tenors and mezzo-sopranos, bombastic arias shattering goblets in every parlor.
There was a little square where the road split, and on it was a stage with long, tall supports and a checkerboard floor, long strips of turquoise satin undulating along its rear edge to represent the sea, and a red ship carved ornately and bobbing upon it. The silk was threadbare and the ship had lost one mast already, but in the torchlight one could hardly see these things. There were two men on the stage, singing fit to burst barrels, their voices punching holes in the night air. There was no audience, but in the wings, a chorus was hurriedly pulling on tights and rouging their cheeks, urgent and excited.
“Who are they performing for?” I asked.
Agrafena smiled sadly. “There are no audiences in Ajanabh. We all act; we all observe. Yet it is no less vital that the theater be perfectly timed, that the songs be on key, that the sculptures breathe as though living. This is the Opera Ghetto—poor things, the opera was always such an expensive profession. I can play my songs whenever I like, but where are they to get more rouge? Where are they to replace the shoes of the ballet corps? But they are brave and true, and there are performances every night, with matinees twice weekly. They are as faithful as husbands.”
We watched the tiny opera for a time, and the women danced like no women I have seen, their parrot-feathered dresses more stalk than feather, a few strands of blue and green trailing behind them as they leapt across the stage. A girl in stilts and horns embraced a high tenor in an outlandish seal’s head with one eye missing, and I was ashamed to watch their passion. I wanted to give them peace and privacy, though that is surely silly, and so I fixed my eyes at the foot of the stage while her voice spiraled up to the moonless night with the torch sparks.
At the foot of the stage was a little mound capped with a stone plaque, littered with ginger roots with faces whittled wetly into their yellow flesh and rough bouquets of violets, sheet music burnt at the edges and the satin laces of cast-off stage shoes. While I studied this diminutive monument, the show ended and the dancers stepped lightly from the stage into their homes, scraping their rouge carefully into little wooden pots, saving it for the next show.
The tenor sat down on the edge of the stage and grinned at us through his tottering papier-mâché head.
“Brought your country cousin to see the sights, Fena?”
“Hardly. And take that stupid thing off, Arioso. I never liked that story.”
He lifted the seal head from his shoulders and tossed it lightly aside. Several whiskers fell out onto the stage. Under the mask he had the head of a great brown bear with yellow teeth and a torn ear. I caught my breath.
“Don’t look so shocked, burnt-face. A head is a head.” He put his hands to his chin and lifted off the bear’s head, under which he had the clapping, flapping beak of a pelican. Cawing gleefully, he wrenched the bird head off by the throat pouch with one hand. Beneath it he was a very handsome young man, with a curly white wig and penciled eyebrows. Unceremoniously, he ripped his curls away. Beneath that, he had the long-eared, sleek-furred head of a jackal with a small black nose, and his jaw was very fierce. I waited, but he did not remove that one.
“Is that all?” I ventured.
“Maybe,” he said, still grinning.
“We haven’t time for this. Come, Scald, a night does not last forever, even in Ajanabh.”
“Wait, wait!” the jackal-headed man cried, bounding off the stage. “She was looking at the grave! She wants to know the tale! I know she does, I can feel it in my ticket-burdened bones! It has been so long since we had anyone to talk to who didn’t know our every libretto and score, Agrafena! You can’t keep her all to yourself!”
“I do know your every libretto and score, Arioso, and besides that I know there is an army camped outside Simeon this very night, an army which contained this one, until recently. Now, do you think you can leave me in peace?”
“An army? Think of the full seats!”
A glare from the violinist silenced him for just a moment. “But, Fena darling, you must let me have her for a few moments. Don’t be selfish! Do you know why the fields died, smoke-bones? Let me tell her—”
“The fields died because they were farmed dry for century upon century,” grumbled Agrafena, scratching her shoulder blades with a long, slender bow.
“Ha!” His small black face was alight with eagerness, his pink tongue panting in and out. “That’s what you say! But what kind of opera would that make, hm? I have never been one for verismo. Let me tell her the better tale, let me tell her about the Duchesses…”
THE TALE OF THE
TWO DUCHESSES
IN DAYS GONE BY, WHEN THE PALMS WERE GREEN and high, and the saffron threads were stitched into the aprons of young girls with milk still on their breath, Ajanabh was a Duchy. This is not to be wondered at! No city so absurd, beguiling, and barbaric as ours would tolerate a King. Dukes are far more likely to lose their daughters to enchanted forests or to find themselves shipwrecked on sinister isles. This is a keener expression of the Ajan character than a dotard with a crown teetering on his bald head.
It so happened that the Duke had a lovely daughter, as Dukes are prone to do. Her hair was golden as a rooster’s breast, her eyes bluer than the bay tide. It was clear enough that the Duke’s wife had been a foreigner, but no one ever saw her. The Duke had it put about that she had died in childbed, and this was common enough that no one suspected otherwise. The child had such sweet pink cheeks and a laugh like silver falling from a sparrow’s mouth, and all loved her. She was called Ulissa.
Now, it so happened that in the poorer quarters of Ajanabh, in the slosh-slough of the Vareni, which flows through the left-hand side of the city like a giant’s tears, another child was born on the lowest floor of a red and pockmarked tenement, which is to say lower even than the street itself, for such buildings house the poorest folk below the grates and below the ground. This child also had golden hair and eyes like the sparkling of the sun upon the sea, and a laugh like gold coins falling from a grackle’s mouth, and all in her sad little rookery doted upon her. Her name was Orfea, and in every way she was identical to the Duke’s daughter, though Orfea’s mother was nothing but a seamstress with needles in her mouth and dirty blond hair sweat-plastered across broad cheeks, and Ulissa’s mother’s body was carried through the streets in a closed casket all of mother-of-pearl. Think not that this is strange, for in the theater we see it happen as often as not, and are undisturbed.
