The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (81 page)

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about it is the smug satisfaction of those who have never been to see one of our performances, yet who feel competent to discuss them!"

"How long have the broadsides been up?" Glisselrand asked, stopping her work once again and fixing Feltheryn with a look not unlike the one she gave the crooked bailiff in the great trial scene of The Merchant's Price.

"Well, the paste was still wet when I pulled this one down," said Feltheryn. "It cannot be too long."

"Very good!" said Glisselrand. "Then we shall set Lempchin to run ning around town today pulling them all down. Better still, we shall give him a chance to practice his performance (he wants so much to go on stage!) by going in disguise, and thereby not making it obvious that we are the ones responsible. Unless Vomistritus is very well off, he won't be able to have his scribes keep making copies as fast as we can take them down. Perhaps he will get tired of being a critic and find some other way to annoy people!"

Lempchin was called, Glisselrand cozened the chubby boy neatly into disguising himself in the interests of the theater troupe's welfare, and Feltheryn was shortly back to preparing the script for The Chamber maid's Wedding, the next play the company was to produce.

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Their current production, The Falling Star, was doing well enough, but Feltheryn was not fond of playing the villain and Glisselrand was waking each morning after the performance with aches and pains brought on by the finale, that desperate scene in which the actress who was the "star" of the title hurled herself from the castle walls rather than face the charge of murder against her from Act Two.

Of course as the villain Feltheryn got that wonderful scene in the second act in which he soliloquized about the joys of lust: and the scene that followed was not without satisfaction as he got to order the torture (horrible, but off stage) of Snegelringe, who would soon deserve torture if

he didn't stay out of the bedchambers of some of Sanctuary's better class of bored ladies. Rounsnouf, the company comedian, got to play the tor turer and he was quite good at it; although one had to keep an iron hand on his performance or he would chew the scenery to such a degree that the audience would begin to laugh, and that was unforgivable in a play of such passion and violence.

It was a good play, no doubt about that! But Feltheryn would have preferred to delay his own murder to the last act. As it was, he lay dead in a puddle of pig's blood at the end of the second act, and there was naught for him to do for a full third of the play but sit backstage in his costume and makeup waiting to take a bow at the end. And he had a
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sneaking suspicion that the applause he got would have been consider ably greater if the audience had not had time to forget how good he was when Glisselrand plunged the knife from the supper table into his throat.

But enough of that! It was time the company took on a comedy, and The Chambermaid's Wedding was probably the best comedy ever written. Tragedy was all very fine, and it inevitably drew a crowd, but Sanctuary was a town with plenty of tragedy of its own; Sanctuary could use a few laughs, and Feltheryn intended to provide them.

There was only one small difficulty, and that was the lack, in the troupe, of a third-string female. Glisselrand would of course play the Countess, and Evenita the title role of the Chambermaid. But there was Serafina, the Schoolgirl, to cast as well, and one needed a strong actress for that because there were a great many lines, a song, and most of the time on stage the school^//-/ was disguised as a schoolboy. That was be cause she had a schoolgirl crush on the Countess and, in an innocent schoolgirl way, wanted the Countess to make love to her.

They had tried doing the play with a boy in the part and it had proved a disaster. That was before Lempchin had joined the company. If they were forced to use Lempchin it would be worse than a disaster! Besides which, audiences loved to see a pretty young girl dressed up in tight pants pretending to be a boy. It was traditional, and even a bit erotic.

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No, Feltheryn sighed to himself as he sat at the kitchen table looking at the script; they would have to find another female, that was all there was to it. And the best place to look for women was in the Street of Red Lanterns, at the Aphrodisia House. Myrtis had helped them before, she might be able to help them again.

He went upstairs to where Glisselrand was preparing for an afternoon nap, explained carefully what he had in mind, and got her blessing. Whatever else might be thought of The Chambermaid's Wedding, it was the one play in which all the sympathy and love went to the older

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woman, not to the younger title role; and Glisselrand was of an age to appreciate that

Feltheryn would of course play the Count, who was also in a way a villain; but at least he would be on stage right up to the final curtain.

His trip to the Aphrodisia House was despoiled only by the presence of the offending broadsides distributed by Vomistritus. Apparently Lempchin had not yet got to the Street of Red Lanterns. Feltheryn pulled a few down as he passed them, but the glue was beginning to dry and it was difficult to get it off his hands once it was on. He had to beg pardon
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at the door when he finally arrived and ask for a basin and then, as the glue was much tackier than he had thought, he had to ask for help from one of the ladies of the house.

Feltheryn was not beyond appreciating the charms of the lovely young woman who helped him, nor was he in the least insensitive to the fine tuned professionalism of her performance, displayed in even so humble an activity as helping him get his hands clean. The world's oldest profes sion was at least eighty percent theater, he recalled from his wild and reckless youth. Any woman could offer sex for money, but it took talent to make that sex so desirable that the audience returned again and again for the show.

And it was a show: the act itself was only the last curtain of an evening compounded of beautiful costumes, exotic perfumes, graceful movement, tantalizing conversation, stimulating music, and a setting that was a mar vel of womanly design. To visit the Aphrodisia House was to enjoy a show with only one plot but a constantly changing cast of characters: and it was that fact which made the difference between Myrtis's elegant cour tesans and the sad and desperate women who walked by night in the Promise of Heaven.

"There now!" said the young woman, drying his hands with an em broidered towel. "We've got it all off, Master Feltheryn. I'll clean up this mess, and you can go talk with the madam. Do you know the way to her
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room?"

"No, I am afraid I have not had that pleasure," Feltheryn answered in his most courtly fashion as he stood from the little table.

"Then I'll have one of the girls show you," she said, beginning quickly to clean as she had said she would. "Shawme! Shawme, would you please show Master Feltheryn up to Myrtis's room? I sent word up to her that he was here."

Shawme, a mere child whose blue eyes held inordinate pride, smiled at Feltheryn and led him up the stairs. A moment later he was seated in a

small parlour, explaining his needs to Myrtis, the proprietrix of the Aphrodisia House, and sipping the blackberry tea she provided.

"—so you see, lovely lady," he finished, "she must be talented and willing to leam to act if she cannot, and reasonably beautiful, but she must also have the sort of figure which lends itself to wearing men's clothing. For most of the play she must be disguised as a man, and it must not appear laughable that she is so disguised. The audience will suspend its disbelief to see a young girl in tight pants, but it will not accept a full-blown womanly figure in the same outfit. I very much want
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to do the play, but without your help I fear I cannot."

Myrtis laughed

"My dear Feltheryn! The fact is, there are plenty of people running around this town in the clothes of the opposite sex, and most of them are women. For some strange reason they assume cross-dressing to be the one way in the world they can protect their precious chastity. Not that I am in any wise tolerant of any man abusing a woman, mind you, but really, there are so many other and better ways of preventing rape! Why, you will never find a softer, more engagingly femimne roster of ladies than reside within my walls; but any one of them could tell you a dozen ways to keep a man in place if he tried to take something that wasn't his. Yet it is not the lovely, soft, delicate ones who worry, and who sometimes should. It is those hard, intolerant women: the ones with some kind of chip on their shoulder. They never in their lives have tried to make themselves attractive to men, yet they assume they are irresistible to anything on three legs. Ha! They should try working here, coaxing some poor merchant to arousal who is more worried about whether the money is well spent than whether he is having a good time! But beyond that, these women have gone to extremes to make themselves less than attrac tive to men, have often learned some devastating martial an in response to their fear, and they have acquired manners that would get them barred from my house if they were men; and still, they go through life assuming that rape is around every corner! So they disguise themselves as men, and
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spend most of their life energy worrying about whether they will be found out. It saddens me deeply, A woman should live her life going forward at full charge, not cringing back in fear of something that may never happen."

"But Myrtis," said Feltheryn, "some women do get raped."

"Well of course they do!" said the madam-"And some get murdered and some get robbed and some get tortured and a great many are beaten by their husbands in the cozy confines of respectable marriage. By far the greatest number of women die in childbirth! But life is about living. Mas ter Player, not about the piddling little moment at the end when you die.

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Oh, some of these fearful women are dear friends of mine, and I try to understand. But it does seem foolish to put such a high value on rape when a woman in this town is far more likely to be robbed or murdered. What a rapist seeks to take he really cannot, unless the woman lets him;

and that is not her body, but her dignity. She may not like the physical part, it may sit with her like a canker for her lifetime if she lets it; but frankly, nobody can use my body to humiliate me. I am flesh, but I am more than that. I am a woman, and inordinately proud of the fact, and
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neither pain nor humiliation can touch that. Besides, men get raped too, so it's not much of a disguise in the long run. In fact, in Sanctuary, disguising yourself as a goat wouldn't be much better!"

"I had heard that goat rape was up," Feltheryn said.

"Only since the influx of all those foreigners who are working on the walls." Myrtis smiled. "But getting back to the point, I do believe I have someone in mind who might fill the bill. Her name is Sashana. Her family was killed by Raggah in the desert. She hid among the dunes, and then, being very young, managed to pass as a boy with the next caravan that came by. It was sensible in those circumstances, but now she lives and dresses as a woman. In fact, such a charming woman that I have often wished her fortunes had been a little worse when she came to Sanctuary. She would have made me a bundle! I'll give you her address, and a letter introducing you. She does not disguise herself anymore, but she doesn't take any chances, either!"

It was too late in the day to pay a call on Sashana when Feltheryn left the Aphrodisia House. There was to be a performance, he had to get into his makeup, and before that he needed a little rest. It was not as if he were a young man. He noted, as he left the Street of Red Lanterns, that all the broadsides were, if not gone from the walls, at least defaced enough to be uninteresting to the passersby. He made his way back to the theater, went up to the room he shared with Glisselrand, and lay down on the bed next to her.

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For a moment the stimulation provided by Myrtis's elegant environ ment caused him to think about waking his leading lady for an afternoon tryst; but thinking about it led quickly to dreaming about it, and in his dreams he was more the man than even he used to be. He had discovered, with age, the one truth a young man dare not face; that dreams are always better than reality.

The Lady Sashana lived in a small but well-appointed house in as good a section of town as Sanctuary had. She employed few servants but they were all strong and healthy and Feltheryn suspected, as he waited in her

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parlour, that they could double as bodyguards. There were shelves in the parlour, and on them manuscripts: beautiful volumes bound in fine leather. Reading the titles, Feltheryn understood exactly why Myrtis had sent him to Sashana. Most of the manuscripts were plays, and those that were not were tomes of tales of far lands and enchantments. There were even some he had not read!