The Last Poet-King
Considered for decades to be a timeless performance, if only in the literal sense, the first and last production of The Marriage of Bertram ends the moment it begins.
As soon as the show is set to start, the cast and crew and audience spill from the stage doors, ejected in a screaming rush of fumigants and gunfire.
The Opera exhales like a protracted cough, expelling a breath of rot and dissolution.
From afar, the building seems to glow as it unravels, prompting the journalists waiting in the cracks of Conundrum to jot another notch in the Opera’s record, the thirteenth time it is besieged to destruction (or fourteenth, counting the incident of the mad Marshal Nathaniel Thwart).
Cameramen hurry to capture the historic moment, or what’s left of it, only to later watch their film dissolve in the developer; poets scribble all they see, spilling unreadable nonsense into their notebooks; musicians struggle to comprehend the cacophony as it dissipates into the blushing Rut Moon night.
In the turbulent years to come, hundreds will try to re-create, or merely describe, the theatrical masterpiece of Asteritha Vost. They will try to intellectualize the bizarre void of ground on which the Opera once stood, try to narrate the epic tragedy that broke the heart of the city.
They will create a thousand poems and paintings and plays depicting the immolation of Olaf Aufhocker—but in the end, none can capture it.
The moment the work begins, it begins to dissolve.
It defies words, defies images; it is a one-act negation of structure, of logic, an opera devoid of its prima donna, a wedding its bride, though no one notices that Elspeth Scholin has gone missing until the art columnist for the Arbuscle publishes his opinion piece the next day, describing her elopement, and the fumes that facilitated it, as “a performance as pedestrian as it is nonsensical.”
“A harrowing, profound statement,” counters the Rhizosphere in the first issue they’ve printed since the Revival.
“An invitation for the Marshal Revenant to retaliate,” warns the Lunar Herald, “when he emerges from the dust—if it can even be called dust.”
Aster doesn’t care much for what the papers say, at any moment, but especially not this one.
As The Marriage of Bertram falls apart above her, she is mostly concerned with wading through the pile of bones and beaks and feathers in the depths of hell.
She gropes through the dark, grasping at the hem of a silk dress, at the rapidly wilting flowers of a headpiece, the smooth gauze of a spiderweb veil.
Her heart turns, then settles when she feels a body stir, a cheek tighten in a smile.
“God,” Elspeth moans, struggling to sit upright in her soft bed of dead and dying birds. “My fucking back.”
“Free drinks for life, El,” Aster says.
“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I come to a show.
Help me up.” She rolls through the pile of feathers, the pleats of her silks, hand reaching for Aster’s.
They meet and interdigitate, diamond knocking against emerald.
As she struggles down from the bar, Elspeth turns Aster’s hand in her own, laying her lips against the inside of her wrist. “God,” she breathes.
“That was fucking brilliant. I could see it. Everything. I still can. Magnificent.”
“I hoped you’d like it,” Aster says. “Though I still think it could’ve used some more time to simmer.”
“Time—fuck time. This is your best work yet.”
Elated, terrified, they stare at one another through the gray-blue dust of shredded feathers.
Both know better than to ask what happens next.
It is a pointless question, and an insult to the brilliance of Aster’s work.
They know to cling to this brief peace, to bask in their own destructive glory; from now on, every moment will be their last.
“Let’s snag a bottle while we’re here,” says Elspeth. “Celebrate my unmarriage.”
Guided by the unseen light of the destruction over their heads, Elspeth moves through the dark, parting the corpses of her wedding doves. Shuffling along a bar emptied of clientele, she steals whatever she can. Aster urges her along when a column of fumes billows down the immolation chute.
“Did you come with Mal?” Elspeth asks, tucking a bottle of sulfur gin under her arm.
“I did,” Aster answers. “But I think he left with someone else.”
“Isn’t that the way,” Elspeth laughs. When she takes Aster’s arm, she is still trembling, with joy or fear or pain or a bit of each.
As the Opera rumbles above them, ripping apart at the seams, they make their way through the dark.
Constrained by her dress, Elspeth hops like a small dog trying to keep pace with its walker.
“Here, let me lead,” she says. “Don’t worry.
I can see everything. The light is pouring down—or, not light, but—” As she leans against Aster, limping on one sore leg, she shifts her eyes upward.
“I’m sad you can’t watch it with me. There goes the foyer, poor Demetrius.
And the auditorium—hah, no great loss. You know what I always say. ”
“What do you always say?”
“Musical theater is the lowest form of human expression.”
Aster laughs. “You’ve never said that.”
“Sure I have. It’s not my fault you didn’t hear.”
When they reach the labyrinthine safety of Sigmund’s tunnels, Elspeth turns, occasionally glancing up to watch the birth of a movement. As a part of Aster wilts with envy, another part swells with pride. She knows that whatever Elspeth sees only Elspeth will see, and only fleetingly.
They slip up into the alleyways by Conundrum, panting, terrified, exchanging tense whispers and occasional giggles.
Rats flee at their passing. A nest of third-eye moths flutters over their heads, dusting hallucinatory powder over the girls as they sidle along the bricks, conjoined at the hands.
Aster follows Elspeth away from the seething void, equally blind to what transpires behind her as what might transpire ahead.
Her stomach flutters in her throat, weightless at the crest of gravity.
Deep in her lungs, she feels the cold tightening of a wheeze.
Soon enough, Crypsis will be on their tail, stripped of perfume but not of bullets—followed by the Guard, by the Marshal, the Chancellor or someone else entirely, some military debutant waiting for a day like this to grasp the levers of power and crank that mill once again.
In an hour, a week, a century, order will restore itself, and the wheel of Tiliard will grind Aster’s bones like the rest of them.
But for now, she clings to Elspeth, unwilling to think of the future, unwilling to consider anything but the heat of glory at her back and the feel of a familiar hand in hers.
She can only pray that she, like the brothers vant Passand, will be lost in the smoke, if only for a moment—cockroaches small enough to escape the crushing notice of history.
Unsure if he is dead or only still dreaming, Emmory wakes on a thin, soft bed.
The room is small and unlit, but the darkness has none of the same damp heaviness of his cell in Strangleroot.
There is movement in the air, and the floor rumbles with the groan of sugar-motors.
He rises, shakes a small torch to life, and blue light fills the cabin.
He has no sense of the hour, or the date, but that is usual for him.
He has spent the past seventeen years adrift in darkness.
Emmory slips on his shoes, rolls up his sleeves, and gropes past the stacked boxes of contraband to the ladder.
He opens the latch above him and climbs onto the deck.
Gray light floods his vision, and he squints against the sky.
The pink blush of Rut Moon glows through the misty sunrise.
A few of the crew are at work; several stop to glance at his blackened arms, raising eyebrows at the cost of his passage.
They make no comment. A paid fare is a fare paid, as the captain always says.
At the stern, under the angular shafts of morning light, Mallory leans over the handrail. He’s not wearing his gentleman’s clothes, but one of the bishop’s housecoats, refitted as a traveling cloak. A frayed hat dangles in his hand, whipping in the morning wind.
Emmory approaches, suddenly afraid the man will turn and show him the face of a stranger, that Mallory will disappear over the side of the boat, and he will wake up in his cell, victim to a cruel and tempting dream.
“Mal,” he croaks.
Mallory glances over his shoulder. His eyes are bright, his frown familiar. Relief spills through Emmory as he leans over the rail beside his brother.
“Careful,” Mal says. “You’ll fall in.”
“Don’t be grim.” Emmory raises his hand to his brother’s cheek.
There is a wide abrasion on his chin, from which a cluster of dark threads grows, evenly, as if he had missed a spot shaving that morning.
Emmory moves to his hair, tucking a windswept curl behind his ear.
“It’s clean,” he says. “It’s finally clean. I can’t believe it.”
“Shut it, Em,” Mal says, and Emmory can’t help himself. He pulls his brother into his arms, rocking a little.
“What, will I embarrass you in front of your friends?”
Mallory laughs. His smell is thick, the fog thicker; either it is going to be a cool day, or they have already crossed the misty river of the dead. He decides he doesn’t really care which is true.
“You look good with a beard,” Mallory says.
“Thank you. It’s usually not this nice. It was … a lot stickier in Strangleroot.”
“Everything is.”
Emmory releases his brother, but still clings to his hand.
It is so much larger, so much stronger than when he’d last held it.
He wants to take off Mallory’s glove and examine every change, every cut and callus, but he only turns back to the water.
They stand in silence for a while. Mallory’s eyes scan their wake, and Emmory knows he is looking for smoke, the ripple of a pursuer.
“I imagine we’ve been added to the Manual by now,” Emmory says.
“If there still is a Manual,” Mal answers. He dons his hat with an evil curl of his lip. “I’ll send out a few letters when we get to Dagdrun. See what a mess Aster’s made of Tiliard.”
Emmory breathes a sigh. “Who finally taught you to write, Mal?”
“Father Davide Bateusse.”
“Did he?”
“I understand he was your patron. Of a sort.” Mallory glances at him. “There’s a lot you haven’t told me, Em.”
He hesitates, unsure where to start. “I’ll tell you my half if you tell me yours.”
“All right. So long as there aren’t any songs.”
Emmory laughs. He waits for his ear to flare with pain, with music, but all he hears is the soft breath of the wind. “Fine. I’ve been thinking of moving on to prose, anyway.”
He closes his eyes, helpless to stop the shiver that runs through him.
After so many years of imprisonment, with the valley and all its history confined to his head, then his cell, then a stage, he is struck with terror that the clouds will lift, and he will see a world too vast and too real to comprehend.
He squeezes Mallory’s hand, feeling weightless, unspooled, like a fiber flung from the spinning wheel.
When he opens his eyes, the mist still lies heavy over the boat.
He can’t see the shores of the Catoptric, he can’t see Tiliard at all, but he knows, somewhere beyond his grasp, undying and unfathomable, the city turns, and turns, and turns.