persons are to be taken into Empire custody for their part in the playing and writing of plays and entertainments unbecoming to the dignity of an Empire territory.”
I stared at him. He couldn’t be serious. Close the theatres? Arrest the writers? It was madness.
The crowd thought so too. There was a surly grumbling from all over the building and a scattering of boos and hisses.
The officer nodded as if this was to be expected, and the soldiers drew their weapons. They were serious.
“William Hawthorne,” said the officer.
“Hello?” I said guilelessly. “Yes?”
The officer paused.
“I’m reading the list,” he said.
“List?”
“Of those who are to be arrested,” he added with steely patience.
“Ah,” I said. “William who?”
“Hawthorne,” said the officer. “Isn’t that you?”
“Me?” I said. “No. Never heard of him. I’m just a kid.”
“That’s Hawthorne, all right,” said a big, booming voice from the stage-left side. It was Rufus. He took a step out onto the lip of the stage and pointed a thick finger at me. “William Hawthorne.” He added, in case anyone might have missed the gist of the chat thus far, “Actor, playwright, thief, liar, and all-round snake.”
It was his most flawless performance to date.
The officer considered this. Then, returning his eyes to the list, he said simply, “Take him.”
SCENE II
Making an Exit
Immediately two of the foot soldiers plunged through the crowd towards the stage: I hesitated, but I had been visited by a sudden and violent conviction that being “taken” by these men would likely turn out to be a very bad thing indeed, something far beyond even Rufus’s mean little imagination.
Sedition? I was an apprentice actor who had some small talent with a pen. How was that sedition?
It made no sense, but the Empire tossed that word around with fond abandon, and anyone tarred by that particular brush wouldn’t see the light of day for some considerable time. Hadn’t a poet in Freescroft had a hand cut off only a couple of days ago? I wasn’t sure, but it suddenly seemed more than likely. And the fines! Why must authorities persist in thinking that actors have some secret treasure trove? At least if they demanded one of my hands, I could oblige. If they wanted silver, I was really screwed.
All this mental rambling took about three seconds, during which the young troopers in the pit readied themselves as if they expected some monstrous grizzly to come crashing towards them. In fact, of course, I was an adolescent in a dress—a skinny adolescent at that, whose combat skills were limited to the ability to deliver heroic battlefield speeches from old plays.
Panic set in. I had no choice but to turn myself over.
Having reached that conclusion rather reasonably, I cannot say exactly what it was that made me scale one of the pillars that supported the stage canopy and scramble over the rail onto the balcony. Maybe my simmering resentment of the Empire had finally taken over. Maybe I was standing up for the oppressed in the face of overwhelming force. Maybe I was outraged that the art of the theatre should be so demeaned by these thuggish philistines. Maybe, and this was more likely, I just hated the idea that Rufus’s limited intellectual abilities should be so instrumental in bringing me to “justice.” Yes, that was more like it. My pride was injured.
Stick around, I thought, and they’ll wound more than your pride.
Two of the soldiers had unslung bows and were training them in my direction. By the time I had hauled myself onto the balcony—and try doing that in a floor-length velvet gown—one white-feathered arrow had whistled over my head and another one had slammed into the oak rail just below my hand. The crowd murmured, coming to life as if the play had picked up where it left off. I gave a startled yelp, half dumb realization of what I had begun to do, half sheer bladder-stretching terror.
I glanced down. I always loved being up here in the balcony with the music rooms behind me and a sea of faces turned up and hanging on my every word. I’d had some of my greatest actorly moments from this very spot, a suitably dramatic place to go down in a hail of arrows.
But the play wouldn’t end that way. Not today. No tragedies for William. I was in strictly comic mode, which is, I suppose, why I pulled the ladder over and started shinning up to the trap in the canopy. I started up, dodged another arrow, nearly fell