“I hope they take only a passing interest, those gods.” She gave Leodora a worried smile.
Hamen said, “Enough of this jabber. Come on, I’ll lead you back to the theater.” He lifted a light from a stone figure and walked past Leodora. She acknowledged the group with one final nod, then set off after him.
Meg stood watching until the darkness had swallowed the lantern light. Then she said, “I think we’d best see this performance tonight.”
“Because there might not be another?” mused Chork.
“Exactly.”
Hamen led her past dozens and dozens of small stairways, past embedded foundations of whole buildings that evoked a walk through a maze, past kegs and barrels, crates and clay jars and cloth sacks, and past dusty, stony upright corpses. In one place they passed an overturned boat that was a little too reminiscent of her uncle’s ruined esquif, and she made haste to close the distance to walk beside Hamen, secure in the lantern’s pool of light.
“I’m going to dally once I’ve taken you up,” he said to her. “I want to see your performance. The others, too, they’ll most likely come along once they talk themselves into it. The idea that something might happen and they’d miss it will play on ’em till they have to see, too.”
She nodded but said nothing.
“Pelorie’s tale—I saw how you reacted. That was all about you, wasn’t it?”
She eyed him askance. “It seemed to be,” she admitted. “Everything he said, I kept thinking—hoping—the next wouldn’t be more of it, more of me, and then it was. And where it wasn’t, it was as if someone had replaced the missing stones in the mosaic with a different color of stone, was all. But the picture—”
“You’ll not be performing it, then.”
“Not ever, I think.”
“Makes you wonder a bit. I mean, how many of the stories you tell do you suppose used to be about somebody—somebody real, once upon a time. And then the story took over—some of the stones, like you say, got replaced with different ones, made-up ones—and the real person and their story went different ways altogether. Separate ways, like. I mean, do any of us ever perform our own stories,” he asked, “save for the one time?”
She shook her head, both in answer and in surprise at the depth of his comments and question. “I don’t know,” she said.
“No, nor does anyone, I expect. You can’t know your story when you’re part of it. And until you die, you’re always in the middle of it, aren’t you.”
“I never looked at it that way, Hamen.”
“Well.” He gazed down, as if embarrassed by his own sudden metaphysical opinions. “Besides, what you want to know about is the Pons Asinorum.”
“I do.”
“Well, then, I hope somebody above can help you, because I can’t. I’ve never seen it, nor really believed in it, nor have the others. Just stories to us.” He chuckled then. “All just stories.”
When they’d walked a little farther, he spoke up again. “I was thinking, you know, I said that the group of us all live in the dark here, and, well, so do you, don’t you? I mean, with your puppets and all, you’re in the dark, you know, a lot. People don’t see you, just see what you offer ’em.”
“That’s so,” she agreed.
“Yeah, well. Same with us.”
“You seem to think a great deal, Hamen.”
“Don’t know about a great deal. No more nor you, I expect. But if the Pons Asinorum exists, I think it’d be good if you found it.”
“Why?”
“Can’t say, quite. I’d have to think about it some.” Then he grinned to himself, and she laughed.
“One more thing—what are vermes?” she asked. “Some kind of fish?”
“A terrible fish. Can climb up on land and pull down an ox, tear it to shreds. That’d be one of those stones of another color in your mosaic you were talkin’ about.”
“It would, yes,” she replied, and wondered where that element had been added to the story. What isle or span did the notion of vermes hail from?
Before long they approached a great curving wall of stone. “The Terrestre,” Hamen pointed out. “That’s its foundation. The prima pietra’s around here somewhere, got Burbage’s name etched on’t.”
Around the far side of the wall they came to another flight of steps, and Hamen delivered her to the surface. The steps led to a narrow gated portico across the alley from the rear of the theater. It smelled of a rusty